Dana's Ramblings

I finally had time to work with VirtualBox (VBox) on my Macbook Pro the other day and since I ran into a couple snags I thought I'd post a short blog entry that provides some of the details. But first here are two other blogs that helped:

• Alan Burlison's Kicking both tyres together - VirtualBox and Indiana
• Rodney Campbell’s OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 (Indiana) under VirtualBox on MacBook Pro…

I've tested VBox with the newly released OpenSolaris 2008.05 as well as Solaris 10 Update 5 and both run well.

Here are some notes that may help:

• If you read Alan's and Rodney's blog entries first, note that there is no need to install a newer network driver with VirtualBox 1.6. All you need to do is set the network device to "Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (NAT)". Also don't be caught by the mistake I made and try using ping to test the network connection. The VBox documentation clearly states that ICMP through the VBox virtual network stack is unreliable.
• If you want a higher res screen, the default in VBox is 1024x768, before starting the VirtualBox guest run:

  VBoxManage setextradata "Solaris 10" "CustomVideoMode1" "1280x10240x24"

  Where "Solaris 10" is the name of VBox vm and I'd recommend bumping the video memory to at least 64MB. I had to do this for each vm I created.

  Note that the xorg.conf that Alan provides on his blog currently causes X to crash on the latest Nevada and OpenSolaris. I'm currently trying to figure out why.

• Set the network device emulation to "Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (NAT)"
• If you are installing Solaris for the first time, be sure to link or mount the Solaris iso image as the CDROM
• Start the VM and run through the standard Solaris install.
• On Solaris 10:
  • start a terminal session (not CDE or Gnome)
  • disable CDE with "/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d"
  • enable gnome desktop login (this gives you Xorg X11 server) with "svcadm enable gdm2-login"
  • if you want a higher resolution desktop, use the VBoxManage command above and install the attached xorg.conf into /etc/X11/xorg.conf (remember this bombs terribly on Nevada/OpenSolaris) and log out and back in to restart X

    So far I've tested X and networking with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and Solaris 10 U5.

    As proof and from the sick puppy category, here is a screen shot off my Macbook Pro 17 with OpenSolaris running in one VBox instance and Solaris 10 U5 installing in another (click the picture for a full sized version):

    

    Posted at 09:58AM May 06, 2008 by danaf in Sun | Comments[1] | Permalink