pfr Where do you get an Oracle Solaris ISO? And what are your thoughts on OpenSolaris?
One more question, If you're down with illumos have you played arount with Tribblix?
And where were you during my recurrent random ramblings about SunOS?
Ok, let's try to be quick.
Where do you get an Oracle Solaris ISO?
You register on their site, agree with the TOS (OTN license, non commercial use), then download the ISO. Solaris has a semi-rolling release cycle. A while ago you had to update manually from 11.4.0 to whatever point release they were at (currently 11.4.46 I believe). Free license (CBE) tends to lag behind paid license (SRU) and is updated slower.
I don't recommend Solaris 11.4 to any SunOS beginner. 11.4 is diverges substantially from Sun's standards, and is tremendously server-oriented nowadays (not much stuff for the desktop in repo). To sum up, not a good starter imho (the best starter would be Solaris 10, but that's another story).
And what are your thoughts on OpenSolaris?
My first UNIX encounter. Very enjoyable OS. Dead as of 2010.
pfr One more question, If you're down with illumos have you played arount with Tribblix?
Yes, back on our original topic, if you want to experiment with SunOS, I recommend either Tribblix or OmniOS. Tribblix has more desktop-oriented software in repo. And both play nicely with pkgsrc. Read carefully the README.Solaris inside pkgsrc/bootstrap. I think you'd probably like Tribblix better; pretty much the equivalent of Slackware and NetBSD within the SunOS ecosystem.