On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 08:47:45AM -0500, Kevin Monceaux wrote: > My first concern with Solaris is that it doesn't have virtual consoles. > > (snip questions about virtual consoles)
Your questions are best directed to the virtual consoles project team[0]. Generally speaking, backwards BFU is not supported, so it would not be surprising if you had problems after installing snv_74 and then bfuing to something based on 66. In the meantime, use screen[1]. > Speaking of bfu, is that the preferred way to update Solaris systems? If Preferred by whom? The Sun-supported way to upgrade among Solaris *releases* (which SXCE and SXDE are not) is to use the Upgrade feature, including LiveUpgrade. BFU is preferred by many ON engineers for development and testing purposes because it is faster, but it's not really the best way for end-users to manage their systems. > system and ended up with a non-bootable system. It would start to boot, > display some errors, then reboot. I didn't have time to make note of the > exact error messages before it rebooted. I backed out that attempt, once You're probably experiencing some form of panic-on-boot. Edit the grub kernel command line to add '-kv' so that you can stop in kmdb when the panic occurs. This will allow you to debug the problem. > moment, I'm running snv_75. How would one recover from such a failed > upgrade attempt on a "real" system? On a "real" system, one would never use BFU. The exact steps necessary to recover depend on the nature of the problem, which could be anything from VMware brokenness to a bad boot archive to a failure to resolve BFU conflicts correctly. You haven't provided enough information to know. One recovery strategy is to boot into the failsafe archive to examine and correct problems with the root filesystem or its boot archive. Whether this is appropriate in your situation is unclear. > Which brings me to another concern. One of the things that appealed to me > about Solaris was that there's not umpteen distributions available, like > Linux. But, since I've started investigating Solaris I've discovered the > existence of Nexenta and have also heard of the Indiana project. Is > Solaris trying to head down the same road Linux did? I've tried out It's open source software; anyone is free to distribute it in any way they like. So there will be as few or as many distributions as there is a perceived market for. The mere existence of multiple distributions is not harmful to you; you need only use one of them. At the present time, all architectural requirements are being enforced at the OpenSolaris level, not the distribution level, so it will remain possible for all distribution vendors to produce compatible products if they wish (note that these requirements[2] are much stronger than comparable efforts in the GNU/Linux communities such as LSB). Again, however, no one can force them to do so. If you need a consistent and reliable distribution experience, stick with Solaris. I'm hopeful that Sun will continue to ship and support it in something like its current form for many years. [0] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/vconsole-discuss [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/ [2] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/ -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list [email protected]
