It hasnt been a very good 24 hours
Friday Dec 28, 2007
What Solaris installers have done is always surprised me every now and then. Yesterday I spent the entire time maintaining my computer. While I was upgrading to Leopard I had to remove the Solaris virtual disk to create space for the upgrade. Not that I was very happy with the Solaris VM then. I had reinstall it anyways so as to convert my 64-bit vm to 32-bit. There is some bug (thats what I have heard) in VMware Fusion that causes 64-bit vm to halt for 2-3 mins with a black screen at the very beginning of the booting process. Quite a few times it had happened that people would come to me to see Solaris and while waiting for this 2-3 minutes they would start talking and forget all about it. Now I dont know if it can be changed in the same VM, so I decided to do a clean install once again. Now that I have learned quite a bit about this operating system, I would like to experiment with is a little bit. Maybe I can get down to playing with ZFS and some virtual hard-disks. This way I would be able to demonstrate that how to work with ZFS on actual hard disks, instead of just files. Any ways, so I cleaned up some space in my laptop. Wrote some DVDs which had been pending for quite some time due to a faulty superdrive. Eventually I was able to free about 15.5 gigs. And considering the fact that I usually have only 1-2 gigs of free space, Id consider this to be an achievement in itself.
So once my space is cleaned, I started with my installation at about 1 AM in the night. I used the OpenSolaris Community Edition, build 77 that I had burned quite some time back. I had burned that disc to mainly install it into an HP laptop of my friend. I remember, that the build 72 that was given to us during the Campus Ambassador Induction Program, would not install on selected HP Pavillion laptop having a LightScribe DVD writer. The installer did not identify that hardware as a DVD drive, although the DVD had booted off it. These errors are pretty common during development and is quite acceptable. This problem was in the later buids I guess 75/76. Unfortunately build 77 had failed me in the HP laptop,it would load Caimanall right but it wont go past selecting language for the installation. On trying the older GUI, it got past the language and everything, but the installation wont begin. So I even tried the build 77 on my college desktop on that unfateful day But it would go on an on and on....
So this time I said, lets try build 77 on my virtual machine, cause my vm has accepted every installer till now. I am using VMware Fusion Version 1.1 (62573). So I created a a Sun Solaris 10 (32-bit) vm with 800 odd RAM for the Caiman installer and started the installation. It booted off the dvd easily, all the process was smooth and the installation started very quickly (cause in a vm u dont have to think about partition and stuff, simple installit over the entire hard disk). I waited for quite some time, doing some other things and I noticed it was only 3% complete. So then I went to sleep, hoping for a fully functional Solaris in the morning. But it was not to be, the installation had reached only 41%. Simply all hopes of its completion was shattered. I suspended that installation and tried to make a disc image out of the DVD. But it gave some IO error. Which means that there was some problem with the DVD. So basically it comes down to the fact that DO NOT use a scratched dvd to install Solaris!! Cause if you do, it will go on infinitely. So I created a new VM now, and I booted off the disc image of bulid 72, and withing 25 mins the installation is 65% complete... Hope to start with a fully functional Solaris soon.
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