[immigrants-discuss] Solaris Community Edition and Penguin partitions

[David Lloyd]

Peter,

> 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.

Welcome to the Solaris world!

> 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.

The installer does support Linux partitions in the sense that with a bit 
of fiddling and very careful reading of prompts (and summaries), you can 
get SXCE (Solaris Express Community Edition) to install without overly 
disturbing one's Linux or other partitions.

> 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.

Indeed; I find this behaviour particular annoying.

> - (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.

No, it probably overwrote it to be honest. If one isn't careful, the 
current Solaris installer might very well just blow up all your partitions.

> Real-world user would expect that other main OS' partitions could be
> mounted, at least some types read/write and others read-only.

I'd hope you'd understand that the writers of the GNU/Linux installers, 
such as Anaconda (RedHat, Debian) and the YaST have put a significant 
amount of time configuring and improving their install system. During 
this time they've built GNU/Linux from a very, very different 
perspective than Sun Solaris (tm).

Specifically, GNU/Linux was, for a long time, an operating system 
"hackers" would have on their machines. Often other distributions would 
be on the same disk and often Windows would be installed. I remember a 
time when the GNU/Linux distros would do exactly what you're describing 
here.

The distro vendors obviously took notice of their potential installers 
(i.e. you and me) and made it easier to put their distro on by 
configuring Grub or Lilo in the way that you expect.

*I* was there when this started to be implemented. *I* also remember 
when it wasn't implemented and an install of one GNU/Linux would clobber 
the MBR of the other OSes on the machine.

Let's take a look at Sun Solaris' pedigree:

  * It has, I'd argue, generally only had to live with itself
  * And if other personalities were about, they were hidden by hardware
  * And those personalities were probably some version of Solaris anyway
  * Oh, and on Sparc, some/all of the boot process was OpenBoot's problem
    (is that its name?) and NOT a program like Grub or Lilo

Consequently, Solaris' venerable installer may not play as nicely with 
other "random" distributions on one's disk! I'd hazard a guess that 
"commercial" Sun Solaris (tm) wasn't generally installed on the same 
disk as a "commercial" AIX :P

> 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.

I'd have to agree here.

But to make sure this was effective, there'd have to be effective 
documentation on how to setup the OTHER Grub or Lilo to boot one's 
Solaris instance. If you look at a "menu.lst" for a Solaris boot, it's 
quite different and quite foreign to what a pro-Linux admin might see.

Again, welcome!

DSL