Installing Solaris 9 x86 on a Shuttle SS40G

by Ed Hagihara

   (this may apply to the Shuttle SS50G and SS51G as well)

I've written up this little blurb on getting Solaris 9 to run on my Shuttle SS40G - this may apply to the SS50G and the SS51G as well (didn't test it out), but because it uses the same chipset, I imagine it would have the same IDE controller detection problem that the SS40G did. I don't think the SK41 suffers from this problem because it's using a VIA chipset, but I didn't test it out on a full install, either.

ANYhow, I don't know if there's any interest at all in this or not, but here it is anyhow for your enjoyment (if you can call it that):

Overview:

I've gotten used to having a solaris x86 box at home to run as my Samba primary domain controller for my windows network at home. So when I got my Shuttle SS40G, it seemed to be obvious that the next step should be to try to set up solaris x86 on it - ideally, this was great in concept, but difficult in practice as it didn't seem to work out of the box.

I've kind of cheated in a sense on the video portion, since I had an old S3 pci video card floating around that I knew solaris x86 would support out of the box. I don't even know off the top of my head if XFree86 would work with the embedded video on the SS40 or not (and frankly, even though I've gotten XFree to work on various systems in the past, I figured I'd save myself a headache bypassing it).

If you really want to try getting XFree86 to work, though, there's an excellent tutorial on getting that running from http://www.geocities.com/~gregl/htm/Xfree86_setup_rev3.htm. In my opinion, it'll be quicker and take less time to run out to your local pc chop shop and get a supported video card. S3 PCI cards seem to work really well, and in general, I avoid video cards that have SIS chipsets as they even have issues supporting linux, much less Solaris.

Some notes before installing Solaris x86 on the SS40G:

1. Make sure you have a floppy drive installed. This was kind of a pain for me since for about the past 2 years I've run floppyless on almost all of my systems. This is needed this for the boot disk.
2. Turn off ACPI in the bios.
3. Though I've written this up as guide to solaris 9, most of the source notes I've used about the installation pertained largely to solaris 8. Though I haven't tested it, I imagine these instructions will work on 8 equally well.

Creating the boot floppy:

On disc 2 of the solaris 9 CDs, you will find a boot floppy image under '/Solaris_9/Tools/d1_image' . Get the Dos version of the dd utility from http://access1.sun.com/drivers/utilities/dd.exe, open up a command prompt and use the syntax to copy the image to the floppy:

dd.exe d1_image a:

(this is assuming that your floppy drive is the a: disk).

Then go into the /solaris subdirectory on the boot floppy and modify the bootenv.rc file to comment out the line that says 'setprop pciide true' by changing it to '# setprop pciide true'.

Installing the OS:

1. Boot from the floppy and install the first disc of the OS.
2. During the boot, after scanning for devices in your system, you'll hit a point where you will be asked to "Select one of the identified devices to boot the solaris kernel and choose Continue". Select the cd.
3. After the install of the first cd, you then have to reboot from the floppy and do the same thing for the second cd. You will be prompted again to "Select one of the identified devices to boot the solaris kernel and choose Continue". Select the cd option again.
4. A web start launcher will kick off for the installation of the 2nd cd. After the 2nd cd is done installing, reboot with the floppy still in the drive.
5. It will go through the 'identifying devices' stuff again, and this time when prompted to "Select one of the identified devices to boot the solaris kernel and choose Continue", select the hard disk.
6. After booting and logging in, go into the /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc file and modify it to comment out the line that says 'setprop pciide true' by changing it to '# setprop pciide true'.

Configuring the realtek 8139 ethernet interface card:

I picked up the drivers from Realtek at:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?Keyword=solaris

Even though they specify it's for solaris 7 & 8, it does appear to work under solaris 9 as well. A really excellent installation guide (which is pretty much what I used to configure it) can be found at:

http://solaris-x86.org/documents/tutorials/rtls.mhtml

But the basis of it is that you need you run the installation script by going into the directory where the extracted files are and running:

./install

I usually reboot after this (open a terminal window, issue an init 6).

Then to temporarily make Solaris see the interface:

ifconfig rtls0 plumb

Then give it an address and bring it up:

ifconfig rtls0 inet 192.168.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Then to permanently configure it, you need to create a file representing the ethernet interface with the address in it:

echo 192.168.0.2 > /etc/hostname.rtls0

If you have issues being able to ping other IP addresses past your firewall, from there you need to create a defaultrouter file in /etc as such (usually I need a reboot for this to take effect as well):

echo 192.168.0.1 > /etc/defaultrouter

And if DNS names don't appear to be resolving properly, make sure to copy the nsswitch.dns file to nsswitch.conf -OR- edit the nsswitch.conf file line that says something like:

hosts:  files

and change it to:

hosts:  dns files

and reboot. I believe that either one will essentially do the same thing. After you do either one of these, then also make sure that you have an /etc/resolv.conf file that has your DNS server addresses. An example of a resolv.conf file would have a couple of entries like this:

nameserver           198.6.1.10
nameserver           198.6.1.50

Conclusion:

I already know in advance that these notes are far from perfect, and there's probably lots of other stuff that I'm not covering here that I probably should. I'm also no expert at this, and these are largely the result of random Google searches and some trial-and-error stuff, but it worked well enough to make me happy - I hope you find this useful anyway.