OK, tried to install only Solaris on the hard drive. Then Grub gave me an Error 22 and wouldn't do anything, so now reinstalled SUSE instead. I have a partition available now for Solaris, but since it's not looking like I'll be able to run it alongside SUSE and Win XP I might have to forget about it. Is it because it calls the partitions something else or something that it doesn't show up as sbd3, etc.? Grub doesn't even see it.

Would this "chainloading" fix it? If so, how would I go about that? Or is there a way of modifying Grub?

There's no way I'll put Solaris on my main hard drive. I keep reading how fpart just happily partitions away, regardless of what's on the partition, so I'm not losing all my stuff by installing Solaris to my bootdisk.

Edit: Say I put Solaris on Partition 3 on the hard drive, could I modify the Grub configuration file to say "boot from hd1, sector 2" and then edit the menu.lst to say "Solaris" as well? If so, what would I type in?

To put an "affirmative" to the "can" and "will" run.
I installed Solaris 10 x86 on a Dell Inspiron 4000 Laptop. I have been working the installation for one and half weeks just to get the display to configure correctly. Granted I have not worked a lot with Intel chipped systems using Solaris, but I have a farm of Sun servers that are easier to maintain then this one laptop.
Even using the update manager for the Java Desktop System (JDS), I was still able to kill the video configuration bad enough tonight to require a new installation. (As an aside, I have ordered a media kit from Sun with a one year JDS update. I am going to try again with reduced chances from media errors from burning the ISOs to hopefully a much beter build.).
The system is listed on the HCL and has several specific notes about the installation, particularly concerning the display, which are not for the novice. This is helping my troubleshooting skills, but frustrating me none the less. FC4 installs cleaner than Solaris 10 x86. Having said that… if I can get this configured for this system, I will be soooo happy to talk with other Sun systems natively and have a great desktop like JDS. I tend to use that over the CDE or GNOME.

For What It is Worth.

“A high IQ is like driving a Jeep, you still get stuck… just farther from help.”

I found the error, i disable "lengen USB support" in BIOS and the blue screen can advance to the grey instruction screen. Now i can interact with the installation deamon.

Grub is very flexible, and allow boot command editing at boot time.
You can certainly ask it to boot whatever partition you want on whatever disk is connected.

Heyheyhey, got Solaris up and running. Made the mistake of starting it in CDE first. Yuck! That background made dizzy.

Got some issues when booting though; I edited the Grub config in my SUSE install to include Solaris, pointed it to the right partition and so. So when I select Solaris from the SUSE Grub, I get Solaris Grub and I have to select it again. I then have to edit the boot command from Root (hd0,2,a) to Root (hd1,2,a) (it's on my second hard drive) to run it. Any way I can put all this in the SUSE Grub or get Solaris Grub to pick up on SUSE (not an option at the moment) and run first?

This is expected, SuSE grub don't know about Solaris booting.
This looks to me like a bug in the Solaris installer. When booted on Solaris, go to /boot/grub, as root, edit menu.lst and correct hd0,2,a to hd1,2,a in the Solaris entry.

Great, thanks. Will do it as soon as I'm back on the system. Off for a few days on business. It's always such a pain to have to go back to using Windows 2000 on a rickety old laptop for work again...

Oh, and speaking of root, how do I add another user to the system?

You can do it with a GUI:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817...hm8o5li?a=view
or with a CLI:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817...hm8o5lj?a=view

We have single sign-on for AIX,Linux and Solaris. But a guy having 3700 files in his home directory cannot exexute ls command in Soalris. But, no problem in AIX/Linux. As we noticed the limitation is up to 512 files. Can we overcome this restrictions.

Hmm ...
How do you achieve SSO ?
What do you mean by "cannot execute ls command" ?

Our SSO is as follows:

We had an NIS doamin server in AIX
configured using smitty yp
User's home directories are in different AIX servers.

Solaris machines are added to the NW recently.
They are included in the domain using the following way.

Modified /etc/nsswitch.conf

executed the following commands
1. domainname name
2. domainname
3. domainname >/etc/defaultdomain
4. ypinit -c
5. /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypstart

Login no problems. ypwhich , domainanme are correct

When the number of files in a directory is above 512
commands ls, cp and mv hangs.
Have to press Ctrl-C to terminate.
We suspect it as a problem related to NFS
If we unmount and mount NFS , where the user home directories resides everything is OK
After some operations the problems starts again.

If the number of files are less than 512 no problem.

Things to explore:
- What Solaris and AIX versions are used.
- What NFS version.
- Snoop the traffic to find where it hangs.

AIX version is 4.3
Solaris 9
NFS version is 3 in both
But, sorry, How to find out the NFS versions (in both)
Excuse me, I did not get the next statement.

"Snoop the traffic to find where it hangs."

What methode is to be used.

With Thanks

Here's an old document, but that give some hints still valid.
http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/nfs.html

Hi:

Going back to the original question, I would highly suggest that you give solaris 10 a try. It has great features like zones, dtrace, wanboot, as well as new pieces of software like services (svcs, svcadm, svccfg) and fma (fault management architecture) with commands like fmdump, fmadm faulty to improve its "self-healing" (to use ibm's terms). I think that it's great.

If it gets stuck during the install, perhaps your dvd image is not ok. Solaris will boot from either a cd or dvd.