Ayoi’s

This is not my laptop, this one belongs to http://www.ataliba.eti.br/

Ok, to be honest, I dun have THAT much time to playing around with something new for me these days. So in between of preparing training slides, writing articles and reading my current book “The New School Of Information Security” and writing reports, I decided to punish my laptop by installing OpenSolaris on my virtual Machine.

Initially I dun have any kind of plan to have this Operating System running on my VMware. It started when I visit my colleague workplace (as we have lunch appointment ;P), and when I look the estimate time of completion for the thing that he tried to download (32 hours plus) I can’t resist on asking him what’s on earth he is trying to download and he simply replied,

“opensolaris”

As a good citizen and as a good friend, I offered to download the iso for him as I have a respectable line speed for these kind of downloads. How? Let me keep it to myself. Anyway since I have the iso sitting on my desktop, what the heck, it is not a good practice to leave the good iso alone and delete it. And my itchy fingers start to fire up my vmware and create one portion for this Operating System.

The installation is quite straight forward, no messing arround. But initially you need to define the language that you are going to use and the keyboard language (for appropriate keymap loading I guess). And as this OpenSolaris is by default a liveCD, you need to wait for a few minutes for the Desktop to appear and you can pursue the installation process by double clicking the “Install OpenSolaris” icon on the desktop which is in your laptop not on you Desk top. But before that, I just have look on the device drives that might be detected or not detected for my machine by executing the Device Driver Utility icon. The only read mark is the missing device driver for my audio device which I dun think very critical.

Well better proceed with installation. The first thing that will be presented to you is like other OS installation, the question on how big is the hard drive portion for the Operating System. I know this is the most Dangerous phase when you trying to perform dual boot native installation but as I will install this in my VMware, what the heck. “Use the entire Disk”

Next is time zone setting. Similar with FreeBSD installation, for us in Malaysia, the setting will be ASIA> Malaysia > Peninsular Malaysia. Finish IF you want your machine to have Malaysian time, if not, it is your choice ;P

Next phase, just set the language that you want to use (again, it is up to you) and define the user account and its password and also with root password. A note here, root in opensolaris is different with root in linux or in BSD variants. What I mean is by default, once you’ve installed linux or BSDs, you can log into the newly installed system as root but for OpenSolaris, that access is not enabled either on the LiveCD or on the installed system. However you can still have the superuser access by issuing su command  or if you don’t want root to be treated as Role Based Access Control (RBAC) - which I think RBAC is a good practice- you can always execute

# rolemod -K type=normal root 

And root will be what you want root to be. (huh)

After all the information keyed in and before any actual installation begins, the summary of your system information will be presented and you can always go back to perform any modification if necessary.

And the moment you click the Install button, you can just lay back and relax while the installation take place (in my case, I spent most of the time at the ’smoking area’ here having a puff or two).

After successfully making myself drowning in my cigarette smoke, I decided to went back to my workstation and voila, the installation completed and like any other Operating systems (windows included) OpenSolaris require itself to be rebooted and reboot the machine I did.

And IF the loading successful without any hiccups, you will be presented with the login page (and remember, you can’t login with root) so use your user account that you’ve created before.

So far, that’s the only thing that I managed to do for time being. OK I did meddle around with the network configuration and one thing for sure:

svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:nwam

svcadm enable svc:/network/physical:default

is not a good thing. Now my NIC is gone from ifconfig. Anyone can help me on this? Btw, network config assistance is highly appreciated tho

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