One of the primary reasons Solaris fails, and fails again to get any real mindshare among ‘hackers’, is the needless demand for memory and other system requirements. They’re certainly cutting themselves out of the poor nerd market, who can’t just pull $100 of RAM out of thin air. (”I’m so Solaris, I shit 2GB sticks of RAM!”…”Gee, I can’t understand why all those high-school proto-hackers go with Linux all the time! Whhhyyyyyy???”)
The recently released OpenSolaris 2008.05 was no exception. My only spare ‘experimental’ machine at the moment is a PIII/500 with 384MB of RAM, however OS2008.05 asks for a minimum of 512MB. From my prior experience with installing/running Solaris, the 512 would certainly be needed for the Java-based administration tools, but I’ve succeeded in getting text-console Solaris up and going with less. (I actually prefer SunOS and Solaris text sessions, from the years of using it that way at Uni..)
Okay.. Boot the 2008.05 LiveCD, do the text console boot… and what the hell– there’s no text installer. :-/
Try again, but with the default ‘graphical’ GNOME desktop, and an hour of CDROM seeking later, the “Install Solaris” button just won’t run, maybe due to an out-of-memory problem.
Looking for help gets the usual Marie Antoinette replies. (Hmm.. a Linux and Solaris Class War…)
But I found a solution, without having to use the full GNOME desktop:
- at the GRUB menu choose the text console
- login as “jack”, password “jack”
- su to root (password “opensolaris”)
- start gdm (I was lucky in that the X server had no issues starting.. YMMV)
- At the gdm greeter, Options -> Choose Session -> Failsafe terminal
- login as jack again (all going to plan, you’ll get a genuine plain X session, with an xterm in the corner)
- gnome-wm &
- su to root again..
- gui-install
Due to the almost non-existent buffer caches, the CDROM will chug a lot, but it’s working, and at least didn’t take the 5 hours installing like the original Solaris 10 did. (Hey, it took only 3! :)