rv's techblog: some kind of blog

I was looking for a decent FTP client for OpenSolaris and ran into FireFTP, which runs as a Firefox extension.

A very cool piece of software, plain and simple as it should be and extremely plug and play. No installation hassle or nothing, just download the extension and off you go.

Two thumbs up :)

Quick post about getting Broadcom's BCM4401 NIC working on OpenSolaris Nevada b55.

Had just donwloaded it and installed the Developer Edition but there was no driver for the network device.

Anyway, I went to this page, which is where the OpenSolaris' Device Drivers Community keeps their files. Downloaded every version of bfe avaiable, burned them to a transit cd and logged on Nevada. I had tried the 2.4 version first, from another site, but it didn't work. The module wasn't loading for some reason, but 2.3 worked without much effort, just following the readme file.

Links on this:
freeman liu's blog has lots of info on several NIC's
OpenSolaris Device Driver Community

After a few attempts at this, last night I finally got it working. Here's a small report on how things worked out.

Most people that come from the Linux side of the fence know their way around partitions that look like hda(0,1) or sda(0,1). So opening up a Solaris book and learning how it referes to disks and what 'slices' are is definetly a good idea, to say the least.

I won't reinvent the wheel here, _read_ this: http://multiboot.solaris-x86.org/iv/3.html before continuing.

I started by booting into a System Rescue CD to partition (not format) my disc. One for Fedora, one for Nexenta and last one for my Linux home.

After that, I booted into the Nexenta install cd and proceeded through the installation. When I got to the "where to install" part, it offered to repartion my entire disk and use all space (nope) or to manually partition the disk (yep).

This is where things can get tricky, if you don't have any Solaris file system (which I didn't) it won't recognize a few properties of your disk and will ask you for these (cylinders, sectors and such..). You might wanna reboot into the Rescue CD and find these out or see if you can use GParted to format a Solaris partition - don't waste your time, at this point in time, that's not an option.

So I picked up a copy of BeleniX, another OpenSolaris distribution but a liveCD one (you can even install it, but I'm not a fan of KDE or xFce). Opened a terminal and 'format' recognized the disk. Removed one of my partitions and created a Solaris2 in its place. Then, sliced it with 'partition' and created a root and swap slice inside it.

Went back to Nexenta, manual partitioning (just for the sake of it, didn't touch a byte), selected the right slices for the right purposes and Next>Next>..>Reboot.

GRUB now should point to the Nexenta partitions, but it tried to boot into (hd0,0,a) instead of (hd0,3,a). Nothing to it, just edit on command line and then on /boot/grub/menu.lst.

The rest was simple, I installed Fedora from the DVD, it replaced Nexenta's GRUB and added an entry for it (chainloading).

That's pretty much it.

Off to FISL tomorrow morning :)