Philippe Vo cong tri

1) Introduction

I have been a long time admin of Solaris sparc servers and x86, professionally speaking.

I remember that I needed quite a lot of time to learn how to use the tools, browsing thru myriads of books and manuals, without really understanding their mechanism or inner workings. The manuals are explicit enough to carry out the daily work. But I was frustrated.

Now, I have the opportunity the delve into the bowels of some of the tools that SUN has opened.

As a boon, Opensolaris developer edition offers the fame Sun Studio, that only big commercial enterprises can afford (the ones developping software).

At my home, I can now delve into the arcane of Solaris, as I can do with Linux.

A few weeks ago, I bought a new Desktop, my first 64bits dual core machine.

Lenovo 3000 J205, AMD Athlon 64X2 4000+ 2.1GHz. 1 Gb Ram, Sata 160GB.

Embedded Ati Radeon X1250, Giga Ethernet, Sound, usb … Vista professional (I asked and received XP professional), just in case I want to “downgrade”.

I always work with at least two systems (Windows and Linux/OpenBsd/FreeBsd/Solaris X86).

The price is a bargain for the features offered.

My screen is an Acer LCD 17″ (the one which came with my former Acer T180).

I decided to use an external drive ( 300GB 3.5″ IDE in an external enclosure IDE/USB).

To actually test if my new desktop is able to boot from USB device, I installed Linux Ubuntu 7.10 .

It works nice with most embedded components, except the ethernet NIC.

I added the D-Link DGE-528T Ethernet NIC.

The NIC is linked to the ADSL modem to access the Web.

My printers Brother DPC115C and Laser 2030 are running quite well. The drivers are included with the distribution (under other slightly different labels).

2) OpenSolaris install:

I boot the Ubuntu by changing the boot menu in the Bios (External hardisk USB).

With Ubuntu 7.10, I download the DVD iso at

http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/

I burned the iso with my preferred k3b.

I download the Ethernet NIC driver at:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/driver-discuss/2006-May/003251.html

Burn it on a spare CDWR.

I printed the /boot/grub/menu.lst , which contains the boot for Ubuntu and Vista.
Once the Opensolaris DVD is booted as LiveDVD, I switchoff the Linux swap partition, since the later will be recognized as a solaris partition and the wizard sttubornaly wants to use it.

I run the “install-solaris” from the terminal. The Wizard starts to run.

I choose to add a new Solaris2 partition (20GB) and let the wizard taylor by default the inner partitions it needs.

After the install and reboot (with the external Disk as boot device), the grub menu will show only Solaris and Vista.

I go to /boot/grub/menu.lst to add the missing menu items for Ubuntu.

I install the Ethernet NIC (D-Link) driver from the previous CDWR.

After some tweaking with commands lines. Lo, the web access is done.

3) Conclusions

At first install, with a simple user login, I can’t run staroffice 8 (java thing).

With root login, it can run.

After some googling and tweakings, StarOffice 8 is running.

I download OpenOffice 2.3 for Solaris.

OpenOffice 2.3 and StarOffice 8 clearly share many features.

My printer Brother Laser 2030 is recognized right away.

I download and install clamav from:

http://www.blastwave.org/

Give a try with gftp by going to:

http://sunfreeware.com/indexintel10.html

I have to create /usr/local directory, when I run pkgadd -d gftpXXX and its depedencies.
And of course, I ran Sun Studio. Thanks SUN.

4) Appendix:

The pkg list: pkginfo.txt

uname and NIC tip: UnameMisc.txt

menu.lst: menu.txt

Some snapshots:

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.