What you need for this book

This book will be helpful to you, if you actually have a test Solaris box to play with. If you happen to have a spare SPARC (T series or M series only) or x86 machine laying around to test on, that's great. This book will show you a few different methods for installation. Otherwise, you may wish to experience Solaris 11 through a Virtual Machine (VM).

Oracle provides pre-made downloadable images for the free VirtualBox VM system. To use this, you will require at least 1 gigabytes of free RAM, and ideally more than 10 gigabytes of free disk space. Get the VM software from http://www.virtualbox.org and then do a web search for "solaris 11 vm download". This should take you to the current Oracle page for downloading the VM image itself.