I used to have a soft spot for Sun. I cut my teeth on a Sun 3/50 running SunOS 4.1.1, marvelled at the crystal-clear screen of the SPARCstation SLC, struggled with the half-baked Solaris 2.1 x86, schlepped countless Ultra 10s around a big EDA shop, and ran lots of mid-range Sun hardware. However, since Oracle took over, in my view there has been a loss of interest in small- to medium-sized systems, and a significant regression in the quality of support. For me, it’s no longer a value proposition.

However, I have quite a few (what I now regard as) legacy systems running Solaris, so I have to keep my hand in. At the beginning of the year I decided that I should start playing with Solaris 11 with a view to upgrading my existing systems. Solaris has always been a bit quirky, but it had a few surprises in store for me. Hopefully this post will mitigate the shock of those planning a move to 11.