Home Directory of Solaris

The default home directory of Solaris 2008.11 is "/export/home". This location is different from all distributions of Linux which places the user's home directories under "/home".

Installing Flash Player on Firefox under Solaris 2008.11

The following are the steps on how to install the flash player in Firefox under Solaris 2008.11:

1. Download the flash player package at the www.adobe.com website (flash_player_10_solaris_x86.tar.bz2)

2. Unpack the package by clicking on the file and clicking the "extract" button

3. On the extracted directory, copy the file (libflashplayer.so) and place it under the directory "/usr/lib/firefox/plugins"

4. Restart Firefox

Review of Solaris 2008.11

If you are like me who enjoys testing various operating systems, then you must have heard about Solaris. Solaris is an industrial-grade server operating system published by Sun Microsystems. I've always wanted to test drive Solaris but I don't have the resources to do so, up still recently when Sun placed Solaris under open source. Now I can test drive the system.

I tried downloading the latest Solaris version that comes under the name OpenSolaris 2008.11. Here are my notes:

Desktop

Solaris now sports a pretty GNOME desktop interface. So if you are an old Linux hand like me, you will feel at home with the graphical user interface.



RAM


Solaris 2008.11 requires a huge memory to effectively install it. On my machine, it required 512MB of RAM. Anything lower, the system will not install.


Home Directory


To my surprise, the user's home directory is not located in "/home" unlike in all distributions of Linux. It is located in "/export/home".


User Name


Solaris still does not support long usernames. So you will have to make do with an 8-letter username.


Internet Browser


The default Internet browser is Mozilla Firefox. However, you cannot view "youtube" since flash has to be manually installed. Fortunately, there is a flash player available for Solaris which you can download from www.adobe.com.

To install the flash player, download and unpack the flash player package (flash_player_10_solaris_x86.tar.bz2). The package only contains one file (libflashplayer.so) and does not contain any instructions on how to install it. So I tried experimenting with it given my knowledge of Firefox. Here is what I did:

a) I copied the file (libflashplayer.so) to the Firefox plugin directory at "/usr/lib/firefox/plugins"
b) Then, I restarted Firefox.

I went immediately to youtube to test if the flash player will work. To my delight, it did!


Office Suite


OpenOffice is not part of the installer CD. But my guess is, it can easily be installed since it is published by Sun Microsystems.



Network Card


Solaris 2008.11 still got limited network card support unlike Linux. I tried installing it on three other desktops, it did not work. There was no driver support for the network card.


Sound


On all three desktops and 1 laptop I installed Solaris 2008.11 on, none of the built-in sound card was supported. I did not investigate any further as all distributions of Linux do not have problems with the sound card on all of those machines. My guess is, Solaris 2008.11 still needs some polishing in terms of its driver support.

Installing VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a software package that allows you to install Windows in a virtual environment. Under Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04, VirtualBox can be installed by issuing the following command:

#apt-get install virtualbox

Adjusting Image Sizes in GIMP

To adjust image sizes in GIMP, click on "Image"->"Scale".

Installing Squid on Ubuntu

Squid is an industrial grade web proxy server cache. To install squid on Ubuntu 8.10, issue the following command:

#apt-get install squid

Installing Squirrelmail on Ubuntu

To install the Squirrelmail web interface software on Ubuntu 8.10, issue the command:

#apt-get install squirrelmail

Installing BIND on Ubuntu

To install BIND on Ubuntu 8.10, issue the command:

#apt-get install bind9

Installing ISC's DHCP Server on Ubuntu

To install ISC's DHCP server on Ubuntu 8.10, issue the following command:

#apt-get install dhcp

The configuration file of the ISC's DHCP server (dhcpd.conf) is located in the director "/etc/dhcp3".

The server can be started by issuing the command:

#/etc/dhcp3-server start

GIMP Commands for Slicing Images

Why do you want to slice images? Well, for most web designers, slicing images into smaller image files tend to make the images load faster when using a browser. GIMP allows you to easily slice images and create the corresponding HTML fragment file which you can copy and paste to your web page. Here is how:

1. Go to the menu "Image"->"Guides"->"New Guide"
2. Then select the preferred guide. Usually you either choose horizontal or vertical. Choosing horizontal will give you a horizontal guide rule which you can transfer to the part of the image you want sliced.
3. To slice, click on the menu "Filter"->"Web"->"Slice"

Installing Dovecot IMAP4 and POP3 Mail Delivery Agent on Ubuntu

Dovecot is a secured IMAP4 and POP3 mail delivery agent (MDA). To install, issue the following command:

#apt-get install dovecot-imapd
#apt-get install dovecot-pop3d

The configuration file of Dovecot (dovecot.conf) can be found in the directory "/etc/dovecot".

The package usually works in tandem with the Postfix SMTP mail transfer agent (MTA). I've tested the above commands under Ubuntu 8.10.

Installing the Postfix SMTP Mail Server on Ubuntu

To install the Postfix SMTP mail server on Ubuntu 8.10, issue the command:

#apt-get install postfix

Installing MySQL on Ubuntu

As always, various distributions of Linux have different ways of naming their software packages. In the case of Ubuntu 8.10 Linux, the software packages for MySQL database system are: "mysql-client" and "mysql-server". To install MySQL on Ubuntu, issue the following commands:

#apt-get install mysql-client
#apt-get install mysql-server

Installing Apache on Ubuntu

Ubuntu is one of the Linux distributions that grew out of the Debian Linux distribution. Unlike the RedHat-based distributions (RedHat, Fedora, CentOS and Mandrake), installation under Ubuntu does not use the "yum" command. Instead it uses the "apt-get" command. Variation also exists between the package names under Ubuntu and those of the RedHat-based distributions.

Installing the Apache web server under Ubuntu uses the following command:

#apt-get install apache2

As you may have noticed, the package name for the Apache web server is "apache2" instead of "httpd" under RedHat-based distributions.

You can also install the accompanying PHP scripting engine by issuing the following commands:

#apt-get install php5
#apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

The home directory of the Apache web server is located in "/var/www" directory instead of "/var/www/html" directory under RedHat-based distributions.

I've tested the above procedure under Ubuntu 8.10.