I’ve just been sent the latest version of Solaris 6/06 release) and wanted to get it working in a Parallels virtual machine.

Not everything is plain sailing, but with a combination of past experience and a few quick configuration changes you can get it working fine.

Basic installation

The key to getting the basic installation working fine is to ensure you choose and set the correct options when configuring the disk device. The Solaris Installer will see the virtual disk, but for some reason wont automatically perform the fdisk partition for you. Once you get to the option that shows the disk drives and default partition, make sure you go through the FDISK configuration and create a single partition. This will give Solaris the block device it needs to then create it’s own partition map.

Networking

Once booted up, you’ll need to get the networking driver that comes with the Parallels boot disk installed. Attach the vmtools.iso disk (on Mac OS X this is located in /Library/Parallels/Tools); it should automount in Solaris. Navigate through to the network/Solaris directory and run the network.sh script to install the driver and configure the IP address, netmask and gateway. You’ll need to reboot.

Once rebooted, copy /etc/nsswitch.dns to /etc/nsswitch.conf to enable DNS searches for hosts, and then edit /etc/resolv.conf with your domain name (optional) and nameserver information. For example, mine reads:

domain mcslp.pri
nameserver 192.168.0.22
nameserver 192.168.0.24

X11 configuration

The default X11 configuration will often work fine for the display and keyboard, but the mouse fails to be configured. You need to configure the mouse to use the /dev/kdmouse device and operate as a PS/2, not USB, mouse.

You can do this by hand by editing the /etc/X11/.xorg.conf file, or you can create your own, or you can download this file and copy it into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

If you want to go through the process yourself, first run kdmconfig and set it to use X.org.

Then run /usr/X11/bin/xorgconfig - you’ll need to go through each step (which involves setting up the mouse, keyboard and display). Select the PS/2 mouse option and give the driver name. Choose an appropriate keyboard layout (I’m using the 102-key international layout and haven’t had any issues yet.

For the display driver, configure a multisync monitor (using huge manual horizontal and vertical refresh values) or using the largest of the options provided, and select VESA as the display adaptor type, setting an appropriate amount of video RAM etc. to get the display depth and size you want.

All set!

That should be everything - you can see a sample of Solaris 10 running in Parallels below.

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