Solaris for Linux users
 

I have recently bought an old Ultra 5 and installed Solaris 10 on it. I am reasonably competent with Linux but am spending a lot of time trying to work out how to do dozens of little things. This forum is full of Q&A dealing with similar issues.

It occurs to me that someone somewhere must have written a guide to Solaris for Linux users. Is there a pdf or web page or something? I have not found much on the internet.

ZB

Don't know exactly what you're looking for. Here's a good starting point:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1658

as well as

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/47...+administrator

Great thing docs.sun.com is.

There is one doc called Linux overview for Solaris Users
http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0803/817-3341.pdf&e=7620
I found it very useful the other way round.

What are you looking for? Maybe I can help. I am a Linux user who has recently started using Sun. I am learning too, but maybe there is something I have already read on docs.sun.com that can help you.

-Mike

Thanks guys, I have been looking at the Sun site but they are so vast and so much is aimed at enterprise setups. In time I will have a fat Solaris manual but, at the moment, I am looking quick answers to silly problems. The article mentioned by mqzaidi is a good start.

I have spent so much time trying to work out what is the Solaris equivalent of slocate, why I cannot create a user directory in /home, how to create a user with sensible defaults, how to start sshd, how to install "less" instead of "more", why I have no man pages or documentation, how to change my installation packages ... and plenty more. Some of these questions I have answered, for some I am still searching.

There must be thousands of people who have done a similar journey and I was hoping to find a journal/guide somewhere recording the gotchas and solutions. It must be out there somewhere.

ZB

I understand you ;) Solaris default home directory for root is / which cause
create some dot files in /, I changed the home dir for root to /var/root in
/etc/passwd file and his default shell to /usr/bin/bash.

I understand your predicament, as I'm new to Linux and also to Solaris.

Maybe you can start to enquire about the basic admin then work your way up from there.

Ah, some classics.

First off, the /home thing. Look in /etc/auto.master ( I believe that's right, look in etc for auto, you'll find it ). In that file will be something like +/home, remove the line. You can now do stuff in /home ( might require restart of some service, or just reboot ).

There is no equivalent of slocate. If you want a good replace, make a shell script that does a "find / > /blah/locate.db", put it in cron to go off at 4am at night, then create another shell script called locate that does "grep -i $1 /blah/locate.db". However, there may be some compiled program out there that does it for you.

SSH should be installed by default, if not, install it, then you'll have to create an init script, follow what's in /etc/init.d, then create a link in /etc/rc2.d to that startup script.

I'm trying to remember the site, http://www.sunfreeware.com

The good old man pages problem, man -k not runable by default, you have to execute makewhatis and give it the path to your man pages in order for it to work, if you have no man pages to begin with, then you didn't install them when installing Solaris ( for future suggestion, when given the options of what to install for Sun, usually a multi-choice radio button option, choose the one that inclues the kitchen sink )

Anyway, those are the answer to the questions you have above, I can probably answer quite a few more having gone through this hassle many times on many different sun boxes.

Thanks Technoslave, I appreciate your help.

The home directory problem was not a problem once I realized that I should ignore /home and look at /export/home

The missing slocate seems like a massive oversight. It is freely available on every Linux distro that I have seen and is incredibly useful. I suppose there must be some technical reason for leaving it out. It is hard work writing an equally reliable script and I do not believe that every Solaris admin does that.

It was not a problem with sshd once I searched for it (using find which is a bit over the top for such a simple task) and found that it was run from /usr/lib/ssh The lib bit confused me as I was expecting /usr/bin or something similar.

The man pages are starting to haunt me :( You were a great help mentioning makewhatis. I am slowly working out how much there is to man files. I am used to them just being there and working by default. I installed the documnetation (at least I asked for it) and have found man files all over the place. Quite a few are now accessible using the man. I reckon i will have won when I can run:
man man
and get a response :) In the mean time I am trying to get a MANPATH that works.

Thanks for the help and for the offer of more. I am still sure there must be a Linux users' guide to Solaris somewhere - or at least there must be plenty of people as confused as I am. I really want to get to grips with some of the really cool Solaris stuff like zones and dtrace and am stuck trying to learn vi when I have always used vim.

Just in case I am irritating any old Solaris hands: I am not getting at Solaris - it will be some time before I will know enough to even try. I am jut truing to find the fm to read :)

ZB

>>> In the mean time I am trying to get a MANPATH that works

With the following MANPATH, you will be able to access most of the man pages. Add more to it as you come across any missing path

MANPATH=/usr/dt/man:/usr/man:/usr/openwin/share/man:/opt/sfw/man:/usr/local/man

This is what I tried:
$echo $MANPATH
/usr/bin/man:/usr/openwin/share/man:/usr/openwin/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/sfw/share/man:/usr/sfw/man:/usr/perl5/5.8.3/man:/usr/dt/man:/usr/dt/share/man:/usr/man:/usr/apache2/man:/usr/apache/man
# man man
No manual entry for man.

I get the same result for man ls, grep, who, and lots of others so there must be something missing. On the other hand man perl, apache, mozilla, openssl do work. There must be a vital path missing but I cannot work out which..

ZB

That's strange. Even if MANPATH env variable is not set, man should be using /usr/share/man path as the default search path.

Can you check if you have any files under /usr/share/man. Also search for man pages for essential commands like "ls" under /usr/share/man, and try man -M /usr/share/man ls, if you found ls.1 somewhere under /usr/share/man

eg.,
% find /usr/share/man -name ls.1
/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1

% man -M /usr/share/man ls
Reformatting page. Please Wait... done

User Commands ls(1)

NAME
ls - list contents of directory

SYNOPSIS
/usr/bin/ls [-aAbcCdeEfFghHilLmnopqrRstux1@] [file...]
...
...

% man -M /usr/share/man/man1 ls <- incorrect usage
No manual entry for ls.

Thanks Technopark2. I am slowly working out some of the differences from Linux

I ran the find command a drew a zero result. I then ran the various commands you suggested plus some:
:
I guess that the man files are still zipped but in another format?

There are lots of *.1 files in /usr/shar/man/sman1 and the ones that have tried do format properly when the man command is run.

ZB

>>> I ran the find command a drew a zero result.

Okay, guess your installation is missing essential manual pages and may be some other documentation that you may need. So, try to install the missing documentation from the installation CDs. Important: Make sure to select "upgrade installation", but not "new installation". Then choose "custom installation"

>>> gunzip: unzip.1: not in gzip format
>>> gunzip: zipinfo.1: not in gzip format

unzip.1 & zipinfo.1 are the actual man pages with embedded markup. man utility takes care of the markup and shows the information in plain ASCII text. So, "man unzip" should be working on your machine

eg., To check the file type of unzip.1:

% file unzip.1
unzip.1: [nt]roff, tbl, or eqn input text

Great, now I think I understand what is going on. There is more to a man page than I realised.

I need to do a clean install to see if I can solve a number of problems and have what I need and no more. I will take care with the documentation options.

ZB