OpenSolaris and VirtualBox

I used to use OpenSolaris on my workstation while I was with the Sun Cluster group. When I moved to Cluster Filesystems, I got a new Dell laptop and I moved to Ubuntu out of necessity - I needed to use virtual machines (VMWare Server) for my work.

I have been looking for a way of moving to OpenSolaris and have been eying Xen as a possible replacement of VMWare. But the traffic on xen-discuss@opensolaris.org suggested enough difficulties and I kept away.

VirtualBox on OpenSolaris gave me a new reason to try things out. So, I decided to throw away Windows Vista (given to me, thanks to Dell) and decided to take OpenSolaris for a spin.

OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 vs Solaris Express

I have used OpenSolaris and Solaris on Virtual machines and on workstations. So I am not a newbie. I had two options - Solaris Express or Indiana. Given that it is easier to upgrade Indiana (thanks to IPS a.k.a pkg(5)) and having tested it on a virtual machine, I decided on Indiana.

Installation of Indiana

So, I burnt the iso on to a CD and booted from it. Partition editing is disabled in preview 2. And certainly did not want to use the entire hard disk. So, I booted back into Ubuntu and changed the partition type of the Vista partition to Solaris and booted back to Indiana LiveCD.

Now the Solaris partition was recognized. And the rest of the installation was a piece of cake.

Grub entries for Ubuntu (and ext3 read only support)

Installation did not make entries for Ubuntu. And the default page on Firefox told me to get the entries from the Linux partition. Well, time for a resuce CD to access the Linux partitions? No! Time to install read-only support for ext3/ntfs.

# wget http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/binfiles/FSWfsmisc.tar.gz
# gzip -cd FSWfsmisc.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
# pkgadd -d . FSWfsmisc
# mount -F ext2fs /dev/dsk/c7d0p1 /mnt/lin1
# cat /mnt/lin1/boot/grub/menu.lst

Copied the grub entries that I wanted to /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst and I was done.

Thanks Moinak and Martin Rosenau!

Network drivers

Indiana had no trouble supplying drivers for my wireless network. But the Ethernet driver was not supported. I do have a wireless router. And nwam configured it just fine. But I did want the LAN to be functional as well. And thanks to Masayuki Murayama and Moinak Ghosh , it was as simple as

# wget http://blogs.sun.com/moinakg/resource/nicdrv.tar.bz2
# bzip2 -cd nicdrv.tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -
# cd nicdrv
# for i in `ls -d SFE*`; do yes | pkgadd -d . $i; done
# ifconfig -a plumb

VirtualBox

Installing Virtual Box was a piece of cake

# wget http://virtualbox.org/download/testcase/VirtualBox-opensolaris-x86-1.5.51-r28414-beta1.tar.gz
# gzip -cd VirtualBox-opensolaris-x86-1.5.51-r28414-beta1.tar.gz | tar -xf -
# pkgadd -d VirtualBox-1.5.51-SunOS-x86-r28414
# VirtualBox

I had some trouble launching Virtual Box though.

No 64-bit VirtualBox

I have a 64 bit system and the VirtualBox vboxdrv driver is 32 bit only. So I had to boot into 32 bit. So, I added a new grub entry:

  title OpenSolaris Developer Preview 32 bit
  kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
  module$ /platform/i86pc/boot_archive

Now the driver vboxdrv loaded just fine. 'add_drv vboxdrv' confirmed this.

But still VirtualBox failed to start a virtual machine with the message:

   VBox status code: -1909 (VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_ACCESSIBLE).

Need to be root user! But "su -" refused to connect to X. Setting DISPLAY, "xhost +", ForwardX11 etc did not fix the issue. Google came to the rescue again. Doing the "su" instead of "su -" did the trick.

Sound driver

My laptop has a 82801G (ICH7 family) Intel audio controller. And OpenSolaris does not support it yet. No problem, OSS has drivers for it!

# wget http://www.4front-tech.com/release/oss-solaris-v4.0-1014-i386.pkg
# pkgadd -d oss-solaris-v4.0-1014-i386.pkg

However, though osstest produces sound, the audio devices do not show up in the sound preferences. This is a problem to be investigated for another day.

Blastwave

Blastwave has a huge repository of packages for Solaris. So, I pkg-get a piece of it.

# pkgadd -d http://www.blastwave.org/pkg_get.pkg
# /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i xchat
# /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i xemacs

This should become simpler once the pkg(5) version of blastwave is unleashed.

Now, I am installing CentOS 5 on a virtual box!