To do that, you’ll need to register for an Oracle account and agree to their legalese. Now that you have it up and running (and it sure appears to me that it includes a free copy of Windows XP as the test virtual machine, which is neat, even if Microsoft just hit EOL (end of life) with that OS), it’s time to grab Solaris 11. So start by grabbing a copy of it for your system here: Download Virtualbox. Virtualbox is another of the same, it just happens to be free. You might have already heard of VMWare and, on the Mac side, Parallels: both of them also offer virtual machine capabilities on your system and I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows 8 on my MacBook Pro. You can download it off the Oracle site and it gives you a sort of virtual computer that runs as an app on your own computer. The trick is to use something I’ve worked with before, an incredibly slick virtual machine system call VirtualBox.
But how do I test? Through virtualization, turns out that you – and I – can now run a full version of Solaris Unix from Oracle (they bought Sun Microsystems a while back) on a Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows system. I posted a short script for testing on Google Plus and promptly had someone say “hey, doesn’t work on my Solaris system”. What a great question and perfectly timed too, because I was just going through this same dilemma for some scripts I’m developing for a new edition of a book I wrote a while back.
