beadm create snv-126
beadm mount snv-126 /mnt
pkg install –R /mnt entire@0.5.11,5.11–0.126
bootadm update-archive –R /mnt
beadm unmount snv-126
beadm activate snv-126
reboot

Now OpenSolaris is not as popular as Linux so there are not as many devices supported as there are for Linux (So bare that in mind). When I first installed OpenSolaris and OpenSolaris booted up just fine, I logged into the nice Gnome Window Manager and opened up a shell. I ran ifconfig –a and it showed two lo interfaces (One ipv4 and the other ipv6) and an nge0 interface (Old Nvidia Drivers).

I had no network connectivity, so I had to google for a few seconds and I found that if you run ifconfig dhcp start this will send a DHCP request to the DHCP server. Well I ran this and it just sat there and waited until it exited with no dhcp server response. I did not know if that was the right driver for my network card though I did assume it was why else OpenSolaris choose that driver for me.

My first instinct is how do I found out for sure that nge was the correct driver for my network card. So I need a utility that is equivalent to lspci in the OpenSolaris world, after some searching I found scanpci and prtconf. Though prtconf did not give me what I was looking for in this situation but scanpci did. This is the output of scanpci for my network controller…

/usr/X11R6/bin/scanpci –v

pci bus 0x0000 cardnum 0x07 function 0x00: vendor 0x10de device 0x03ef
nVidia Corporation MCP61 Ethernet
CardVendor 0x1565 card 0x2505 (Biostar Microtech Int’l Corp, Card unknown)
STATUS 0x00b0 COMMAND 0x0007
CLASS 0x06 0x80 0x00 REVISION 0xa2
BIST 0x00 HEADER 0x00 LATENCY 0x00 CACHE 0x00
BASE0 0xfe02d000 addr 0xfe02d000 MEM
BASE1 0x0000ec01 addr 0x0000ec00 I/O
MAX_LAT 0x14 MIN_GNT 0x01 INT_PIN 0x01 INT_LINE 0x0b
BYTE_0 0x65 BYTE_1 0x15 BYTE_2 0x05 BYTE_3 0x25

The info above was a great help,

1. The type of card we have and its model nVidia Corporation MCP61 Ethernet
2. The device ID 0x03ef thought all you really need is 03ef

I found this link on the OpenSolaris web site. This link will show you all the supported and third party supported drivers for OpenSolaris. I found the nfo driver which is for the nforce chipset. Though for the third party drivers, OpenSolaris does not provide you the link to the sources or binaries . So after another search on google I found this link http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/. This site was exactly what I needed, Here is the link for the newest driver for nfo.

After I downloaded nfo , here are the steps I took ( They were in the Readme.txt ).

gunzip nfo-2.6.0.tar.gz
tar –xvf nfo-2.6.0.tar
cd nfo-2.6.0
rm obj Makefile
ln –s Makefile.${KARCH}_${COMPILER} Makefile ( for me it was ln –s Makefile.amd64_gcc Makefile )
ln –s ${KARCH} obj ( for me it was ln –s amd64 obj )
rm Makefile.config
ln –s Makefile.config_gld3 Makefile.config
/usr/ccs/bin/make
/usr/ccs/bin/make install
cp nfo.conf /kernel/drv/nfo.conf
./adddrv.sh
modload obj/nfo
devfsadm –i nfo
ifconfig nfoN plumb ( where N is the device number, for me it was nfo0 )
ifconfig nfo0 dhcp start ( this is if you want your interface to use DHCP )
touch /etc/dhcp.nfo0 ( this is if you want your interface to use dhcp when it come back up)
edit /etc/nsswitch.conf ( Where it says host: files, change it to host: files dns )
reboot — r

The utility takes a workspace containing the OpenSolaris build snapshot tarballs and patches to apply and at the end delivers binary packages. It is also has the ability to check for pre-requisites for running the build. For eg. presence of proper version of SUN Studio 12, development and locale headers, assembler etc. It should work on both BeleniX and OpenSolaris though I have found time to only test it on BeleniX till date.

Getting it: Execute pkgadd –d http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/autobuilder.pkg

Setting up: Create a directory like say osol_ws. Now create osol_ws/downloads and osol_ws/patches. If you have patches for ON create another directory osol_ws/patches/on_patches and copy them into it. Copy your XEN patches if any into osol_ws/patches/xvm_patches. Now run osol_builder prereq while connected to the net. This will check for prerequisites for building OSOL on your distro and fix most of the requirements except for installing the proper SUN Studio 12 which you will have to do manually since it requires a login to download from SUN’s site.

Building: Now download all the requires build snapshot tarballs into osol_ws/downloads: on-src.tar.bz2, xvm-src.tar.bz2, SUNWonbld.i386.tar.bz2 or SUNWonbld.sparc.tar.bz2 ‚  on-closed-bins-nd.i386.tar.bz2 or on-closed-bins-nd.sparc.tar.bz2. Finally fire up the script: osol_builder build –R /path/to/osol_ws –d myosol

Running the utility without arguments prints a complete help text that will explain the subcommands and options.

This video might be interested to show full potential of ZFS. It has been done on a funny way but it still show full advantage of ZFS over other file systems.

I hope that we created our OpenSolaris community that will never disappear and will be able to self-govern and grow up in future. When I receive such feedback from our Community I’ll be very proud on myself and on my colleagues whose helped me so much to achieve such target.

Topics I plan to cover will be from OpenSolaris world. It won’t be connected necessarily to operating system itself but also to its surrounding technologies. It would be mixture of personal opinions, technical stuffs, news and ideas related to OpenSolaris Project. I hope you will like it, and find interesting material for reading. Comments are, of course, more than welcome.