From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:56:30 -0400 (CLT)
This is taken from an email I wrote at work. Responses from co-workers suggested that VmWare would probably have been a better bet... There's some software called Xen - http://www.xen.org/ - that somehow lets you run several different OSes on a single machine. We have been trying to test [work stuff] with Oracle, so I thought I would install Solaris on Xen (and then install Oracle on that to run the tests). On the face of it, Xen appears to be pretty cool. I eventually ended up with a window on my (Linux) screen that contained a Solaris desktop (just like a remote desktop). And I didn't need to do any messing around with dual booting to do it - the Solaris was installed off an ISO image sitting on my Linux disk. However, there were also a lot of problems. Some because I'm not as smart as I should be, and some because this seems to be rather new technology. I should mention that I am using OpenSuse 11.0 and some of these may be specific to that OS (on the other hand, Suse/Novell seems to have put quite a bit of effort into packaging Xen into some "wizards" in the Yast system that Suse uses for system management, so it's possible things are actually worse on other Linuxes). - The current Nvidia driver will not load. So you need to downgrade to the "legacy" drivers if you have an Nvidia graphics card. This seems to be a known Linux-wide problem. As a consequence I have a low-res (800x600!?) "VESA" screen (this might be improvable - it was enough hassle to just get something that worked that I haven't touched it since). - Nothing seems to be well documented. I was *very* lucky in finding some helpful people on IRC (Sun has a solaris-xen channel). There are two ways of running Xen (Full and Para-Virtual, whatever that means). I gather PV is better (faster?), but I couldn't get that to work at all. With help I got "Full" working with a specific Solaris build (NOT the one you get if you follow the OpenSolaris "download" link - apparently the ISO image needs to be specially tuned for Xen). - To get this working, Linux itself also has to run on Xen. This was completely automated by Suse, and worked (apart from the Nvidia driver issues). But I imagine it might be tricky to get working otherwise (it involved modifying the boot process - I need to reboot into the Xen version; when I said dual booting wasn't necessary I meant not for the Solaris part). - Although I got Solaris running, I can't restart it! The program to restart images is crashing for me (I have a file on my Linux disk that, as far as I understand things, is a disk image with Solaris installed, but I cannot "boot" that disk). I assume this is a known bug that will be fixed ASAP, but it made the whole exercise pointless. - The Solaris install did not include a connection to the net. This seems to be a known issue and Google turns up some possible solutions. However, in my case since the Linux machine I am using is also the DNS and DHCP server for the local network, I am not sure how things would have worked. - I was particularly frustrated because after all that I found that Oracle didn't support Solaris on x86 anyway - but that turns out to be just for the latest release. 10g is supported. Andrew
Try VirtualBox
From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>
Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2008 09:17:05 -0400 (CLT)
I had much more success with VirtualBox (although I cannot load the guest add-ons in OpenSolaris 200805 - this seems to be a known issue). See http://www.acooke.org/cute/SunsVirtua0.html Andrew