Erik Trimble <erik.trim...@oracle.com> writes:
> Also, with the removal of the Xsun driver from OpenSolaris, there are no
> drivers for most SPARC graphics cards.
>
> Graphics on SPARC is hard under OpenSolaris.
>
> :-(
But fortunately still doable: I've finally upgraded my Blade 1500 with
XVR-600 from SX:CE build 130 to OpenSolaris build 134 (with the
expectation to further upgrade to self-build snv_147 as I'm already
running on several other machines, both SPARC and x86).
I had originally meant to wait for snv_136+ becoming publicly available
since Alan had suggested that the X11 packaging there would be more
amenable to adding Xsun etc. packages from SX:CE, but since this won't
be available at least until Solaris 11 Express (which might be around
the corner: a bug I'm watching on bugs.opensolaris.org got tagged
2010.09-reviewed a few days ago, while similar keywords were used for
previous OpenSolaris releases) I've decided to try it now.
The upgrade consisted of several steps:
* Perform a LiveUpgrade-like upgrade guided by
http://blogs.sun.com/edp/entry/moving_from_nevada_and_live
* Install the necessary SX:CE packages for graphics support. This is
Xsun SUNWxsun-server, SUNWxsun-keytables, SUNWxwdv
XVR-600 (jfb) SUNWjfb.u, SUNWjfbcf, SUNWjfbr, SUNWjfbw, SUNWfbc
* I'm still running xdm and twm, no GNOME or KDE. For xdm to work with
Xsun, you need
! Xsun doesn't support XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1, so don't attempt to use it
DisplayManager*authName: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
in /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config, otherwise no X11 application can connect
to the X server.
* You need to make sure that x11/x11-config is installed, otherwise the
x11-server SMF service where the Xserver configuration variables live
isn't available.
* At first, Xsun doesn't start. In /var/log/xdm.log, you find:
Cannot create /var/dt/sdtlogin directory for display manager pipe: No such file
or directory
failed to set default font path
'/usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,/usr/share/fonts/sun/Type1,/usr/share/fonts/sun/F3bitmaps,/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc,/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc-ISO8859-1,/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi,/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi-ISO8859-1,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi-ISO8859-1,/usr/share/fonts/sun/TrueType,/usr/share/fonts/TrueType/bitstream-vera,/usr/share/fonts/TrueType/liberation'
One of the directories in the list above does not exist
or it does not contain a valid 'fonts.dir' file
The first is harmless (especially since xdm doesn't handle the display
manager pipe yet), but it's better to create the directory to silence
the warning.
The second is fatal, though. It happens because three directories in
the default Xsun fontpath don't exist in any OpenSolaris packages:
/usr/share/fonts/sun/Type1
/usr/share/fonts/sun/F3bitmaps
/usr/share/fonts/sun/TrueType
To work around this, you need to start Xsun with an explicit -fp
argument containing only the existing directories. To do so, I've
set options/server_args in the x11-server SMF service to
options/server_args astring -nobanner\ -fp\
/usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc,/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc-ISO8859-1,/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi,/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi-ISO8859-1,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi-ISO8859-1,/usr/share/fonts/TrueType/bitstream-vera,/usr/share/fonts/TrueType/liberation
-nobanner is there since the default Xsun banner looks just ugly with
xdm. Unfortunately, this doesn't work: the parsing of SMF properties
in /usr/bin/Xserver isn't right in that it passes the backslashes
used to escape whitespace in strings through to Xsun, which chokes on
e.g. an unknown -nobanner\ option ;-(
To work around this, I've added the necessary -fp option to
/etc/X11/xdm/Xservers instead, also adding -defdepth 24. This should
be determined automatically by Xserver, but doesn't work any longer
since Xsun now lives in /usr/X11/bin/X11 instead of
/usr/openwin/bin/Xsun.
After going through those contortions, I've got a working installation
of OpenSolaris on my Blade 1500, and hope to upgrade to a self-built
copy of the X consolidation as of snv_147 once an unrelated ZFS root
problem can be sorted out.
So while the path to OpenSolaris on SPARC with unsupported graphics is
ugly, it can be done.
Rainer
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
