Installing Solaris on a Sun Blade 100 (05.Mar.2010)
!!!UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!
PLEASE REFER TO THE INTRODUCTION TO HAVE SOME BASIC INFORMATIONS ABOUT WHERE I AM INSTALLING SOLARIS.
Solaris 10 installation
After burning the DVD-image I booted it and ...... not much was happening! Only the cursor was rotating, sluggishly, and the DVD-ROM was lit all the time.
As a professional programmer I am a very patient person and therefore ....... I waited.
Probably at this point many people would think that the workstation is stuck, but if you waited for ~10 minutes (on the Blade 100 with Ultrasparc 2e) you would see that the system reacts.
After those 10 endless minutes I was first greeted by a "WARNING: INVALID VECTOR INTR:..." which made me have a small heart attack, but as that was followed quite quickly by other normal messages I quickly regained my mental sanity.
I answered the simple installations questions, chose ZFS as filesystem and then the serious installation started, which took a few hours.
That's it.
Once it finished I was able to login and start a few apps.
More software
I downloaded from Sun/Oracle as well the Companion CD which contains some useful tools.
Having no idea how to install the programs from the CD I started by inserting the CD into the DVD-ROM :o)
The OS detected automatically the CD and showed me its contents but I couldn't install anything graphically.
So I opened a terminal and checked with "df -h" where the OS mounted the CD, which in my case was under "/cdrom".
I went there, navigated into the subdirectories and from within "/cdrom/s10_1009_software_companion/Solaris_Software_Companion/Solaris_sparc/Packages/" I executed e.g. ...
pkgadd -d `pwd` SFWtop
... which installed the "top" program.
After the installation just digiting "top" didn't work as the executable got installed under "/opt/sfw/bin/" and as I didn't have that path in my $PATH variable, the OS didn't find it.
Setting the PATH, shell and home directory
I therefore executed "export PATH=$PATH:/opt/sfw/bin" to add it to my $PATH environment variable.
Of course I didn't want to have to execute the command after each login and additionally I wanted
- to have an "own" directory for the user "root" and not just the "/" directory.
- to use the "bash" shell instead of "sh".
To fix this I
- created the directory "/root".
- created in the directory "/root" the file ".bash_profile" and in it I wrote the line "export PATH=$PATH:/opt/sfw/bin".
- edited with "vipw" "/etc/passwd" and changed the line "root:x:0:0:Super-User:/:/sbin/sh" to "root:x:0:0:Super-User:/:/usr/bin/bash"
- ran "passwd -h root" and set the home directory to "/root".
- rebooted.
This worked perfectly.
Well, I additionally changed the prompt of the shell by editing again "/root/.bash_profile and adding the line...
export PS1="\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \w \$\[\033[00m\]"
...which displays a nicer prompt like "root@mysparc /etc/ssh $".
SSH
The ssh-service was apparently running as I could connect to the Sun box from another machine, but it didn't want to let me log in, even when using the correct password.
To fix this I set in "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" the value of "PermitRootLogin" to "yes" (THIS IS A SECURITY RISK!).
After restarting "sshd" with "/lib/svc/method/sshd restart" I was finally able to login into Sun's box from my notebook.
DNS
I probably did some mistake when doing the initial install as right now the network works (e.g. I can "ping 10.0.0.1" to my router) but I cannot resolve domain names (e.g. "ping www.google.com" does not work).
To solve this I created the file "/etc/resolv.conf" and in there I entered the IP-address of my router ("nameserver 10.0.0.1").
Then I had as well to modify the line "hosts: files" in the file "/etc/nsswitch.conf" and add at its end "dns" which results in the line now being "hosts: files dns".
Again, more software
I downloaded Sun Studio 12. The installation was straightforward with the exception that I had to create and specify manually a temporary directory.
I found the very nice site Blastwave.org which offers a lot of packages and the installations are extremely simple as they have an own package manager.
Following their instructions for Solaris 10 I downloaded and installed their package manager. After doing this, installing "gcc" version 4.3.4 was just a matter of executing...
/opt/csw/bin/pkgutil -i gcc4"
Great!