I'm trying to load Solaris 10 on an HP Pavilion xt953. It's marginally capable of handling it. The machine had windows ME originally which was corrupted beyond all belief. It's currently booted with the back-up copy of windows XP sp1 from this machine.
I had it installed once but seemed to be missing a few things, ie no sound, nowhere to add programming and not a hint as to where to go to connect to dial up, by the way, I pretty much live in the sticks and can't swing high speed right now. Any way, now the program won't install. I saw enough of Solaris to know it seems far superior to XP, but to truly be that much better, any dummy (ME!) should be able to load it as easily as XP.
I'm at the end of my ropes and my nephew needs his computer back.

- No sound: driver not installed or just non existing.
- What do you mean "nowhere to add programming" ?
- Connect to dial-up. Mostly obsolete, not enough demand for an easy cookbook to exist.
- What program won't install ?

Solaris is far superior to Windows except about H/W support.
All H/W manufacturers make sure a driver exists for Windows otherwise they just write it before launching their products.
Most H/W manufacturers do not care that much about Solaris / BSD / Linux, so the existence of a driver is often a community effort, with unequal guarantees.

You may have better luck if you try OpenSolaris of Solaris Community Express - those have a lot better hardware support than Solaris 10 even though they are largely identical. I had neither sound nor internet when I tried Solaris 10 but I got both out-of-the-box when I installed Solaris CEDE. Btw, there is a hardware compatibility list for these operating systems on the internet that I used to check some things beforehand. I would say, google.

I have the "dial-up" issue too... If anyone runs across a working solution, let me know. I abandoned Solaris at home (and switched back to Windows) when I had to drop my cablemodem (couldn't afford it anymore). I've done dial-up with LinuxPPC on a Mac way back in the day with a chat script, but couldn't get it working on Solaris.

You should try Open Solaris instead; the discs are called Solaris Express Community edition. It is very similar to a modern linux, like Ubuntu or Suse. Everything gets detected and internet is setup automatically. The windows network (via Samba) is automatically too. You should really try it out. You can dual boot with Windows XP.

Ordinary Solaris 10 is very cumbersome to setup. Lots of fiddling to get only internet setup. You dont have anything of that in Open Solaris.

Oops, wrong thread.

While it is true every new Solaris Express release is showing improvements, I doubt there is any effort to support dial-up network with it.