Petar Tahchiev's Blog

Solaris First Impressions

On Monday I got the server (x86 platform using Xeon Server Dual Core) I had order, and I immediately started installing it. My desire was to set up on it some king of a Unix (say Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc). I downloaded the Solaris image, burned it and was ready to start having fun. My server doesn't have a DVD, God only knows why since I ordered it explicitly with a DVD. So I started planning of using an external DVD. I bought the external DVD player, placed the disk inside and installation started. I was following this tutorial:

but strangely enough, I didn't get the windows that are shown, but instead, I got a nice blue linux-like-installation screen. After the few questions about the Language, Network, Date/Time, Security and Remote Service Management I got a really strange error, saying "No disks were found". After this a new terminal appeared and, indeed the Solaris couldn't recognize my hard disks. Although, they seem like a pretty normal HDDs: "Western Digital Caviar SE 80 GG, SATA II 300, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache". So my next guess, was of course to google a little bit, and after a while I found that the problem was caused by the fact that my disks were not formatted, and so didn't have a solaris label. So I installed Slax on my USB and booted the server with it. I formatted and partitioned the disks. Then booted the Solaris again, but the same thing happened again. So I started googling further. Another suggestion that was made was that my RAID controller wasn't recognized. So I disabled it from the BIOS, and tried again. This time the problem was something else. My disks were recognized, but the install program replied that the disk I was using wasn't a Solaris installation disk. And again the sh prompt, which by the way, is really hard to cope with. I checked the /cdrom and it turned out that Solaris couldn't mount the external DVD on the hard disk for some reason. So I had to do it all by myself.

after which the installation went smoothly. So to sum up, everything seems really nice with this OS, but probably the guys from the Solaris dev. team should really think about:

• improving the hardware support (for instance the RAID support and the external DVD).
• maybe improving the documentation a little bit.
• using the bash shell instead of the sh shell.

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