Install OpenSolaris side by side with Nevada

Monday May 12, 2008

I have being running Nevada(think it as Solaris Express Community Edition if you are not a Sun employee) on my laptop since I joined Sun, upgrades from one build to another. Lately, I use Live Upgrade and that works great.

With the Image Packaging System available in OpenSolaris, I had being looking forward to migrate, but considered the fact that OpenSolaris does not support upgrade of existing Solaris, the desire to upgrade simply cannot be satisfied because I don't want to risk interruption of my daily work. The laptop is where I do all my work.

With the latest OpenSolaris 2008.05 live CD distributed at JavaOne, seeing the cool visual effect of compiz(Yes, I am that shallow to love eye candies), and after JavaOne it is usually OK to take a little break, so I took the plunge.

As I have being using live upgrade, I would like to free one of the slice used for the old BE and install OpenSolaris in that slice. I knew OpenSolaris at this point can only install to a Solaris partition or use the whole disk, so what should I do? This discussion gave me good hints, and thanks to Detlef Drewanz, his detail instructions make the migration a much easier experience.

Note the process requires a secondary HDD. I do have a spare IDE HDD, and a must-have SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter by Vantec.

So here is a quick note on what I did, not exactly, but roughly recalled: 

1. Connect the HDD with the USB adapter.
2. Boot from OpenSolaris live CD, and install to the USB HDD.
3. Reboot into the existing Nevada. 
4. ludelete <old BE>
5. zpool create osol <free slice>, in my case, /dev/dsk/c0d0s3.
6. zpool import rpool. This will make the OpenSolaris installation available in Nevada.
7. zfs send -R rpool/ROOT/opensolaris@install | zfs receive -d osol
   
8. mount -F zfs osol/ROOT/opensolaris /mnt
   
9. cp /etc/zfs/zpool.cache /mnt/etc/zfs/zpool.cache
10. cp /kernel/misc/sysinit /mnt/kernel/misc/
11. cp /kernel/misc/amd64/sysinit /mnt/kernel/misc/amd64/
    
12. touch /mnt/reconfigure
13. vim /mnt/etc/vfstab to make sure correct pool is used.
14. vim /boot/grub/menu.lst to add the new entry for OpenSolaris
15. bootadm update-archive -v -R /mnt
16. Reboot! Remove the USB HDD while rebooting.
17. Enjoy OpenSolaris by configuring visual effect and start to install stuff with pkg. :-) 

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Posted at 12:15AM May 12, 2008 by slowhog in OpenSolaris
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