Know How OpenSolaris

Most things apply to Sparc-Solaris, too, but mostly tested with Intel-Open-Solaris.

Currently I am still not aware of how to get networking operable in Solaris 10.

All normal OSses automatically detect my networking card on the mainboard ASUS P5WD2, which is over 2 years old. Except Solaris, of course.

Another problem is how to mount an ext2 filesystem from Solaris. Apparently there is no support doing that. OTOH I can mount Solaris partitions on Linux if I find out how to enable the Sun disklable on a standard Debian Etch (no, I do not compile a kernel for this, this would drive me nuts to do so. Period).

Perhaps I have to use FreeBSD instead. As then all the problems vanish at once.

  1. Why Solaris?
  2. Install
  3. Notes
  4. Dummies guide to Solaris
  5. Links

Stopped trying out OpenSolaris in favor of FreeBSD 7.0 CURRENT (instable), as OpenSolaris apparently has bad driver support for my mainboard chipset (mostly Intel) and I was not able to find a suiting driver. Sad thing and bad job, Sun!

So to get ZFS running I started to install FreeBSD. (Well, this failed for me, too, for some other reasons. So I backed to good'ol Linux Debian Etch, added fuse-zfs userlanddriver, and hey, it worked instantly.)

Things which annoy me on OpenSolaris:

  • Apparently nobody knows how to install support it with usable drivers. There are no download areas and no information on how to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. Linux is better in this respect. Bad job, Sun.
  • Only one console in the default install. You have a graphical desktop or a text console, but not both. Maybe there is a way to archive this, however why isn't this present in the default install? Again, bad job, Sun.
I tried to find a solution to my problems for over 1 day but came out with plain nothing. Perhaps it's my fault, but I doubt it. It looks like Solaris needs some hand-selected hardware to run on, such that it does not even support often used well known mainboards which are already in the market for quite a while (well, it's not a super-cheap normal consumer mainboard, though, but which one do you expect in a server environment, eh?).

Yes, of course, I could have added a supported PCI networking card in my computer. However I am not doing Solaris for a Solaris purpose, I am doing Solaris for a certain Feature:

ZFS

And this as well is supported on FreeBSD now. So if I start with an OS I had not touched for ages, I can as well try out FreeBSD.

-Tino, 2007-10-01