[immigrants-discuss] Solaris Community Edition and Penguin partitions

[Peter Kehl]

Hi.

I come from Penguin world. I've installed current Solaris, OpenSolaris
Developer Edition and Community Edition x86 in VMware Server and liked
it. So I wanted to install it as my second main OS on its own fdisk
partition.

What a surprise that when installing Solaris Community Edition 2/07
(SunOS solaris-devx 5.11 snv_56) it said it didn't support Linux
partitions. OK, I thought, so it doesn't mount them - so be it.

However, what it did:
- changed the active fdisk partition to Solaris' one, but Solaris'
GRUB doesn't recognize/offer a way to boot back to other OS(es). This
is how it works in world where people enter via "Windows" and not
doors.
- (I guess) it somehow wrote to existing EXT3 partition, so now it
can't be mounted. That is a very bad behaviour. Luckily for me I was
testing my new PC and didn't have any data on the UTF3 partition.

Real-world user would expect that other main OS' partitions could be
mounted, at least some types read/write and others read-only. If
nothing else, then the installers should give an option not to touch
MBR and not to change the active partition, so tha user can do it
themselves until Solaris installation program matures.

Best regards,

Peter Kehl