Issues You Need to Know About Before Installing Solaris 8 Software

Locale Installation Mechanism Change

The locale support installation mechanism has changed in the Solaris 8 operating environment. In the Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7 operating environments, the level of locale support installed depended on the software cluster chosen. The Solaris 8 operating environment includes a new installation interface that prompts you to select specific geographic regions for which you require locale support. Therefore, you have more freedom to customize the configuration of your system when you install the Solaris 8 operating environment more than was possible in the Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7 operating environments.

Notice especially the following behaviors:

• You must select the locales to be installed during the initial installation in the Geographic Selection screen. C (POSIX locale) and en_US.UTF-8 (Unicode support) are the only locales that are automatically installed.

• When you upgrade from previous releases, some of the locales are automatically selected depending on the available locales on the system to be upgraded. Note that English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish partial locales were always present on the system in the Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7 operating environments.

• Unicode locales (UTF-8) have a feature to enable multilingual text input. Because these locales use Asian input methods that are provided by each individual locale, install those Asian locales for which you need to type text.