Sunday December 23, 2007 Alan Perry's Blog
Sunday December 23, 2007 Wasn't I doing this same thing a year ago?
Last year, I bought myself a Mac Mini was spending the winter break (Sun shuts down between the Christmas and New Year holidays) getting Solaris running on it. With some help from BootCamp, this mostly involved looking for drivers, writing drivers and porting applications.
Oh, and also spending hour upon hour trying to figure out how to set up dual-boot (Solaris and MacOS) in a manner that was reproducible and didn't depend on old data being left on the disk from a previous attempt to set it up.
This year, on the Thursday before the winter break, a new MacBook showed up on my doorstep and I found myself trying to get Solaris running on it.
So, was it any easier than a year ago?
Surprisingly, at least initially, it was not. I was trying to install Solaris Nevada build 76 on the MacBook. I found an updated blog by Paul Mitchell describing how he installed build 76 on a MacBook Pro. His work on this was based on a blog that I wrote describing the process that I came up with a year ago working with the Mac Mini. I figured that I was set.
However, it didn't work.
Before I found Paul's blog, I found another blog that described how to install Solaris on a Mac. If you plan on dual-booting the system, I would not recommend following the procedure describing in it, because it blew away the disk's GPT and I had to reinstall the MacBook from scratch.
Paul's instructions consist of creating a Solaris2 partition in the MBR, changing the tag on the EFI partition so that Solaris thinks that it is something else, applying the CR6413235 workaround and running the Solaris install program. When I did this, I still had issues, but it was less destructive than the first time through.
Instead of strictly doing as Paul indicated, I used BootCamp to repartition the disk. I did use his instructions to allocate the Solaris2 partition while preserving the unallocated space after the HFS+ partition. However, Solaris would always use the MBR partition table as the VTOC.
For some reason, I figured that I would download build 80 (not sure if that is available outside of Sun as I write this) and give that a try. I had no particular reason to believe that it would work any differently than build 76. It was just something to try. And it worked!
I booted build 80 and ran prtvtoc and it showed an empty VTOC, not the MBR partition table contents. I was encouraged. I ran format and was able to configure the VTOC as I had planned. I installed the CR6413235 workaround and restarted install-solaris and it ran to completion.
Actually, it seems as if build 80 would have worked as described in Paul's blog. I wonder if he was using a later build.
Now if I could only find a Marvell Yukon driver that works with the Ethernet part in my MacBook ...
( Dec 23 2007, 09:46:13 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [5]
Monday December 10, 2007 I have been asked to make a couple of OpenSolaris presentations at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. One unfortunate consequence of this is that it will delay the next meeting of the PSOSUG, originally planned for January, until the end of February.
The first of these will be a talk at the January IEEE Palouse Regional Monthly Meeting on Janury 17, 2008. I have sixty minutes to talk about OpenSolaris, ZFS and Dtrace. It should be no problem fitting all three topics into sixty minutes, right?
The second talk will be a couple of weeks later, tentatively on Feb 7. The topic is still TBD, but I suspect that it will be a more in-depth technical discussion of ZFS or DTrace.
Maybe I will see you there.
( Dec 10 2007, 12:16:40 AM PST ) Permalink
Tuesday December 04, 2007 Video from my big rally off last year
A few weeks ago, I was at the Volkswagen dealer picking up some parts for my car. I know one of the service writers there and, when I stopped by to say 'hi', he told me that he had seen me on TV. After probing some more, I figured out that it was coverage from the 2006 Prescott Rally.
That weekend, I had a one-off ride with Lisa Klassen and we were being followed around by an independent videographer (forget her name - doh!). She was putting together a piece about Lisa to air on current.
I don't remember that weekend because we had a video camera pointed at us all of the time. I remember it because it was there that I was involved in my biggest off (rally-speak for accident) ever.
What did it look like from the outside?
The title of this entry mentions video, so where is the video? Here is the video. Most of the segment is about Lisa, but the in-car from the accident starts at about 5:30.
Looks pretty bad, eh? Well, my injuries were limited to some cuts on my hands, lots of dirt in my eyes and undiagnosed neck injuries that I made worse by competing in rallies on the two consecutive weekends following the off. My neck finished finally completely healed over last summer.
What happened? Lisa wrote up the off on her web site. However, she doesn't quite get all of the facts straight. For example, I am not sure how she could have kicked open her door without lying across me and I would have remembered that!
Also, she didn't quite get the stage note right, but the notes in the book were basically correct, maybe a little tighter than noted. The sequence was a little tricky for faster cars and probably should have been cautioned because of an accident there at a previous running of the rally.
But Lisa was still going into it too fast for the sequence that I called. Unfortunately, by the time I realized she had gone in too fast, there was nothing that I could say to change the situation. The car went light and hit the ditch. The back end may have hit the bank hard and initiated the roll. As the car rolled, the front of the roof dug into the embankment and broke out the windscreen and this filled the car with dirt. The car stopped and we got out.
But why should I complain? I got on TV, right?
( Dec 04 2007, 02:36:54 AM PST ) Permalink
