Installing Solaris Express (B98)

[Budious]

Do we have any Solaris Express experts in house at Neowin?

I downloaded the most recent release of Solaris Express (snv_98) on DVD .iso using Sun's download manager to ensure checksum of final download, burned the disc with Brasero in Ubuntu, and tossed it in the tray of a recently refurbished tower. The first time I booted the disk, it worked just fine and I was able to get into the GUI installation and got to around 80% of installation but had the system suddenly reboot. I tracked that to memory timings in BIOS, and after a few hours of Memtest was satisfied everything was good, I preceeded to install Windows 2000 on the first drive (160GB IDE). I wanted to go back later and reinstall Solaris on the second drive (74GB SATA) but the disk will no longer boot far enough to reach the GUI installer. I should mention it detected both drives and all my hardware fine the first time trying this. Instead, after the DVD's grub menu, the system freezes on the portion of the kernel boot...

"

Sun Release 5.11 Version snv_98 32-bit

Copyright 1983-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Use is subject to license terms.

"

Installation hangs at this point and is non-responsive. I couldn't locate any relevant info to this problem, but it was strange the disk worked the first time, and does not boot any longer.

[Glowstick]

Likely more hardware issues. If it booted to the GUI installer the first time, anything short of a selfcombusting DVD-R should have it boot into it again and again. If you get the release info output and nothing else, it's likely hanging at device detection. I think if you add parameter -v to the kernel line of the GRUB entry, it should output verbose info. If you also want/need verbose info of services, add "-m verbose" after the -v.

See where it hangs and post it here.

Also, you should consider getting the OpenSolaris ISO. It's the same as Solaris Express, minus some licensed bits no one would really miss, plus ipkg. And does ZFS boot. And is a LiveCD. Get the ISO here: http://www.genunix.org/ (latest is snv_98)

[Budious]

After adding "-v" to the boot option, the last line to appear before the kernel hangs is "/pci@0,0/pci1849,5239@13,3 (ehci0): Unable to take control from BIOS. Failure is ignored."

Most of the changes I made to the BIOS were for memory timings, I may have made a few changes to disabling built-in ports and devices, I'll see about enabling some of those again and see what random combination works (high quality ASRock engineering).

Solved!

"Universal Serial Bus (USB*) EHCI Specification

The Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI) specification describes the register-level interface for a Host Controller for the Universal Serial Bus (USB) Revision 2.0."

Going on this information, I disabled USB 2.0 support in the BIOS and the Solaris disk booted without incident.

Edited September 28, 2008 by Budious

[Glowstick]

Nice.

Still, you should consider going with OpenSolaris distro. It's the same system, but with a network package manager. Makes upgrading less of a pain. "pkg image-update", wait a bit and wham, you've an updated ZFS clone of your current system. If you're going with it, be sure to download an updated ISO, one past build snv_89, because snv_89 came with boot changes that actually require hands-on to make the updated clone bootable.

[Budious]

Can the opensolaris builds if downloaded by .iso be installed over a current installation of opensolaris, or solaris express to maintain current configurations and user settings? I'll probably do a reinstall at a later point, this was my first dive into a Solaris w/ Gnome environment. I tried a Solaris 10/06 w/ CDE a few years back but never got used to to it.

On another topic, I am trying to install the Sun Studio 12 package in Solaris Express to be a compiler for the netbeans IDE. I successfully installed the package, but I need to update the $PATH variable to represent the /usr/bin/version to be identify as "Sun Studio 12" when requested. I did not find consistent recommendations on how to do this, but I assuming that the changes should be made to ~/.profile to something along the lines of:

PATH={$PATH}:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/version:/usr/ucb:.

export $PATH

[Glowstick]

From the iPhone since I dont have DSL yet in my new apartment. Details only tomorrow.

You install OpenSolaris only once and then update it from the repository. Downliading newer ISOs is just to keep a current version on disc in case of a catastrophe.

Regarding SS12, I have to check it out...

[PGHammer]

Nice.

Still, you should consider going with OpenSolaris distro. It's the same system, but with a network package manager. Makes upgrading less of a pain. "pkg image-update", wait a bit and wham, you've an updated ZFS clone of your current system. If you're going with it, be sure to download an updated ISO, one past build snv_89, because snv_89 came with boot changes that actually require hands-on to make the updated clone bootable.

True/+1

I upgraded from an early version of OpenSolaris to the current version (in fact, from snv_89), and there's a step-by-step method in the release notes for build 111b (the current version) on a terminal-based over-the-Internet upgrade (works from snv_89 or any earlier build (in fact, from any build that lacks the graphical version of the Update Manager)).

The big news for non-SPARC users is vastly-improved graphics drivers (including new drivers for a passel of nVidia and AMD-based cards, including every AMD HD-series card up to HD4890).

[PGHammer]

Do we have any Solaris Express experts in house at Neowin?

I downloaded the most recent release of Solaris Express (snv_98) on DVD .iso using Sun's download manager to ensure checksum of final download, burned the disc with Brasero in Ubuntu, and tossed it in the tray of a recently refurbished tower. The first time I booted the disk, it worked just fine and I was able to get into the GUI installation and got to around 80% of installation but had the system suddenly reboot. I tracked that to memory timings in BIOS, and after a few hours of Memtest was satisfied everything was good, I preceeded to install Windows 2000 on the first drive (160GB IDE). I wanted to go back later and reinstall Solaris on the second drive (74GB SATA) but the disk will no longer boot far enough to reach the GUI installer. I should mention it detected both drives and all my hardware fine the first time trying this. Instead, after the DVD's grub menu, the system freezes on the portion of the kernel boot...

"

Sun Release 5.11 Version snv_98 32-bit

Copyright 1983-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Use is subject to license terms.

"

Installation hangs at this point and is non-responsive. I couldn't locate any relevant info to this problem, but it was strange the disk worked the first time, and does not boot any longer.

Actually, as opposed to SE, go with OpenSolaris (much further along). The current release is snv_111b (2009-06), with a current developer's build of 117.

Hardware support has vastly improved (over build 98), especially in terms of graphics card support. (I'm entering this from build 117, connected *wirelessly* to the household LAN; wireless because the onboard Ethernet isn't supported by OpenSolaris.)