Unflushed Buffers

The development box is an old 1.6Ghz AMD Athlon with 512mb RAM. So when I booted the Solaris install DVD I got dissed saying it needed minimum 768Mb RAM. Woah! I thought.. that’s pricey.. but it turns out that’s only necessary for the Java based installer (yep java is a memory hog).

So boot with the 2nd option in grub, and then select the 4th option for Solaris Interactive Install (Console session). It’s a straightforward text based installer and works a treat. When rebooting, XWindows and Gnome all work fine and reasonable performance. I won’t be doing much with Java at the moment.

Update: Later I downloaded build 86 of the Solaris Community Edition and the upgrade process via the text installer worked with no problems either. Just answer all the questions and go out for lunch while it works on replacing everything. Apparently if I’d used a hard drive bigger than 20gb (the only one I had lying around the place) it would install the upgrade on another partition and I could choose between the upgrade or original when rebooting.