ALOM Help describes how to use the Sun™ Advanced Lights Out Manager software that is installed on your Sun Fire™ server. For detailed information about setting up an ALOM console on your server, see the Installation Guide and the Administration Guide that shipped with your server.
ALOM Help is an easy-to-use, browser-based help system. You can run ALOM Help directly from the Documentation CD that shipped with your Sun Fire server, from the Sun documentation portal at http://www.sun.com/documentation, or from a local web server. For the latest updates to ALOM Help, see http://www.sun.com/documentation.
To run ALOM Help, you need the following software.
| Type of Software | Version or Configuration |
| Web browser |
ALOM Help works with the following web browsers:
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| JavaScript™ | ALOM Help works with the most popular versions of JavaScript: Version 1.2 and Version 1.3. |
| Java™* | Java Virtual Machine 1.2 or other compatible version. |
* Required only for full-text search in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Swedish
All ALOM Help topics have a control bar at the top of the content area. Each control launches a specific helper application that lets you navigate between topics, provide feedback to Sun, or display information about your current ALOM Help session.
| Control Icon | Function |
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Opens a pop-up browser window containing a graphical table of contents for ALOM Help. Use this graphical table of contents to browse the conceptual, procedural, and reference help topics. |
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Opens a pop-up browser window that lets you search ALOM Help topics. For customers using ALOM Help in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Swedish, ALOM Help supports full-text search. For customers using ALOM Help in Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, or Simplified Chinese, ALOM Help supports key word search. |
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Opens a pop-up browser window containing information about sending feedback to Sun about ALOM Help. |
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Opens a pop-up dialog box that displays information about your current version of ALOM Help, your current ALOM Help session, and your browser configuration. Open this dialog box if you need to contact Sun technical support about ALOM Help. |
At the bottom of the content area you can view links to related ALOM Help topics. By default, the list of links to related topics is "collapsed" under a control icon. Click the control icon to expand or collapse the list of related help topics.
| Control Icon | Function |
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Expands the list of related help topics. |
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Collapses the list of related help topics. |
If you routinely load sophisticated web pages in your browser or routinely run Java or JavaScript applications, you will find ALOM Help to be a well-behaved application on your desktop. That said, there are several known limitations to the way ALOM Help performs on all supported browsers, operating environments, versions of Java, versions of JavaScript, and locales.
| Language(s) | Browser(s) | Operating Environment(s) | Limitation |
| English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Netscape 4.79 | Solaris | If you copy a long string from a web page and paste it into the full-text search input box, Netscape may crash. |
| English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Netscape 4.79 | Solaris | If you are running ALOM Help over a busy LAN and you enter a common word such as "the" or "command" or "ALOM" in the full-text search input box, the Java search applet may time out before it completes searching all ALOM Help files on the LAN. |
| Japanese | All | Solaris, Windows | If you click the "Browser Test" link on the ALOM Help home page (index.html), your browser may fail to open the pop-up window or your browser may display some garbled output in that window. |
| All | All | All | Certain browsers and browser plug-ins can block pop-up windows. To take advantage of the navigation and functions described above, you must enable pop-up windows in your browser. If you cannot enable pop-up windows on a shared network copy of your browser, try clicking a second time the icon or button in Help that normally launches the pop-up window. |
| All | Netscape 4.79 | Solaris, Windows | Netscape 4.79 users will not see the "Related Information" controls for expanding and collapsing the list of related help topics. Netscape 4.79 has a bug in its implementation of the DOM (Document Object Model) that prevents it from supporting HTML divisions correctly. Netscape 4.79 users of ALOM Help see all the "Related Information" links without the controls for expanding and collapsing the list. |