Install Fest

Conduct an install fest today (Well yesterday, but its early morning now)

We had 20 PCs in our SUN Lab. the interest was apparent as around 70 guys turned up into the Lab, and every body had to sit down for the initial talk about partitions and slices.

The usual warnings were given:

*Never let the install create the FDISK partition by itself. Manually delete an existing partition and create an FDISK one in its place

*Check media before installation. You don't want to go halfway and then repent.

*Not down any linux menu.lst entries before you proceed (We didn't have the need to do this)

The fest was a success except for the disaster on 3 PCs that we lost Windows on. Turns out these three had the whole disk on just a single partition and the Windows there was overwritten by solaris. The guys just went along with the instruction to delete an available partition and create an FDISK.

We next ran into problems with display. This has been a fairly usual issue with Solaris in many places that I've installed it. Upon the first boot, you go to the ********** Starting Desktop ******** step followed by a blank screen (or an Out-of-Frequency message).

This indicates that the device was not properly detected. The work around is fairly simple. You need a working copy of xorg.conf . I do this by booting up BeleniX and copying its xorg.conf to the hard disk install. The ufs partition is automatically mounted at /mnt/solaris0(or 1,2,3,... as the case may be).

Check through these directories (or the output of df -h) and recognize the root file system) you specifically want to find the directory which contains the 'etc' directory. I found it on /mnt/solaris4

Next open up a terminal and issue the command

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /mnt/solaris4/etc/X11/

Then reboot the PC, and your display is back :)

Want to doze off now. To the guys who participated: Thanks for turning up and help install solaris. If you have any queries drop me comment here, or a mail. I'll get back ASAP.

Now back to sleep and nightmares about the ghosts of the 3 dead Windows installs.