Havn’t really posted anything Solaris / Unix related in a while, but Oracle gave me a reason to do so today. They released Solaris 11 Express today. So like any “Sun Geek” I downloaded all the different installers; text, automated, live cd, and the full ips package stuff. First up on the install was the text based installer. Needless to say if you are used to the old Solaris text based installer, this one is almost 100% different. The colors are different, there is next to no customization of the install (you can’t do any network config other than auto(dhcp) or none), can’t pick what Filesystem you will use for root (glad I started doing all zfs roots a couple of months back.)
Some of the things I have noticed:
1. Sudo is now installed, and the first user you create (during the install) is automatically given full “root” access via sudo.
2. Seems all of the commands that were in /usr/sfw/bin are now in /usr/bin with symlinks in /usr/sfw/bin
3. There is a new /usr/gnu structure that has a lot of the GNU based commads, one cool thing [date “+%s”] now works and prints out the date since the EPOCH.
4. $PATH has /usr/gnu/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin by default. Which means doing an ls -la looks different than when using the /usr/bin/ls -la. This means it may break scripts ….
5. It seems that when installing in a VMWare environment (I was using Fusion at the moment and will try with ESX later this weekend) that on the first reboot, it will hang indefinitely. You have to do a force reboot or shutdown and restart to get it to “boot”
6. The graphical startup is sort of cool, but it “hides” all the boot messages unless you hit a key to show them
7. cc and gcc are NOT installed by default. 🙁
8. showrev doesn’t exist any more.
9. Secure by default is enabled
10. IPfilter is enabled by default (no rules though)
that is just a few.. more later.
See the What’s New doc for more info and the Release notes.