I'm going to preface this with I should have been testing with my Sparc systems and not the x86. Can we say the default installation is hosed with respect to headless systems?

So I decided the next experiment was going to:

• Replace the grub splash screen with my own.
• Try and force the installation to automatically install the Software Companion packages.

I also decided to remove the Sparc packages from the DVD - eventually I am going to want that space for something else.

Well, I decided to not do my installation testing on wont. I want to do it on an old laptop I have, but I can't find its modular DVD reader and it won't boot from USB connected drives. I don't want another PC in the house, so I decided to use my w2100z.

It is hooked up via a serial console. This is a very important fact. And that is foreshadowing again - the sign of good journalism.

Pop in the new DVD, reboot and stare at the following for 5 minutes:

# sync; sync; sync; halt
Mar 21 00:49:07 warlock halt: initiated by root on /dev/console
syncing file systems... done
Press any key to reboot.
Resetting...

Add in the lack of a decent power reset switch on the w2100z, and the frustration mounts. I got it back up on Nevada b34 and then popped the DVD back into wont. And the reason why I didn't get anything on the earlier console was really evident. The default grub selection is to boot to the attached monitor and not the console. If you are on the box, you can use the attached keyboard to get the selection to go to the console.

Headless boxes are pretty common with Solaris. I'll have to look to see how this is being handled in the labs.

I'm sure I could easily make headed and headless versions of the DVDs. By why waste a DVD?

Oh, by the way, the DVD boots on wont. I didn't see the splash screen, perhaps when the system reboots from the HD? Also, when the system prompted me for where to search for software to install, the DVD was greyed out. That might have nuked my second goal.

As an added bonus, I have some ZFS filesystems on the disk I didn't nuke. It will be interesting to see how they come up.

Ugh, I have my test system back - the modular DVD on the old laptop does not go in the modular bay - it is integrated. :-> I can swap the CD writer out for a floppy drive. Oh well, the first DVD version is installing on it.

Okay, I changed too many things at once on wont - I also added the extra software - which messed the initial boot up.

I'm not getting my splash screen.

The laptop is hung on:

Discovering additional network configuration...

It has a cardbus based network card.

So the good news is that I can repeat my orginal experiment to create a bootable x86 DVD. The bad news is that nothing new worked.

Strike that, I was able to modify the string name which appeared on the Gnome display of the DVD:

I did that with this entry in my ~/.mkisofsrc: Doh!, I nuked that area on wont :->

I really need to get that laptop bootable - even without the NIC it does the same thing.

I'll try to tie up all the loose ends sometime in the next day or so. Oh, I also can't see my ZFS filesystem, but I'll recover it as well.