Blogging Roller

With a new Solaris box on the way (more about that later), I'm saying good bye to Windows, at least on my desk. I'll have three UNIX variants close at hand: Mac OS X on my Powerbook, Debian Linux on an old AMD Athlon box sitting under my desk, and soon Solaris 9 on my main development box. I grew up on SunOS and Linux, but it's been a while since I last used Solaris or, really, any form of UNIX on a full time daily basis and now is as good a time as any to learn up on it (as we say here in Raleigh).

At Borders, I took a close look at <a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0130342874"> Solaris Boot Camp, but ended up going back to the old stand-by <a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596003439"> Essential System Administration which is now in 3rd edition and weights in at 1149 pages - what a brick. I had a copy once before and it is truly a great book. It includes details on everything from startup/shutdown to configuring and building kernels. It covers all of today's major UNIX variants including AIX, FreeBSD, HPUX, Linux (Redhat and Suse), and Solaris (8 and 9) - but not, sigh, Mac OS X.