After a constantly recurring conflict between Ubuntu and my desktop’s nVidia card, I decided to switch operating systems.  OpenSolaris has nice, built-in support for nVidia, so I decided to give it a try. I used Solaris for close to a decade at Cisco, and it’s still one of my favorite OSs.

First, I went to sun.com, was shocked to be redirected to oracle.com, found the Download page, got the x86 ISO, and burned it to CD.  It’s a Live CD, meaning you can boot from it and run the OS “on” your machine without actually installing it to your hard disk.

Running the Live CD, I was able to confirm that OpenSolaris recognized all my PC’s hardware: the network worked, and video was good.  Nice!  I rebooted into Ubuntu, copied all my files onto a USB stick, and then proceeded with the install.

Now, I’m back to getting everything reinstalled and my environment back how I like it.

First up: A Windows administrator needs to be able to remote to Windows servers!  This requires the rdesktop package, which is not installed by default.

To Install VNC client and rdesktop Client with IPS under OpenSolaris

# pkg install SUNWvncviewer
# pkg install SUNWrdesktop

To Run Microsoft Remote Desktop Client
# rdesktop <hostname_or_IP_address>

via Microsoft Remote Desktop and vncviewer for OpenSolaris : JB French OpenSolaris User.

I wrote a script called rdesk to connect to various Windows and VMware hosts:

#!/bin/bash

host=$1
resolution='1162x768'

case $host in
201 | 211 | 212 | 213 | 216)
hostname=192.168.249.$host
user=administrator
;;

101 | 102)
#VMware Remote Console Information:
#Usage: vmware-console <flags> [[user@]host:]vm
#where <flags> are:
#-h host        connect to HOST
#-P port        port on HOST
#-u user        connect as USER
#-p password    password for USER@HOST
#-c vm        name of virtual machine to connect to
#-v           print program version
vmware-console -h 10.5.10.$host -u root -p
exit
;;

*)
hostname=$host
domain=’-d OURDOMAIN’
user=me

esac

rdesktop $domain -u $user -p $pass -g $resolution -r clipboard:PRIMARYCLIPBOARD -T $hostname $hostname

This allows me to run ‘rdesk hostname‘ or ‘rdesk ip‘ and open a rdesktop window to that machine, asking for a password.

Next step: installing KeePassX