Notes from a Carbon Based Life Form

Well. I finally managed to get the Sun Solaris Operating Environment installed on my Intel-based Apple Mac Mini. More specifically, I managed to get a patched version of Solaris Express build 46, which should be available to the public VSN, installed onto the Mini.

*edit: It appears that changes required to multiboot, grub, stage2 (and stage2_eltorito), as well as to fdisk, should be available in build 47 of Solaris Express, which should be available by mid-September at the latest, considering build 46 is available now as the Solaris Express Community Release as linked from the OpenSolaris ON Downloads Page.

tcsh-[107]% prtdiag
System Configuration: Apple Computer, Inc. Macmini1,1
BIOS Configuration: Apple Computer, Inc. MM11.88Z.0055.B03.0604071521 04/07/06

==== Processor Sockets ====================================

Version Location Tag
-------------------------------- --------------------------
Genuine Intel(R) CPU T U2E1
Genuine Intel(R) CPU T U2E1

==== Memory Device Sockets ================================

Type Status Set Device Locator Bank Locator
------- ------ --- ------------------- --------------------
DDR2 in use 0 DIMM0 BANK 0
DDR2 in use 0 DIMM1 BANK 1

==== On-Board Devices =====================================
Integrated Graphics Controller
Yukon Ethernet Controller
Azalia Audio Codec
SATA
PATA

==== Upgradeable Slots ====================================

ID Status Type Description
--- --------- ---------------- ----------------------------
2 available PCI Express AirPort

I did have one little bug, though, (6374895) related to the Solaris fdisk binary, and the Apple EFI disk label. The Solaris install seems to have eaten my Mac OS X partition. It did, however, leave Apple's Boot Camp as the bootloader though, so that's nice. With a keyboard, and a Left-ALT key, I can boot from CD if I need to. :)

I guess now I'll have to bootstrap a gcc just to compare it against my linux server, and my Sun Ultra 20 Workstation.

Comments:

"Eaten your Mac OS partition?" that's a pretty severe bug if you ask me. A bit more explanation would be nice on how that happened and any tips on how to avoid such a nasty problem.

Posted by 70.187.235.79 on August 24, 2006 at 10:35 PM EDT #

Well, basically the deal is that Apple's EFI disk labels are incompatible with Sun's fdisk binary. There's more of an explanation in the bug-id I linked there. Essentially, Sun's fdisk doesn't believe that the Apple EFI label is correct, so it wants to set it's own label that encompasses the disk. Since I'm hoping to turn this Mini into a colo server, I'm not terribly keen on having Mac OS X on it, therefore I referred to it as a small bug. Although, if I were more interested in dual-booting, then yeah, that would indeed be one heck of a bug. As for a work around, I haven't any idea. :) Good thing I didn't need OS X, eh?

Posted by Tim Kennedy on August 24, 2006 at 11:41 PM EDT #

Why bootstrap gcc? It's there in current solaris builds under /usr/sfw/bin.

Posted by Boyd Adamson on August 26, 2006 at 07:24 PM EDT #

Yeah, I have that installed. All the SpecINT ratings and stuff like that are sort of abstract for me. Since that's not how I use computers, they don't make much sense to me. Bootstrapping GCC is a time consuming effort for a lot of computers, and to me, it's a more valuable measure of a computer's potential.

So, whenever I get a new PC, or a new OS on one of my PC's, I'll try and bootstrap a GCC, and see how long it takes. Then I'll have my own personal score for the system.

Posted by Tim Kennedy on August 26, 2006 at 08:51 PM EDT #