Ease-of-Use and Management Improvements

The Solaris operating environment is large and complex; its structure gives customers the flexibility to meet their needs. New features enable customers to easily install and manage the Solaris environment.

Installation

This section describes new features in the Solaris 7 software that affect installation.

Installing the 64-bit Operating Environment

The Solaris 7 installation programs have a new check box for selection of 64-bit support. The check box is active (not grayed-out) if 64-bit support is a valid option for either the hardware or the software group (metacluster) selected for installation.

Selection of 64-bit support is appropriate if the system is to be used to either develop or run applications compiled for the 64-bit SPARC instruction set. The 64-bit SPARC instruction set is currently supported on UltraSPARC systems.

Deselection of 64-bit support for an UltraSPARC system removes the ability to run or compile a 64-bit program. An UltraSPARC system with 64-bit support should execute 32-bit programs at comparable speeds (typically within a few percent) to a system running without 64-bit support.

Installing AnswerBook with Web Start

The Solaris 7 Documentation CD includes a new choice for installing software from the CD. Standard utilities, such as pkgadd, can be used to install everything on the CD or the install icon can be clicked to use the Web Start product. The Web Start product provides a point-and-click interface with selections for installing the AnswerBook2 server, all document collections on this CD, or selected document collections.

For more information, see Chapter 8, Accessing Online Documentation.

More Locale Selections

In the Solaris 7 release, the English and European localized versions of Solaris software have been combined on a single CD. As a result, more locale selections are available during installation of this combined CD than were seen for Solaris 2.6 software.

Note that more than one locale may be associated with a particular language. This allows for regional differences such as currency notation. For example, an English-speaking user in the United States can select the en_US locale (English for the United States). An English-speaking user in Great Britain can select en_GB (English for Great Britain).

Documentation

The AnswerBook2 online documentation system uses a web browser-based interface that enables you to view and print a variety of Solaris information, including existing AnswerBook documents and man pages. The following are new features for AnswerBook2.

Solaris Reference Manual (Man Pages) Available in AnswerBook2 Format

Man pages are available in AnswerBook2 (SGML), rather than AnswerBook1 format. This provides improvements in navigation and links to them directly from other AnswerBook2 documents.

Running an AnswerBook2 Server Directly from the Documentation CD

With the Documentation CD and root access to the system on which the CD is connected, the AnswerBook2 server can run directly from the CD using the ab2cd script.

For detailed information, see the Doc CD README file on the Documentation CD, Chapter 8, Accessing Online Documentation, or AnswerBook2 online Help.

Ability to Use CGI-based Web Servers

The AnswerBook2 server can run on top of an existing web server, such as Sun WebServer, rather than requiring an additional web server running on a system solely for AnswerBook2 support.

For detailed information about how to change servers, and some possible limitations, see Chapter 8, Accessing Online Documentation or the AnswerBook2 online Help.

Ability to Control Display of Stylesheet Errors

An environment variable, AB2_DEBUG, can be set on the AnswerBook2 server. This controls whether style sheet errors are displayed to the user with a red "BUG."

For detailed information on setting this variable, see the AnswerBook2 online Help.