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Installing Solaris 9 OS, x86 Platform Edition - One User's Experience

Supporting heterogeneous environments requires more hours and effort than sticking to one hardware and software platform. The downside of complete homogeneity lies in the fact that higher-end servers require faster and more scalable hardware while desktops and small servers can get by on cheaper x86 hardware. To bridge this gap and provide its customers with multi-platform support, Sun offers the Solaris Operating System for x86 Platforms. While the underlying hardware remains disparate, the x86 Platform Edition appears much the same as the SPARC Platform Edition. The resulting semi-homogeneity can help cut bottom-line costs for system administration and development. This article take a brief look at interactively installing the Solaris 9 OS, x86 Platform Edition.

My last attempt at installing a UNIX-like operating system on an x86-based machine was fraught with IRQ, jumper, and address fiddling, so I was a bit leery of attempting to install the Solaris 9 OS, x86 Platform Edition. Thankfully, my worries were unfounded. Once I put all of the hardware together, the Solaris OS installation program auto-detected everything and things went smoothly. If installing the Solaris OS on x86 hardware, first be sure to refer to the Hardware Compatibility List for supported configurations. Most of my hardware was listed there, and I hoped that the rest would be covered under some generic drivers.

The Hardware
My hardware components were:

• Motherboard: ASUS A7V133 4 channel IDE
• CPU Socket: Socket A (133/266 DDR MHz Support)
• Chipset: VIA KT133A
• Form Factor: ATX
• Multiplier Options: Up to 12.5x
• Bus Speed Options: 100 - 166 MHz in 1 MHz intervals
• Voltages: 1.1 - 1.85v in 0.25v increments
• Memory Support: 3 x 168-pin SDRAM PC100/PC133 Support
• Expansion Slots: 5/0/1/1 (PCI/ISA/AMR/AGP)
• AGP Support: 4x AGP Pro
• USB Support: 2 Standard USB ports, expansion for additional 2 ports
• BIOS: Award BIOS Flash ROM
• Onboard IDE: 2 x ATA100 EIDE, 2 x ATA100 Promise PDC20265 RAID (RAID 0 only)
• CPU: AMD 1.2 GHz Athlon
• Memory: 256M strip of Apacer PC133 CL2
• Hard Drive: Seagate ST340016A Barracuda ATA IV 40G (main primary IDE)
• DVD: Hitachi GD-7500 (main secondary IDE)
• CDRW: Generic 4x4x32 (main ATA100 primary IDE)
• Floppy: Generic 3.5
• NIC: 3Com 3C905B PCI
• Sound card: Sound Blaster Audigy 2
• Video Card: ATI All-In-Wonder Rage 128 Pro
• Monitor: Modograph MG-3930 9" SVGA 800x600
• Keyboard: Generic Windows PS2
• Mouse: Logitech M-C43 PS2 3-button

Instead of using the RAID 0 setting in the motherboard's BIOS, I opted to utilize all four IDE channels separately so there would be no chance of master/slave contention. The hard drive, DVD, and CDRW drives were each masters on their own IDE controllers. The machine was set to boot from the primary (hard drive) or secondary (DVD drive) device.

The one bit of hardware I wished for in this machine was a PCI PC Weasel card. I could have plugged the x86 hardware into the serial terminal server with all of my SPARC hardware and avoided sitting in the machine room while I performed the interactive install. If this had been something other than a one-off test install, I would have set up an x86 jumpstart image on my SPARC jumpstart server. Using jumpstart and/or a flash image also would have automated much of the work I ended up doing at the console. As it was, the x86 interactive install was fairly straightforward and looked similar to its SPARC counterpart.

Booting and Selecting the Language
The first step was to boot off of the CDROM and pick my language and locale:

1. I inserted the Software 1 of 2 CD into the DVD drive and powered on the system.
2. The system scanned for attached devices, and I hit F2 to accept the devices it found.
3. The next screen prompted me to choose the device to boot from. I selected the second device, the CDROM, and hit F2 to continue.
4. I then chose the type of installation, the first choice, Solaris OS interactive installation.
5. I selected choice 0, English, as my language.
6. I selected choice 0, English (C - 7-bit ASCII) as my locale.
7. I was then presented with the Solaris OS installation splash screen and hit F2 to continue to the next step.
8. I opted to bypass the screen setup.

Network Configuration
The next step involved configuring the network settings for the machine. After choosing the correct setting for each step, I hit F2 to continue.

Time and Date
Next I needed to set the date and time information, again hitting F2 to continue after each choice:

Disks and File System Layout
With the basic system configuration complete, the installation moved on to planning the system layout and choosing which software packages to install. The installation instruction screen explained that I would now be customizing the type of software, disks, and file system layout. The Solaris OS would generate a profile based on my decisions, and then start the actual installation.

1. On this information screen, I was prompted to hit F2 for a standard install or F5 for a flash install. I chose F2.
2. On the next screen, I opted not to select any support for additional geographic regions, and then hit F2 to continue.
3. Next I selected the software group Entire Distribution plus OEM support. I had the option of customizing the packages to install by hitting F4, but I chose to accept the default install of everything and hit F2 to continue.
   Note: I would never actually install everything in a non-test environment. For security purposes, I tend to install the bare minimum on machines and then add packages on an as-needed basis.
4. On the next screen, I selected my installation disks. I only had one, c0d0, which was already selected. I hit F2 to continue.
5. The next screen prompted me to either manually lay out my file systems by hitting F4 or accepting the Solaris auto layout by hitting F2. I always lay out my own file systems, so I hit F4.

At this point, I hit my first and only snag in the entire installation process. The next screen, Current filesystem and disk layout, didn't display any options at all. I expected it to note that the disk in the machine was not formatted for the Solaris OS and offer me the option of formatting it. Or, I should have been told that the disk was not suitable back when I selected it the first time.

1. I had to hit F3 twice to go back two screens to where I had selected my installation disk.
2. I de-selected c0d0 as my installation disk, and then reselected it. At this point, the installation software informed me of the need to install a Solaris OS fdisk partition on this disk in order for it to be suitable. I hit F2 to continue.
3. The next screen prompted me to create a Solaris OS fdisk partition. I chose to use the entire disk for Solaris OS and boot partitions, and then hit F2 to continue.
4. I was brought back to the screen where I needed to select my install disk. c0d0 was still selected, so I hit F2 to accept it again.
5. Once again, I hit F4 to do a manual layout instead of hitting F2 to do an auto layout.
6. This time the screen showed the c0d0 disk layout with just the overlap slice on c0d0s2. Back on track, I hit F4 to bring up the partition editor and customize my layout.
7. Using the disk partition editor, I configured the following layout, leaving 10M in slice 7 in the event that I ever wanted to use it for Volume Manager state databases or something similar:
Slice Mount Point Size (Mbytes) 0 / 1024 1 swap 1024 2 overlap 38152 3 /usr 2048 4 /var 1024 5 /files 33015 6 7 10
8. I hit F2 to accept my layout and was brought to the layout confirmation screen.
9. I hit F2 again to confirm my file system configuration.
10. The next screen asked if I wanted to mount remote file systems. I had the option of hitting F4 to configure remote file systems. Since I wouldn't be using NFS, I hit F2 to continue with the setup.
11. The following screen asked me to confirm my profile. I could hit F4 to change the profile, but since it was correct, I hit F2 to continue.
12. The next screen prompted me to choose between an auto reboot after installation or a manual reboot. I chose a manual reboot and hit F2 to begin the actual installation.

Software Installation and X Configuration
The installation went fairly quickly, and I was presented with an information screen declaring: If you want to bypass the device configuration and boot screens when the system reboots, eject the Device Configuration Assistant/Boot diskette now.

After the install of Disk 1 of 2 finished, I rebooted the machine and ejected the CDROM while the machine was resetting. When the boot loader screen asked which partition I wanted to boot from, I let it time out and it picked the default. I also let the secondary boot time out and pick the default, autoboot.

I hit F4 to bypass the X configuration, since I suspected that it might be somewhat complicated and I didn't want to hang the machine in the middle of the install. Then, when prompted, I set the root password. It asked me to type in the root passwd to configure X, but instead I hit Ctrl-D to continue with the boot sequence.

The next screen asked me to pick media to continue the install. I picked choice 1, CD/DVD. I inserted Disk 2 of 2 and hit return. The installation program added the extra packages from the second CD and ejected it when finished. When presented with an installation menu, I entered choice 2 (done) to finish up the software installation.

With the installation complete, the system came up and presented a text login screen. I logged in as root and ran kdmconfig to finally configure X. Because my video card was almost, but not quite, like a few of the driver choices, I stumbled around for a bit trying to pick something appropriate. Once I determined that I wanted the generic VESA driver, things went smoothly. I wound up with the following settings, which seemed to work well with my small low-resolution monitor:

• Generic VESA driver
• SuperVGA monitor type (800x600 @65Hz and 1024x768)
• 9" screen
• 800x600 256 colors at 56Hz
• Virtual screen resolution 800x600 (no panning)

I saved the configuration and tested the X server, which displayed the X root window and gave me a working mouse pointer. As a final test, I halted and booted the machine to make sure there were no errors on boot. The X login screen started, I was able to log in as root, and all of the higher-level parts of the operating system looked very similar to my SPARC machines. I let the machine burn in for several days to make sure no hardware or software incompatibilities or problems cropped up, and then it was ready for use.

Resources

• Purchase the Solaris 9 OS, x86 Platform Edition Media Kit or Download
• The Solaris OS x86 main page
• The Solaris OS 9 x86 Hardware Compatibility List
• The PC Weasel x86 serial interface card
• The Solaris OS on Intel - x86 FAQ
• Multi-booting Solaris and other operating systems
• Sunfreeware.com for third party Solaris OS freeware packages

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