Installing Solaris 10 5/08 in VMWare
Here is the process I went through to get the x86 version of Solaris 10 running on my Intel based MacBook.
First step is to download VMWare Fusion and install it on the laptop. This is very straightforward. Double click on the VMWare installer application. You will need to register with VMWare to get a temporary license that is good for a 30 day trial.
The second step is to download the Solaris 10 5/08 install image. Again, this is pretty easy to do. Just register, answer some questions, and then you can download the DVD image. I saved this on the MacBook as ~/Downloads/solarisdvd.iso.
Now for the installation of Solaris 10 in the VMWare virtual machine.
- Start the VMWare Fusion application.
- select New...
- Operating System: Sun Solaris
- Version: Solaris 10
- Save as: Solaris 10
- Where: Virtual Machines
- Disk size: 8 GB
- Start virtual machine and install operating system now (checked)
- Use operating systems installation disk image file:
- ~/Download/solarisdvd.iso
- then select Finish to begin the installation process
I won't try to detail every step of the installation process here. It is lengthy. A good reference guide to installing Solaris 10 is available online at docs.sun.com.
I did the Solaris Interactive (default) installation option. A word of advice, you'll need to turn off your Mac's function keys by going into the System Preferences application for Keyboard & Mouse and select the option to use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.
You will progress through a series of menus and questions about your Solaris 10 installation. During the networking questions I selected to use networking, DHCP, no IPv6, no Kerberos, and NIS for name service. There are selections for language, time zones, date/time, root passwords and enabling of remote services.
Once this gauntlet of menus is conquered the screen will go black momentarily. Then it will ask you to select a Standard or Flash install. I picked Standard and asked it to manually eject the DVD image and auto reboot when the installation completes.
Next you will see the system get initialized and you also must accept the license agreement. Another round of menus to select your Geography and Locale. I selected no Additional Products and chose the Entire Distribution of Solaris 10. It then asks a few more questions about your Disk Device and I chose to do the Auto Layout of filesystems and I selected to use the entire fdisk partition.
After all of that the real installation finally begins!
The system was rebooted after installation and I was able to login as root, select Gnome as my windowing systems and get online. At this point you are basically done. I recommend that you set up your own user account using the "useradd" command. This way you aren't always logged in as the root user.
Installing Solaris 10 is very complicated as you can see. Fortunately there is a simpler approach to getting Solaris 10 running as a Guest OS with VMWare Fusion. Sun has put together snapshots of the VMWare virtual appliance images for Solaris 10 and Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 (aka, OpenSolaris). The most recent available version is Solaris 10 11/06 (aka, Update 3 or U3 for short). Hopefully, the more recent versions of Solaris 10 8/07, Solaris 10 5/08, and Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08 can be added as virtual appliance options to download. Don't you just love our lame marketing lingo with dates as names for our updates instead of just sticking with good old Update 1, Update 2, etc? Sigh.
The Solaris Operating System Virtual Appliance for VMWare images can be downloaded from here.
The installation process here is quite a bit easier and much faster. The VMWare virtual appliance images are downloaded as two tar and gzip'ed archive files. I extracted the both of the Sol10u3_1.tar.gz and Sol10u3_2.tar.gz files into my ~/Downloads directory on the MacBook. First I created a new directory in my ~/Documents/Virtual Machines directory called Solaris10U3. This is the default location for VMWare's virtual appliance images. The next step was to copy all of the Solaris 10 virtual appliance files from both tar files into this new subdirectory. Now all I had to do was start the VMWare Fusion application and use the File->Open menu option to select the Solaris 10 update 3.vmx file from the ~/Documents/Virtual Machine/Solaris10U3 directory. The Solaris 10 Update 3 image comes ready to run with a root account. My only issue with the canned image was the default screen resolution for the main login screen. It was set to an extremely high resolution. Once you are logged in, you can change the Screen Resolution to fit the screen of your Mac. Just Launch->Preferences->Desktop Preferences->Display->Screen Resolution. I set it to 1024x768.
