Solaris Express Dev Edition 05/07 - After Install Screen goes BLACK

[MikeekiM]

Anyone else have this problem?

Solaris Express Dev Edition 05/07

After a long, successful install, and Vmware TOOLS install,

at the next boot screen goes BLACK, reboot Never Finishes.

I'm going to try Not installing tools and see if I get the same symptom.

[IscariotJ]

I'm currently running 5/07, with the tools installed. However, I have had that happen; it was down to the resolution settings being too high to render. Some prident editing of xorg.conf is required.

Have you tried leaving the machine to boot, and then SSH'ing in ( I have a host-only NIC for situations such as this ).

[MikeekiM]

\- I reinstalled, and backed up the guest, before installing tools this time.

I then, ran tools, and set the default res to 800*600.

Still, after that, a reboot fails.

\- Running Solaris Express without tools, however, has the feature I most want.

Ability to switch to full-screen mode works out of the box.

VMWare tools isn't needed to get this feature to work.

\- Under tools the mouse is much more finicky, rolling over the shutdown menu item causes the machine to throw up the shutdown menu.

\- Solaris Express is much more developed in this release,

it's just those gosh darn tools...

[tkendel]

Solaris Express Dev 05/07 (as well as the latest Solaris 10 patches) comes with XOrg 7.2, which is incompatible with the vmmouse driver installed by the VM Tools installer...

There's a Solaris patch out that contains new vmmouse_drv.so files... From Sun, download patch 125720-10. Unfortunately, in Express, you won't be able to install it directly (using patchadd), because the patch installer complains about incompatible package versions. But of course you can find the two vmmouse_drv.so files in the unpacked patch directory and copy them to /usr/X11/lib/modules/input and /usr/X11/lib/modules/input/amd64, then restart gdm (close all applications, then in the terminal, issue command: svcadm restart gdm), and voila!

Thanks, OpenSolaris!

A word to VMware: after the VM tools installation, I needed to add a line "Virtual 1440 900" to the Display subsections to make the GDM login screen behave on my MBP (found that hint on a web search). Maybe the VM tools installer should already add this line by itself (setting the Virtual setting to the default resolution).

[tkendel]

One more question to the VMware team: Should the VMware driver support automatic resetting of the screen resolution? (I seem to remember that this worked before...) Well, it doesn't do it any more on Solaris Express Dev Ed 05/07, i.e. XOrg 7.2! (?)

[tkendel]

Yet another question to the developers: When I boot the Solaris Express Dev Ed, after the GRUB screen disappears, it takes about a minute or so (anyway, like forever) until the initial Solaris banner appears and Solaris starts booting. What is the VM doing during that time? It basically looks like between GRUB and loading the Solaris kernel, something has to time out first before the VM continues. The CPU usage is quite high during that time... (>100% on my MBP).

Once booted, the performance is great!

[MikeekiM]

\- where did you get that patch?

I tried to get it from a sun patch download site but it didn't show up.

\- having the same problem you've got, looooong wait required between grub and the os actually starting

Some nice features:

\- desktop looks polished

\- the method of setting up a user and attaching preconfigured roles looks new,

and I like it.

Netbeans M10 has a great editor...

[erayl]

I did a search for 125720-10 on sunsolve.sun.com and was able to download the patch from there.

[scottishwildcat]

The long delay after the GRUB screen is apparently a known issue with Solaris Express, and I've heard on the grapevine that the VMware folks have a fix in the works (although it didn't make it into 1.1, sadly).