Installing Solaris can be a strange experience for someone who is only used to modern time Linux installers. Yes, there is a graphical installer, but it consists of little more than an X windows which basically asks the same questions as the text mode installer. Unless you already know how to install Solaris, and what the installer expects of you some of the questions and dialogs seem a little strange.
Due to Solaris' focus on binary compatibility some of the defaults don't make that much sense anymore, either, but changing them to more sensible defaults would cause confusion, or so it seems.
For the install on the storate system, though, most of the defaults are sensible, and since Solaris does not have to share any disks withother operating systems the partitioning process is not that painful, either.
The first question the installer asks (always in text mode) is about the general installaton mode the user wishes to perform (roughly graphical/text based or rescue shell). Interactive/text mode (option 4) is usually fine.
If the system has booted from the network the installer will not ask about IP configuration for the network cards but assume DHCP for IPv4.
The question about the name resolution service is one of the odd quirks in the installer. The naming service defaults to NIS, which is probably wrong for almost any new installation on this planet. Usually DNS is the right choice here. The installer will then ask for the DNS server IPs and default domains. If the installer can not resolve the current machine IP via these nameservers it will explicitly ask for confirmation that the data is really right.
The default answers for the next questions (Kerberos/NFS4) are sensible in the usual cases.
When asked for the file system to use for the root filesystem the default is UFS. Change it to ZFS. I prefer to use separate datasets for /
and /var
, but that is a matter of personal taste.
The (almost) final question is for the amount of packages to be installed. The installer offers five predefined groups, ranging from several hundred to almost three gigabytes of installed data. Selecting the smallest set will do fine here, the system will boot, have network and NFS client support, which is enough to get at the rest of the packages to install later.
That's it, basically. The installer will now copy the files to the boot disk, prepare the bootloader and restart the system.