Solaris Stuff

• Solaris XFree86 Porting Kit ported to Solaris 9 x86 and modified to include the vmware video driver

In November I purchased and downloaded the Early Access version of Solaris 9 for x86. Where I work I support a large UNIX environment (300+ servers (primarily Solaris and AIX). Having Solaris x86 available is extremely valuable since it is very cost effective to run Solaris on fast/inexpensive PC hardware. My UNIX support group uses Dell Latitude C610 Laptops. The laptops have 1.2 Ghz PIII processors, support 1 Gb of ram, and the ATI Radeon Mobility graphics chipset supports 24bit color at 1400x1050 on the 14.1 inch lcd display. I run Gentoo Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. I run Linux because it supports all the hardware and peripherals I need. The corporate desktop is Windows 2000. I now run both Windows 2000 and Solaris 9 in vmware. To effectively use Solaris under vmware (in graphical mode) you need the XFree86 vmware video driver. Sun provides all of the XFree86 drivers for Solaris x86 in the binary version of their XFree86 Porting Kit; however they didn't include the vmware driver in their packages. I used their source package to build the porting kit on Solaris 9 x86 and modified the package to include the vmware driver. With the porting kit installed and proper kdmconfig settings you will get reasonable graphics performance.

Notes on Usage

1. Download SUNWxf86u_4.2.0_vmware_sol9x86.pkg.bz2 and SUNWxf86r_4.2.0_vmware_sol9x86.pkg
2. bunzip2 SUNWxf86u_4.2.0_vmware_sol9x86.pkg.bz2

(before you do the remaining steps make sure you remove any other versions of SUNWxf86u and SUNWxf86r that you may have installed.)

3. pkgadd -d SUNWxf86u_4.2.0_vmware_sol9x86.pkg
4. pkgadd -d SUNWxf86r_4.2.0_vmware_sol9x86.pkg
5. Exit graphical mode in Solaris 9 x86 and run kdmconfig as root to setup your graphics, etc. (You need to set your color depth and desktop to the same settings as your host operating system. In my case I am running at 1280x1024 16bit under Linux, therefore my kdmconfig settings are as follows:
   

   [X] MultiFrequency 76kHz (up to 1600x1200 @ 60Hz)
   [X] 14-inch (36cm)
   [X] 1280x1024 - 65536 colors @ 70Hz
   [X] 1280x1024