Beginner, lot of little problems

Question

Hello everybody (excuse me for my bad english).
I just installed solaris, for the first time, and there are several things I don't understand.
1) Firstly, I have seen that the $home folder for a new user is generally /export/home/username (no problem with this). But I was used to do this on /home/username before, so I tried the following before executing useradd: "chmod u+w /home" -> it answered me that it is impossible to modify /home. For me it's strange because I am root. Could someone explain me that?
2) More important, in some applications (java applications?), some keys of my keyboard are not recognized (ALT GR - X, backspace sometimes). For example, during the installation procedure of solaris, or in the management console, or again in the update manager. So I can't type an email address (@) or I have to use copy/paste from an other application (I copy the text from the terminal for example before copying it to the field. Does someone know how to solve this?
3) Last important thing, it looks like if there are problems with the update manager, it tries to install things during too long time (I have wait at less 2 hours, it was at the same level on the progress bar than 1 hour before). And when I try to cancel, I have a little popup that says it is cancelling, I wait I wait but nothing happens!
These are not very important things, but I would be very happy of any help (I hope my post is undestandable, as you can see, I am not very good in english :) )

Answer 1

thank you sid_sanders , you was probably right about the "out of space" problem. I have re installed solaris and the update manager seems to work fine. I have also solved my /home poblem. But I have a new one, with my internet connection.
At the beginning, my ethernet device was not set up in solaris, so I followed this tutorial:
http://solaris-x86.org/documents/tutorials/network.mhtml
But something does not work, because my connection is not set up when solars is started.
I can easily access internet by doing this:
# ifconfig rtls0 192.168.1.243 netmask 255.255.255.240 up
# route add default 192.168.1.241
But apparently, my files are bad configured, or solaris does not use them, have you got an idea about what happen?
I use an basic switch/router at home.
This is some informations about the concerned files:
my card is a realtek, and there is only one driver name for it
# cat /boot/solaris/devicedb/master | grep Realtek
pci10ec,8139 pci10ec,8139 net pci none "Realtek 8139 Fast Ethernet"
# cat /etc/driver_aliases | grep rtls
rtls "pci10ec,8139"
# ls /dev/rtls*
/dev/rtls /dev/rtls0
(for the following file, I am not absolutely sure of me because I don't know if it is necessary to use a domain name and i don't really understand the first line)
# cat /etc/hosts
::1 localhost loghost laptop
127.0.0.1 localhost loghost laptop
192.168.1.243 laptop
cat /etc/hostname.rtls0
laptop
# cat /etc/netmasks
192.168.1.0 255.255.255.240
# cat /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 192.168.1.241
# cat /etc/defaultrouter
192.168.1.241
And I have done the following:
cp /etc/nsswitch.dns /etc/nsswitch.conf
If you have an idea about the problem...
Thank you by advance.