Solaris x86

By kristof on Mon, 11/11/2002 - 17:59

As the installation of Solaris 8 on x86 didn't succeeded on my old P-133, I almost gave up. But then I tried to install it on VMWare, even though I hate so much (way too slow). It installed without any problem, though I only have 16 colors in graphical mode :(

Time to install some GNU utilities on it, and maybe a XFree server. Of course it was only after the installation that I found out about this site, which explains in detail how to install Solaris on VMWare.

Anonymous Wed, 06/15/2005 - 18:59

Enhancing the 16 color mode can be frustrating, as I too found out ;) The thing is that you don't need an XFree86 server, but there are VMware drivers for the commercial X server which is shipped with Solaris x86. All you need is the following :

  • patches 109401-08 and 108653-27 from sunsolve.sun.com - don't bother installing the latest patch cluster - I aborted the thing after a *six* hour install.
  • Download Solaris VMware xfree86 drivers, http://mostlysoftware.com/downloads/sunwxf86-vmware.tar.gz and install the packages SUNWxf86u and SUNWxf86u. Caveat : You must install the SUNWxf86u package before you install the SUNWxf86r, otherwise you will have to start the process all the beginning.