My biggest gripe with the T2000 so far is actually with Solaris package management. pkgadd sucks because it does not handle dependencies and will not automagically download stuff from Sun. I really which they had something like the FreeBSD ports collection or apt-get or yum or something which automatically downloaded and install dependencies.

The T2000 ships (the one I received atleast) with Solaris 10 1/06 release. I want to play with ZFS which was included in the 6/06 release. Plus, I hope installing some of the other packages will be easier if I install the developer packages with some amount of libraries.

So not being able to find out how to upgrade the system from 1/06 to 6/06, I downloaded the 6/06 release and am doing a reinstall.

Since the T2000 does not ship with a video card, you have to install from the console. Not having used Solaris very much , it took a little while to figure out how to get the box to boot from the cdrom.

The trick is to get to the ok prompt. You can do this by logging in as root on the console and issuing the following command:

shutdown -y -g0 -i0 now

This leaves the server running but in init mode 0.

Now, you can boot from the cdrom and start the installer with the following command.

ok boot cdrom – nowin

This will start the installer in the console mode, rather than in X.