Glance at Solaris 10
September 30, 2005
So, I took the time to take a peek at Solaris 10 (x86). The boot process starts out with a black-on-gray screen. How ugly. Some xterm (and derivate) users might think that black-on-white was best since a paper printout is also black on white... but blah blah -- if black-on-white was so wonderful, how come we are still using a black background for more than 20 years now? Besides, I get a headache when looking at white backgrounds for long time, must be because of the brighter intensity. The boot prom on the SPARC architecture also has black-on-white, fine, but black-on-gray is absolutely suckage.
The next thing it does it to display me a menu with four installation type choices and says if I did not pick one within some timeout, it would start in interactive install. Intersting, the menu lists three types of interactive install and I am no clue further.
The kernel takes ages to load -- even longer then FreeBSD. I may need to mention that I do use VMware for it, and I do have copied the Solaris DVD to harddisk, so I am not limited by the speed of a CD drive, but the harddisk, which means that my perception of Solaris kernel taking longer to load is comparable to BSD and Linux.
When it comes to hardware probing, it finds VMware's network card (pcnet32). Fine. What does it do? "Attempting to configure interface pcn0..." and sits there for what must have been 60 seconds. Doing what? Sending RARP packets. What the hell for? RARP is probably best superseded by DHCP now. It did not probe for DHCP, though and ended with "Skipped interface pcn0". Wonderful.
Earlier, I have selected menu choice 1, "Interactive Install". Amongst the others, this must be the graphical install. But hey, what's happening now? Not enough memory? It only found 91 (or 96) MB of virtual RAM. Heh, I have installed 128 MB in this VM. (Is that the big kernel that soaked everything up?) So I cannot do a graphical install but are redirected to an ncurses-style installer, which actually does look nicer than the boot part thanks to its blue background with bars of green and red -- reminds me of the nvidia driver installer for Linux. It is a mixture of typical Linux Distribution Installers (colorful) and BSD (one question after another).
Anyhow, it shows me the hypothethical X configuration, with all values correct. Mouse is detected as 2-button, but leave it at that, it's not that important and can be changed to 3-button. Whatever it said about 91 MB, I was able to start an X server during the config.
Next is the language choice. Too bad the vt emulation is a little bit b0rked, hitting Backspace produces ^H instead of the otherwise well-known effect. If you press a key, you cannot go back, and therefore 2^H0 in the language dialog will give you German even though I wanted English! More baddies: you cannot go back in any dialogs. Despite I selected to keep IPV6 disabled, it sent something that got classified as "Non-IP (prot 0x0)" in iptraf. Must have been HOPBYHOP IPV6 option stuff. How mean.
When it asks me about Name Servers, I choose DNS. But, I also selected DHCP before, so why cannot it derive the DNS server from the DHCP reply and instead relies on me entering an IP, domain and searchlist? (Sending this information does work -- see my Windows Clients.)
Because I accidentally hit F2 (Continue) one time too much, I restarted the VM. And also installed 144 MB of RAM. Wohoo, now it does indeed an X install. Uh, with an xterm. I think that's not worth the memory. Hey, but Backspace works at least. Beginning with the Software Selection sub-installer, there is also a Go_Back entry for the dialogs. When it finally comes to selecting the components I almost get a shock: a good fifth of the DVD is for some Java stuff? The "Customize" [packages to be installed] only shows up in the second dialog. The package abbreviations are nonsense to me, they try to fit everything mostly 8 chars, of which 4 are already used by SUNW. It is interesting to see that Solaris 10 has a lot of "Free Software" and GNU components that were not present in Solaris 8 (the last thing I tried). One of the first things I am going to remove is "Customer registration application". I wonder why they think "Ogg Vorbis" and libpopt are part of GNOME. Failed to do their homework. It could also need an automatic dependency solution system for the software selection. Even though I finally cleaned up all dependencies by hand I was struck down by a missing libl.so.1 on bootup. Cheers then, reinstall with all-defaults-no-customization to see if that works.
So after I let it reinstall from scratch without customizing the software selection (which is what makes something missing normally), the libl error still persisted, so I GAVE UP ON IT. Screw it.
