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Solaris users on Parallels/Mac out there?

Monday Oct 01, 2007

If you are one, please read on and help me out here.

As I wrote in my earlier blog, I'm using Solaris 70b on Parallels desktop on Mac. Everything's working fine, except for the Time and Date stamp. Somehow the stamp on Parallels slowly goes back to past as time passes. I tried to synchronize with Internet server, by checking the box in

Administration > Time and Date > Periodically synchronize with Internet servers

with the time.apple.com as the server. It asks me for root password and synchronizes the time and date immediately. However, the problem persists after a few minutes. Time is not going as fast as it's supposed to. :-)

Another option I tried is to uncheck the "Periodically ..." box, but clicked on Synchronize Now button. Again it synchronizes the time and date immediately at that moment, but goes back to an odd timezone that I can not figure out.

Any ideas?

[5] Comments

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Posted at 03:13PM Oct 01, 2007 by Young Joo Pintaske in Sun
Tags: opensolaris

Comments:

I cannot add any value to your question. But I wanted to add my name to the list of Solaris on Parallels users. Here is what I would like would like to see to improve the experience:

1. Add the Realtek 8029 driver to the OpenSolaris release. It is ridiculous that we need to mount a separate CD image and run a script to get the driver. Sun needs to either source an existing OSS driveer or write one.

2. Add 2 serial ports to the standard Solaris VM configuration. If not there, Solaris complains and it looks like a bug. Parallels needs to add this to their standard configuration. Obviously this would be simple.

3. It would be great if the mouse would seamlessly move between the VM window and OSX like it does for Windows VMs. I don't know how hard this would be but it would make using Solaris on Parallels much easier.

Thanks, scott

Posted by Scott on October 01, 2007 at 05:06 PM PDT #

With Boot Camp I have to use the timezone Ponta Delgada, Portugal even though I am in California due to different method of storing time to the physical machine. While you're talking about Parallels here, it's worthy to note Solaris may save it in a different format also, although unlikely as all UNIX systems use UTC, not GMT to store into hardware clock.

This is a Parallels bug, VMware Fusion does not have time drift between the host and guest, and it doesn't use a daemon to synchronize either. Something's a miss with how Parallels interfaces with the scheduler, or something.

Scott, agreed on #1, since it's generic and is an ISA-based legacy 8139 in all simple honesty. #2 is a bug, it's mainly Solaris' fault for trying to detect legacy hardware that many machines, especially Macs don't even have. #3 is possible, but not without help from Alan C. of Sun (X.org maintainer and engineer) It's not as simple as having a daemon run, it lies within the driver itself passing information to the host process.

Posted by James Cornell on October 02, 2007 at 12:58 AM PDT #

Thanks, Scott and James.

I've forwarded all your comments to Alan C. as I'm not quite sure where each one has to go to.

Thanks for the tips, James. So if I understand your comment correctly, I can't have the correct time and date stamp as long as Parallels doesn't address the bug. That's bad... Several colleagues sent me emails to correct the time. :-)

Posted by Young Joo Pintaske on October 02, 2007 at 03:24 PM PDT #

I'm not sure what I can do about the Parallels mouse problems. For VMWare, we simply ship the open source vmmouse driver that VMWare contributed to X.Org to better coordinate the mouse between the host and the guest - I'm not aware of anything similar for Parallels.

Posted by Alan Coopersmith on October 05, 2007 at 08:46 AM PDT #

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