Solaris 10 x86 on VMware

Peter Baer Galvin

The history of the x86 releases of Solaris is long and sordid, full of mystery, promise, heartache, and resignation. However, with Solaris 10, Sun is promising full, renewed support of the x86 platform, including Intel and AMD chip support. Even though we are still a few months from the official release of Solaris 10, I wanted to test this new Sun resolve and determine whether Solaris 10 x86 is a usable, feature-rich, first-class citizen. This month's Solaris Companion discusses installing and testing S10 x86 within the VMware environment. In a subsequent column, I'll describe an install to native hardware.

Overview

To increase the difficulty of the challenge (and because I wanted to have Solaris 10 with me at all times!), I decided to use my laptop as the test system. The system is a Dell Latitude D600 replete with a 60-GB hard drive, CDRW/DVD-R drive, and 512MB of memory. The system is running Windows XP. It has a modern ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 chipset with 32MBs of graphics memory. This system is not on the current Solaris x86 hardware compatibility list (available at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/). In the past, graphics devices have been a big challenge for Solaris 10, so I expected to spend a lot of time trying to get a Solaris GUI running in this environment.

VMware is a commercial program (http://www.vmware.com) that provides virtual machines on a host. These machines can each be installed with a guest operating system. For example, a Linux system with VMware installed could run Windows XP as a guest. This guest runs in an emulator that provides a full virtual system (including bios, memory, disk, and network devices).