In article <8fu7s0$k6
...@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
Chris Thompson <cet1-nos
...@cam.ac.uk.invalid> wrote:
>Solaris 8 differs from previous releases in that the packages are
>distributed over twop CDROMs rather than one. SUNWman is on the
>second one. From previous posts I get the impression that sometimes
>things go wrong during installation in such a way that the expected
>packages from the second CDROM never get installed.
You mean like what happened to me earlier this evening -- I installed
Solaris 8 from the CD-ROM, and it never prompted me for the second CD
or even mentioned in any way that the second CD would be necessary.
Then, it churned away for a while and printed the words "Installation
completed" (or "installation finished"? Anyway, You get the idea...)
without having asked for the second CD-ROM.
"That's strange," I thought, "I know there is another CD with stuff to
install, and yet it's telling me it's done." I considered the
possibility that Sun had put the less frequently used packages on the
second CD and perhaps I'd lucked into choosing packages from the
first. This didn't seem likely, but it was the only explanation
consistent with what the software had said. At any rate, I decided to
give it the benefit of the doubt and just continue and see what
happened.
So, I booted into single-user mode and checked out the system. Many
things seemed to be there; the one obvious exception was the manual
pages. I decided to boot into multi-user mode and see if some kind of
script got run from /etc/init.d to take care of this.
Sure enough, it did. It said something about starting webstart,
and then it tried to start the X server. This failed, so it then
informed me it was rebooting.
It rebooted (quite unnecessarily), and I thought perhaps this time it
might work. Well, it didn't. And, somehow the magic that had caused
it to run webstart before was gone, and it just booted up like normal.
So, I decided to run webstart again. Luckily, I was able to guess how
to do this. (I ran "/etc/init.d/webstart start".) I did, and the same
business with the X server crashing happened again. Not good, I
thought. I believe I stopped it from trying to reboot yet again, and
this time ended up looking at /etc/init.d/webstart to see if there was
something I could fix.
Sure enough, I happened upon this segment of code:
if [ -f /var/sadm/webstart/.nodisplay ]
then
CUI=yes
fi
So, I did a "touch /var/sadm/webstart/.nodisplay" and ran it again.
This was helpful -- it avoided the Xsun crash promblem, and I got to
interact with it in a text mode. (Also, going to /var/sadm/webstart
helped me find the core file from Xsun.)
Anyway, webstart ejected the CD-ROM and asked me to insert the CD #2,
then hit return. I did. It complained that it couldn't find the CD.
So, I tried again. Same thing. I then decided I'd hit control-C, make
sure the CD was available under /cdrom, and then start webstart again.
I did. The first thing it did was to eject the CD-ROM, thus making
sure my efforts were in vain. I finally settled upon following a
different set of directions than the ones I was given -- when prompted,
I inserted the CD, waited a long time (like 60 seconds), and *then* hit
return.
At this point, webstart (which, apparently, has nothing to do with the
web at all, BTW) was able to recognize the CD. It then printed
something to the effect that it was starting installation of the
packages, and then very shortly afterward printed "press return to
reboot" or something like that. Knowing it couldn't have installed 200
MB of stuff in 5 seconds, I decided to just wait instead of doing what
it told me, and sure enough, a cute little text progress meter showed
up on the screen, just to the right of the "press return to reboot"
message. So it started installing.
This finished after a while, and I was asked to answer another prompt.
Of course, having been told that pressing return would cause a reboot
and not having pressed return yet, I was a little anxious about this,
but I went ahead and answered at the prompt, and it turned out that the
desire to reboot was apparently just a bluff on the part of webstart.
Anyway...
After all this, the system *did* install correctly. But I was really
*not* pleased with the install process. At any one of several points,
I could have experienced real problems if I hadn't been able to guess
what to do, since what I was theoretically *supposed* to do was not the
thing that was going to get the install completed. Having to create
/var/sadm/webstart/.nodisplay by hand was just ridiculous. It could at
*least* fall back to text mode if it can't start the X server.
It just shouldn't be that hard. And I hear booting from the web
installer disk is worse than booting from the first "Solaris 8
Software" disk. That's a scary thought...
- Logan
