Tag Archives: Server

A Lean Solaris 11 Server

Leave a reply

I‘ve just put together a brief guide to installing Solaris 11 in text mode and making it ready for a subsequent installation of Oracle 11g. That basically involves installing a minimum of X-related software and then knowing how to get Solaris-based graphical clients talking to a locally-run X server. The results aren’t always pretty …but they’re functional enough to run things like Oracle Universal Installer or Database Configuration Assistant without too much drama!

I haven’t actually documented that sort of Oracle installation on Solaris yet: but consider it a ‘forthcoming attraction’ (it’s already 90% written, so early next week is looking good!)

Solaris 11 has surprised me a bit: even in text mode, it’s easy to install, mostly painless to configure and (!) attractive to use. I wish other OSes would adopt its default choice of bold, serifed fonts in their terminals, anyway! If you prefer the full-on desktop experience, it can be installed with a slick Gnome desktop that is instantly familiar to any Linux user …and it’s Gnome 2, which is even better!

I virtualized my Solaris box in KVM (Linux’s built-in virtualization tool). It worked well enough, provided I lied upfront and said I was about to run a Unix/FreeBSD box. That stops KVM building the virtual machine with virtio hard disks, a format that Solaris neither supports nor recognises. There were a couple of other KVM-specific virtualization issues that arose during and after O/S installation, too -but those are documented in the main article. Anyway, VirtualBox runs Solaris 11 quite well -but VMware Workstation 9 had “issues” that prevented me from ever getting it working. Nevertheless, most people will be able to virtualize a Solaris server pretty easily, I think.

Give it a whirl, anyway: you may be pleasantly surprised!

VirtualBox Boot-time BIOS Error

2 Replies

A slightly annoying error message always appears whenever you boot Ubuntu 11.04 Server as a guest O/S in VirtualBox:

piix4_smbus 0000.00.07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade bios or use force_addr=0xaddr

It doesn’t actually do any harm to the guest (as far as I can tell), so one could perfectly well leave it alone. But it’s possible to get rid of it altogether simply by issuing three commands and editing one configuration file. First:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Add the text

blacklist i2c_piix4

…to the end of the file. Finally, issue the commands:

sudo update-initramfs -u -k all
sudo reboot

When the machine comes back up after that last reboot, you won’t see the error message. What this is doing is simply preventing an attempt to load the i2c_piix4 kernel module. VirtualBox doesn’t emulate the hardware for which this module is actually needed, but Ubuntu doesn’t know that and tries to load it anyway. Blacklisting the module prevents Ubuntu doing that and thus makes the error disappear.