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]