Mine the Harvest

I have really been having some fun with the new OpenSolaris 2008.05 release. It actually prompted me to break down and get a new 500GB SATA drive and do a fresh install of Suse 11 with LVM so I could have more room for virtual machines. My old install was just running out of room and I could not add more VMs, plus hdparm showed the old drive performance was pretty horrid (17MB/sec).

Installing VMware Server 2.0 and getting OpenSolaris to run was a bit challenging though. There are pages on my wiki discussing both and some of the issues I encountered.

Getting VMWare tools to work was a bit challenging. After installing it and restarting X the screen would go black and you are unable to get to a virtual terminal. Quite annoying. I finally found the solution courtesy of a comment by Ankush on this blog.

This blog is a pretty good guide to getting OpenSolaris to run on VMWare fusion. I have some additional notes on my wiki article at here which include some notes on installing MySQL, getting networking to work and other misc. trivia on OpenSolaris and VMware.

The solution to this little black X delimma is quite simple:

Log into a console session – if your grub does not have a text mode entry it will start X with the black screen automatically and you will be stuck. To avoid this simply press ‘e’ to edit the boot line in grub, then ‘e’ to edit the kernel line. Append this to the end of the line: init=/bin/bash and then boot the kernel with ‘b’. Log in as root and the pw is opensolaris. Now you just need to rename a file.

View the gdm log and it will likely show an unknown symbol referenced by the offending driver. To see the log: #tail /var/log/gdm\:0.log

The file in /usr/X11/lib/modules/drivers is the problem. I renamed the existing vmware_drv.so to vmware_drv.so-broken and then renamed vmware_drv.so.PreVmwareToolsInstall into vmware_drv.so, rebooted and it works great.

This was a pretty annoying problem and I hope others are able to resolve it so they can enjoy test driving OpenSolaris with ZFS, DTrace and all its goodies. Enjoy!