Solaris 10 x86 Install

These were some of the steps I had to take:

h2. GRUB

* I installed it on the second disk and tried to boot it with FreeBSDs easyBoot. This didn’t work the first time so I switched disks in BIOS, booted solaris and re-installed GRUB. Then it suddenly worked.

installgrub -m /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c1d1p0

h2. useradd

* After logging in as root I added the first user:

useradd -m -d /export/home/user -s /bin/bash -g other user

h2. keyboard

* I installed my keyboard layout with

vi /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc

h2. mounting Fat32

* Just in case you don’t have a working network driver and have to bootstrap your solaris, naming conventions of partitions:
** c the disk controller number
** t the target number, that is the SCSI Id. Ignored for ATAPI.
** d the disk on that target, that is 0 for the first disk etc.

*Example*: /dev/dsk/c1d1p2 The 2nd partition (p2) on the second disk (d1). The special p0 denotes the whole disk, this is the reason partitions start at 1.

h2. basic networking

* From another OS I put the network driver on a Fat32 partition, which I was able to mount with the following entry in /etc/vfstab:

/dev/dsk/c1d1p2 /dev/rdsk/c1d1p2 /mnt/data pcfs 2 yes ro

* Assuming your interface is named yukonx0, you can use *DHCP* this way:

touch /etc/hostname.yukonx0
touch /etc/dhcp.yukonx0

* My experience is that DHCP works slow, and a simple ifconfig yukonx0 dhcp doesn’t work most of the time. Instead, I simply rebooted, which was even slower but worked.

h2. locale

* You can modify this in /etc/default/init. For installing new localed see man localeadm, e.g. localeadm -a en_US.

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