Dave, I have just purchased your book Solaris 9 for Dummies to help me learn the OS. I have been accustomed to the rubbish Windows XP Pro system and fed up with crashes and the rest of the multitude of problems that are inherent to Windows therefore I purchased a Sun Ultra 5 workstation (refurbished) and really want to get to know it and how to use it.

My problem is that the welcome screen names Alfred as the host. Please would you tell me how to change the name? bearing in mind that I am completely new to Unix systems and somewhat intimidated by the jargon.

A reader of Solaris 9 for Dummies reports:

"Is there a typo in Chapter 15? I'm referring to page 288-289. The book says you should modify the S30network.sh file in step 3 then says you should modify the same place in the same file in step 6. (although this time 'shcat' is just 'cat') I was wondering if in step 6 I should be actually modifying a different file rather than remodify the change just made?"

The Mad Hatter project at Sun should prove to be a real boon to Solaris users worldwide, particularly those who hate the transition from Windows or Macs to the more bare-bones CDE environment. Yes, I talk at length in Solaris 9 for Dummies about the transition from CDE to GNOME as a desktop environment for Solaris, but the Mad Hatter project definitely goes further than just a standard GNOME configuration.

A Solaris 9 for Dummies reader asks the following question:

"I just read your book and was sad to see that you didn't cover PPPD in too much depth. I read the links from SUN that you offered and didn't find that much useful for my needs. Do you have PPPD experience? I have DSL but want to use my Sparc 5 for dial-up only just to play around on my web server. I am having a problem with the pap-secrets file and wondered if you had experience with that too?"