The blog for freshly-minted Solaris sysadmins
I can't advise you strongly enough not to do this. Even if you manage to get the OS installed, Solaris is not usable for anything vaguely desktop-related. It's a waste of good hardware. Besides you can't even patch it unless you pay Larry Ellison for a support contract.
Instead, I suggest installing Solaris as a guest OS using VMware player (it's free) and only booting it when the mood to do some serious command-line work takes you.
You can download the latest Solaris 11 x64 binaries from here.
Only to practice on.
In my view, Solaris on SPARC is a great choice because the integration of hardware and software is so complete and because it's so well supported by software vendors. You can partly mitigate the former by buying an x64 server from Oracle, but there's nothing you can do about the generally poor level of vendor enthusiasm for Solaris on Intel.
My advice is that if you really want a Unix-like OS to run on cheap commodity hardware, go for Red Hat (or even SuSE). Otherwise pay up and get the SPARC boxes in.
