I am not much of a basketball fan, so apologies for a misleading post title (attributable to the partial attention I paid to ESPN India's telecast of a Maryland-Duke game). I managed to install the Indiana Developer Preview 2 OpenSolaris distribution on my TigerMacOS X 10.4 laptop using VirtualBox yesterday.

A 20MB distribution that allows me to run Indiana DP2 on top of MacOS X sounded too good to be true. Thanks to simple VirtualBox configuration and Alan Burlison's advice on guest OS networking, obtaining a connected Indiana VM on my Macbook Pro was a breeze. Entertainment by the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens during configuration possibly helped too.

I used the PCN driver from the Solaris Express Community Edition for networking as Alan suggested, but his post also contains instructions around (and an ISO image of) Masayuki-san's free NIC drivers for Solaris. I set 1GB of base memory and 32MB of virtual memory for my virtual machine.

The idea of a layer managing and provisioning resources for applications and abstracting those resources from the environments in which the applications run is not new, of course. However, virtualization seems to have come into its own lately. The innotek acquisition is the most recent milestone in the history of our virtualization portfolio - a history that has looked very busy in the last decade or so with my favourite highlights being Dynamic System Domains (a capability that has evolved several generations since the E10K days), Solaris Containers, Sun Ray thin clients, Chip Multi-threading, Secure Global Desktop, Logical Domains, ZFS, the Storagetek acquisition, Project Blackbox and Sun xVM.

There is no particular need for the screenshot that occupies much of the real estate here, but it saves you a thousand words.

Tags : virtualbox macos opensolaris