(Not) Installing OpenSolaris 200805 onto a Compaq nc4010

Solaris is by all accounts a great operating system (I continue to think so) but OpenSolaris 200805 on this laptop does not show any of the excellence that Solaris is supposed to have.

I have tried Solaris x86 in the past, including installing Solaris 2.6 onto an aging 486, and installing Solaris 8 onto several different machines, including laptops. None of these installs have had as many problems as installing OpenSolaris 200805 onto this machine. Installing OpenSolaris 200805 into a VirtualBox virtual machine was slick; not so this system. (I still don’t know why a complete install description is required for virtual environments; it’s just another computer system after all.)

First, I installed OpenSolaris to a physical hard drive using the VirtualBox machine to do so. This worked beautifully. Installed, no problem.

However, booting the installed operating system provided a big problem: apparently the root filesystem definition is buried in the filesystem itself (ZFS) so that booting the disk from anywhere else in the system causes the boot to fail. This is not the problem – the problem is trying to find out how to fix it. With Linux, a kernel parameter and a fix to /etc/fstab is all that is needed.

In searching for the answer to this, there were a number of stumbling blocks – obvious ones – and there seemed to be no one who had answered this problem properly:

• Boot into Failsafe mode and… When I see that, I always wonder what operating system they’re using: OpenSolaris 200805 has no failsafe mode. (Later on, I found out that OpenSolaris 200805 was the first Solaris to not have a failsafe mode…. nice.) This is not helpful, and rules out a majority of the responses right off the bat.
• OpenSolaris 200805 uses ZFS as the root filesystem. This means that a) it is new and not well-tested; and b) most answers to this problem are irrelevant as they are assuming UFS as the root filesystem, not ZFS.

Having had such problems just getting the stupid drive to boot, I gave up: I tried to install directly, using a 3.5″ USB disk caddy with a CD/DVD ROM player in it. The system will boot from this, but the speed was very slow.

The first try resulted in the machine freezing at about 22% done. After rebooting, the system would continually hang right after the initial SunOS boot text. I was able to fix this (after many reboots and freezes) by booting into Linux and overwriting the half-baked install on the internal disk. Thus, the pre-existing data on the internal disk (unused) was enough to cause OpenSolaris to freeze up (I’d used the “entire disk” install option – which presumably wipes the DOS-style partition table clean off the drive).

The second try resulted in a complete install, but that was it. No reboot ever succeeded there after. The system froze first at the “zfs0 is …” text, then at “tz0 is …”, then another one. Trying the option “-B acpi-user-options=0x8” permitted the machine to boot long enough to shut itself off!

About then is when I decided I’d had enough. Maybe Solaris Express or Belenix will work, but OpenSolaris is extremely poor in this department – which is so disappointing. Did I mention that OpenSolaris does not support JumpStart installs either?

With this sort of track record, I cannot recommend OpenSolaris for laptops – nor for production x86 servers. Sad really – I’d been looking forward to getting OpenSolaris on one of my laptops – very much, as a matter of fact.

Overview: how to install UNIX/Linux to a machine with no bootable disk

Installing operating systems to the HP nc4010 ultralight notebook has been an excercise in how to accomplish the seemingly impossible: installing an operating system to a laptop with no removable disk and no bootable disk.

Generally, there are three different ways to do this:

• Boot from the network using PXE.
• Boot from an external add-on device such as USB CDROM or USB memory device.
• Create a bootable disk in another system and install the disk afterwards.

Booting from the network requires several servers to be set up, including a TFTP server, a NFS server, and a DHCP server. Though they could all be on the same machine, it does represent a significant amount of set up and configuration in order to install, including the need to copy all installation parts to the NFS server to be served up to clients. In addition, there are special configurations needed for DHCP to get this started.

Booting from an external device is much easier, and can be done on the nc4010 and probably can be done on most laptops from the last 10 years or so. This method is probably the easiest to accomplish and without any fuss.

Alternately, it is possible to install the operating system normally in another system and then transfer the disk over to the new system. The biggest problem – the major problem – is that the disk locations all change. What had been /dev/hd1 is now /dev/hd0; all of this will need to be changed in order to have the new system boot properly.

The boot loader may also need to be changed to recognize the new location of the disk.

Linux has a parameter “root=/dev/zzzz” which allows the boot process to specify where the system root disk is. After this, then /etc/fstab will have to be changed (which is standard everywhere).

Solaris has UFS and ZFS, and UFS can be modified to reflect a new source disk location. ZFS is more troublesome and hard to do, as the filesystem is newer and has not been used as a boot drive for hardly any time at all. I still do not have an understanding of how to convert ZFS from using one boot disk to another (in name only) – once that happens, I’ll have OpenSolaris on an nc4010.