OpenSolaris installation screencasts

Today, I came across a very good collection of screencasts which visually walks one through the backing up, repartitioning and then installation of Open Solaris on ones laptop. The OpenSolaris release is 5.11 and all the installation steps are shown. You need Flash player ver 6 or greater to watch the screencast - not a big issue as Adobe has released Flash player ver 9 for Linux. In a nutshell, these are the steps that are showcased in the screencast.

1. Backup your laptop to prevent any data loss, should something go wrong. The laptop has Windows XP professional pre-installed. So first the disk is defragmented and scan disk utility is run to make sure there are no errors. To do the actual backup, they use the free G4U - short for Ghost for Unix, which is similar to the Norton Ghost disk cloning software in Windows. This can be downloaded into three floppys or as an ISO and burned onto a CD. Using G4U, they perform a backup of the whole disk to a remote ftp server. G4U can also be used to do a disk to disk backup.
2. The second step in the procedure is to repartition the disk to make room for OpenSolaris. For this they demonstrate how to shrink the Windows partition using the Free software QtParted. This is a GUI front end for the 'parted' tool and is similar to Partition Magic in that it non-destructively shrinks the partition. This software is available on the System Rescue CD which is a remastered Gentoo Linux distribution. One thing worth noting is that while creating the new partition, they format the new partition as Linux swap.
3. Install Solaris on the newly created partition. This screencast shows all the steps in the installation of OpenSolaris albeit in a time compressed sequence.
4. And finally, another screencast shows how to download and install Sun Studio 11 software on OpenSolaris.
   

All in all, there are 5 screencasts which I found to be truly informative. If you have the time and the bandwidth, watching the screencasts is highly recommended. More over, they may not be around for a long time as the domain doesn't work properly except the link containing the screencasts.