Well I am now ready to install Solaris again after going through 5 BSD installs and openSUSE (super nice kitchen-sink distro btw).

I need to run a winbloze guest and I found VirtualBox has fantastic performance even on dog-slow openSUSE and is supposed to integrate well with Solaris. I have a new 3.0 GHz core 2 dual box and 4G of RAM.

One thing I never understood is Solaris' file structure. What is /export/home (did I remember that right).

I want to understand where things go so I can allocate the right amount of space for my partitions. I realize I will probably not create an optimal set up the first time and will have to install again after living with it for awhile but I want to get as close as I can on the first try.

Search as I might, I haven't been able to find any information explaining the Solaris file structure. Can anybody give me some pointers to discussions on this or Solaris doc, etc?

Also anything to watch out for or tricks to getting the most out of Solaris?

I want to use it as a desktop, a development environment, a web server, and to run at least one VM guest.

Thank you all.

Hi,

I know little about Solaris but

You are right about home, it is under /export (/export/home/users)

/tmp is actually is RAM so keep that in mind if you decide to extract a tar into /tmp

Apart from that, I guess it's a unix box like any other.

Thank you. Does anybody have more detail and info?

Solaris filesystem structure is documented in the manual pages (man filesystem).

/export/home is a directory where home directories are physically located, especially in the case where these homedirs are to be shared between different machines.

User's home directories are normally under /home/<username> like they are traditionally under most Unix implementations. They are automounted there (either locally or remotely) but you need to configure the system to tell where to find the actual data.

You are free to disable the whole thing if you don't plan to share homedirs (comment out the /home line in /etc/auto_master)

/tmp isn't exactly on RAM but on virtual memory so the swap area is used in case RAM is exhausted.

Thanks for the information jlliagre

I can't do anything now because I broke my desktop trying to get kdmconfig to use my whole screen instead of a small part of it. Now it sits there on the console with no prompt and doesn't let me do anything.

Where can I get something for Solaris like this: http://bp3.blogger.com/_Vbsj-yhipTw/..._structure.jpg

Thank you jlliagre, man filesystem does help a lot.

Is there some guide to getting started with Solaris? All the information seems to be reference manuals rather than user guides and there is much doc.

I strongly dislike the way uppercase is used to represent file and directory names but this graphic is anyway mostly compatible with what Solaris uses. It is even representing directories that are more relevant to Solaris than most Gnu/Linux distributions, like /var/opt and /etc/opt.

Some of the differences are:
/bin doesn't exist as a directory under Solaris, it is a link to /usr/bin.
/dev contains links to actual devices nodes that are under /devices.
/usr/local isn't part of Solaris although many third party software do not care and install there anyway.
/usr/sbin isn't for "no essential binaries" but for "non essential system administration binaries".
/ is root's home directory, not /root.
There is a lot of "getting started" documentation generally specialized in specific areas.

Better to ask more specifically what part you need help with.

Some time ago, Ben Rockwood did some explanation about Solaris' filesystem layout and functions on his Blog.
Right here: http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=562

And this one may serve well to see the differences to other UNIXEN: http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

Jlliagre thank you so much for your typical excellent information!

Specifically, I have a difficult time understanding how to "think Solaris" even after running Slackware and BSD for about 4 years. I need to learn how to find things (the filesystem info will help), how Solaris package management works, etc. I think that Solaris doesn't support my video chipset (G3) on this box so I am going to have to wait for a while until I can get back to it.

Coolster, that Rosetta stone may be just the ticket for me! That's the type of information I was looking for. I bookmarked both your links. Thanks very much, guys!

On 36GB disks when installing Solaris 10 I typically create (rough sizes)

/ 8GB
swap 4GB
/foo 25MB (for metadb databases)
/var 6GB
/export 20GB (the rest of the available disk)

-Raymond

This is an area where changes are coming.
Traditionally, Solaris was using the SVR4 standard packaging system (pkgadd/pkginfo/pkgrm). There are some tools, especially pkg-get, which provide some enhancements to these tools while keeping the package file format compatible.
Latest OpenSolaris based distributions start to implement an alternative solution with better automatic dependency management and repository handling.
Can you provide more information about this chipset ?
What says the sun device detection tool ? http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.jsp

Thank you very much jlliagre, I will have to get back to you later on this.