I'm currently going through an Army school which will be teaching Solaris in a few weeks. I'm proficient (but not exactly superskilled) with Slackware linux, and I was trying to get an idea of how easy/difficult Solaris will be to pick up with a Linux background. The rest of the school focuses on Windows and as far as I know I'm the only Linux user in my class, so I'm not sure if that will be an advantage or a disadvantage for me.

Basically, would a Linux background hurt or help with learning Solaris, versus someone with only a Windows background?

I'd download the image to play with it for myself, but I have terrible bandwidth here and I don't even know what version we'll be learning on, so I've just got to wait til we start

1. having a*nix background is definitely going to give you a thick edge over anyone with a purely MS background; both because its a similar OS and because they likely have (almost) never seen a cmd line...

2. A hunch says Solaris 10; its the current one and has been for a few yrs. Solaris 11 isn't due out till end of yr I think

3. docs to read/ref
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E...-11/index.html
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E...403/index.html
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E...9a6/index.html
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E...166/index.html

Note especially that for each variation of *nix, its common for cmds to have slightly (or more) different effects and option/args.
IOW, don't assume you know what a cmd will do, just because you've seen the same cmd in Linux, although same name cmds usually(!) do almost the same thing.

At the SysAdmin level, entirely different cmds and concepts exist between *nix variations; tread carefully here.

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/...ion/newbie_faq

The BigAdmin site has a lot(!) of good links. http://wikis.sun.com/display/BigAdmin/Home

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Advantage. Definite advantage.

You'll spend a lot of the time thinking '...that's just like the <command on Linux>, but the options are different and/or it formats the output differently, or it doesn't show some detail or adds other detail...' so there will be a degree of frustration, because you'll have to keep going back to the documentation to find out exactly what the command does, but you'll be thinking on the right lines. The rest probably won't.

And, by the way, don't assume that any script you've got on Linux that takes command outputs on Linux and filters them to do something else will work - either the different options will get you, or the filtering of outputs will pick out the wrong parameters in the outputs. It is probably fixable, but assuming that a script will '...just work, because they are both Unix, right?...' is likely to lead to disappointment.

I assume that you mean the rest of the school students, and not the rest of the teaching in the school; maybe, you mean both.

You may have to just groan if the lecturer says '...and that's like your C: drive...'.

And, watch out for ZFS...excellent system, but it does go away from the 'large collection of small tools, all doing just one thing, and doing just that well' philosophy. I certainly have doubts about performance, but to get anything like that capability on Linux (in a well-developed and stable system) is rather difficult, and to get ZFS set up and doing its business on a Sun system is really quite slick. Not sure how much you'll do with this, but it combines (some of) the capabilities of md, a filesystem and LVM and is easier to get up and running.

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Definite advantage knowing some Linux, as mentioned before watch out for the option differences is the biggest thing.
An example in Linux du -x is equivalent to du -d in Solaris (don't cross filesystems).

I thought ZFS was strange when I was first introduced to it but the more I do with it the more I like it. Log file locations just take some getting used to (/var/adm vs /var/log). For a basic introduction class I doubt you will get into anything too deep.

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Linux experience is a definite advantage as its syntax you are dealing with so you have a rough idea of what you want,its the same only different,there is so much you know already before you start,like devices are just a different naming convention,you just have to find out what things are and write them down on your bits of paper.

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Or create a notes file and grep out of it