Solaris on Mac Book

Over the weekend, I had an access to a New Mac Book (One of my cousin's) for a
very short period of time. It comes with 32 bit x86 class of processor. It
had Mac OSX and Windows XP installed using the Boot Camp software.

The first thing I wanted to try is to boot the Mac Book using Belenix.
Unfortunately, I did not have a copy of Belenix image to try it out. However, I
had a Solaris Installation DVD (One of the latest build) handy and decided to
test it.

After powering ON the Mac Book, while pressing the alt key, I inserted the
Installation DVD. The Mac Book waited for a while and threw a screen which had
three boot options :





Macintosh (HD), Windows (HD), Windows (DVD)

Interestingly, Boot Camp considers any non-OSX as Windows. This brings a RFE
to the Boot Camp project team to identify other Operating Systems like
Solaris, BSD, Linux and Windows while booting.

I selected the Installation DVD to boot :





The primary boot loader of Solaris Grub immediately got the control :





Then, I selected the default option to boot. There was a progress, of files
being read from the Installation DVD :





Bingo !!!

I got the Solaris Copyright message from the Kernel and the installation
options from the Solaris installer without any problem :





I then selected the Interactive method of Installation :





It then started the graphics (Generic VESA mode) too without any issues :





I then issued couple of commands to get the hardware details :









I was too tempted to blow away the Windows Installation with Solaris, but then
It was not my Mac Book. I had to stop playing with Solaris on the Mac Book at
this point.

The only problem I had, mouse pad did not work under Solaris. I used one of my
USB mouse as a workaround.

I was so happy to see Solaris booting on this excellent piece of hardware,
Mac Book without having to modify anything. Solaris had definitely come a
long way to reach where it is today. It is because of the hard work, we many of
the engineers at Sun have put till date.

I am sure that Solaris will improve in the near future too, so that it can run
on the Mac Book for production purposes.

This experiment infact is pushing me to spend around 2 grand to get a Mac Book
as an upgrade from my 3 Year old laptop.

I made up my mind that, I would consider a Mac Book iff it is available with a
64 bit x86 class of processor, so that I can run 64 bit Solaris. I hope the
Mac Book Pro will be using 64 bit processors soon. This atleast stops me
spending a bulk of buck as of now :-)

Posted at 07:05PM Jul 31, 2006 by prabahar in General  |  Comments[0]