Solaris and Windows Vista on a laptop
Tristram Scott
came with Windows Vista installed. After some mucking about I have managed
to get this to dual boot with Solaris 10 (05/08).
The first thing I did was to have Vista resize the NTFS partition to leave
enough space for Solaris. That seemed to go fine.
Next, I did a default install of Solaris 10 (05/08) from the DVD media.
This also went okay, but didn't detect the onboard ethernet which is a
Broadcom 5755 or something similar. (I later fixed this with the BRCMbcme
package from the Broadcom website. Note that there is not a Solaris x86
driver for this particular card, but the one labelled as being for
something similar seems to work. The file was sol86-10.4.5.zip.)
Then I rebooted into solaris, and all was happy! That is, until I
attempted to reboot into Vista, only to discover that the Solaris install
of grub had upset Vista in a way which seems to be quite well known.
I managed to repair Vista by having grub make the Vista partion active, and
then booting the Vista installation DVD and asking it to repair the boot
disk. It seemed to notice that the MBR wasn't the way it thought it should
be, and wrote itself a new copy. After that it was able to boot into
Vista, and I could boot into Solaris by using the installation DVD to get a
grub session, then using rootnoverify (hd0,3), chainloader +1, boot.
Now, the recommended way to avoid this problem is to install a Nevada
release (B70 or later, I think) rather than the generic Solaris which I had
chosen. The later versions of Nevada have corrected the problem with grub
overwriting the part of the MBR record which Vista likes to call its own,
and so the two can coexist happily. However, rather than install the
latest Nevada build, there is an alternative, which is simply to use
installgrub from one of these later builds.
So, boot from the sol-nv-b91-x86-dvd, and go into a single user shell as
soon as possible. It will notice that you have a Solaris install already,
and offer to mount this on /a. You don't need to do that, but do take note
of the device name so you can installgrub to the correct place. Then, at
the shell prompt:
# /sbin/installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 \
/dev/rdsk/<root slice>
After that, boot from the DVD once more and have grub make the Solaris
slice the active partition:
rootnoverify (hd0,3)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot
If anyone has any other suggestions on this topic I would be pleased to
hear from them, but the above has worked for me.
--
Dr Tristram J. Scott
Energy Consultant
usenetper...@gmail.com
> My old laptop died recently, so I grabbed a Dell D630 to replace it. It
> came with Windows Vista installed. After some mucking about I have managed
> to get this to dual boot with Solaris 10 (05/08).
>
> The first thing I did was to have Vista resize the NTFS partition to leave
> enough space for Solaris. That seemed to go fine.
>
> Next, I did a default install of Solaris 10 (05/08) from the DVD media.
> This also went okay, but didn't detect the onboard ethernet which is a
> Broadcom 5755 or something similar. (I later fixed this with the BRCMbcme
> package from the Broadcom website. Note that there is not a Solaris x86
> driver for this particular card, but the one labelled as being for
> something similar seems to work. The file was sol86-10.4.5.zip.)
>
> Then I rebooted into solaris, and all was happy! That is, until I
> attempted to reboot into Vista, only to discover that the Solaris install
> of grub had upset Vista in a way which seems to be quite well known.
>
> I managed to repair Vista by having grub make the Vista partion active, and
> then booting the Vista installation DVD and asking it to repair the boot
> disk. It seemed to notice that the MBR wasn't the way it thought it should
> be, and wrote itself a new copy.
somewhat snipped
> If anyone has any other suggestions on this topic I would be pleased to
> hear from them, but the above has worked for me.
Vista is such a PITA - a RAM warthog and resource waster.
I dont know if VirtualBox works on Vista yet but VMWare Player
does last time I checked. You need to use a pre-built "appliance" for
Player though
and there are not too many out there to download. I ended up building
one of my own
but its only Update 4.. Anyway once you have a working appliance you
should be able to upgrade it to something more recent...
I suggest 2 GB of RAM for Vista+VBox/Player
I ended up buying a new HD for my laptop and installed Solaris only on
it.
Spent about 80 dollars and saved untold hours of messing about : >
Dave Uhring
> Vista is such a PITA - a RAM warthog and resource waster.
> I dont know if VirtualBox works on Vista yet but VMWare Player
> does last time I checked.
I just checked my install of VirtualBox-1.6.2 and it does support both
Vista and Winblows Server 2008.
AGT
What about the other way around? The OP might actually "need"
Vista as the host. However a horrible a thought though that may be : >
Maybe thats what you meant.
And does VBox play nice with earlier version of Solaris?
Seem to recall its more Nevada friendly.
Nice thing about these hosted OS offerings is you dont have
to dick around as much with drivers etc. Well... Maybe less
Dave Uhring
> On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:29:16 -0500, Dave Uhring wrote:
>> I just checked my install of VirtualBox-1.6.2 and it does support both
>> Vista and Winblows Server 2008.
>
> What about the other way around? The OP might actually "need"
> Vista as the host. However a horrible a thought though that may be : >
> Maybe thats what you meant.
Gaaaack! Running a nice stable OS on a POS like Windows is just
incomprehensible.
But Sun does seem to have both x86 and amd64 versions of VirtualBox
available for the Windoes platform. Damn if I'll ever waste a drive or
even a PeeCee partition for that crap. XP does run OK as a vbox guest and
wastes less than 4 GB of HDD space.
> And does VBox play nice with earlier version of Solaris? Seem to recall
> its more Nevada friendly. Nice thing about these hosted OS offerings is
> you dont have to dick around as much with drivers etc. Well... Maybe
> less
I have Solaris 10 u5 installed as a vbox guest; host is Nevada b_91. Like
the other guests it runs on only one processor and in 32-bit mode but it
does run OK, even in 512 MB of allocated memory.
VirtualBox is available for Solaris 10 in both x86 and amd64 models. The
OP's Vista should run acceptably well as a guest there, unless his version
of Vista is the OEM version and *locked* to the hardware.
If that's the kind of Vista he has then he probably would have to use
Windows as the host and Solaris as the guest.
Dave
> My old laptop died recently, so I grabbed a Dell D630 to replace it. It
> came with Windows Vista installed. After some mucking about I have managed
> to get this to dual boot with Solaris 10 (05/08).
<snip>
> If anyone has any other suggestions on this topic I would be pleased to
> hear from them, but the above has worked for me.
>
I thought that on laptops, Nevada would be a better choice than the
plane, well supported Solaris 10. More things are likely to work, there
is a Laptops forum on the OpenSolaris forums etc.
Since I've installed Solaris, I've only booted Vista to play freecell
once or twice - the version for Solaris is pretty poor in comparison to
the Microsoft version.
AGT
> Tristram Scott wrote:
>> My old laptop died recently, so I grabbed a Dell D630 to replace it. It
>> came with Windows Vista installed. After some mucking about I have managed
>> to get this to dual boot with Solaris 10 (05/08).
> <snip>
>> If anyone has any other suggestions on this topic I would be pleased to
>> hear from them, but the above has worked for me.
> I thought that on laptops, Nevada would be a better choice than the
> there is a Laptops forum on the OpenSolaris forums etc.
nevada requires a bit more work than adding a few patches here and there
does it not? Also its getting further and further away from Update 5 all
the time. So it may not be what the OP is looking for.
i agree though that the laptop support is better: often it
actually installs -AND- reboots OK. Amazing stuff : >
> Since I've installed Solaris, I've only booted Vista to play freecell
> once or twice - the version for Solaris is pretty poor in comparison to
> the Microsoft version.
But if you are talking about xsol its much harder to "win"... : >
And if we were to have a poll I'll bet the XP version would be the
favourite over Vista's offering!
Dave Uhring
> Since I've installed Solaris, I've only booted Vista to play freecell
> once or twice - the version for Solaris is pretty poor in comparison to
> the Microsoft version.
AGT
> On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:10:46 -0700, AGT wrote:
>> On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:29:16 -0500, Dave Uhring wrote:
>>> I just checked my install of VirtualBox-1.6.2 and it does support both
>>> Vista and Winblows Server 2008.
>> What about the other way around? The OP might actually "need"
>> Vista as the host. However a horrible a thought though that may be : >
>> Maybe thats what you meant.
> Gaaaack! Running a nice stable OS on a POS like Windows is just
> incomprehensible.
: > So's the World of "IT" in general
Mr Gates wouldnt be so rich if we all got paid a dollar an hour for all
the time wasted getting his junkware to work - he'd be broke!
Think I could buy a used Ferrari with my refund.
> But Sun does seem to have both x86 and amd64 versions of VirtualBox
> available for the Windoes platform. Damn if I'll ever waste a drive or
> even a PeeCee partition for that crap. XP does run OK as a vbox guest
> and wastes less than 4 GB of HDD space.
>> And does VBox play nice with earlier version of Solaris? Seem to recall
>> its more Nevada friendly. Nice thing about these hosted OS offerings is
>> you dont have to dick around as much with drivers etc. Well... Maybe
>> less
> I have Solaris 10 u5 installed as a vbox guest; host is Nevada b_91.
> Like the other guests it runs on only one processor and in 32-bit mode
> but it does run OK, even in 512 MB of allocated memory.
Ive posted before that my laptop and the VBox it has cant even
run Freecell w/o the screen jittering when I drag something around.
But its an older version of VBox.
> VirtualBox is available for Solaris 10 in both x86 and amd64 models. The
> OP's Vista should run acceptably well as a guest there, unless his version
> of Vista is the OEM version and *locked* to the hardware.
> If that's the kind of Vista he has then he probably would have to use
> Windows as the host and Solaris as the guest.
Thats certainly the case for me. The Acer I bought didnt even come with a
Vista DVD just a modified BIOS of some sort and a "special" partition
which probably has a ghost image of some sort. Pretty tacky.
Sure I could ORDER a DVD for an outrageous price.
Instead buried under a ton of icons it turned out I could make
a bootable set of CDs for "repairing" my disk.
It made sense? to try VMWare Player on it and that did work.
But I ended up buying another drive and putting XP on that..
Dave Uhring
> On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:43:00 -0500, Dave Uhring wrote:
>> Gaaaack! Running a nice stable OS on a POS like Windows is just
>> incomprehensible.
>
> : > So's the World of "IT" in general
"In general", yes, but not everywhere. There are a few places where
reason and logic still prevail.
> Mr Gates wouldnt be so rich if we all got paid a dollar an hour for all
> the time wasted getting his junkware to work - he'd be broke! Think I
> could buy a used Ferrari with my refund.
His EULA promises you a $5.00 USD refund if his crap fails to work.
> Ive posted before that my laptop and the VBox it has cant even run
> Freecell w/o the screen jittering when I drag something around. But its
> an older version of VBox.
I just played a few cards of FreeCell on XP running as a guest on b_91; no
such problems at all. But the machine is an amd64 running at 2500 MHz.
VirtualBox version is 1.6.2 and it's easy enough to update.
You might also want to install PySolFC on Solaris. It's a huge set of
card games written in Python and does include FreeCell, although its
FreeCell is a bit cruder than that in Windoes.
http://pysolfc.sourceforge.net/
> Thats certainly the case for me. The Acer I bought didnt even come with
> a Vista DVD just a modified BIOS of some sort and a "special" partition
> which probably has a ghost image of some sort. Pretty tacky. Sure I
> could ORDER a DVD for an outrageous price. Instead buried under a ton of
> icons it turned out I could make a bootable set of CDs for "repairing"
> my disk.
My son bought a Gateway desktop machine with Vista installed. A complete
restore DVD was included, and he had to use it. The POS just decided that
it did not want to boot up one day.
> It made sense? to try VMWare Player on it and that did work. But I ended
> up buying another drive and putting XP on that..
Update your VirtualBox and see if that makes a difference. It certainly
works well enough here although I haven't put even an hour on the billyware
installed in a vbox.
Thommy M.
Lovely, never heard of it before. Thanks.
Tristram Scott
> On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:49:28 +0100, Dave wrote:
>> Tristram Scott wrote:
>>> My old laptop died recently, so I grabbed a Dell D630 to replace it. It
>>> came with Windows Vista installed. After some mucking about I have
>>> managed
>>> to get this to dual boot with Solaris 10 (05/08).
>> <snip>
>>> If anyone has any other suggestions on this topic I would be pleased to
>>> hear from them, but the above has worked for me.
>> I thought that on laptops, Nevada would be a better choice than the
>> plane (sic), well supported Solaris 10. More things are likely to work,
>> there is a Laptops forum on the OpenSolaris forums etc.
>
> nevada requires a bit more work than adding a few patches here and there
> does it not? Also its getting further and further away from Update 5 all
> the time. So it may not be what the OP is looking for.
> i agree though that the laptop support is better: often it
> actually installs -AND- reboots OK. Amazing stuff : >
>
Thanks to everyone for their comments on this thread. I intend to look
closely at the VirtualBox technology in the near future. My immediate need
is to have both Windows and Solaris available so that I can go and visit
some clients with a working laptop. I seem to have that under control now.
I tend to favour the official Sun releases over Nevada builds as it puts me
in a better position for raising support cases when things go wrong. I
don't pay Sun for support for my laptop, but I do have contracts for my
desktop and server machines. If I keep the laptop configuration in line
with the desktop machine then it is usually much easier to replicate
problems and then raise a support call.
When I have a few days spare I will have a go at installing the latest
Nevada build as a comparison. Last time I used a Nevada build (12 months
ago) I did indeed find it better out of the box for the laptop, especially
for wifi.
Clearly I should also look at VirtualBox. I'm hoping that the 4GB of RAM
will suffice for that.