Solaris is perceived to be a heavy weight operating system in terms of the kind of resources (read hardware) that is required to install and use it. And when you hear the word Solaris, you at once visualize Sun Blades and Sun fire servers costing upwards of a few thousand dollars.
But it is possible to install Solaris 10 on a machine which costs under $300 if the machine is build with carefully chosen parts as shown by Christian Joaquin Cruz.
He selected parts with the following specifications to build his test machine :
- Motherboard - Intel D201GLY "Little Valley" Mini-ITX
- Hard drive - Maxtor 300GB PATA 16mb-buffer drive
- Memory - DDR 1GB pc6400 single-module 800MHz
- Optical drive - Sony DRU-170C
- Case - CoolerMaster Elite 340 mATX Case
- Power supply - RaidMaster 380w Power Supply
- Case fan - LD 80mm
The machine, after installation of all the drivers, networking and apache configuration, was very functional and able to serve up web pages on my local network quite well. Secure Shell connections worked straight out-of-the-box, as did hot-plug-in detection of USB thumbdrives. The CD/DVD reader/burner was compatible with Solaris, but Sun has omitted the inclusion of a graphical CD/DVD burner application. The upshot of this is that you have to use the commands mkisofs and cdrw to use this functionality (or download a compatible GUI based application).In most respects I am quite pleased at the results. It's quite a cool box for the very low amount of time and money invested.
Read the full findings of Christian Joaquin Cruz in taking his newly built under $300 Solaris box on a test drive. [Print version]
