sun solaris

Learning Sun Solaris at the Sun Open Learning Center

I admit I have become intrigued with OpenSolaris and Sun Solaris. Sun has made it extremely easy to get started learning these two operating systems with their Sun Open Learning Center.

The SOLC is free to use for just getting a Sun account. The curriculum at the beginner level include Desktop Components, File Systems and Directories, Working with Process, Working with the Shell and Archiving Files and Remote Transfer.

The SOLC includes an intermediate level which is currently in beta. The curriculum here includes Intermediate Booting SPARC and x86 Based Systems, Installing Solaris 10 and Safely Shutting Down a Solaris System. Sun promises more to come at this level.

You can also join the Sun community at the Solaris Campus at Second Life. Here they have various times setup for “live” classroom learning via the Second Life application.

According to Sun the curriculum should prepare you for a Solaris Certified System Administrator. I have taken the first course as was quite impressed with it although it is at very beginning level.

The application works beautifully walking you through the subjects and giving you some brief tests at the end to check your learning. The course takes some time to get through so you will probably need to shutdown or close your browser before you are done. When you log back into the application it will ask you if you want to start where you left off. You can click yes and go directly to the lesson where you stopped. If you need to back up a few pages for review and start from their just click the back button.

Given the cost of certification materials and classes this is a giant step for Sun, should help them get more certified admins, while taking it easy on your wallet. You should go try one of the courses today.

-j

Convert your dpkg, rpm, tgz and slp applications to another package with alien

alien is software that allows you to convert an rpm package to dpkg or vice versa. It can also convert a .tgz package to the rpm or dpkg format allowing you to use software that has been packaged for a different package manager on your machine.

The latest version release is 8.72. The author of the software states that even though the version number is high alien should be considered experimental software and should not be used to convert or replace important system packages. That said alien has been in use many years and converted many packages.

The CentOS repositories don’t show an alien package. Apparently this seems to be a debian thing. Never fear though, alien to the rescue before ever installing the package!

First obtain the source package, unpack it and cd into that directory:

wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/mai…
tar xzvf alien_8.72.tar.gz
cd alien


Don’t install it! We get to have that fun here in a couple of steps. Now get the alien*deb package and download it into the source directory which you just unpacked. Once that is done we’ll convert the deb package to rpm and install it.

wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/ma…
./alien.pl -r alien_8.72_all.deb
alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm generated
ls
Alien alien_8.72_all.deb alien.lsm.in alien.spec debian GPL Makefile.PL README
alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm
Preparing… ########################################### [100%]
1:alien ########################################### [100%]
which alien
/usr/bin/alien


There you have it! You now have alien and can convert your favorite rpm packages to deb or deb packages to rpm. Enjoy!

-j