Installing Solaris 10

Almost two weeks now my computers running Sun’s Solaris 10. I don’t know the version. But it says SunOs 5.10. Actually I have the CD’s since last year. But due to hardware issue, I abandoned the OS until recently. My interest.. comes again after reading an article saying that Google’s trying this OS. Why not give it a chance…?

First try was not silk smooth. Partly because I didn’t know how to share swap memory between Linux and Solaris. Some documentation explained that both can share the swap, while official documentation from Sun explicitly told that Solaris must have it’s own swap. Also I allocated not much space for Solaris.

Previously I have 20 GB disc with 3 linux partitions, hosted Arch linux, Ubuntu 6.04 and Slackware 10.2. Later I have to merge the last two partitions to provide more space to Solaris. I decided to keep Arch because it is located on first partition and also due to it simplicity, speed, and lightweightness. But still when I finished editing the partitions, I can’t boot into my remaining linux partition .

To shorten the story, finally I can install Solaris to my computer. I have to repeat some stages since the steps a bit different from installing linux. Then I boot first time into my fresh Solaris.

It takes longer than my Arch linux or Slackware to get into graphical login. The first window manager I encountered is CDE. I am playing a bit until suddenly the display resolution become terrible. Looking at the docs, I launch kdmconfig to fix the problem. It brings me to the installation of Xorg (sound familiar). Upon complete the process, I reboot and choose the JDS environment. Tadaa…what a nice desktop there. Yes it is GNOME based.

But the system is crippled because I have no internet, sound and mouse scroll button didn’t work. Quite strange because the mouse works well during the installation. A quick workaround on file /etc/X11/xorg.conf fixed this issue. I changed the mouse protocol to “ImPS/2” and added line Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5 6 7” on mouse section.

Googling the net, I came up with solution for getting sound on. It says I have to add audio810 "pci10de,ea" on /etc/driver_aliases. At that time I don’t know the reason why I have to put pci10de,ea. Later I know that this is the device-id of NVidia sound controller :). And here I use driver for Intel’s i810 audio controller since there is no specific driver from NVidia available.

So the remaining biggest issues is internet connection. I will tell the story on another posting since this one is really interesting…or frustrating?


Note: I was really helped by SLAX, a nice linux live CD based on Slackware during the process of installing Solaris. Thank you very much Tomas….:)