First tasks: setting up RAID, disabling GDM

The installation of Opensolaris 2009.06 is pretty straightforward. You can select the disk to install to, and that's it.

The first important task after the installation is setting up the mirrored ZFS root pool, which is the equivalent of a RAID1. The official install manual doesn't provide enough information for a beginner, but I found some good instructions here. To run the commands from the user account you created during the installation, use "pfexec" (roughly the equivalent of sudo on Linux).

The next thing you probably want to do is get rid of the X server. This can be done by disabling gdm, the Gnome display manager service:

pfexec svcadm disable gdm

svcadm is the main interface to SMF, which manages all the services that are running on the system.

In the next post I will explain how to set up ipfilter, the IP packet filtering service.