Is that real or VMware ?

    It took a lot of work on my part to try to get decent screenshots for this document.  No matter how hard I tried I just could not get a decent quality image with my hand held camera and a monitor.  In order for this document to be readable, legible, and reasonable I wanted to ensure that I did this install with real hardware.  In order to get decent pictures I needed to use VMware.  Let me show you what I mean.

  This is a typical picture that I can take with a handheld camera :

X-Windows Monitor Test Pattern

  This is the exact same image when I use a VMware based virtual machine :

X-Windows Monitor Test Pattern via VMware

  Do you see what is going on here?  I can't stop the lies!  Even that picture above is not the real picture and if you click on the link there then you will see the real thing and this time I promise.  Let me show you some other pictures okay?

  Here we can see what the “Video Device Selection” stage looks like :

Video Device Selection

  This is the exact same task when I use VMware :

Video Device Selection via VMware

  One further example of the situation :

Window System Configuration

  Here we see that VMware allows me to take a perfect sharp screenshot :

Window System Configuration via VMware

  I was faced with a slight ethical delimma; should I proceed with my real hardware or simply work within VMware ?  I decided that the best thing to do for everyone involved was to do both.  I want to provide you with the best quality images and information while also show that this really works on real hardware.  So at any given point in this process you need to know that I took pictures of the actual monitor when I was forced to ( like the BIOS and CMOS info screens ) and used VMware when I wanted a crisp image.  We need to remember that the objective here is to install Solaris 10 and not to create some report based on experimental data.  We have some latitude with respect to illustration purposes I think.

  The last thing that I want to say here before we plow forwards is that I am typing this all out via a seven year old HP Kayak PC running Solaris 10 right now.  It has 512MB of memory and two 9GB internal SCSI disks.  I really do run just about any old hardware and Solaris 10 runs fine for me.  I also have some very slick hardware too but we can get to that some other day.  Let's proceed with actually booting the first CDROM from the Solaris 10 Update 3 media.  Let's just get started and from here on in you will not hear much from me other than “do this” and “do that” and from time to time I may even tell you “why”.  So grab that first CDROM and let's get the job done.

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