i86pc SunOS

When I finally figured out how to approach Solaris Express on a VMware virtual machine through the Remote Desktop option, I started looking for the compiler.

For some reason, Sun isn’t very happy about you using the GNU compilers, so they hid the files in the /usr/sfw/bin directory. Before I could call `gcc -dumpmachine`, I had to add the directory to the $PATH environment. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds unfortunately. After fiddling around on the web, and making scripts with various combinations like export PATH=/etcetc or PATH=/etc; export PATH, I couldn’t make it work except for on the command line itself without using a script.

After that, building applications seemed like a picknick. Solaris Express supports GTK+ by default, and for example the MySQL client libraries are easily installable. A few ln -s commands, and a few adjustments to the Makefiles, and you’re good to go.

The thing that was most curious though, was the fact that I had to statically link against -lnsl and -lsocket on network related code.

Never perfect

Do we not just enjoy the incompatibilities, the quirks and the complications of the assemble-it-yourself-things? No we don’t, but developers and hardware assemblers get a real kick out of it.

I decided to buy a bare clean HP Proliant ML110 5G tower, and I connected some extra RAM, an extra 1Gbps card and 2 extra 250gb harddisks. So far, so good.

I forgot the Sata cables, so I didn’t connect the disks yet, and tried out Ubuntu Server and installed KVM + Virtual Manager – for ‘virtualisation’. Unfortunately it doesn’t work exactly like a charm, the speed was ok for the most part, but at some points at the installation of Windows 2003 Server, it stalled up to a point where I just fell asleep. So I let it rest, got the sata cables, installed the harddisks.

Since I wanted to use the extra disks to store large backups, and because I wanted to try out Sata Raid, I decided to enable and configure a raid array. And since I wanted to backup files across servers in a swift fassion, I decided to do a clean install of the Ubuntu Server edition again.

Ubuntu shows a nice surprise; no raid. Just 2 seperate disks. When I insert the HP smart-setup CD-rom that came with the Proliant, it seems HP doesn’t support its own products either. I guess it’s my own fault for buying a cheap pc.

So out of frustration I disabled raid again, and I popped in the Windows Server 2003 cdrom I got along with my VS2008 Pro/MSDN Pro subscription. A nice clean install, but naturally half of the hardware drivers weren’t available, so I had to download it – with the Internet explorer that blocks just about every website there is out of security reasons. After a few reboots I wanted to see what happened if I enabled raid again: bluescreen reboots. So it’s just 3 seperate harddisks from now on.

Since I didn’t dare to download Virtual Server from MSDN, I wanted to get back to the familiar VMWare Server. Upon installing however, several MSI Installer and security issues arise which had to be patched, but only after about 2 hours of searching the web. Installed and well, the installation of Windows XP Pro went like a charm on VMWare.

And then I wanted to be bold and reckless, and reached for an old OpenSolaris cdrom. But alas, the graphics are beyond legible and I couldn’t install. So a new version perhaps? Solaris Express? Same graphics issues, and more – it couldn’t read the dvd, but I didn’t know what the error meant. Once I pointed the VM configuration to the ISO itself instead of the physical cdrom drive, it finally worked.

Now I’m waiting for the text based installation to finish and I will pray for some proper graphics once it’s installed, because even the text based graphics are just beyond normal.

Not to mention that working on the actual Windows 2003 installation is faster via Remote Desktop than a physical screen, keyboard and mouse for some reason. I suspect that drivers are fighting eachother off on the same IO or Memory addresses as always.

Come to think of it, I had similar issues with text based installation on Windows 2003. I suppose the VMWare beta has issues supporting the 80×40 lines resolution as opposed to the 80×25.

“unknown console login:” … that sounds promising.

Ah, and the graphical login screen looks horrible.

Example of what I’m dealing with here:

Solution