On Mar 21, 2004, at 5:57 AM, Todd Ruch wrote:
Unless you have a specific need to run the OS on your iMac, I would advise you to just go buy an Ultra10 on ebay (about $150 now) to learn Solaris on. Spend the extra money, and save yourself alot of headaches while you are trying to learn. I am a Solaris Admin, and I love my Macs, but the differences are just going to confuse you at this point.
Whether its OS X, Red Hat Linux, SuSE, Solaris, FreeBSD, they all manage to hide configuration files in different places. At least on OS X, the settings you need to administer as a personal computer user can be accessed through a well organized GUI interface. The concepts are similar between unixes, but a lot of the details are different.
You'll find that there is very little really good comprehensive documentation pertaining to a particular implementation, and that administering an unfamiliar unix is a process of reading man pages, googling for web pages and changing lines in config files until you get services to do what you want. iI gets to be even more fun when you start compiling open source code for your box. In this respect unixes are similar.
So if you want to know the intimate details of Solaris, then take Todd's advice, get a used Sun. But if you want to lean the general process of unix admin, you can get that kind of abuse from any unix.
There's a lot of really great tools that run on unix. My little TiBook has served me very well working along with Linux development, embedded Real Time OS development, and PeeCee development. It great for things like running packet sniffers, and connecting into another box through SSH. The terminal is much more usable than the windows DOS command shell, and once you are comfortable with the command line on one unix, you'll be able to move most of that skill to any other distribution.
I worked along with a dyed in the wool Linux guy at a recent job developing an embedded Linux system. He liked my TiBook so much he went out and bought a 17" AlBook.
Paul
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