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Posts tagged Open Solaris
First Impressions of Open Solaris
Jul 10th
I have decided to nuke my Windows XP partition (I haven’t used Windows in last two months) and install Open Solaris. Open Solaris requires a Solaris distribution to be already installed, so as per the instructions, I downloaded Solaris xpress community release and burnt the CDs.
Initial Blues
I booted with the first CD and was surprised at how sluggish the installation was. I think Solaris was scanning for various devices. Unfortunately, none of my three ethernet cards were configured. The installation options were quite simple. When it asked me for networking, I checked the box ‘enable’. I thought it will just setup the hostname etc., but Solaris went into what looked like an infinite loop probably trying to bring the interfaces up. I gave up and rebooted my machine.
Solaris doesn’t like Linux fdisk partitions
So, I skipped the network setup and was at the partition setup. Solaris was not able to recognize the paritions created by Linux and tried to take the whole hard disk. I was initially confused, booted into Linux and looked for information on the net. I couldn’t find any specific reasons except that Solaris fdisk is a bit wierd. Solaris fdisk probably got confused with the number of paritions (13 in total) I had.
The installation
Finally, I have decided to just install it on a new disk and went on with the installation. Installation was pretty smooth and I chose to install everything. I booted Solaris and X is setup with the wrong resolution (800×600) and was greeted with CDE.
Grub problems
Solaris installed Grub on my second hard disk and when I tried to multi-boot using my existing Linux partitions on the first disk, booting failed. Grub kept on saying that No such partition (hd0, 0, a). After a bit of searching, I found various resources on Solaris multi-booting. However, my problem was a little wierd. When I installed Solaris, I setup a partition on the second hard disk as the active partition as Solaris was complaining about active partitions. As a result, Solaris Grub conf had (hd0, 0) (pointing to the second hard disk actually) in it. When I booted using Linux Grub conf after setting the /boot as the active partition, the (hd0, 0) no longer pointed to my second hard disk. I fixed the /boot/grub/menu.lst in Solaris and everything is working fine.
Conclusion
Well, you can’t do much without networking. I wanted to install Open Solaris, but downloading it in Linux and mounting the partitions etc. is full of pain. I have already spent/wasted four hours doing all this. I was really unimpressed at the long wait at the start of the installation while probing the devices. Fedora core 3 takes 20 minutes to install everything on my 3GHz machine and everything is configured without a hitch. I checked Sun’s hardware compatibility list and didn’t find my network cards. They have a long way to go, if they want more people to start using it. I would like to do some hacking in Open Solaris, but somebody has to write a driver for my network card. May be, I will 
Funny comments in Open Solaris
Jun 24th
It’s been ten days since Open Solaris is released and I had a brief look at the code and discussion forums. I looked at the file system code as I am most familiar with Linux kernel fs code. Their source browser is pretty cool with nice syntax higlighting. The code looked quite neat filled with a lot of comments. That doesn’t mean it’s good, but it’s a good sign. Was looking at the discussion forums and found this interesting post about funny comments in the code. Nice read, enjoy !