Managed to get the install done eventually. Its blown away the grub that Feisty put down without asking me where I wanted its grub to go, but that might be expected I suppose. Would be nice if it had asked or made it easier to select (maybe I missed something?)
Anyway, the installation for Solaris Express Developer Edition failed, but the Solaris Express Interactive install worked. The SXDE install fails with: (WW) I810: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0:2:) found (EE) GARTInit: Unable to open /dev/agpgart (No such file or directory) (EE) I810(0): Failed to allocate framebuffer. Is your VideoRAM set too low ?? VideoRAM isn't the problem - Belenix works and so does the result of the text mode install, booting to 1600x1200. Installation seems slooow. Maybe for an installation onto a virgin partition where the slices got set up, the on-disk writae back cache could be enabled and the POSIX file access time updates turned off? On first boot I waited a long time for the 158 smf(5) service configs to load. Long enough to wonder whether its supposed to be like that - it was probably a good 90seconds. This is a dual core system with 2Gig RAM and a decent SATA disk. Desktop started in 1600x1200 OK, which I guess is a standard i810 'feature'. Be nice to have 1920x1200. I'll ask on the x list about how to fix this. *BUG*: The registration application started, and I asked to configure the network proxy settings. At that point I got a tiny sliver of popup window that the mouse pointer changed on. Turns out that this can expand into the Network Proxy settings dialog - it just picked a really bad size. This also happens for other popup dialogs, such as 'Learn More>>' next to 'Enable Auto Registration'. The little window is about the height of 2 text lines and the width of a letter 't', with rounded top and bottom. I could grab it and resize, but its not very intuitive. The users/groups application seems a bit weird. I created a 'developer' group and added my new user account but a) its not shown in the list unless 'Show all' is selected and b) it didn't seem to have actually added e until I then reselected it. In the README in /DeveloperTools, the example command line to install the developer tools has SOL_11_X86 in the path, but actually it should be sol_11_x86. The developer tools install has set up a menu item under: All Applications / Developer Tools / Sun Studio. This works. But: All Applications / Developer Tools / NetBeans 5.5. does not work. It says 'Failed to execute ... /opt/netbeans-5.5/bin ...' Which is unsurprising, because the installer put NetBeans in: /opt/netbeans-5.5.1 It still doesn't quite run, saying: 'Cannot find java. Please use the --jdkhome switch'. which is odd, because java and javac are both on my path and I would have hoped it might have a better stab at it in the default install. Would have been nice to have been askked whether to run catman to build indices, or just have it done automatically.. Still, I have a working system now, just not very nicely tuned and rather rough around the edges. I think the installation technology is a big weakness. I know there's Cayman to address installation, and I know there's some fuss over how to scope a 'reference distribution', but really I think if anything it is much more important to make it really easy to install Solaris into arbitrary primary or extended partitions and unformatted disk space, without destroying existing boot setups, so that its accessible to more casual investigation. I have a real need to test some code on Solaris so I've persevered, but its not been a productive use of my time so far. James
