Tags: solaris October 26, 2008    

I have recently become interested in generating solaris binaries in my research. Trying to get a cross compiler on linux working proved to be too difficult. And I do not have enough disk quota at school to do what I want with their solaris machines. Although I resorted to using the /var/tmp directory to have more disk space, that is not a long term solution. Therefore I checked the opensolaris website and found out two things: there is finally a working live cd that will install solaris and there is a virtualization system, VirtualBox, that will run solaris. Perfect.

However, just installing VirtualBox is not enough. I performed the following steps to get everything working.

In the synaptic package manager, install virtualbox-ose along with virtualbox-ose-modules-generic.

Add myself to the vboxusers group via System > Administration > Users and Groups > Unlock then Manage Groups > vboxusers Properties > checkmark yourself.

Log off and back in.

Download the newest OpenSolaris iso.

Create a new virtual system with 8GB of disk space. Then configure the system to have 32MB graphics memory, 512MB ram, the iso as the cdrom, and two NAT networking adaptors. For some reason only setting adaptor 0 did not work but enabling adaptor 0 and adaptor 1 did, go figure.

Then I started up the system, installed solaris, and once solaris was installed, I went to its package manager and installed cpp, gcc, and gcc-dev.

Afterwards I disabled the cdrom to make boot up faster.

Finally, I installed gcc 3.4.6 to be able to generate solaris binaries, although that's a different story.

Overall, the system is very nice. My next O/S might be OpenSolaris.

Copyright © 2008 Borys Bradel. All rights reserved. This post is only my possibly incorrect opinion.