The road to building OpenSolaris is paved with a fairly easy set of steps. The first and most obvious is to simply get over to the OpenSolaris website and read the documentation there. Seems fairly clear. You will need to actually install an OS to build with and you should start with the most recent Solaris Express release. I started with snv_16 and then simply did a build, a BFU followed by conflict resolution and a reboot. The last step was to install a pile of software from Blastwave.

Have a quick look at the Blastwave HOWTO and install the CSWcommon package along with OpenSSL and wget.

From this point onwards it is trivial to install a complete GNOME and KDE and FlightGear :

  
KDE with the FlightGear Flight Simulator

  
GNOME with StarOffice 7 on OpenSolaris

  
BZFlag on OpenSolaris

NetBeans IDE 4.1 on OpenSolaris


I strongly recommend that any developer take a long look at NetBeans and jump into their tutorials and easy to handle documentation.

It is certainly working well for me on my freshly built OpenSolaris :