1. Introduction

Welcome to the University of Rochester's Astronomy Group. These pages are intended to get our users up and running with Solaris 2.5.

Outside users may find useful information in the installation notes section.

Why are we upgrading to Solaris 2.5? Here are is a list of reasons Sun gives for upgrading. My own personal reasons are as follows:

Increased NFS performance.
Improved Automounter. Now we do not have to worry about a machine going down and taking everyone else along (excluding the server, of course).
All new development will be for this OS. All new software which UCC gets will be for Solaris 2.5 only.
Motif libraries. Now we can compile our own Motif applications and bypass using precompiled versions with the Motif libs statically linked in, reducing the size of the executable by a factor of 2.

So, here is what this document covers:

Introduction: This document. An overview of the contents. Some things you should know about Solaris.
Where are Things Located?: Explains the various directory structures implemented by the UR Astro group so that applications will be easy to find and install.
Comparison of SunOS 4.1.x and Solaris 2.5: Basically a comparison of BSD commands and SVR4 commands.
Setup Tips for your New Environment: Information on configuring your setup to work right.
Application Help Links: Links to places on the WWW which provide information on how to use applications we have installed locally.

Solaris 2.5 Installation Notes: Here is a fairly complete list of everything I did to install Solaris 2.5.

What is Solaris

The FAQ states that Solaris is a retroactive naming of Sun's UNIX-based operating system. Currently, Sun has Solaris 1.x and Solaris 2.x versions. Each version contains the UNIX OS itself (SunOS 4.x and 5.x respectively) and Openwindow 3.x (Sun's graphical user interface). When people say Solaris they usually mean SunOS 5.x. Solaris 2.x also has a number of additional features, such as WABI (an interface for Windows 3.1 binaries), CDE (the Common Desktop Environment, an open interface which is supposed to bridge most UNIX manufacturers) and other stuff I have forgot.

Conventions

Bold	is used for command names, functions and things you will execute on the command line.
Italic	is used for file and directory names, as well as options to functions or commands.
`Constant Width`	is used for output from a command or a list of items you are to change/insert into a file.