I just downloaded and installed SXCE build 99 in a VMware VM and it didn't go as smoothly as I expected. Firstly, after installing using the text-mode installer I saw errors that about 10 packages failed to install. The VM then refuses to boot and just ends up at the grub command prompt.
I assumed these problems were down to a duff ISO image as this was the first timeI had used a different download manager to download the image, so I downloaded it again using my old download manager then verified the MD5 sum. Same problem. I was a bit surprised as this is the first SXCE release that has failed to work properly for me on VMware. Upon closer inspection it seems that for some reason the installer has not set the partition ID on the root slice to ZFS, so GRUB is unable to identify the filesystem type and load the correct filesystem reader (I assume). I fixed this by booting from the OpenSolaris 2008.11 build 98 live CD and using format to re-write the slice information, then import the ZFS pool. The system was then able to boot successfully from the hard disk, although the X server could not start. The end of /var/sadm/system/logs/install_log lists the packages that failed to install as follows: SUNWxwfnt SUNWxwcft SUNWgttf SUNW5xmft SUNWolrte SUNWinttf SUNWjxmft SUNWkxmft SUNWcxmft SUNWxwoft SUNWkttf SUNWkxfnt SUNWcttf This looks like a load of font-related packages, which makes me suspect that this is a general problem with SXCE rather than something specific to running it on VMware. I manually installed the first failed package and pkgadd reported the install worked OK. I'll try the rest shortly. Is this a VMware-specific problem? Thanks Andrew. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
