Q:
Where can I find logs if a program fails?
Like my cron or even if the system halts or reboots?
A:
Well first you should check the man page on the program in question. It may
have it's own log files that can be checked, which may require that you do
something to enable them.
In the case of a catastrophic failure which causes a trap of some sort or in
the unlikely event the system crashes you need to look at two commands that
help you control where your files go and even what is put into them.
For programs that fail you want to look at coreadm. Typically a core file
will be placed in the current directory the program is running in at the
time. Since that may not be a place you would look for such a file you may
want to change that behavior with coreadm. This is a relatively new feature
of Solaris.
Previously all such files were simply called 'core' and you had no control
over where they were placed. Now you can have several with name formats of
your choosing so that each one could be a unique filename. You can set this
for a general usage by a user or make it a system-wide setting if you are a
super-user or root. Check the man page for the full details.
For system crashes you want to look at the dumpadm command. Normally you
will find files from system crashes in the /var/crash/<systemname> directory
on your system. Previously you did not have control over where the files
where created, but now you can change that with this command.
An additional feature that is new with this command is the ability to have
all of memory dumped. Normally you would only get system pages dumped as
part of a crash dump file. This allows you to see not only the system data,
but program data as well. Use with caution on a very large memory system.
Note that this is one reason you should always have plenty of space for /var
on your system. Running out of space on /var can make your system
unbootable.
Q:
I have a Viewsonic LCD 27 inch monitor and I can only get 16 colors.
In an older version I always had 32-bit color. What can I do?
A:
You have a 27-inch LCD display and you are complaining? #8^)
I am not sure what makes you think you have 16 colors, because kdmconfig
does not offer that choice. Now with the XFree86 drivers, of which the VESA
and the Trident driver are included at this time with more in the Porting
Kit, you can choose 16-bit (65536) color depth. That is not recommended though
because many things do not work correctly in that mode, not the least of
which is Java. Typically you will only be offered 8-bit (256) or 24-bit
(16,777,216) color modes.
Naturally for higher resolution monitors you may be offered less colors at
the higher resolutions. This will depend on the memory and capabilities
of your video card. Choosing a lower resolution may give you more colors.
If there are a lot of possible choices they will not all appear on the one
screen. You will need to use the cursor keys to scroll back and forth to
see all the possible choices.
If the licenses are for legitimate non-commercial use - evaluation, software
development, non-profit organisation and are fur use with 1-CPU systems,
then further licenses can be registered under the terms of the Free Binary
License program:
For any commercial use, and for deployment on any systems with capacity of 2
or more CPUS, appropriate RTU's (Right to Use licenses) must be purchased
from Sun - these are available from http://store.sun.com and also from your
Sun sales representative/reseller.
In this case, assuming the 10 licenses in question were registered under the
terms of the Free Binary License Program, you need take no further action -
we do not issue paper licenses when licenses are registered under the free
program. If at any time in the future these systems are moved into
commercial deployment, appropriate RTUs must be purchased.
Q:
How can I log anytime someone deletes something or uses the rm command? Is there somewhere that is already setup that I can view?
A:
Not that I am aware of. However, nothing prevents you from replacing the
/usr/bin/rm command (and don't forget /usr/bin/rmdir and /usr/xpg4/bin/rm)
with a script of your own devising, or even an executable program of your
own that does the same function.
In there you can implement whatever logging you wish. There may be some
Sun package that I am not aware of that would implement this for you, or a
3rd party software package. I am not familiar with everything, after all,
and I am not fully conversant with all the nuances of system administration
that are possible under Solaris. If you have the space you might even
implement a multi-generation undelete capability if you roll your own design.
Q:
Why does Sun not support the x86 version of Solaris when contributing builds of the Mozilla releases?
The last Solaris x86 Mozilla contribution was version 1.1 and that was not even contributed by Sun!
I also feel that Sun should push Adobe/Macromedia to keep up versions of Acrobat Reader / Flash Plugin current on both OS,
after all it should be little more than recompile.
It is very hard to justify expenditure on Solaris x86 without key applications
like Mozilla, Acrobat Reader, (Flash) and Open Office as supported (in some
form, even with just builds of the current release, for download) by Sun itself.
A:
You are correct about that and we are doing something about it.
For Mozilla you can look at our Beta version here:
There was a version 4.05 of acroread on the Adobe site until just the past
week or so. It looks like they may have pulled it because of the security
issue that was recently raised about acroread. I am sure they have been
approached about an updated version for Solaris X86. In the meantime you
can look into xpdf:
I used to use that before the acroread version was available and found it
to be quite good.
As for Flash there is a version being developed, but I do not know what it's
current status is. Nor do I know how it will be released. It might appear
on our freeware site, be bundled in with the Solaris X86 software in an
Update, or you may have to get it from Macromedia. We'll have to wait and
see how that develops, but it is coming from what I have heard.
The same is true for OpenOffice 1.1 for Solaris X86. I recently saw an
internal notice that it was available for testing, so it is not ready for
prime time just yet. But it too will be coming in (hopefully) very near
future.
Even though our current emphasis has been on providing Solaris X86 server
solutions, to support the hardware Sun is currently shipping, the desktop
has not been forgotten.
Q:
I have Intel 810 chipset with PIII processor and only get 16 colours when I install Solaris 8.
How can I get 256 or more colours?
A:
I am guessing you chose the older VGA mode and that you have a version of
Solaris 8 older than the 7/01 update. That is the version where support
for the 810 & 815 chipsets was added, if I recall correctly.
You need the 109401-14 video patch and the 110959-01 xsvc patch for 810 & 815
video support on Solaris 8. Solaris 9 already has this in it, of course.
Note that the 16-color VGA mode was removed for Solaris 9 and we now have the
VESA driver from XFree86 in there. It is a much better solution and works
with many cards when you do not have a specific driver. Unfortunately it
does not work with the Intel video for the 810, 815, 830, or 845 chipsets.
Those chipsets require a driver that knows how to reserve system memory for
their use and can then program the addresses into the controller. The VESA
driver is unable to do that.
Q:
I have a problem with setting up the network in Solaris 8 02/02 on a P4 system with the (rather new, I think) Intel 865G chipset.
I already tried three different NICs (Intel GB and FE and 3com FE), but the problem stays the same:
The network interface can be plumbed and configured with IP, netmask and broadcast without error, but I cannot access the network.
A snoop on the device shows _nothing_ at all, on a linux box on the same subnet I can see the arp
requests and the replys fine when pinging from the Solaris box, but the NIC
seems to be deaf.
Do you have any idea concerning the cause of this problem? I considered PnP, but in this BIOS, there is no possibility to turn if on/off.
Will the 865G chipset be supported in Solaris 9?
A:
I am not aware of one off the top of my head, but it probably does work.
This sounds like the classic ACPI issue I have been seeing for the past year
or more. Some BIOSes are reporting the interrupt info for a device in such
a way that Solaris is not seeing it correctly.
The workaround for this is to disable ACPI. If that can be done in the BIOS
then you should do it there. If that is not provided by your BIOS, and most
do not, you need to tell Solaris not to use it. You disable ACPI in Solaris
by using eeprom to set acpi-user-options to 0x2:
eeprom acpi-user-options=0x2
To enable it you set it to a value of 0x0 (default):
eeprom acpi-user-options=0x0
Some fixes went into Solaris 9 recently that will catch some of these ACPI
info problems, but there may be more lurking out there. As a standard let
us just say that ACPI is open to many interpretations. We are now trying to
make it handle all possible cases that we see on hardware we are supporting.
Q:
Is it possible to successfully install and run Oracle 9i SPARC 32-bit on Solaris x86?
A:
I see this question all the time. If not for Oracle then for some other
SPARC application.
There is no SPARC virtual machine that runs on Solaris X86, so it is not
possible to run any binary that has SPARC native code in it on Solaris X86.
The only type of code that would work on both X86 and SPARC platforms would
be something that is based on Java. I have seen more than one case where a
Java application was released as being for Solaris SPARC and people were
able to install and run it just fine on Solaris X86. Which just shows you
that the people releasing those products were missing part of their
potential customer base by not saying it worked on both platforms and being
prepared to support it on both of them.
Q:
Will there be support for S-ATA Controllers and Disks?
A:
That is a very good question. Unfortunately I do not have an answer for it.
Several people have expressed the concern that we need to support them, but
nobody that I am aware of has ever tried it on such a system. The Solaris
driver basically takes whatever setting the BIOS decides to use for an IDE
device and leaves it be. About the only thing it does is it tries to decide
if it can use DMA or Programmed I/O modes for the particular device.
So if Serial ATA controllers look like the older legacy or PCI devices we
have seen previously, I would expect it to work just as well as it does with
the older hardware.
If it does not work we will be adding support to Solaris for it, of that I
am certain. It is too important a standard not to support. But it has not
yet reached enough penetration into the marketplace that it has become a
factor for Solaris yet.
I actually was looking for anyone shipping S-ATA hardware at Comdex last
November and nobody could even say when it would ship for certain. They had
controllers and drives on display, but nobody would commit to a shipping
date at that time. Everyone was waiting on drive availability it sounded
like to me. They are certainly out there now. If anyone has actually tried
it I would very much like to know what the hardware was and if it worked or
not.
Q:
I want to install Solaris 9 x86 on an ALR Evolution Dual P Pro.
This workstation cannot boot from CD. How I can make boot diskette?
A:
This is a common question. There are several ways to get a boot diskette
image, so I will discuss them all, along with their merits:
Starting with Solaris 9 X86 you can find the image of the boot diskette
on the CD labeled "Solaris 9 Software 2 of 2". It is in the directory
/Solaris_9/Tools and is called d1_image. Our Solaris 9 media kits no
longer ship with a floppy in them to cut costs. Since most systems can
boot from CDROM it is not needed, especially since the image it there to
let you make one if it is required.
Merits: This will always match the version you are installing.
Merits: You can get an exact match for your Solaris 8 CDs.
Issues: This site should have other versions for Solaris 9 and earlier,
but it does not. It did prior to being moved to this location.
I have brought up this issue and was told the older images are
going to be restored. It probably is not an issue for Solaris 9
since you have one on the 2 of 2 CD, but it would still be nice
to have one place to go for any boot diskette image.
Look for an ITU or DCA patch dated after the date on your CDs. To find
these go to http://sunsolve.sun.com and search for ITU or DCA. The
patch synopsis may not say it is an ITU patch. Look also for boot or
driver in the synopsis line and then check to see what files are in it
by looking at the README. An ITU patch will have ITU1.3 in it. Some of
the ITUs also contain a DCA file named something like this from patch
107291-02 - S27DCA0199. This name means it is the Solaris 7 (2.7) DCA from
January (01) 1999 (99).
Merits: If a DCA file is present as part of an ITU that you are using you
need to use that DCA file or a newer one for your boot diskette.
Also this may allow you to get fixes that were created after the
last Update was released for your version of Solaris. This may
have bug fixes needed for your system to work and it certainly
can't hurt as all previous fixes will be included. Only using
an older version of the DCA is likely to cause problems.
Issues: It is a pain to try and find a DCA image file this way. The
search on SunSolve used to look into the READMEs, but does not do
that any more, so the burden is on you. I have made it a policy
within my group that all ITU patches from now on will have the
work ITU in the synopsis to make them easier to find, so that may
help (besides you need that when you are looking for an ITU patch
to install with).
Floppy image files are easy to recognize simply by their size: 1474560 bytes.
Q:
Just last year Sun was planning to drop kick Solaris x86 out the door.
The "secret six" had to defend Sun customers from Sun management and only mildly
succeeded. For the past year, the meager support for Solaris 8 x86 has become the
no support for Solaris 9 x86 hardware. Why should I risk my business trusting a
company that has shown quite recently, abruptly and without my input, that it
dosn't care about my business in the least?
A:
Not knowing what your business is I can't speak to that, but I can address
your other points. At the time the decision was made to stop new
development on Solaris X86 (note that Support for Solaris X86 never stopped)
Sun was trying to cut costs to return to profitability. Frankly, the
business model they had used for Solaris X86 at that time would not have
made it pay for itself. Instead of coming up with a new business model that
would have done so they put it on hold until after they could evaluate the
situation later.
I think the Secret Six did a very good job of turning Sun management around.
They did not get everything they wanted, but they did cause Sun to reverse
their decision to stop production of Solaris X86. It was far easier to turn
it off than to turn it back on, which is why it took a while for product to
start showing up for Solaris X86 after it was decided to restart it. They
showed several ways in which Sun could make money selling Solaris X86 and
they also made them aware of just how many places it was being used. That
was something that many who were more isolated from the customers were not
aware of and something I think the free download program contributed to by
allowing people to download it and simply put it to use with no way for Sun
to track it.
Name me another large company that has reversed a business decision for a
product like this one has done based on customer feedback. It was obvious
that such feedback as to how Solaris was being used was missing and we are
now working to correct that by providing ways for customers to work with us.
The new HCL site ( http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/ ) is one of them.
This Xpert session is yet another. More will follow I am sure and we will
continue to work with the Secret Six and other interested member of the
Solaris community going forward.
As to why you should consider risking your company on Sun consider this.
We offer support for our products for five (5) years after the final
version of it ships. At least for software products, I can't swear the
same is true for hardware (please no jokes about programmers and light
bulbs...). Do any of the Linux companies do that? I know Microsoft does
not do it, as they are trying to force everyone to Windows XP even though
2000 and ME are at best three years old.
Extremely reliable in being able to run older software on new revisions of
Solaris. We recently evaluated upgrading servers throughout Sun and found
that many were still running 2.5 or 2.5.1 (or older!) versions of Solaris.
By using newer hardware with current Solaris versions we were able to
combine multiple servers into a single server in many cases. Yet something
like 98% of all software did not need to be upgraded to a newer version,
because it worked as before when put onto the newer version of Solaris.
That goes directly to reducing the TCO for your business:
2a) Software purchases for applications are reduced.
2b) Training for new software is not needed as often.
Sun is selling X86 hardware for the first time ever since Solaris X86 has
been in existance. Our sales people now have a physical product to go
out and sell and they know how to sell hardware. That is why we have
been gaining marketshare over IBM and HP, our nearest competitors in the
Unix Server market. So we now have a vested interest in making Solaris
X86 the same OS across the board as Solaris SPARC. That is why you will
be seeing our various software products such as SunONE and Orion all come
out for Solaris X86 now.
Sun is actively working to engage the ISV and IHV developers for Solaris
X86. At the recent announcement with Oracle for support of 9i on X86 we
also announced 300 ISVs developing for Solaris X86. The availablility of
Gnome and other parts of the Open Software environment will make it much
easier for ISVs developing on Linux to also develop on Solaris. It will
probably be done first one Solaris X86 for some of them, since in many
cases they can use the same system for both Linux and Solaris
development.
For the best support for your business on Solaris X86 you should choose a
Sun hardware platform. The second best platform to choose would be one that
is listed as Sun Certified. For Solaris 9 that does include all platforms
on the older Solaris 8 HCL as well, but I won't guarantee that will hold for
the next version of Solaris. Any problem that reproduces on a Supported
system will be accepted by Sun, whether your particular system is supported
or not. With a Support contract you can escalate the issue for an immediate
fix as well. Without one you would have to wait for someone else to report
the problem *and* ask for a patch to fix it.
I can tell you this. I have been here for eight years and Solaris X86 is
now bigger than ever before. There are times when SPARC development is
being put on hold to work on Solaris X86 now, which is something new for
Sun. And with something like $6 billion cash in the bank Sun is not going
away any time soon. So I would say that Sun is a good risk for any company,
but I may be just a little prejudiced...
Q:
Dell and HP have precisely zero support for Solaris 9.
Why should I risk my job by purchasing thousands of dollars in hardware that 'may' work on Solaris x86?
It would take one person one week, a test bench, and a credit card to certify one of every current model from HP and DELL.
Why hasn't this been done?
A:
Maybe your credit card has a high limit, but I certainly can't put every
Dell system (in every possible configuration) there is on any of mine. Plus
it takes 3 days, as I recall, to run the Certification Suite. My test bench
is not big enough to do that in a week, assuming there were not problems
found in getting Solaris installed in the first place on some of the
systems. Then there is the little problem of paying for the card when it
comes due. My wife won't let me carry a balance, so it has to be paid in
full, and frankly my paycheck just isn't that big. I wish it was though!
We are working to get systems certified now with both of these companies and
we are not limitting it to just them. When you go to the HCL web site you
will see three categories:
Sun Certified - These are systems that Sun sells and maintains.
Test Suite Certified - These are systems Sun has tested using the suite we
have developed to certify that a system works with Solaris. We have worked
with the manufacturer to certify these systems.
Reported to Work - These are systems where a customer has reported that
Solaris worked for them, but it has not necessarily been certified by Sun.
We only just started this certification process back up, so it will take a
while to get systems added to it. Let's take the Dell 2650 as an example.
It has several issues with earlier versions of Solaris X86 due to how it
implemented ACPI. Those ACPI issues were addressed by a combination of BIOS
updates and code fixes that went into Solaris X86, both of which took some
time to get done and tested.
There is also the issue of what we can support. We are unable to have every
model of every X86-based computer that the world turns out. We never had
many of the systems listed on the Solaris 8 (or earlier) HCLs except maybe
for a brief period of testing in our lab before shipping them back to the
manufacturer. For some of them they were never in our lab at all, because
we let the manufacturer do their own certification testing and they just
notified us of the results.
We want to have a more sustainable support plan with Solaris X86 this time.
So the plan is that any bug found on a Sun Certified platform is something
we will do everything possible to fix, since it is our own hardware after
all. A problem on Test Suite Certified hardware will first try to be
recreated on Sun Certified hardware. Failing that we can try to recreate it
on the same hardware, but those systems will probably be in limited numbers
within Sun and new functionality (such as a newer video card option) will
not be supported most likely. A system in the Reported to Work category
must have the bug recreated on our own hardware for it to be worked on.
These rules are for what we called Escalated bugs, which are those that need
an immediate fix for a customer resulting in a patch being released. A bug
can always be filed on any issue, regardless of the system being used.
There is no guarantee we will work on it if it is not at least in the first
two categories though.
Note that we are choosing systems for the Test Suite Certified category that
are very close to our own systems in the hardware they use. This gives us a
much better chance of being able to reproduce a problem on our own hardware
and we only need a (relatively) small amount of non-Sun hardware that we
need to keep for things that don't recreate on our own hardware.
By choosing the right types of systems we should be able to have systems that
represent the majority of X86 systems out there that are worth considering to
run Solaris X86 on. We will not be certifying low-end home systems, but will
limit it to well-built high-end desktop/laptop systems and server systems for
the most part.
A:
Support for the Broadcom Gb Ethernet devices will probably be included in
a future Solaris 9 Update. It will either be bcme or our own driver. I
am just not certain which update it will be in at this time.
Q:
Is there a hardware compatability test you can run before you install Solaris?
A:
The short answer to that is no. Our own Certification Suite requires
Solaris to be installed before you run it, because being able to install
Solaris is a major part of the compatability check you need to do.
However, you can get a fairly good idea of how well Solaris recognizes your
hardware from the scan it does of your devices when you boot with the Device
Configuration Assistant (DCA).
For legacy items you will not see much. Items like serial and parallel
ports, or IDE and display controllers are simply named as such with no
specific name given.
For items like your sound, SCSI, or network devices you should see a
specific name associated with it in the list of devices that is displayed
after the scan is complete. If the exact device is not recognized you will
see some message like "RAID Controller" for a RAID controller, "Network
Device" or maybe something more specific like "Ethernet controller" for a
network card, or "Mass storage controller" for a SCSI or IDE card that it
doesn't recognize. Sound cards would be shown as an "Audio device". there
are many more I could list, but you get the idea.
Note: We probably should change that for display devices. All that would
need to be done is to add an entry in the master file to describe those we
know work with that version of Solaris. Seeing a good descriptive name
could then tell you that your video card will likely work with that version
of Solaris X86. The problem would be that matching a display device is a
bit trickier than just matching the device ID information, but it would be
able to show that we support that class of display device at least.
To see what types of names I am talking about look at the master file on a
boot floppy in /solaris/devicedb or on an installed Solaris X86 system in
the /boot/solaris/devicedb directory. The descriptive name is in double
quotes (") at the end of each entry. This name is what is shown by the DCA
and also by prtconf when you use the -pv options.
You should also remember that the name we display may not match the name of
the device you have. This is because the ID we used to match it with in
our master file is being used for more than one type of device from that
hardware manufacturer. In theory they should work the same, since they have
the same IDs. A more accurate method of matching devices with IDs is being
done now which will hopefully let us distinguish between these similar, but
different, devices and to more properly identify them in the master file.
Q:
Solaris 9 x86 as a multimedia home system...
Is it possible to have hardware accelerated OpenGL with a modern cheap graphic card?
Is there any sound driver for surround sound included?
This two things are very important these days, so does Solaris support these features?
A:
Solaris is not designed for multimedia, but there are people that work at
adding features for it.
I am not sure that they have surround sound support though.
There has also been talk within the Solaris X86 community of trying to port
the Linux sound APIs to Solaris X86. This was suggested because most of the
various Open Software players for video or CDs are written with the Linux
library and API set in mind, so having it on Solaris would potentially allow
those applications to run with little or no changes.
For OpenGL the best commercial solution (with fre trial download) is from
XiG, formerly X-Inside Graphics:
http://www.xig.com
The other solution would be to install the XFree86 X server package (not our
porting kit) onto Solaris X86 and use Utah-GLX.
Q:
Dell 2650 is on HCL for Solaris 9 x86.
There's info that additional drivers from Dell are needed. What drivers?
I can't find any info on Dell pages (only drivers for raid cards for Solaris 7 and 8).
What about raid controler in Dell 2650 - is it supported?
A:
I had looked at that earlier today and saw that a specific URL was not in
the comments for the system. I sent an E-mail to those responsible for the
site when I noticed that. The drivers will be in the update after the 04/03
version they tested with.
I looked on the Dell web site and they certainly do not have it there yet,
so here is where you go for them:
Although both of these drivers say that they are for Solaris 8 they will
also work on Solaris 9 just fine.
The RAID device is not yet supported, but it is the same RAID device we
have in the V60x/V65x systems and I do think they will be supported in the
future. I don't have a timeframe for that, nor do I know who will be doing
the writing of the driver (Sun or Adaptec), but I am expecting one to come
out eventually.
Q:
If you are using Solaris x86 on a desktop system without support contract where can you send (email?) any bug reports, etc?
A:
For Sun customers the Big Admin site is a place to look for answers. There
are forums under the Discussion tab for asking questions of other Solaris
X86 users:
As for submitting bug reports there has been some talk of a way to do that,
similar to how the Java group allows customers to submit bugs. Right now
that does not exist. The problem would be that it would require some
resources to screen all the info that comes in, both for duplication and to
possibly get more detailed information of the problem being reported.
If it ever is done you will most likely find any bug reporting tool on the
Big Admin site.
Do I sound like a commercial for Big Admin or what? Maybe it's because they
gave me a cool T-shirt...
Q:
Since Solaris 9 on SPARC is a 64 bit OS and now chip makers such as AMD will
be shipping 64 bit x86 chips will Solaris x86 ever be shipped with 64 bit support?
A:
Since ever is a very long time I don't feel I am going out on a limb when I
say yes. When that will happen and for what CPU chips I am not going to
try and predict.
We were essentially done with the initial work for Itanium when Intel broke
off with our development effort. Mind you there was still a lot of work to
be done to make it ready for the market, but at the time there was no real
machine to develop for. So the team that was doing the work were mostly
re-assigned to do other Solaris work while a few more worked on the details
that were left. That is probably the reason Intel said at the time that we
"weren't serious" about Solaris on the Itanium.
Frankly, the Itanium has never lived up to expectations to this day. So I
think we were right in moving people elsewhere. It might take off with the
Itanium 2 processor and now there is genuine hardware out there to develop
Solaris on. But is the market the size we would want to do so? Not yet...
We still have a working relationship with Intel, just as we did when there
was all the press about us fighting over the Itanium. We are too dependant
on each other not to.
Now the AMD Opteron is a very exciting processor. We have already run on
an early prototype Opteron system in 32-bit mode. It also seems to be well
designed as a multi-CPU system from what I have seen so far. I also like
that the register set is very similar to that of the SPARC, which will make
the code very similar in how the compiler would organize it for calls and
such.
We also have a working relationship with AMD, just as we do with Intel. So
we may very well consider a 64-bit version that runs on the Opteron.
The deciding factor in either case will be: What is the market going to be
and how big will it be?
Since either one can run 32-bit programs it is better for us right now to
concentrate on getting as many 32-bit software packages out there as possible
so that there is a software base for Solaris X86. Once that is done we will
have customers that want those same applications running on 64-bit hardware.
The choice then will be is that hardware going to be SPARC, or is it worth
it to also have a Solaris X86 64-bit solution?
It is just a little too soon to tell what the X86 64-bit market will be like,
so if you really want 64-bit SPARC is the best answer. It has been around
the longest and has the best track record out there. Any X86 64-bit solution
is still a ways off.
Q:
How can I change the time format from GMT to EST on a Solaris x86 box?
A:
I will confess to being lazy about this. I typically use sys-unconfig to
set this. Because when I have to set that I often have to reset other
things at the same time.
If you really want to do this manually you can edit the /etc/TIMEZONE file.
Q:
How do I get Solaris 2.7 installed on a GX260 Intel system?
I have made a few attempts and it panics after the install.
A:
You have a few issues with this system, but I don't think they are ones
that can't be handled. It depends on your system configuration as to how
you will do this. I am looking at this web page for possible system
configurations:
Well the easiest thing would be to use either Solaris 8 7/01 (or later), or
to use Solaris 9. Those have the fix for the Pentium 4 boot issue some
systems have with earlier versions of Solaris.
We do have a patch for Solaris 7 and that is 106542-19, which you can get
from http://sunsolve.sun.com for free. The problem you will have with
this patch on this system is that you need it for installation and you
can't simply put it onto a floppy the way you can an ITU (Install Time
Update) patch.
In theory you could patch your CDROM, but this process is not documented
and I am not going to even try to do that here.
Better would be to do a network installation, where you have applied the
patch to the network image. But you have a problem with that as well,
because your network device has no realmode drive available for it and
Solaris 7 does not support PXE booting (assuming your system does, the
web page does not say). Note that both Solaris 8 and 9 do support PXE
booting.
So I think your only real option is to use Solaris 9 with this system. If
you have to use Solaris 8 for some reason, be sure it is 7/01 or later.
Next let's address the issue of your network card:
If you have the Intel Pro/1000 MT you can find the driver for it here:
This driver will be in the next version of Solaris 9, but the device IDs
that will be enabled will only be those that match the new V60x and V65x.
Applying this version will enable all possible device IDs, or you can add
it manually. This version of Solaris 9 is due out for general release in
either July or August. But since you can download the driver there really
is no need to wait if you do not wish to. Note that it works for Solaris 7,
8, and 9. This is the network driver that has no realmode driver support
for doing network booting.
If you have the 3Com Etherlink 10/100 card that should be supported by our
elxl driver and it does have realmode network booting support. However,
3Com has a newer version out that requires an updated driver which is only
supported in Solaris 9 (and a fix for network installs is in the next update)
and the driver for Solaris 8 is about to be released. There is no Solaris 7
driver for it at this time and it would require a Support contract to get a
version for Solaris 7 made into a patch. It can be done though (I have done
the fixes for 9 & 8, so I should know) fairly easily if a customer needs it.
I think that covers your network options.
Next let's address the issue of your video device:
If you have the integrated Intel Extreme video the only possible solutions
would be to use the XFree86 video drivers for it or the XiG drivers. Here
are their web sites:
I understand that Jurgen Keil's version of the XFree86 4.3.0 update to our
own XFree86 Porting kit has a working driver, so you might also check into
that (I have not personally used it):
We are currently working to upgrade our support to include the same driver,
but that will be in some future update. You might also want to check his
site if you have one of the optional ATI video devices, especially if you
want to use the DVI output for an LCD monitor. Our ATI driver may support
the ATI Radeon 7500, but it won't support the others and will not support
DVI. That too will be coming in a future update.
Next let's talk about your audio device:
Again, go to Jurgen Keil's web site where he has a driver that has worked
for many people with the AC'97 chipset:
Finally, there is your USB 2.0 ports and hard disk:
These are not currently supported in Solaris X86. When they are it will
probably be only in Solaris 9, but it might be as a patch to Solaris 8 at a
later date as well. No promises on that! The driver it would require is
called ehci, so if you look for patches or updates that mention that driver
you will know USB 2.0 is supported in that release.
Solaris 7 has a problem with larger IDE drives. If you have the 20GB drive
youl would be OK. The 40GB and 80GB are too large for Solaris 7. This is
fixed in Solaris 8 by patch 110202-02 and would be in the 7/01 version.
So the short answer is that Solaris 7 will be almost impossible to install
on this system. Remember that Pentium 4 CPUs didn't even exist when it was
being sold, much less developed, and the same goes for the rest of the
hardware that makes up this system.
But it should be possible to install Solaris 8 and even easier to install
Solaris 9 on this system. So please consider using one of those.
Hopefully this example of how to look at putting Solaris X86 on a system
will help you and others with other systems. Do not expect older versions
of Solaris to run on new hardware, any more than you would expect Windows
98 to run on it (and it would not for many of the same driver issues). I
have also given you some good resources for drivers that can supply what is
not in Solaris. But here are two more places to look and do research that
you will find invaluable.
Simply put in the words "solaris driver" and the name of your device that
you need the driver for and if there is something out there Google will find
it for you. I sometimes throw in the word "download" to get the actual page
I can do the download from once I confirm there is a driver.
