I have recently installed Solaris 8 (Release 2.5) for Intel on one of our internal PC's and so I thought I would just cover some key points that I found while installing.
The installation screens themselves are very straigh-forward and are function key choice driven (F2 is the continue key for example). Compared to other Intel UNIX, the installation follows along the same questions: System name, IP address, Hard disk layout and so on.
I used an A-Open system which has a 20GB IDE based hard drive, 128MB of RAM, Intel embedded video and ethernet card.
The main problem I found was that when I created a Windows partition (win32 fat) using the Solaris fdisk utility, it wasn't particularly liked by WindowsME with regards to good old MS Scandisk (scandisk /is only got me to the next screeen that said it didn't like the partition). The solution was to create a partition using a Windows98 startup disk, then install WindowsME.
You need to use the cylinder specification approach for setting up the Solaris partition because if you use the percentage option, it complains that partitions are overlapping with Windows (which they do). As always with dual boot partitioning, most of my time was spent getting Windows setup - Solaris went on without a hitch after the fdisk juggle.
My final areas to focus on were the GUI (given the Intel embedded video controller does not have drivers in Solaris), and getting the Intel 82815 ethernet card up and going.
As you find with other Intel versions of UNIX such as SCO and Linux, the latest hardware drivers are always ported to the MS environment so you have to do some digging around the Internet to find drivers and how-to's.
Solaris gives you the CDE GUI by default and given my past years with SCO Unixware7, I was right at home.
Solaris on Intel - nice product and easy to install.
