Finally completed the switch to open solaris by installing
nv b89 dvd on my U20 M2. Earlier I was using Solaris 10 11/06.
Most of the installation and configuration of existing software
went fine. The procedure to just get a desktop up and
running has improved a lot compared to earlier Solaris.

Some questions and suggestions of improvements:

1. GUI installer: Could not install when choosing default
   "Solaris Express Developer edition" from the main menu.
   The installation aborted after the language selection pages with
   some error about cannot create a directory, "/root/.gnome2/share/fonts"
   Had to restart and choose "Solaris Express". This is not a
   big deal although a bit annoying for a first time user of Solaris.

2. Installer: Network configuration. The installer does not
   allow me to choose between DHCP and static IP. It just
   asks about an IP number to be entered and later it runs
   some network tests, which it reported fails. This is confusing
   if you are running DHCP in a typical LAN home environment
   where the IP is generated by the router. I would also prefer
   to have better control over what host and domain name you
   want to assign.
I should mention that the network connectivity still came up after a
reboot but I did not get the local IP and hostname added in the
/etc/hosts file as I'm used to get under DHCP in  Solaris 10.
nv 89 /etc/hosts:
::1     localhost
127.0.0.1       localhost
Solaris 10 /etc/hosts, the dynamic IP and hostname added like:
127.0.0.1       localhost
192.168.1.101   my_host_name # Added by DHCP

This causes problems in sendmail hostname/domain name not
fully qualified, which I could only resolve by manually adding
192.168.1.101   my_host_name  my_host_name.my_domain
in /etc/hosts

3. X11 forwarding into the local X server.
   If I do telnet or rlogin from this machine to another local machine
   and set DISPLAY to the proper IP, X11 forwarding did not work.
   I found out that the X server per default had changed to not to listen
   to incoming tcp requests. Had to run:
   svccfg -s x11-server setprop options/tcp_listen = true

4. Change from IDE to scsi drivers for SATA interface. This is good
   although I experienced problems in mounting an older ufs partition
   created under Solaris 10 on my second drive. Don't know if there
   is some incompatibility between file systems created using the older
   IDE drivers and the new scsi drivers. Had to recreate the ufs
   file systems on this second disk.

5. Companion CD confusion
   The iso image of the companion CD software for Solaris express contains
   only some of the packages. Also, some sunfree packages are already
   installed under /usr/sfw. It's confusing to identify what you need
   to install and what is already on the system.

/Karl D
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-help mailing list
[email protected]

Reply via email to