Minimal OpenSolaris Installation – OVF Image

If all you need is a minimal OpenSolaris installation where you can play with the operating system and familiarize yourself with the Image Packaging System (IPS), the Service Management Facility (SMF), the basics of ZFS, networking and anything else you feel up to, you will probably find the ~270MB OpenSolaris OVF image in this post useful. The creator of the appliance goes through the details of how the image was created, so you can create it yourself (just in case you do not trust OS images made by 3rd parties). Note, that if you use VirtualBox you will need version 2.2 or newer to import the appliance from “File->Import Appliance“. By the way, Virtualbox now supports automatic configuration of bridged networking. No more bridged network setup scripts! (hurrah!) Unfortunately, I didn’t have the necessary spare time to play with this appliance as much as I liked, but I can say for sure that it is much more convenient than having to load a full blown OpenSolaris installation in a virtualized environment.

Minimal OpenSolaris Installation – OVF Image by George Notaras is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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About George Notaras

George Notaras is the editor of the G-Loaded Journal, a technical blog about Free and Open-Source Software. George, among other things, is an enthusiast self-taught GNU/Linux system administrator. He has created this web site to share the IT knowledge and experience he has gained over the years with other people. George primarily uses CentOS and Fedora. He has also developed some open-source software projects in his spare time.