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From: Dan Anderson <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.solaris.x86,comp.unix.solaris,alt.answers,comp.answers,news.answers
Subject: Solaris x86 FAQ 1/2
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Summary: This posting answers frequently-asked questions from the
     alt.solaris.x86 newsgroup that aren't already covered in the
     Solaris 2 FAQ.  It should be read by anyone who wishes to
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     comp.unix.solaris newsgroups.
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Archive-name: Solaris2/x86/FAQ
Posting-Frequency: quarterly
Last-modified: 2005/03/17
URL: http://sun.drydog.com/faq/
Version: 2.28
Copyright: Copyright � 1997-2005 Dan Anderson.  All rights reserved.
Maintainer: Dan Anderson <[email protected]>, San Diego, California, USA

 _________________________________________________________________

(1.0) TABLE OF CONTENTS

(2.0) INTRODUCTION

(3.0) RESOURCES

(3.1) + What web and FTP sites do I need to know about?
(3.2) + How do I subscribe to the Solaris/x86 mailing list?
(3.3) + Where can I obtain Solaris 2/x86 maintenance updates?
(3.4) Where can I obtain Solaris 2/x86 patches?
(3.5) How can I obtain freeware, shareware, and GNU software on a
CD-ROM?
(3.6) What UNIX-like operating systems are available on x86?
(3.7) What books are available on Solaris x86?
(3.8) What magazine articles are available on Solaris x86?
(3.9) + What's new for Solaris 10 x86?

(4.0) PRE-INSTALLATION
(4.1) What information should I have before an install?
(4.2) + What hardware is supported by Solaris 2.x for Intel?
(4.3) What size disks and partitions should I have?
(4.4) What are SCSI IDs expected by Solaris x86?
(4.5) What video card/monitor combination works best?
(4.6) Is Plug-and-Play (PNP) supported by Solaris/x86?
(4.7) Is Advanced Power Management (APM) supported by Solaris/x86?
(4.8) Are "floppy tape" devices supported by Solaris x86?
(4.9) How can I get a "free" copy of Solaris?
(4.10) What's missing from the "free" copy of Solaris that's in
the commercial version?
(4.11) How do you create a Device Configuration Assistant (DCA)
Diskette in DOS/Windows?
(4.12) How can I get Solaris to see the third ATAPI controller?
(4.13) Are Ultra DMA (UDMA) drives supported?
(4.14) + Are Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices supported?
(4.15) + Is the scroll wheel on the mouse supported?
(4.16) What's the difference between Solaris x86 Server and
Solaris x86 Desktop?
(4.17) Solaris doesn't recognize all of my large (>40GB) ATAPI.
For example, a 60GB disk shows up as only 28GB.
(4.18) + Is Solaris x86 64-bit aware?
(4.19) What's the difference between partitions and slices?
(4.20) I already used the 4 primary fdisk partition table entries.
Can I create a partition for Solaris within my extended partition?
(4.21) What are the IRQ assignments?
(4.22) Are Laptops supported for Solaris x86?

(5.0) INSTALLATION
(5.1) How long does the install take?
(5.2) My ATAPI CD-ROM isn't recognized during install by Solaris'
FCS MCB and it's not in the HCL. What can I do?
(5.3) What kind of problems might I encounter installing my SCSI
system?
(5.4) What do I do when the install hangs/panics?
(5.5) I'm trying to install Solaris/x86 on my ATAPI drive.
However, the installation program says the root partition must end
within the first 1023 cylinders of the disk. What can I do?
(5.6) Does Solaris x86 prefer to have the motherboard BIOS set to
NORMAL or LBA for ATAPI disks?
(5.7) Why does a Solaris install to a disk with valid,
pre-existing fdisk partitions sometimes fail?
(5.8) How do I add a 8 GB or greater ATAPI drive to Solaris 7 or
earlier?
(5.9) How do I install or use the "2 of 2" installation CD?
(5.10) How do I install or use the documentation CD?
(5.11) Help! I get a "VTOC" or cannot mount error installing
Solaris.

(6.0) POST-INSTALLATION (CUSTOMIZATION)
(6.1) How do I add additional drives?
(6.2) How do I add or configure users, printers, serial ports,
software, etc.?
(6.3) How do I suppress the banner page on my printer?
(6.4) + How do I set up an HP-compatible printer to print
PostScript files?
(6.5) How can I improve disk and graphic performance?
(6.6) + How do I get Solaris to recognize a NE2000 compatible NIC
card?
(6.7) + How do I get Solaris to recognize generic network cards
with well-known chipsets?
(6.8) + How do I change the IP address or hostname or both on
Solaris/x86?
(6.8) + How do I configure another serial port, /dev/ttyb-ttyd
(COM2-4)?
(6.9) How do I disable Solaris/x86 from probing the UPS on COM2?
(6.10) How do I set up Solaris/x86 to use PPP to connect to an
ISP?
(6.11) + Is there any open source PPP that's easier to use than
Sun's aspppd?
(6.12) Is there any commercial PPP that's easier to use?
(6.14) Help! My USRobotics Internal modem doesn't work with PPP.
(6.15) PPP runs extremely slow. What's wrong?
(6.16) How do I configure PPP using Dynamic IP Addresses (DHCP)?
(6.17) How do I configure my SoundBlaster card?
(6.18) How do I enable the audio output from my CDROM to my SBPRO
card?
(6.19) Is Solaris/x86 Year 2000 (Y2K) compliant?
(6.20) Can I use Solaris/x86 to setup a "headless" server?
(6.21) Can I get a Sun-style keyboard (Ctrl & Caps Lock reversed)
for S/x86?
(6.22) + Can I run multiple terminals on the console of Solaris
x86 like those supported on Linux, FreeBSD, Interactive Unix, and SCO?
(6.23) How do I upgrade my video graphics card?
(6.24) + How to I burn a CD-R or CD-RW with Solaris?
(6.25) Is IPv6 available for Solaris/x86?
(6.26) + Is IPsec available for Solaris/x86?
(6.27) Is Kerberos 5 available for Solaris/x86?
(6.28) Does Solaris x86 support multiple processors?
(6.29) How do I uncompress a .gz file?
(6.30) Why doesn't /usr/bin/cc work?
(6.31) How do you get PGP 2.6.2 to compile on Solaris/x86?
(6.32) How do you connect Solaris to my cable modem?
(6.33) How do you setup Solaris to use Time Warner's RoadRunner
service?
(6.34) How do I force the speed and/or duplex of my network
interfaces (ndd(1M) doesn't work)?
(6.35) Why can't I create a home directory under /home?
(6.36) Is Veritas file system available for Solaris x86?
(6.37) How to I use Zip and Jaz Drives for Solaris x86?
(6.38) How to I use Linux NIC drivers for Solaris x86?
(6.39) How to I add color to "ls" or "vi"?
(6.40) How to I move the disk containing Solaris from the ATAPI
primary master controller to the secondary controller or slave
connector (or both)?
(6.41) I've installed Solaris using Sun's brain dead disk slice
defaults. How do I modify my slices?
(6.42) How do I mirror root with Disksuite when /boot is a
separate fdisk partition?
(6.43) Is ISDN supported for Solaris x86?
(6.44) Is there a substitute available for PRNG /dev/random for
Solaris x86?
(6.45) What are some good, easty-to-use printing solutions for
Solaris?
(6.46) What is the Solaris 9 Data Encryption Supplement?
(6.47) How do you mount a Solaris ISO image (with UFS filesystems)
in Solaris?
(6.48) Is noexec_user_stack supported in Solaris x86?
(6.49) How to change the audio beep frequency?
(6.50) * Is Adobe Acrobat Reader available for Solaris x86?

(7.0) TROUBLESHOOTING
(7.1) What can I do if Solaris won't boot?
(7.2) How do I restore the Solaris boot block without
reinstalling?
(7.3) What can I do during the Solaris/x86 booting sequence?
(7.4) How do I logon as root if the password doesn't work
anymore?
(7.5) My licensed software fails because the host ID is 0. What's
wrong?
(7.6) How can I fix Netscape Communicator to render fonts
correctly on S/x86?
(7.7) Why doesn't Netscape run as root?
(7.8) I moved my PCI host adapter to another slot and the system
won't boot!
(7.9) + Why is Solaris always booting into the Device
Configuration Assistant (DCA)?
(7.10) What is the equivalent of STOP-A for Solaris x86?
(7.11) How can I reboot Solaris x86 without it asking me to
"press a key" before rebooting?
(7.12) Help! I'm stuck in the "Boot Assistant" and can't boot.
What do I do?
(7.13) Help! I get error 2 or error 8 while applying patches.
What do I do?
(7.14) How do I prevent kdmconfig from running on boot up when I
know my keyboard, display, and mouse configuration has not changed?
(7.15) I get this error message: "can't get local host's domain
name" or "The local host's domain name hasn't been set." What do I do?
(7.16) My system doesn't boot due to superblock problems with the
root filesystem. What do I do?

(8.0) X WINDOWS
(8.1) + How do I find a Solaris video driver for my graphics
card?
(8.2) How can I use a XFree86 video driver with XSun?
(8.3) How do I install XFree86 on Solaris?
(8.4) How do I configure 64K colors for CDE?
(8.5) How do I Add KDE, FVWM, GNOME, or other non-CDE Window
Mangers to the dtlogin screen?
(8.6) Where can I get GNOME or KDE packages for Solaris/x86?
(8.7) After upgrading to Solaris 9 or installing GNOME, GNOME
does not appear in the dtlogin menu. How can I fix this?
(8.8) Are TrueType fonts supported in Solaris?
(8.9) How do I make XFree86 version 3.x- or XiG Xaccel 5.0.3-
work with Solaris 8?
(8.10) How do I disable CDE auto-start upon booting multi-user?
(8.11) How do I su(1) to another user and run an X application?
(8.12) Does Solaris x86 support multiple heads?
(8.13) How do I get my 2-button mouse to emulate 3 buttons?
(8.14) How do I get admintool(1M) and some other Solaris GUI's to
run with XFree86?

(9.0) INTEROPERABILITY WITH OTHER OPERATING SYSTEMS
(9.1) Can I install Solaris x86 on a system that already has MS
Windows 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP (among other systems)?
(9.2) How can I use MS Windows' NT/2K Loader to boot Solaris/x86?
(9.3) How can I use the Solaris boot manager to boot Windows NT?
(9.4) How can I use System Commander to boot Solaris/x86 and
other systems?
(9.5) Can I install Linux and Solaris on the same drive?
(9.6) How can I use GRUB to boot Solaris/x86?
(9.7) How can I use LILO to boot Solaris/x86 on the primary slave
ATAPI?
(9.8) How can I use OS-BS or System Selector to boot Solaris/x86?
(9.9) How can I boot both Solaris/x86 and Win NT on the same
disk?
(9.10) How do I mount a DOS partition from the hard drive?
(9.11) Does PartitionMagic and BootMagic understand Solaris
partitions?
(9.12) How do I access a DOS-format diskette from Solaris?
(9.13) Does Solaris mount and recognize MS Windows 9x/ME/2K/XP
partitions with long file names (VFAT)?
(9.14) How can I make my Solaris files easily available to MS
Windows 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP on a network?
(9.15) How can I make my Solaris files easily available to an
Apple Macintosh on a network?
(9.16) Can I use SunPCi on Solaris/x86?
(9.17) Will Linux programs run on Solaris 2/x86?
(9.18) How can I get the DOS and UNIX clock to agree on
Solaris/x86?
(9.19) Is Solaris x86 able to execute Solaris SPARC applications?
(9.20) Will my old applications from SVR3 or SCO run on Solaris
2/x86?
(9.21) Will my application from Solaris/SPARC work on
Solaris/x86? I have the source.
(9.22) Can I access Solaris/x86 partitions from Linux?
(9.23) + Can I access Linux (ext2fs) partitions from Solaris?
(9.24) What are some books on Wijdows NT/Solaris integration?
(9.25) How can I view MS Word files in Solaris?
(9.26) + Where can I get Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, or another
web browser for Solaris x86?
(9.27) * How do I setup Xprint for Mozilla?
(9.28) Can I mount other ufs disks, say from BSDi/FreeBSD, and
vice versa?
(9.29) How can I use a disk partition on Solaris 2.x which was
previously dedicated to MS Windows 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP (or other OS) as
dual boot?
(9.30) How can I convert a DOS/Windows text file to a Unix text
file? +
(9.31) + Can VMWARE be used with Solaris x86?
(9.32) Is Solaris on Intel really "Slowaris"--slower than other
Intel-based operating systems?
(9.33) How can I remove (uninstall) Solaris from my hard drive?
(9.34) I can install Linux on a system with Solaris x86, but why
can't I boot it?
(9.35) What hardware solutions are available for dual booting?
(9.36) What are the /dev/dsk/ disk naming conventions for x86
disks?

*New question since last month.
+Significantly revised answer since last month.

Copyright � 1997-2005 Dan Anderson. All rights reserved.
http://sun.drydog.com/faq/
 _________________________________________________________________

(2.0) INTRODUCTION

The Solaris x86 FAQ: Frequently-asked Questions about Solaris on Intel
- x86.

This posting contains frequently-asked questions, with answers, about
the Sun Solaris 2 Operating System on the Intel Platform (x86) found
in the alt.solaris.x86 and comp.unix.solaris USENET
newsgroups. The alt.solaris.x86 newsgroup covers Solaris on the
Intel platform, for version 2.5 and higher. The most up-to-date copy
of this FAQ is at http://sun.drydog.com/faq/

The comp.unix.solaris newsgroup is for Solaris on all platforms--
Sparc or Intel. Please also consult Casper Dik's excellent FAQ on
Solaris 2, which mostly applies to Solaris x86 too. It's at:
http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2/ and elsewhere.
Solaris 7 and 8 are also known as SunOS 5.7 and 5.8. Solaris 2.x is
also known as SunOS 5.x.

For earlier versions of Solaris/x86, please see the (somewhat dated)
"Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ" by Bob Palowoda archived at various dusty
corners on the net. The (mostly historical) Sun 386i (Roadrunner) is
covered in Ralph Neill's (hard to find) FAQ.

If you post questions to alt.solaris.x86 or
comp.unix.solaris, please be sure to indicate:
 * the machine type and brief configuration, e.g. Pentium II 450 MHz,
   128 MB RAM, 200 MB swap space, 8 GB XYZ hard drive, etc.,
 * the exact Solaris version number, i.e. Solaris 7 is NOT
   sufficient, whereas "Solaris/x86 7 HW 3/99" is more useful.

I'm doing this on my own time as a public service. PLEASE DO NOT ASK
ME QUESTIONS THAT SHOULD BE ASKED OF SUN. Although I am now employed
by Sun Microsystems, as of February 1999, I have never worked at Sun
on this particular product. Nothing I say is endorsed or approved by
Sun. If you suspect you have software defect problems, please call
1-800-SOFTSPT (1-800-763-8778 or 1-510-460-3267). If you have hardware
problems call your hardware vendor. If you are outside the United
States, contact your local Sun representative.

PLEASE DO NOT ASK ME QUESTIONS THAT SHOULD BE POSTED TO
alt.solaris.x86 or comp.unix.solaris. I don't have the time
to diagnose individual Solaris problems, and I probably don't know the
answer either :-). Many experienced and knowledgeable people read the
newsgroup. Post your question there. However, answers, corrections,
and comments should be directed to me.

No FAQ is the work of one person, but is a USENET community effort.
This material was "snarfed" from other FAQs, USENET newsgroup
postings, mailing lists, and personal knowledge. Generally the source
is noted at the end of each question. Most answers have been reworded,
or expanded, or updated. Thanks to everyone who contributed directly
or indirectly. Please send any corrections or additions to me.

Copyright � 1997 - 2005 Dan Anderson. All rights reserved. Tous droits
r�serv�s.

This faq may be freely redistributed in its entirety provided that
this copyright notice is preserved. Permission is expressly granted
for this document to be made available for file transfer from
installations offering unrestricted anonymous file transfer on the
Internet.

This faq is provided "as is" in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law; without even the
implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR
ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE
GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER
IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF
ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Sun, the Sun logo, Sun Microsystems, SunSoft, the SunSoft logo, Java,
Solaris, SunOS, and NFS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun
Microsystems., Inc. SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC
International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products
bearing the SPARC trademarks are based on an architecture developed by
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Adobe and PostScript are registered trademarks
of Adobe Systems Incorporated. HP is a trademark of Hewlett-Packard
Company. IBM is a registered trademark of International Business
Machines Corporation. Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks of
Intel Corporation. Pentium� II Xeon is a trademark of Intel
Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Microsoft, MS, MS-DOS, MS Windows, and Windows NT are registered
trademarks of Microsoft Corp. Netscape is a trademark of Netscape
Communications Corp. Netscape� Communicator is a trademark of Netscape
Communications Corp. Open Source is a registered certification mark of
Open Source Initiative. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open
Group. All other product names mentioned herein are the trademarks of
their respective owners.

-Dan Anderson https://dan.drydog.com/comment.html
alt.solaris.x86 FAQ Maintainer
San Diego, California, USA

Copyright � 1997 - 2005 Dan Anderson. All rights reserved.
http://sun.drydog.com/faq/
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.0) RESOURCES (3.1) What web and FTP sites do I need to know about?

http://sun.drydog.com/faq/
      The latest version of this FAQ is always at this URL. It's
      available in text and HTML formats. This FAQ also appears in
      the alt.solaris.x86 or comp.unix.solaris newsgroups
      and on various FAQ archives. Check the date at the top of this
      FAQ to make sure you have a recent version. If you don't have
      USENET news access, you can search past postings and post your
      own messages at http://groups.google.com/

http://www.Sun.COM/software/solaris/x86/
      Sun's web site for Solaris on x86, contains pointers to Solaris
      x86 product information, updates, resources, news, etc.

http://developers.Sun.COM/
      Sun's Software Support and Education website. Has Solaris
      knowledge base, Hardware Compatibility List (HCL), device
      drivers, patches, and Device Configuration Assistant (DCA) boot
      diskette images. This website requires (free) registration to
      use. Links to drivers for Solaris x86 are at
      http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/solaris-drivers.html

http://access1.Sun.COM/ site.
      Sun's download website for patches and various technical
      documents. Maintenance updates (MUs) are at
      http://access1.Sun.COM/Products/solaris/mu/ (Registration
      (free) required for MUs). Public patches (and patch clusters)
      are at http://access1.Sun.COM/patch.public/ Their Solaris
      x86 FAQ is at
      http://access1.sun.com/FAQSets/Solarisx86FAQs.html

http://docs.Sun.COM/
      Sun documentation on-line. Includes manuals, guides,
      answerbooks, and man pages in HTML format. Especially useful
      for configuring new hardware and new systems is the Information
      Library for Solaris (Intel Platform Edition).

http://sun.drydog.com/bookstore/
      My Solaris online bookstore, in association with Amazon.com,
      where you can read reviews on selected Solaris books and order
      Solaris or other books.

http://www.stokely.com/unix.sysadm.resources/faqs.sun.html#s86.fa
      qs.link
      Stokely Consulting's list of FAQs has lots of pointers
      resources, not only for Solaris x86, but UNIX System
      Administration in general.

http://sunfreeware.com/
      S. Christensen's Solaris Freeware Page. Pointers to LOTS of x86
      pre-packaged GNU and other open-source software.

http://home1.swipnet.se/~w-10694/helpers.html
      Pointers to many Solaris viewers, players, and Netscape
      plug-ins. Includes sample media files.

http://solaris-x86.org/
      A new site with tutorials and news on Solaris x86.

http://www.laxmi.net/cde.htm
      CDE (Common Desktop Environment) FAQ

http://www.blastwave.org/
      Community-built packages for Solaris x86 using Debian apt-get.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/packages/solaris/i86pc/
      Selected Solaris x86 binaries conveniently packaged in pkgadd
      format at the University of North Carolina (formerly Sunsite).

ftp://x86.cs.duke.edu/pub/solaris-x86/bins/index.html
      Joe Shamblin's annotated collection of Solaris x86 open source,
      with pointers to documentation, make it good for open source
      browsing. This site appears to be dormant (last updated circa
      1998).

http://sun.drydog.com/
      My Solaris x86 Webpage has includes a search engine that
      indexes selected websites containing Solaris x86 information,
      including those listed here. Also contains the latest version
      of this FAQ and my online bookstore (in association with
      Amazon.com).

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/x86_desktop.html
      Good overview on installing Solaris/x86 for your desktop
      workstation, including frequently-used add-ons such as
      OpenOffice. Lots of good pointers. Article published 2003.

http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/
      Phil Brown's Solaris tips, packages, and drivers. (includes
      packages and drivers he wrote). Lots of useful information.

http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2/
      Last, but not least, Casper Dik's thorough FAQ on Solaris 2.
      This entire FAQ is available as one file at:
      http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.2) How do I subscribe to the Solaris/x86 mailing list?

Subscribe by sending an e-mail message to
<[email protected]> or visit Yahoo Groups'
Solaris x86 web page at
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisx86/ You DON'T have to
register to join the list, but you do have to register to read the
list archives on the web (sorted by thread and date).

Sun maintains a similar "Solaris on Intel" discussion forum. To access
it, go to http://forum.sun.com/ and select "Solaris x86 Platform
Edition".

A web-based forum, covering SPARC and x86, is at
http://www.solarisforums.com/
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.3) Where can I obtain Solaris 2/x86 maintenance updates?

Starting with Solaris 7, Sun includes the drivers in the Maintenance
Updates (MUs) and updated versions of the OS. These are available at
http://access1.Sun.COM/Products/solaris/mu/ (free access, but you
must register with "solregis" or at http://developers.Sun.COM/ if
you didn't during your Solaris install)

Older Solaris 6 and earlier driver updates (DUs) are at
http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/solaris/

[Thanks to Alan Coopersmith]
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.4) Where can I obtain Solaris 2/x86 patches?

The Solaris x86 driver updates can be obtained by HTTP from:
ftp://sunsolve.Sun.COM/

A listing sorted by release is available by clicking on "Patches" at
the SunSolve web page, http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/

Pointers to patches, including one huge *_x86_Recommended.tar.Z file
for each release. This directory is publicly accessible--it doesn't
require you to be a contract customer. Patches are also available
locally at many SunSites.

The "showrev -p" command shows what patches you have installed.

All files replaced by a patch are saved under /var/sadm/patch/ or
/var/sadm/pkg/
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.5) How can I obtain freeware, shareware, and GNU software on a
CD-ROM?

Solaris 8 comes with some GNU utilities, such as gzip and less. More
binary packages for GNU and other Open Source software are in a
separate CD. The CD is installed after Solaris is installed. The
packages on the CD all start with "SFW" (SFW stands for "Sun
Freeware").

For older versions of Solaris, Micromata of Kassel, Germany offers its
"Summertime" CD with precompiled software for Solaris SPARC and Intel,
http://www.micromata.com/summertime/

See question 3.1 above for FTP and web software sites.
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.6) What UNIX-like operating systems are available on x86?

 * Solaris x86, SVR4-based (http://www.Sun.COM/)
 * SCO OpenServer UNIX, SVR3.2-based (http://www.sco.com/)
 * SCO UNIXWare, SVR4-based (http://www.sco.com/)
 * BSD/OS (http://www.bsdi.com/)

 * Linux (http://www.linuxresources.com/, open source)
 * FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org/, open source)
 * NetBSD (http://www.netbsd.org/, open source)
 * OpenBSD (http://www.openbsd.org/, open source)

Note that the open source versions can also be purchased on CD-ROM,
which is a convenient way to get it. For Linux, there are multiple
vendors selling CD-ROMs (e.g., RedHat, http://www.redhat.com/).
Other systems are over the horizon, in beta, or for teaching/research.
E.g., GNU's HURD http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/software/hurd/,
Tanenbaum's Minix http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html, or
Lucent/Bell Labs' Plan 9, http://plan9.bell-labs.com/
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.7) What books are available on Solaris x86?

For Unix system administration in general, I like Unix System
Administration Handbook, 3d ed. by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Scott
Seebass, and Trent R. Hein (Prentice Hall, 1995), ISBN 0-13-020601-7
http://sun.drydog.com/bookstore/#0131510517

Ron Ledesma has written PC Hardware Configuration Guide for DOS
and Solaris (SunSoft Press, 1994), ISBN 0-13-124678-X,
http://sun.drydog.com/bookstore/#013124678x. It's a well-written,
but dated, book on setting up Solaris x86 on Intel Architecture.

There's also Solaris 2.X for Managers and Administrators by Curt
Freeland, Dwight McKay, Kent Parkinson, 2d ed. (1997), ISBN:
1-56690-150-2, http://sun.drydog.com/bookstore/#1566901502

The following book by Janice Winsor covers Solaris 9 for SPARC and
x86. I find it covers the subject matter too lightly, but it may be
good for beginners: Solaris Operating Environment Administrator's
Guide, 4th ed. (2003), ISBN 0-13101401-3,
http://sun.drydog.com/bookstore/#0131014013

Other books are available on Solaris in general from SunSoft Books and
on UNIX (with sections on Solaris) from O'Reilly and Associates.
Hardcopies of Sun manuals are available as SunDocs from SunExpress.

<BLATANT COMMERCIAL>
Please visit my on-line bookstore,
http://sun.drydog.com/bookstore/, in association with Amazon.com,
where you can order books on Solaris or any other topic. I get paid a
few percent of most books ordered there.
<END BLATANT COMMERCIAL>
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.8) What magazine articles are available on Solaris x86?

"Sun injects Solaris X86 with new life as it makes its way to 64 bits"
Sun World. Feb. 1997 by Rick Cook.
http://www.Sun.COM/sunworldonline/swol-02-1997/swol-02-solarisX86
html

Note: please send other submissions to Dan Anderson at
https://dan.drydog.com/comment.html
 _________________________________________________________________

(3.9) What's new for Solaris 10?

Solaris 10 for x86 was released in 2005. Solaris 10 features include:
an improved TCP/IP stack ("Fire Engine"), "Solaris Containers"
(partitioning software that's sort of like an enhanced chroot
jail--one kernel, many OS instances), "ZFS" Dynamic File System,
(performance, scalability, and reliability improvements)
"FMA/Greenline" with self-healing features and fault management, NFS
v4, Gnome 2, DTrace diagnostic software, AMD64 support, and Linux
binary support.

Solaris 10 x86 is available at

Copyright � 1997 - 2005 Dan Anderson. All rights reserved.
http://sun.drydog.com/faq/
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.0) PRE-INSTALLATION

(4.1) What information should I have before an install?

 * Size of your disk
 * Ethernet hardware address
 * IP address
 * Bandwidth of your video card and monitor
 * Maximum vertical frequency your video card will drive
 * Mouse type

The size of your disk determines what cluster you are going to install
on your system. I.e., an End User cluster, a Developers Cluster or the
Complete Cluster. See references to how to size your OS when
installing.

The Ethernet hardware address from your Ethernet card would be helpful
if you're on a NIS net and your going to do net installs. You would
like to have the Ethernet address in the /etc/ethers map file before
you do an install. Usually the manufacturer of an Ethernet card will
have some software that you can run under DOS to display this number
or sometimes you can find the Ethernet number on a sticker right on
the Ethernet card. If this is on a standalone network you probably
don't need to know the Ethernet hardware address. Don't confuse this
with the software IP address.

Bandwidth of your monitor and video card are important. During the
install the install process is going to ask you for the size of your
monitor and what vertical resolution you want to drive the monitor at.
Note that in the update disk documentation they give a handy dandy
monitor resolution bandwidth for monitors in the appendix. You may
want to check this out. See other references on video cards and
monitors throughout the FAQ.

The install process will ask you about your mouse type.

[From Bob Palowoda's Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.2) What hardware is supported by Solaris for Intel?

Solaris x86 is the version that runs on Intel-based PCs and servers.
Requirements vary to release, but generally a Pentium (586-class)
processor or better from Intel or AMD, a PCI bus, 128 MB of memory,
and 12 GB Disk. Many multi-processor boards and multi-processor cores
are supported. You must have a CD-ROM drive or access to NFS or a boot
server over the network to install. If you're using GNOME and a web
browser or have heavy database access, your system should be more
up-to-date than the above--say 256 MB of memory, 8 GB Disk, and a
recent (fast) processor.

The Solaris x86 Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) lists the tested
hardware. However, not all hardware combinations will work. Also,
hardware not listed may work, but are not guaranteed or supported. The
HCL is at: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/

For troublesome devices and cards, I find Solaris 7 (Intel
Platform Edition) Device Configuration Guide at
http://docs.Sun.COM/ab2/coll.214.4/HWCONFIG/@Ab2TocView? very useful.
(if the link changed, go to http://docs.Sun.COM, click on
"Installation & Setup," then "Installation Collection," then "Device
Config. Guide." You'll also find the HCL and other guides.

[Updated from Casper Dik's Solaris 2 FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.3) What size disks and partitions should I have?

If you install all of Solaris, with no AnswerBook2 on disk, you
typically need to have 1 GB plus space for optional software and data
and log files. This can be pared down (e.g., by not installing Asian
fonts), but with today's large disks, I usually install all of
Solaris.

Solaris uses a tmpfs where both the swap area and /tmp share a common
disk space. Configure about 200 MB of swap space on a single user
system. Many programs use the tmpfs for speeding up applications. My
swap file is usually 1.5 times my physical memory.

Solaris installation usually suggests several filesystems. However,
for workstations, I recommend a simple layout with just two slices in
the Solaris partition: root (/) and swap (/tmp). and everything else
goes in the root (/) filesystem. If you're expecting a lot of overflow
from /var (usually on servers), consider creating a separate /var
filesystem (say 200 MB or more, depending on your needs).

During installation, you will be asked to select the boot disk to use.
Next, you will be asked if you want to "Preserve Data?" Answer "yes"
if you have unused disk space and want to keep your existing operating
system (e.g., Linux or Windows). Answer "no" if you want remove all
existing partitions on the disk and use the all or part of the disk
for Solaris.

If you are installing Solaris on a disk with Linux, be especially
careful not to use the Linux swap partition for Solaris if installing
Solaris or vice versa installing Linux. They bo th use the same
partition ID, 0x82. For more information, see the question later in
this FAQ, Can I install Linux and Solaris on the same drive?
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.4) What are SCSI IDs expected by Solaris x86?

These are the typical values for SCSI devices. For tape and CD-ROM,
these are the defaults used in the /etc/vold.conf file for controlling
the vold mounter. You can set them to other ID's but remember to
adjust the vold.conf file to the new values.

Boot drive              ID 0
Second drive            ID 1
Third drive             ID 2
Reserved by Solaris     ID 3
Tape                    ID 4
CDROM                   ID 6
SCSI controller         ID 7

[From Bob Palowoda's Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.5) What video card/monitor combination works best?

Some questions will arise when trying to configure your video card and
monitor size. The most critical area is when you do the install and
answer the questions about the vertical HZ, screen size 14, 15, 17,
21-inch, etc. If you get it wrong you get the squiggles.

First, find your video card manual. Ha! I can hear the laughs from
across the world. What manual? If this is the case just select the
slowest vertical HZ. You can always change it later after the system
is up with kdmconfig.

Resolution: be safe and just use 1024x768 or smaller the first time
through the install. Latter, boost it up to 16 million colors and
specify a bigger monitor size.

Screen size should be easy. Measure diagonally: [\] about that big.

If you don't know the video card type just select the standard vga8 to
do the install. Hopefully when your system boots it displays what
video card you have in it.

A good video card combination such as the ATI and Sony 17sei can allow
you to drive it at 76Hz vertical 1280x1024 on a 17-inch screen.

Hint: Look in the update readme files and at the end in one of the
appendices you'll find a chart of monitors and their scan rates. It's
usually good to refer to before you buy the monitor and video card
combination. You could have a very nice high bandwidth monitor and a
lousy video card that can't drive it hard enough. Or visa versa, a
good video card that can drive a high bandwidth but the monitor just
can't handle it.

Another Hint: Even though there's no 14-inch monitor on the
configuration menu you can select the 15-inch setting. If the 14-inch
monitor has a good bandwidth it will sync up.

[Modified from Bob Palowoda's Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.6) Is Plug-and-Play (PNP) supported by Solaris/x86?

Yes, with release 2.6 and latter. Solaris 2.5.1 and earlier (even with
the DUs), do NOT support PNP. PNP should be disabled and the card
manually configured for the latter case. Sun FAQ 2234-02 at
http://access1.Sun.COM/cgi-bin/rinfo2html?223402.faq has
instructions for configuring Solaris to recognize specific PNP
devices. See the Solaris 7 (Intel Platform Edition) Device
Configuration Guide (mentioned above) for details on each device (and
see the Driver Update Guide when using updates).

Personally, I find it a lot easier to disable PNP on cards that have
that option. Boot into DOS or Windows (with a diskette if you have to)
and run your card manufacturer's utility or configuration or
diagnostic program. I also disable the BIOS setting "OS supports PNP".
PNP can be tricky with Solaris sometimes.

To display your current system configuration run "prtconf -pv"

The following is from Sun FAQ 2234-02, which has instructions for
configuring Solaris to recognize specific PNP devices:

You have a device that is "Plug and Play" (PnP), but Solaris doesn't
recognize it. Yet it seems that it is generic enough, like a modem,
that it should be recognized or it is listed by name in the Hardware
Compatibility List (HCL).

Devices are recognized by matching their device id with entries in the
boot system's "master" file. This file is on both the boot diskette
and on the root in /platform/i86pc/boot/solaris/devicedb of an
existing Solaris 2.6 system.

First, be sure you are using the latest Driver Update (DU) for your
version of Solaris. Your device may already have been added to that
since the 2.6 CD was released. This can save you a lot of trouble. Be
sure to read the documenation that comes with that DU to see if it
describes your specific device.

To have the system recognize a device as an asy compatible device, of
which a modem is a good example, the user needs to find out the ID of
the particular device. This can be accomplished by looking at the
output of a "prtconf -pv" on an existing Solaris 2! .6 system with the
device installed. The node that is the one for the Plug and Play card
will have a name property of the form "pnpXXX,DDDD", where the XXX is
three letters and "DDDD" is four digits.

If one constructs a PnP ID by concatenating XXXDDDD, this will be the
ID for the Plug and Play card. To have the system recognize this card
as an asy device, the line in the above mentioned master file that
contains the driver name "asy" as its second field should be edited to
have the constructed ID as one of the IDs listed in the first field.
As in the example below:

USR0006|USR0002|SUP1381 asy com pnpisa none "Serial port w/ built in
modem"

becomes:

XXXDDDD|USR0006|USR0002|SUP1381 asy com pnpisa none "Serial port
w/built in modem"

NOTE: One should be very careful editing this file since if it is
trashed, the system may no longer be able to boot. When changing the
floppy, be sure to change a duplicate of the floppy - not the
original! When changing the file on you Solaris boot drive, be sure to
save the original as master.OLD or some such name.

After making this change to the master file on an existing system, the
user should do a "touch /reconfigure" and reboot the system. If you
are changing a copy of the floppy just boot from the changed floppy.
The device will be recognized as the desired ty! pe and should
automatically have the proper driver attached.

This procedure may work for other drivers that are compatible with
various devices, but whose Plug and Play ids are not in the master
file. For example, the sbpro driver can drive many PnP sound cards
that look like a Soundblaster PnP 16.

Only add IDs to existing lines. Do not create new lines by yourself.
If you truly have a new device then please submit a "Driver Request
Form" to have it supported. If you look where you download the latest
Driver Update you should find a link to it there.
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.7) Is Advanced Power Management (APM) supported by Solaris/x86?

APM isn't really supported on x86. Solaris is "APM tolerant" which
means that if APM can do everything transparently to Solaris, it will
work. If it isn't transparent, Solaris gets confused.

So, SPARC has power management in the OS but x86 does not.

[Thanks to Doug McCallum]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.8) Are "floppy tape" devices supported by Solaris x86?

No. You have to use a SCSI tape backup device. Other options include
purchasing a zip drive, which is supported (except on the parallel
port), or backing-up your files to a MS-DOS/MS Windows partition and
back it up from MS DOS/MS Windows or some other operating system.
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.9) How can I get a "free" copy of Solaris?

A "free" copy of Solaris x86 (where "free" means the download and
license is free. You pay media, shipping, and handling cost if you
don't want to download.) is available from
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/ There are CPU and
commercial use restrictions on this free license. For Solaris 9, the
cost is US $50 for the media kit (CDROMs + install manual) or free to
download.

The download version includes everything but the Open Source "Software
Companion" CD, and the StarOffice CD (the latter is available for
download separately though).

If you download and have problems, make sure you download in "binary"
mode (check that the file size matches exactly). Some CD burning
software (especially for Windoze) requires the downloaded files be
renamed to have a ".iso" extension. I recommend using "Easy CD
Creator" software if you are using Windows machines (see
http://www.roxio.com/ ). Some people like Nero Burning ROM
software, but I have no experience with it.

Keep in mind that the CD uses Solaris (long) filenames, not DOS 8.3
filenames. So if you do a DIR on the cd, don't be alarmed if you don't
see everything. Also MS Windows does not recognize the
industry-standard "Rock Ridge" format for long filenames (in
characteristic fashion, MS Windows uses their proprietary "Joliet"
format).

For Solaris and other flavors of UNIX, several CD burning utilities
are available, such as cdrecord (CLI) at
ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/, BurnIt (Java GUI front
end to cdrecord) at http://sunsite.dk/BurnIT/, or X-CD-Roast
(Linux GUI) at http://www.xcdroast.org/

Educational users .EDU-affiliated individuals can obtain Solaris and a
number of other software packages via the EduSoft program for free.
See "Individuals" at
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/promotions/edusoft/

[Thanks to Sun Microsystems, Alan Coopersmith, John Groenveld, and
Toby McLaughlin]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.10) What's missing from the "free" copy of Solaris that's in the
commercial version?

The following CD is supplied with the commercial version but not with
the free version: Software Supplement for Solaris 7. The latter
contains SunVTS, ODBC Driver Manager, Solaris on Sun Hardware
AnswerBook, PC file viewer, ShowMe, and SunFDDI. OpenGL is provided
with Solaris only for the commercial Sparc version (Xi Graphics
"Summit" software supports OpenGL 1.2.1 for Solaris x86; XFree86 has
OpenGL but doesn't support it for Solaris).

[Thanks to Mike Mann and Alan Coopersmith]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.11) How do you create a Device Configuration Assistant (DCA)
Diskette in DOS/Windows?

The DCA diskette is used for booting, in lieu of booting from CDROM or
hard disk. The DCA diskette comes with the Solaris media, but you need
to "roll your own" if you downloaded Solaris or if your DCA diskette
becomes corrupted. To create the diskette, follow these steps:

1. Download DOS program dd.exe, which is used to write the DCA image,
   from http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/drivers/dca_diskettes/
   or ftp://ftp.uu.net/vendor/sun/solaris/x86/dd.exe (Example:
   dd S8_1001.3 a:) You can also use the DOS rawrite.exe utility
   provided with Linux distributions (usually under the boot diskette
   directory).
2. Download the DCA diskette image for the Solaris x86 version that
   you want to install (for example, S8_0101.3) from
   http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/drivers/dca_diskettes/) A DCA
   boot floppy image is also on the "Software 2 of 2" CD, in the
   Solaris_9/Tools subdirectory.
3. Run dd.exe to copy the image to the floppy diskette: dd.exe
   <filename> a:

You have now created a (bootable) Solaris DCA diskette.

[Thanks to Sean G.W. Graham]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.12) How can I get Solaris to see the third ATAPI controller?

Solaris 7 can be configured to support any ATAPI compliant controller
which doesn't conflict with any existing device. The key factor is
that its interfaces must be complaint with the ATAPI specs. In other
words, you need two ranges of non-conflicting I/O ports, and an free
IRQ, and hardware that's compliant with at least the ATA-2 and
SFF-8020 specs. If it's a legacy-ISA ATA controller than you'll have
to manually configure everything via the Device Configuration
Assistant (DCA) menus because the DCA only automatically probes for
ISA-IDE devices at the two standard address ranges. If you're adding a
compliant PnP-ISA ATAPI controller or a compliant PCI-IDE controller
then the DCA should automatically configure everything for you because
all PnP-ISA-IDE and PCI-IDE devices are self-identifying devices.

The problem you're likely to encounter is there aren't many compliant
add-in ATAPI controllers available. Most of them want to do revolting
things like share ISA IRQs 14 or 15, or advertise the wrong range of
I/O ports or don't specify the right PCI-IDE class bytes. In
particular most SoundBlaster-IDE cards have a broken Alternate-Status
register. The Solaris 7 ata driver assumes that the Alternate-Status
register works as specified in the ATA-2 spec. Unlike the other
non-compliant hardware problems, there's a trivial workaround for the
SB-IDE hardware bug (i.e., don't use the Alt-Status register) but I've
no idea whether anyone at Sun has spent the 15 minutes it would take
to apply the fix to Solaris 8.

If you've got an add-in ATAPI controller card that doesn't come with
specs that clearly spell out that it won't conflict with your existing
controllers, or if it requires you to disable any built-in
controllers, then that's almost certainly one of those bogus
controllers that isn't fully compliant with the ATAPI specs. I haven't
yet found a legacy-ISA ATAPI card that works correctly (they all want
seem to want to share IRQ 14 or 15), but people persist in telling me
they exist. If you do find a compliant one then the Solaris 7 ata
driver will work with it just fine.

[Save yourself some trouble and use a SCSI controller and disks. -
ed.]

[Thanks to Bruce Adler]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.13) Are Ultra DMA (UDMA) drives supported?

I understand Solaris 7 recognizes UDMA drives in native mode. They are
not supported in Solaris 2.6 or older, although they are recognized in
its compatibility mode as regular ATAPI drives.

During installation, you may want to disable UDMA mode if your install
hangs during recognition of hard drives (which occurs shortly after
the Solaris copyright line is displayed).

For Solaris 8, DMA is disabled for ATAPI devices, as it caused
installs to fail for several BIOSes. It can be enabled with the
"ata-dma-enabled" property from the Device Configuration Assistant.
See the question on "How can I improve disk and graphic performance?"
for details.

[Thanks to Christopher Arnold and Steve]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.14) Are Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices supported?

Solaris 8 supports USB. However, not all devices attached to USB are
supported. The HCL lists supported devices (see the answer about the
HCL, above).

Also, there are three different types of USB host controllers, and
Solaris x86 (8 or 9) supports only one:
 * USB 1.1 UHCI is supported by Solaris x86, but not Solaris SPARC.
 * USB 1.1 OHCI: not supported by Solaris x86, supported by Solaris
   SPARC (with the Solaris USB DDK v0.8a).
 * USB 2.0 EHCI is not supported by Solaris 9. It might be supported
   in a future Solaris release. On Solaris 8 SPARC, install patch
   109896-19.

Run the command "prtconf -pv | grep 000c03". If there's no output from
that command, your machine dosn't have USB :-(. If there's a
"class-code: 000c0300" line, you have UHCI USB and it should be
possible to use USB devices under Solaris x86. If there's a
"class-code: 000c0310" line you have an OHCI USB controller, which is
not supported with Solaris 8/9 x86. And "class-code: 000c0320" is an
EHCI (USB v2) controller.

So, if your USB controller is UHCI, your USB keyboard/mouse should be
detected and should be usable as USB devices under Solaris x/9 x86. If
your system has an OHCI usb controller, you cannot use USB under
Solaris x86. Your only option is to enable "USB legacy support" for
the keyboard and mouse in the system's BIOS, and the BIOS will emulate
a PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse from the USB peripherals. In kdmconfig
you have to tell the system to use the (emulated) PS/2 mouse; the USB
mouse pointer entry won't work!

Drivers for some USB devices are availabl from Philip Brown at
http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/drivers/ For information on
Solaris USB support, see Sun's USB FAQ at
http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/USB-Faq.html The FAQ has
information on USB 2 devices.
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.15) Is the scroll wheel on the mouse supported?

Yes, with Solaris 9 or 10. It is autodetected and enabled by default.

XFree86 and Xi Graphics X Windows graphics card server software also
support wheel mice. For earlier releases, use
http://www.tools.de/solaris/
http://www.tools.de/solaris/ps2wheel/
for PS/2 and
http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/drivers/usb-usbsm.html for USB
mice.

[Thanks to Juergen Keil, Alan Orndorff, and Alan Coopersmith]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.16) What's difference between Solaris x86 Server and Solaris x86
Desktop?

There is absolutely no difference, other than what you are licensed to
do with it. You get exactly the same software with the two products.
(This is not the case with Sparc server, where the server product
contains more CDs with some additional software. If you want something
like Solstice AdminSuite, you have to order it separately.

The Solaris desktop license restricts you from using the system as
"any type of server" (other than print or NIS). or supporting more
than two continuous users. Read your license for details. A Server
Upgrade License is available.

[Thanks to Andrew Gabriel]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.17) Solaris doesn't recognize all of my large (>40GB) ATAPI. For
example, a 60GB disk shows up as only 28GB.

Apply patch 110202-01 from http://SunSolve.Sun.COM/ which fixes
bug4353406 for Solaris 8. For Solaris 7, you can modify a patch by
creating a directory called SOL_27 and duplicate the files and
directories contained in SOL_28.

[Thanks to EB]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.18) Is Solaris x86 64-bit aware?

Yes. Solaris 10 is 64-bit processor aware. It will also support the
new 128-bit ZFS filesystem, which supports 16 million million times
the storage of a 64-bit filesystem. Solaris 10 x86 supports EFI labels
as well as the new UFS format that allows filesystems over 1
terrabyte. 128-bit ZFS files are still limited to 64-bit access until
128-bit processors and Solaris support are available.

However, if Solaris is installed on a 32-bit processor, these features
are not available, due to the underlying Intel chip architecture.
However, Solaris x86 on 32-bit processors still support large files up
to 1 Terrabyte for 32-bit processors. In practice, the limit is 860
Gigabytes. For example:
$ ls -l /work/BackUp
total 13239792
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other    6775454208 Dec 11 00:47 csdb_nfs1.tar

[Thanks to Niklas Zackrisson, Alexander Zinkov, and Merle Ilgenfritz]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.19) What's the difference between partitions and slices?

In the UNIX world, partitions and slices are often used
interchangeably. In the x86 world, partitions usually refer to fdisk
partitions. To avoid confusion, it's preferable to refer to
"partitions" as "fdisk partitions." (e.g., you can only have four
primary fdisk partitions in a x86 fdisk table.) In the Solaris x86
world, the term "slice" should be used to refer to slices which are
within the Solaris fdisk partition (e.g., "root" (/) and "swap"
slices.)

[Thanks to John Groenveld]
 _________________________________________________________________

(4.20) I already used the 4 primary fdisk partition table entries. Can
I create a partition for Solaris within my extended partition?

You can't because Solaris requires a *primary* partition table entry
in the fdisk table and doesn't support placing the Solaris Partition
within a DOS Extended Partition.

[Thanks to Bruce Adler] (4.21) What are the IRQ assignments?

IRQs, Interrupt Request Registers, numbered 0 to 15, handle interrupts
from various internal and external hardware devices. Multiple ISA
devices can't share a IRQ, but multiple PCI devices can share.

Here's a chart:

 * IRQ 0* - System Timer
 * IRQ 1* - Keyboard
 * IRQ 2* - Programmable Interrupt Controller; gateway to IRQs 9 -
   15.
 * IRQ 3 - COM2 (ttyb) I/O Base 2F8h (usually a ISA modem)
 * IRQ 4 - COM1 (ttya) I/O Base 3F8h (usually a serial mouse)
 * IRQ 5 - Usually a secondary printer, NIC, or sound card
 * IRQ 6 - Diskette Controller
 * IRQ 7 - Parallel Printer; sometimes used for a sound card
 * IRQ 8* - CMOS Real-Time Clock
 * IRQ 9 - Sometimes used for a sound or network card
 * IRQ 10 -
 * IRQ 11 - Sometimes used for PCI Video
 * IRQ 12 - PS/2-style Mouse
 * IRQ 13* - Math Coprocessor Exception
 * IRQ 14 - Primary ATAPI Disk controller
 * IRQ 15 - Secondary ATAPI Disk controller

*IRQs 0, 1, 2, 8, and 13 are not on the bus connectors and are not
available to I/O adapter cards.

[Thanks to Jorgen Moquist and other sources] (4.22) Are Laptops
supported for Solaris x86?

No, not anymore. There's just too many and they tend to have strange
hardware. That being said, many happen to work. Also, old drivers or
desktop drivers sometimes function for laptop hardware. For a list of
known laptops compatible with Solaris x86, see Philip Brown's "Solaris
x86 Laptop List" at
http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/x86-laptops.html

If you want more than VGA resolution, you can try installing XFree86.
See section 8 of the faq on X Windows for more information.

Evan Rudderow points out that the simplest way to run Solaris x86 on
laptops is to run it under VMWare.

If it's only Solaris you need on a laptop, and you don't mind coughing
up $$$$, you can get SPARC laptops from
http://www.naturetech.com.tw/ and
http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/
 _________________________________________________________________

Copyright � 1997 - 2005 Dan Anderson. All rights reserved.
http://sun.drydog.com/faq/
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.0) INSTALLATION

(5.1) How long does the install take?

It depends on the CD-ROM and hard disk speed. On a 300 MHz Pentium
with a multispeed SCSI CDROM, from the time "Initial Install" starts,
it only takes about a half hour. Add another half hour for initial
probes and configuration menus. Add a lot more if you have problems,
of course. Upgrades take about 3 hours or more. This is because the
system must determine what critical configuration data must be saved
and replace it on a "per-package basis".

I'm the impatient type and given up totally on system upgrades. Now I
have a separate disk drive which I use for initial installs because it
goes so much faster. With the typical SCSI drives costing in the $200
range it just isn't worth it anymore to do upgrades. But this is my
opinion so take it for what it is worth. I just save the /etc, /opt,
/local, and /export/home directories and selectively restore rather
than upgrade.

Below is typically what I save before doing an initial upgrade. Don't
take this for the ultimate system definition of what you should save,
but it works for my system. Your system may be designed very
differently. The first thing I do is mount the filesystem that has a
home directory with the below critical files and copy them to the
appropriate directories. I'm sure it could be automated but. . . What
the advantage of this process is that I can do an initial install in
about an hour. My home directories are always on another disk
partition.

Install_Notes   My own release notes
defaultroute    If you have one for routing to a DNS server.
df              Save the output of df to keep an idea of my disk usage
dfstab          /etc/dfs/dfstab for shared file systems
passwd          /etc/passwd file
shadow          /etc/shadow file
vfstab          /etc/vfstab filesystems

[Modified from Bob Palowoda's Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.2) My ATAPI CD-ROM isn't recognized during install by Solaris' FCS
MCB and it's not in the HCL. What can I do?

With at least older versions of Solaris (2.5.1 or before), you may
have problems with ATAPI CD-ROMs either faster than 8x speed,
connected to the secondary ATAPI, or connected to a sound card. I hear
reports from multiple people, however, that this problem has gone away
with Solaris 2.6. I understand the problem is related to the CMD640
ATAPI chipset. Consider disabling DMA for the CD-ROM. I find SCSI
CD-ROMS are always a safe bet, as are CD-ROMS listed on the HCL.

[Thanks to L. E. "MadHat" Heath and others]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.3) What kind of problems might I encounter installing my SCSI
system?

Typical problems with SCSI drives are termination and SCSI IDs. You'll
have flakey behavior if there's no termination resistor on the drive
at the end of a SCSI "chain". Worse are double termination resistors.
Some people mistakenly leave a resistor jumper on a drive when it's
not at the end of a SCSI "chain." This also makes the system flakey.
Carefully read your SCSI adapter manual on termination if you're
unsure about it. A SCSI drive can run for hours with no problems--then
boom, you get a panic. Always check cabling, pins, and connections and
use the *shortest* cable possible. The first thing I do when I have a
problem with a SCSI device is to reseat the SCSI cables (with the
machine powered off).

With SCSI IDs, a common problem is that the IDs on the drive, usually
set with dip switches or a button, don't match the settings with your
software (Solaris) or it's a duplicate ID. Check the IDs carefully
when adding or upgrading SCSI devices. The boot drive must be ID 0.

Other more obscure problems are setting the BIOS address space for the
disk controller the same as the network card address space, and the
PCI video card address conflicting with PCI SCSI disk controller BIOS
address space. SCSI ISA adapter support has been removed in Solaris
8--use PCI.

[Adapted from Bob Palowoda's Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.4) What do I do when the install hangs/panics?

One of the most common problems with some mother boards is handling
DMA during the install. Usually, that's the case if you get a hang
right around configuring /dev/devices. Try turning off the
caching--external and internal. Slow the system speed down if it
allows you to do this in the BIOS or through the front panel switch.
Leave these settings ONLY for the install: kick it back up after the
install.

Warning: If you already have a OS installed on your hard drive (and
that's most of you), the Webstart "Installation" disk will most likely
not work. Use the "Software 1 of 2" CD, which is also a bootable CD.

Another common problem is support for new devices. Use the latest
driver update boot and distribution diskettes, especially with
newly-supported hardware. Carefully check the HCL to verify your cards
are listed. Try removing/replacing suspected troublesome cards to
isolate the problem.

Sun gives these tips for handling hardware incompatibilities during
installation (see
http://access1.Sun.COM/cgi-bin/rinfo2html?115502.faq ):

 ". . . Disable external cache, . disable synchronous negotiation on
 the CD ROM, and disable ROM BIOS shadowing. These may be re-enabled
 after installation. Also, if using an un-supported or clone
 motherboard, slowing the system clock or changing from a double-
 clocked processor to a single-clocked one may help. Say, for
 example, a 486DX-50 as opposed to a 486-250 or 486-66."

I would also add (temporary) disabling of these BIOS settings to this
list: video cache, BIOS virus detection (boot block writes), "OS
supports PnP", and UDMA mode. Disabling these settings may not be
required for your hardware and BIOS, but it has helped for some
hardware setups. Remember to reenable these after you installed
Solaris.

Here's a checklist of typical causes of hangs during installation:
 * Incompatible CD-ROM drives (or mounting on the secondary ATAPI).
 * Incompatible SCSI controller (avoid the clones and cheap cards).
 * Incompatible Motherboard (try changing motherboard settings).

The "Troubleshooting" chapter of the Solaris Advanced Installation
Guide has many additional tips, especially for ATAPI drives and
CDROMs. See http://docs.sun.com/

[Parts originally from Bob Palowoda's Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.5) I'm trying to install Solaris/x86 on my ATAPI drive. However,
the installation program says the root partition must end within the
first 1023 cylinders of the disk. What can I do?

The root filesystem must be below 1024 cylinders of your disk The
number of cylinders has nothing to do with the size of the disk. So it
is possible to have 1.5GB partitions below 1024 cylinders on some
disks (with more MB per cylinder) and not on others. Newer BIOSes
support LBA, Logical Block Addressing. The BIOS may have to be edited
on bootup to enable the LBA option. This bumps the HD limit to 8GB.
With LBA, Solaris/x86 and other operating systems can be placed
anywhere you want. For older BIOSes, the 1024 cylinder limit
translates to the first 512 MB on ATAPI.

Be sure that the root and the boot slice of the Solaris partition are
within the 1024 cylinder boundary using the BIOS geometry reported for
your disk and you should be fine. That is the cause of the "slice
extends beyond end of disk" message -- exceeding 1024 cylinders.

If you're having problems, simply make the root filesystem smaller and
create an additional /usr filesystem (and, e. g., /var, /opt, . . .).
For reliability, the root filesystem should be small (say 64 MB) with
large filesystems mounted on it.

I have seen problems with fdisk as well. In those cases I used a disk
editor to adjust the partition so it started and ended on cylinder
boundaries. This seems to happen when Solaris uses the actual geometry
of a disk, as seen by Solaris at runtime, vs. the geometry reported by
a controller to allow DOS to think it has no more than 1024 cylinders.
Partition Magic reported problems with that partition when I tried it
on systems with Solaris partitions that weren't aligned with the other
partitions correctly.

Update: Solaris 8 has removed this size restriction for ATAPI drives.
One must reinstall Solaris, not upgrade, to take advantage of this.
SCSI drives have never had the partition size restriction, although
the boot code in the root / filesystem had to be under the 1024
cylinder limit.

[Thanks to Ronald Kuehn and Mike Riley]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.6) Does Solaris x86 prefer to have the motherboard BIOS set to
NORMAL or LBA for ATAPI disks?

In theory, both work. Leave it up to the BIOS' auto-detect, just as
the Configuration Guide advises.

[Thanks to Randy J. Parker]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.7) Why does a Solaris install to a disk with valid, pre-existing
fdisk partitions sometimes fail?

There is a well known bug that sometimes prevents Solaris from
installing into an existing partition. Its cause has never been
identified, or its existence officially acknowledged by filling out a
bug report. It is secretly well known only to Sun's Installation
Support team in Chelmsford, MA., who claim that the workaround is
apparent from the message "slice extends beyond end of disk".

I agree that the workaround is simple, but I think some kind of
document explaining the workaround should be returned by searches of
sunsolve and access1. Better yet, the error message could actually
describe the error! Or, how about identifying and fixing the bug so it
never happens to begin with?

For those of you too "stupid" :-) to read the error message, I'll
decode it:
slice   = "disk"
extends = "is full of fdisk partitions"
beyond  = "before"
end     = "installation."
of      = "Please"
disk    = "delete at least one of 'em, and try again"

For example: If a disk has three partitions with the following: 1)
FAT, 2) no filesystem yet, 3) NTFS, the installation might fail in
some poorly understood cases, with the misleading error message.

The workaround is to delete the unused partition, leaving a "hole"
between the flanking partitions. The install fdisk, Partition Magic,
or any other fdisk will now see only two partitions: FAT and NTFS.
There will obviously be lots of cylinders between the end of the
first, and the beginning of the second. The Solaris install will spot
the hole, and create a partition according to its own mysterious
specifications. Somehow, this new partition is acceptable, even though
a seemingly identical one created by a different fdisk isn't. Perhaps
the bug is in *when* it was created: if previous, sometimes balk.
Perhaps NORMAL / LBA is relevant at this point - - it did make a
difference in at least one case I tested. Oddly, I have also had cases
where the offending procedure of creating the partitions before
beginning to install Solaris worked fine.

However, I once had a case where the Solaris install created a
partition that left gaps of a few cylinders before and after. I am
wary that it could err on the other side of the boundary, and damage a
flanking filesystem by encroaching across the pre-existing boundary.
The safest approach when dealing with a squirrelly fdisk is to use the
dangerous one *first*. Install Solaris before the other partitions get
used, if possible. Hopefully the other fdisk-type programs will
recognize such corruption and allow the encroached-upon partitions to
be deleted and re-created, without hurting the Solaris partition.

At any rate, the most-likely-to-succeed procedure is to install into a
hole, or onto an empty disk with no partitions.

Thanks to Super-User (asianinter.net), who pointed out cases involving
modern BIOS' auto-detecting ATAPI disks as NORMAL. Alan Thomas prefers
always to set disks to NORMAL, and once had trouble with a disk that
was set to LBA.

[Thanks to Randy J. Parker]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.8) How do I add a 8 GB or greater ATAPI drive to Solaris 7 or
earlier?

Solaris 8 has support for large ATAPI drives built-in. For SCSI
drives, there's no such restriction. However, if you have Solaris 7 or
earlier, there's an 8 GB restriction on large hard drives, even in LBA
mode. There is a workaround for this limit however, by following these
instructions:

To add a drive for Solaris 7, you need a BIOS that supports drives
greater than 8.4GB in LBA mode. Check with the computer manufacturer.
BIOS upgrades may also be available if your system currently does not
support large drives.

You also need to find out the total number of sectors available on the
drive. Solaris 7 or earlier cannot read the extended information on
the drive, so the information will need to be obtained from the
manufacturer. If the manufacturer only provides the total number of
bytes, then divide that number by 512 to obtain the total number of
sectors. NOTE: Ignore the 16383x16x63 (or whatever) listed on the
drive -- this equates to an 8.4GB drive and is not applicable to large
drives.

To configure the drive:
1. Set the drive mode to LBA in the BIOS setup.
2. Boot Solaris.
   WARNING! Continuing will destroy any partitions that are on this
   drive.
3. Create a disk geometry file for Solaris.
   WARNING! EXCEEDING 16383 CYLINDERS WILL LOCK-UP YOUR DISK DRIVE.
   Our formula: x * y * z = s. Where x is the number of cylinders (x
   cannot exceed (2**14) - 1 = 16383), y is the number of heads, z is
   the number of sectors per track, and s is the total number of
   sectors available on the drive. By setting y = 1, we get the
   following:
   x * 1 * z = s, or x * z = s. By further setting x = 16383, we get:
   16383 * z = s.
   Solve for z (number of sectors per track): z = s / 16383. For
   example:
   Western Digital AC 418000 (18.2GB) - Total sectors = 35,239,680.
   35,239,680 / 16383 = 2150.99 = 2150
   NOTE: All results must be rounded down. Solaris reserves three
   cylinders, so making x smaller would end up wasting space.
   Create a file called "geometry" like the following (using our
   example above) where NSECT is the value solved for z (2150):
* Label geometry for device /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0
* PCYL     NCYL     ACYL     BCYL     NHEAD NSECT SECSIZ
 16383    16383     2        0        1     2150 512
4. Run fdisk in Solaris using the new geometry file:
   fdisk -S geometry -I /dev/rdsk/c1d0p0
   Replace "/dev/rdsk/c1d0p0" with your raw disk device (The trick is
   to let fdisk ignore the geometry reported by the BIOS and use the
   geometry specified in file "geometry" instead).
5. From here on, you can format, partition, and make filesystems on
   the drive in the usual manner.

For details see the fdisk(1M), prtvtoc(1M), and fmthard(1M) man page.

[Thanks to Pete Howell and Juergen Marenda]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.9) How do I install or use the "2 of 2" installation CD?

The "2 of 2" CD has the "man" pages and less frequently installed
packages than the "1 of 2" CD. The "2 of 2" CD is not bootable. During
installation, leave the "1 of 2" CD in the tray and switch the BIOS
from CD to HD during reboot. The WebStart progress meter is inaccurate
and can catch you unprepared if you are using auto-reboot (I recommend
to not use the WebStart CD and install with the "1 of 2" CD). The
ASCII progress meter, from the "1 of 2" CD is fine. After rebooting,
if the "1 of 2" CD is in the tray then the system will eject it and
ask for "2 of 2" CD. Otherwise use the trivial manual installation
procedure given in the "Release Notes", the little white book that
came with the CD's. Or use /usr/sbin/pkgadd to install individual
packages.

[Thanks to Paul Kargianis]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.10) How do I install or use the documentation CD?

The AnswerBook documentation CD that comes with Solaris is is very
useful. To use it with Solaris 8, you have to run the Answer Book 2
Server cd. To do this, run the ab2cd script on the CD as root. For
example: cd /cdrom/sol_8_doc/; ./ab2cd Then open your browser and
enter the URL http://localhost:8888/
[Thanks to Daniel Chirillo & Dave Uhring]
 _________________________________________________________________

(5.11) Help! I get a "No VTOC" or cannot mount error installing
Solaris.

"VTOC" is a disk volume table of contents. That is, it describes
Solaris disk slices and, for Solaris x86, resides at the start of the
Solaris fdisk partition. The VTOC contains information on Solaris
slices within the Solaris fdisk partition.

If you get a message similar to one of these: "Can't open -- No VTOC"
or "can't open - no hsfs VTOC" you've probably told the install
program the wrong location of the installation CD. A common error
during installation is answering this question wrong: "Select one of
the identified devices to boot the Solaris kernel." What it's really
asking is the location of the Solaris installation CD, not where
you're planning on installing Solaris on the hard disk.

Also, make sure to remove the CD before rebooting.

For other installation hints, see
http://www.execpc.com/~keithp/bdlogsol.htm
[Thanks to Keith Parkansky]

Copyright � 1997 - 2005 Dan Anderson. All rights reserved.
http://sun.drydog.com/faq/
 _________________________________________________________________

(6.0) POST-INSTALLATION (CUSTOMIZATION)

(6.1) How do I add additional drives?

First, you must have Solaris scan for the new drive. Become root and
type: "touch /reconfigure; /usr/sbin/reboot" This rebuilds the
/devices/ and /dev/ directories.

ATAPI and SCSI the drives are already low-level formatted. If you wish
to format a SCSI you can use /usr/sbin/format that comes with Solaris.
A second drive install would use format.

To create and use a filesystem:
 * Select the disk
 * /sbin/fdisk (select the whole disk or partial for format)
 * Write the label with the "label" option partition, check the
   partition arrangement
 * Create a filesystem with /usr/sbin/newfs on the drive. E.g. "newfs
   /dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s0" creates a filesystem on the the whole drive
   with SCSI ID 1.
 * Create your mount point directory, if it doesn't exist. For
   example, mkdir -p /local
 * mount the partition on your favorite mount point directory. For
   example, mount /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 /local mounts slice 2 of disk 0
   of SCSI ID 1 of SCSI controller 0 at /local.
 * Add a line to your /etc/vfstab file. See the vfstab man page for
   details. For example:
   /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 /dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s2 /local ufs 1 yes -

[Thanks to Bob Palowoda's FAQ and Sonny Leman]
 _________________________________________________________________

(6.2) How do I add or configure users, printers, serial ports,
software, etc.?

Use admintool from X Windows. For the "Keyboard Display or Mouse" use
kdmconfig.
 _________________________________________________________________

(6.3) How do I suppress the banner page on my printer?

To disable the banner pages permanently perform the following steps:

1. cd /usr/lib/lp/model
2. cp standard standard-nobanner
3. Use your favorite editor to edit file standard-nobanner. Around
   line 332, change this from: nobanner="no" to: nobanner="yes"
4. lpadmin -p PRINTERNAME -m standard-nobanner

Note: unchecking the "Always print banner" box in admintool or running
"lpadmin -p st -o nobanner" only allows users to submit print requests
with no banners (lp -onobanner filenamehere), but doesn't suppress
printing of banner pages by default.

[Thanks to Youri N. Podchosov and Rob Montjoy's Sun Computer Admin.
FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(6.4) How do I set up an HP-compatible printer to print PostScript
files?

Solaris 8 has this ability with Print Manager,
/usr/sadm/admin/bin/printmgr, or admintool (select
"Browse-->printers"). Note that higher-end HP printers (e.g., LaserJet
IV) support PostScript directly. Also, Michael Riley reminds us that
EPP and ECP printer modes are unsupported.

Before you do any of this, try printing a plain text file (such as
/etc/motd) to the printer.

John Groenveld provides the following instructions for Solaris 8. It
assumes you have a working GhostScript with a driver for your printer
and that it's attached to /dev/lp1 (/dev/lp0 on some systems). With
Solaris 8, USB printers are assigned logical device names
/dev/printers/[0..N] The printer queue in the example below is called
"lj6l_ps"

# Test your driver:
# (gs may be in /usr/csw/bin/gs, /usr/local/bin, or /opt/gnu/bin, depending
# on who built the Solaris package)
/usr/csw/bin/gs -q -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=laserjet \
    -sOutputFile=/dev/lp1 /opt/csw/share/ghostscript/examples/alphabet.ps

# Create the printer filter definition
# (the "Command:" line is 1 line--it may be broken up below):
cat > /etc/lp/fd/laserjet.fd <<eof
Input types: postscript
Output types: laserjet
Printer types: any
Printers: any
Filter type: fast
Command: /opt/csw/bin/gs -q -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=laserjet
-sOutputFile=- -
eof

# Test:
/usr/ucb/lpr -Plj6l_ps -h /opt/csw/share/ghostscript/examples/alphabet.ps

# Add the filter name to the filter table:
chown lp:lp /etc/lp/fd/laserjet.fd
chmod 664 /etc/lp/fd/laserjet.fd
lpfilter -f laserjet -F /etc/lp/fd/laserjet.fd

# Configure the printer to use the LaserJet filter:
lpadmin -p lj6l_ps -I laserjet

# Stop the data stream to the printer from being modified:
lpadmin -p lj6l_ps -o stty="-opost"

# Enable the printer to accept jobs:
accept lj6l_ps
enable lj6l_ps

# Retry (if needed):
# If something goes wrong (such as using an incorrect command path
# in laserjet.fd), try deleting the printer destination and starting over
# after making your corrections:
lpadmin -x lj6l_ps
lpadmin -p lj6l_ps -v /dev/lp1 -o nobanner

After it's working you may want to set the default printer with the
LPDEST and PRINTER environment variables in your startup script
(~/.login or ~/.profile) and with "lpadmin -d"

Another solution is Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS), which
implements the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), RFC 1179. IPP
standardizes printing of multiple document formats. CUPS provides
System V and BSD (lp & lpr) interfaces and supports PostScript with a
modified version of GhostScript. For Solaris x86 binaries and
documentation, see http://www.cups.org/ See also the question
below in this section on easy-to-use printing solutions.

[Thanks for additional comments from Mark Francis Villa]
 _________________________________________________________________

(6.5) How can I improve disk and graphic performance?

Disk Performance (iozone)

A typical iozone test with 10 to 20 MB sequential file will give about
2 MB/sec. read/write on a 50 MHz ESIA system on a Maxtor 540SL (8.5
ms) drive with an Adaptec 2740 controller. You'll get a little better
performance from a 90 MHz Pentium system. A fully thrashed system will
see writes down to about 1 MB/sec. I noticed that the NCR 810/825,
etc., seem a little more peaky in the performance specially on the PCI
bus.

If you're using a fast wide SCSI controller such as the Adaptec 2940,
use a wide SCSI drive for the system drive. These drives usually have
double the throughput of the normal 8-bit drives, according to the
iozone benchmark results, and they make the tmpfs fly.

Note: If you're using high speed spindle drivers for your boot driver,
like 5400 and 7200 RPM drives, you may want to use "set maxpgio=60"
for the 5400 RPM drive or "set maxpgio=80" for the 7200 RPM drives in
your /etc/system file. This causes the schedpaging to be more
efficient. Enable by typing "touch /reconfigure; /usr/sbin/reboot"

[Andrew Gabriel adds for ATAPI: Read about drive0_block_factor and
drive1_block_factor in /platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/ata.conf (man -s 7D
ata). Even my oldest ATAPI drives support drive0_block_factor=0x10
without any trouble.]

For Solaris 8, DMA is disabled for ATAPI devices, as it caused
installs to fail for several BIOSes. It can be enabled with the
"ata-dma-enabled" property from the Device Configuration Assistant
(set it to one). After installation, you can also change this line in
file /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc:
setprop ata-dma-enabled '1'
If you do this and you have a buggy motherboard chipset, your system
won't boot. This happened to me. You can recover by booting off the
DCA and mounting the root filesystem (see the answer in this FAQ about
recovering from forgotten root passwords). Buggy chipsets include
those with the VIA chipset and ASUS PA5 motherboards. For more
details, see the Solaris 8 Intel Release Notes.

Graphic Performance (xstone) Xstones is a little more of a subjective
measurement of graphics performance. The comp.unix.x.i386
newsgroup keeps up on the latest xstone performance on graphics cards
for PC's.

[From Bob Palowoda's Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ]
 _________________________________________________________________

(6.6) + How do I get Solaris to recognize a NE2000 compatible NIC
card?

NEI is the driver name for the Novell/Eagle 2000-compatible family of
NIC cards. The driver is disabled by default because probing for it
causes problems with other cards (it sometimes locks the system up).
If this card is "Plug and Play," you should first disable it and
configure the card manually, if possible. Don't use DCA probing for
ne2000: it may disrupt recognition of or access to other devices (in
my case, it was keyboard :-). So, you have to modify file
/kernel/drv/nei.conf to include I/O ranges, interrupts (1 line per
card). For example:
name="nei" parent="isa" reg=1,0xf600,0x1f interrupts=11;

Where name, "nei," is what will show up in /dev. The parent, "isa," is
what bus type to use. The term ISA is misleading as it includes PCI
bus (To Solaris, it's either "sysbus," the SPARC system bus, or "isa,"
meaning not SPARC sysbus). The "1" is a flag meaning that I'm going to
specify I/O port ranges, rather than memory offsets, 0xf600 indicates
the beginning I/O address, in hex, and 0x1f is the size of the I/O
range, in hex. The "interrupts=11" indicate IRQ 11, in decimal. Thus,
I have a PCI NE2000-compatible card, set to base I/O addresses
0xf600-0xf61f, IRQ 11. As an exercise, decode this example for a real
NE2000 card:
name="nei" parent="isa" reg=1,0x220,0x10 interrupts=10;

You have to add a /etc/hostname.nei0 file with the IP address or
hostname (if you use IPv6, also add /etc/hostname6.nei0). Add a line
to /etc/hosts. For example:
10.1.1.1        foo.bar.com foo

Check the settings, as root, with "/usr/sbin/drvconfig -i nei". Next,
as root, type "touch /reconfigure; /usr/sbin/reboot" After rebooting,
type "ifconfig nei0 plumb" to make sure the device was recognized. It
should show up in the output from typing "prtconf". For further
details see Sun FAQ 1105-02 at
http://access1.Sun.COM/cgi-bin/rinfo2html?110502.faq and the
Solaris System Administrator Guide, available at
http://docs.Sun.COM/.

The NE2000 driver is not included with Solaris 8 (perhaps Sun thought
it was ISA-card only), but the driver files for Solaris 7, nei and
nei.bef, can be used instead, as follows (although it's not officially
supported for Solaris 8):
 * You do not need the real-mode driver file, nei.bef, unless you
   want to install with the NIC enabled. File nei.bef is available by
   downloading the DOS-format DCA diskette for Solaris 7 from
   http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/drivers/dca_diskettes/ and
   copying file /solaris/drivers/nei.bef file from the DOS-format DCA
   diskette.
 * File /kernel/drv/nei is available from
   ftp://ftp.sun.drydog.com/pub/solaris/nei-i86pc-solaris5.7.zip
   Download in binary mode and extract with unzip.
 * You must also create a /kernel/drv/nei.conf text file, even if it
   only has #-comments or empty lines (see above for an example).
 * Add the driver with: "add_drv /kernel/drv/nei; devlinks"

If you have a Realtek RTL8139 or 8130 10/100 NIC, which is one of the
more popular and low-cost PCI NICs, you can get a Solaris x86 driver
from the manufacturer at http://www.realtek.com.tw/ (click on
"Download", "Network ICs").

[Thanks to Iram Peerbhai, Martin, Youri Podchosov, Alex Selck, and
Vincent Cheng]
 _________________________________________________________________

(6.7) How do I get Solaris to recognize generic network cards with
well-known chipsets?

There are many new ethernet cards available at major retailers for
under $20 using well-supported chipsets. Unfortunately, the cards on
the Solaris HCL have been out of production for quite some time --
particularly the Intel cards. Even Solaris 8 does not recognize these
newer cards. I was amazed how difficult it is to find hardware on the
Solaris HCL, especially fast ethernet cards. For an example take the
Intel EtherExpress Pro/100. This card, based on the i82559 chipset,
has been out of production for years--yet it is the last card
supported by Solaris 8 01/01. The current Intel InBusiness 10/100 card
has the very same i82559 chipset in a much smaller BGA package, yet
Solaris 8 01/01 still won't recognize the card.

First, save yourself a lot of trouble and see if there's a driver for
your card somewhere See if the card is listed on the Hardware
Compatibility List (HCL) for the latest Solaris Maintenance Update
(MU). The HCL is at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ Check for
new and third-party drivers at
http://www.Sun.COM/io_technologies/. Also check to see if there's
a patch supporting your card at http://access1.Sun.COM/

A list of third-party drivers (mostly from hardware vendors) for
Solaris x86 is at
http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/ihv-drivers.html

If you have a Linksys LNE100TX or other NIC card, it may be supported
by one of Garrett D'Amore's Ethernet drivers. See
http://sol-enet.sourceforge.net/

More free Solaris NIC drivers are provided by Masayuki Murayama at
http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/,

If there's no driver found above, here's what to do:

1. Install the card and watch the computer boot. Look for the list of
   devices in the BIOS summary screen. Write down the two 4-digit
   numbers. For the Intel card it was 8086 1030, the PCI/PnP vendor
   and device ID for the InBusiness card.
2. Boot into Solaris. Open the /boot/solaris/devicedb/master file and
   look for the vendor ID you wrote down. In this example, the vendor
   ID is 8086 for Intel. Look through the file for devices that
   closely fit the description of your device under the vendor ID.
   One of them for this card happens to be iprb for the Intel 82559
   chipset which is listed as:
   pci8086,1029 pc8086,1029 net pci iprb.bef "Intel Pro 100/B Fast
   Ethernet"
3. If you're confident that you have a reasonable match, add a new
   line to this file that uses the vendor ID and device that you
   wrote down: pci8086,1030 pc8086,1030 net pci iprb.bef "Intel 82559
   You Bonehead"
4. Open the /etc/driver_aliases file and add a line for the card:
   iprb "pci8086,1030"
5. Type "devlinks". Type "touch /reconfigure". Restart. Hit ESC in
   the the Device Configuration Assistant phase of the boot process
   and ask it to scan for new devices. It should find your device and
   display the name you typed in in step (3) above. This step is
   crucial--the DCA step in the boot process is where some important
   magic happens.
6. Once the system is finished booting, note the magic appearance of
   /dev/iprb (or whatever your device is called) and experience joy.
   Type "ifconfig iprb0 plumb" to wake it up. Edit a file called
   /etc/hostname.iprb0 and put your hostname into it. (if you use
   IPv6, also add /etc/hostname6.iprb0). Type "touch /reconfigure"
   just for good measure and restart a final time.

As another example, these entries (in /etc/driver_aliases and
/boot/solaris/devicedb/master) support both the 905C and 3C980 card,
using the elxl driver:
elxl "pci10b7,9200" elxl "pci10b7,9800"
pci10b7,9200 pci10b7,9200 net pci elxl.bef "3Com 3C905C-TX-M El XL 10/100"
pci10b7,9800 pci10b7,9800 net pci elxl.bef "3Com 3C980-TX El Server 10/100"

Finally, here's a partial list of the sub-$20 cards and their
chipsets, but I am still looking for the proper driver for the
super-cheap 100baseT chipsets from Realtek and Macronix as used by
some Dlink, Hawking, Netgear, and Linksys cards.
 * dnet: SMC, Sohoware, "tulip"
 * iprb: Intel (most)
 * nei: 10baseT NE2000 clones on the PCI bus (Linksys, AT/LANTIC)

Another good set of instructions, particularly for newer generations
of supported NICs, is at
http://solaris-x86.org/documents/tutorials/network.mhtml

[Thanks to Casper Dik, Bruce Adler, and Kriston]
 _________________________________________________________________

(6.8) How do I change the IP address or hostname or both on
Solaris/x86?

See the instructions in "man sys-unconfig" Basically, sys-unconfig
unconfigures the machine to make it ready to be configured again on
reboot. It's a lot easier and less error prone than the usual dozen or
so steps required to purge the old IP address. Update: (11/2001):
sys-unconfig is seriously broken for Solaris 8 FCS (2/2000) and will
make your system unbootable. If you use it make sure you have a later
HW update of Solaris 8 or that you apply x86 patch 109319. Use
"showrev -p" to confirm you have this patch.

For the thrill-seekers among us, you can also do it "by-hand" by
editing these files (possibly more?) with your fav. editor:

/etc/defaultdomain       Set the default NIS domain name, if any, if it changed

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