OpenSolaris 2008.05 on Mac Pro
Recently I posted about installing Solaris Express on a Mac Pro. This morning OpenSolaris was released, the first release of what was Project Indiana. Prior to this release the outputs of the various OpenSolaris projects were available within Solaris Express, however now they have their own distribution which has several differences notably the use of a new packaging system called IPS (Image Packaging System).
I will look further into the workings of OpenSolaris in some future posts but for now I thought I’d take a quick look at how the install ran on a bare metal Mac Pro (2006 version).
OpenSolaris is distributed as a Live CD with an integrated installer to make a permanent install once you’ve had a chance to poke around and check things like hardware compatibility. You can download the CD from Sun or from one of these mirrors.
Previously I’d had some problems with Solaris Express not being able to create a suitable ‘fdisk’ partition on the disk I was trying to install to. To see if this was still an issue I erased my existing Solaris Express drive and partitioned it with a standard OS X EFI/GUID partition table and a single HFS+ volume.
Because I’m rather paranoid about my data I powered down and removed my OS X drives from the machine before trying the OpenSolaris install. Then I booted up from the Live CD which loaded a standard GRUB menu, the banner indicated that this release is on a base of snv_86. I was prompted to pick a keyboard layout and a desktop language, then after a short while a fairly normal looking Gnome desktop poped up.
An item on the desktop that caught my attention was the ‘Device Driver Utility’. This bought up a list all the detected devices in the system and whether an appropriate driver was found for them.
Most devices were detected fine with the following exceptions.
- Broadcom Corporation BCM4238 802.11/a/b/g/n
- ACPI SMBus 1.0 Host Controller
- Intel Corporation 6311ESB/6321ESB I/OxAPIC Interrupt Controller
- Standard PC COM port – Driver Misconfigured
From within the device driver tool there’s an option to submit the results to the central hardware compatibility list.
I have a dual monitor setup, connected to an ATI 1900XT graphics card. Whilst a full resolution display was shown on the larger monitor both monitors displayed the same image, with the lower resolution display showing the top-left section of the other monitor. The ATI card is showing as using the ‘vgatext’ driver which is, presumably, some generic video driver. Unfortunately ATI do not make Solaris drivers for their cards, one reason why I’m thinking about moving to the 8800GT card that is now available.
Since the LiveCD booted ok it seems fairly likely that a full install should work, providing the disks could be detected properly. The ‘Install OpenSolaris’ app is a bright, unmissable icon on the desktop. Picking it bought up with installer which after the initial welcome page displayed the disk chooser.
The disk was displayed correctly, I picked the option to use the whole disk. Then I went through simple time zone and locale options followed by a screen to set a non-root user and some passwords. That was it for the installer, it really couldn’t have been any more simple
The install ran for about 20 minutes and completed without error. After it completed I rebooted the machine and it rebooted into a GRUB menu with ‘OpenSolaris 2008.05 snv_86_rc3 X86′ as the default, and only, option. This booted fine to a GNOME login prompt.
I’ll poke around in OpenSolaris more over the coming weeks and will hopefully post some further thoughts here.
May 31st, 2008 at 22:33
I’m really interested in how you get on with this. I recently downloaded opensolaris and messed around with it on my macbook but I’m waiting for a new HDD to arrive before I start playing with it in the mac pro. I recently got the 8800GT as well so it’ll be interesting to see how that pans-out.
To be honest though, I’m only interested in openslowaris because of ZFS which just seems like the best invention ever.