Daniel's Blog

Solaris on Parallels Desktop for Mac - Problems
In my previous post, I expressed the excitement that I can indeed run Solaris on my MacBook Pro in parallel with my Mac OSX. However, I have come to realize that I could only run it, but the system is nearly usable.

Update Problem
Sun has been working very hard to keep Solaris up to the among the best performers within the OS battle. Patches from Sun come into our system almost every week. However, if you are running Solaris on Parallels, chances are, you might not be able to install all of the patches from Sun. The why and workaround of this is still unknown to me and I do not even know it's a Sun problem or a Parallels problem. Hence, if you use Solaris on Parallels, please be forgivable that you are less likely to be kept up-to-date.

Software from Sun
Software from Sun is also unusable. What I mean by unusable is that you cannot install it on your system! That means, you cannot install Java 6 SDK, Netbeans, Solaris Tools, or any others. Now this makes development under Solaris nearly impossible since you do need Solaris Tools to compile things.
Sun provides 2 versions of their software for Solaris: the x86 distribution and x64 distribution. None of them works. You simply just cannot execute the script that you have downloaded.

Suggestions
If you know some workarounds to the above problems, please post a comment here. Otherwise, we just have to wait for Parallels to release their Parallels Tools for Solaris and say sorry to Solaris until then.

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