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OpenSolaris

I’ve been tinkering with OpenSolaris lately. My intent is to take advantage of ZFS to leverage a small PortWell machine as a NAS. Unfortunately, as soon as the OpenSolaris install CD boots, it probes the computer and results in the following error message:

WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci8086,8119@1d,1 (uhci1): Connecting device on port 2 failed

If I have a USB keyboard connected, I additionally see the following:

WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci8086,8119@1d,2 (uhci2): Connecting device on port 2 failed

Upon which, my USB keyboard goes completely dead (as if unplugged). No toggling caps lock, num lock, nor scroll lock. The same happens for all variants of OpenSolaris that I tried: OpenSolaris 2008.11, OpenSolaris 2009.06, OpenSolars dev build 130, Nexenta Core 3 Alpha 3, Nexenta Core 2.0.

So, instead, I decided to go after installing OpenSolaris on an old Dell 8400. I intended to run OpenSolaris on it and Windows 7 inside a VM. I initially installed the build-130 version of OpenSolaris dev. That seemed to work, except that a little after logging into the X desktop, the system locks up. I tried installing Nexenta 3 alpha 2, and Nexenta 2. They worked, except there’s no X11 system (see here: ). More importantly, there are no packages for xVM–and the Nexenta Core systems don’t use the OpenSolaris pkg facility.

So, I went back to OpenSolaris and installed 2009.06. That worked. Except I found out that xVM (Xen) requires processor virtualization (AMD-V, Intel VT) to run Windows (hardware virtualization rather than paravirtualization).

So, I went on to installing VirtualBox. Unfortunately, VirtualBox requires build 126 or later. So, I need to install the development packages. I think I did this the wrong way, because I added the dev repository, selected the entire package and clicked install. I think this broke things because it installed all the packages in the dev library, rather than just upgrading the packages I already have. Luckily, OpenSolaris’ package manager made a image snapshot for me so that I could revert the changes.

Tonight, I will try to use pkg image-update. I wasn’t sure if this created a new image or not, but it seems to. In addition, I’m hoping it’ll update the grub menu.lst file so I can use grub to revert back to the known-good rollback.

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