OpenSolaris, first install on physical hardware

I have an old server from 2004-ish. It was a dual processer board with one socket used, and an outrageous 1gb of ram. It had a discrete graphics card, and a single gigabit Ethernet port. I don't' remember what its original purpose was, most likely I used it to host a gaming server and a statistics website for the gaming server. I had planned on upgrading it to dual processer with more memory, but that never happened. It spent most of its life not being used unfortunately. Going to college in the lower forty-eight meant it didn't make the cut and get shipped down. At least not for a while. The point is, though, that its an old server. And OpenSolaris installed without a stutter. It was just as easy as on the VM, but it did take a touch longer since it had to format the disk, which wasn't 8gigs this time. The server was put next to my main workstation, and one monitor was connected to it. At work, I've been using Synergy with Windows 7 and Minty Linux so I can use one keyboard and mouse for two systems without a KVM. If you've never heard of it, go to http://synergy2.sourceforge.com, its worth your time. Great piece of software. Anyways, I decided I would get Synergy up and running between my Vista x64 box and OpenSolaris and found a quick tutorial. Here are the steps to get Synergy installed, which I got from here. This was the first piece of software on Solaris, keep in mind, so I was blown away by the ease of install.

wget ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/intel/10/libgcc-3.4.6-sol10-x86-local.gz

gunzip libgcc-3.4.6-sol10-x86-local.gz

pkgadd -G -d libgcc-3.4.6-sol10-x86-local

wget ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/intel/10/synergy-1.3.1-sol10-x86-local.gz

gunzip synergy-1.3.1-sol10-x86-local.gz

pkgadd -G -d synergy-1.3.1-sol10-x86-local.gz

It was that easy. Because my Windows box served as the server for Synergy, I won't go into the config much. Details on that can be had at Synergy's website. This is the command you run to connect to the server:

/usr/local/bin/synergyc

Instant software KVM. I was very very pleased as this software install was extremely quick and easy, easier than installing it on Linux, although that could be because I had installed it on Linux before.

My physical install went quick and easy, and I had a system I could easily work on with my single keyboard and mouse. That was until the heat generated by the old Xeon box heated the office up to 85 degrees and stayed there, and the CPU fan picked up speed to help cool it. Back to the drawing board!