This is actually a good question. Why use Solaris, when you can have Linux? Solaris is a commercial system and the hardware support is scarce. Nevertheless, if you are reading this you have probably already decided on using Solaris. If not, here are some reasons:

This HOWTO tries to help you install Solaris 7, 8, 9 or 10 on an x86 computer already running Linux. The main points are

The reference versions used while creating this document where:

I have updated the information for Solaris 10 based on received feedback.

The information may apply to other versions of the software, or it may be different.

Please back up any data before messing with your system! Many of the procedures described in this document may result in excessive data loss! I am not responsible for any data loss! See also the section called “License”

The standard partition-table has only four entries. The entries important for us are the following:

To find out what partitions are present on your system, use the fdisk program. Partitions numbers 1 to 4 (hda1...4, sda1...4 ...) are the ones in your partition table.

Solaris has its own partitioning scheme. It uses one entry in the partition table, and this entry is and acts as this partition would be the entire disk.

This virtual disk is divided in up to 8 slices. The third slice, s2, covers the complete virtual disk, so you actually have up to 7 slices for Solaris.

Unfortunately, the Solaris partition entry has the same type as a Linux Swap partition (82). Therefore, you should not have any Linux swap partitions as primary partitions. Linux does not care about this, but who knows what Solaris does?

The partition identifier has been changed in Solaris 10 to provide better compatibility with Linux. It is now 0xbf. Solaris still supports the old identifier for compatibility reasons. When installing a new system you should use the new identifier.

Although the Linux fdisk program has some "Sun disklabel" support, this does not seem to help any.

Of course, Solaris needs disk space. The minimum installation of Solaris 8 is about 300 MB. For the normal tools, it is about 700 MB, and for a "developer-system" about 1 GB.

However, this is only the space required for the base installation. You might want to add a lot of GNU-Tools, and other file. In addition, if you want to share data between Solaris and Linux, this has to happen on the Solaris partitions.

You might even think of sharing your home directories between Solaris and Linux. As the time of this writing: Forget it! I messed up my home directory doing so and I was very happy about my backup. See also the section called “Sharing data”

Here is the quick checklist. Make sure you:

Some people do not like building a custom kernel. For those of you: you must build your own kernel if you want to share data between Solaris and Linux on one hard disk. If, however, you do not want to share data, you are safe with your old kernel.

Please note that these instructions where for Linux 2.2 and 2.4 kernels. UFS support has probably improved in newer Linux versions.

Here are your kernel options for "Solaris compatibility":

Additional info about kernel building can be found in the Kernel-HOWTO.

Before messing with your boot loader, please make sure that you have an emergency disk ready that enables you to boot your old system.

Unfortunately, the Solaris install overwrites the master boot record (MBR) and overwrites your old boot manager.

Fortunately, the Solaris boot manager is able to chain-boot. For this to work you have to put your old boot loader (e.g. lilo) into the boot sector of one primary Linux partition.

For lilo, this means: look at your /etc/lilo.conf. Look for the boot= line. If it is something like boot=/dev/hda1 everything is fine. However, if it is something like boot=/dev/hda it points to the MBR. Please change it to point to a primary Linux partition (e.g. boot=/dev/hda1)

A way to check if your boot-loader is chain-loadable is installing lilo in to the MBR and trying to chain load your other boot-manager. I used the following file called lilo.conf.mbr for this:

#lilo.conf.mbr 
#Lilo in Master Boot Record doing nothing but chain-loading another lilo 
boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda5 
install=/boot/boot.b 
map=/boot/map 
vga=ask
delay=50 
other=/dev/hda1 
label=lilochain

You can then run lilo -C lilo.conf.mbr to install lilo into your MBR. In addition, do not forget to run lilo to have lilo in the boot sector of your hard-drive.

If you reboot now, you should have a lilo-prompt. When you select other this chain loads the old lilo, which in turn loads Linux.

The Solaris installation itself is quite straightforward. One thing that might be confusing is the partitioning. Solaris will automatically use all the free space on your hard disk, and create its own virtual disk in it. Moreover, when it comes to slicing up your virtual disk, do not forget to add space for Solaris/Linux exchange. A good place for this is an extra /export/share partition.

Please Note: If you abort during the Solaris installation, the MBR of your hard disk may already be overwritten and you may not be able to boot from the hard disk at all.

I could not get Web-Start to work at all. Please mail me if you have any experience using it.

However, once Solaris was installed, I had no problems adding web-start-packages

Solaris standard installation does not even have a less command. Some people recommend getting the Redhat Package Manager (RPM) for Solaris, but the standard packaging tool will usually do it. You can find many packages at http://www.sunfreeware.com The standard packages can be installed with pkgadd <package>, and the web-start packages with java <packagewithoutclassextension>

The Solaris boot manager gives you a choice to select any of the four primary partitions for booting. If you had your boot loader installed on the boot sector of a primary partition, everything should be fine. Boot from this partition, and Linux should come up.

Now you have lilo as a secondary boot loader, but you want it to be your primary boot loader again? This is no Problem. Lilo can easily chain boot Solaris. Just add the appropriate other= lines to your lilo.conf

For testing, you should add the Solaris chain-loading to the lilo in your boot sector first. Then try chain loading lilo, Solaris, lilo, Solaris ... until you have enough of it. If this works, you should be able to put lilo back into the MBR again.

However, Solaris might have messed up your partition table. This has happened on my system after installation of Solaris€8. Lilo does not like the new partition, nor does fdisk. I had no problems with Solaris€7

According to feedback I have received about grub, booting Solaris with grub works fine.

title Solaris 9 - sdb
        rootnoverify (hd1,0)
        makeactive
        chainloader +1

This will boot Solaris, in this case from hd1,0. You will have to adjust this for your system.

If you have build your kernel with Sun disk label support and UFS support as mentioned in the section called “Building a new kernel”, you are now able to mount your Solaris partitions. During boot up, you should get something similar to:

  hda: [PTBL] [523/255/63] hda1 hda2 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 > hda3 <Polaris: [s0]
  hda9 [s1] hda10 [s2] hda11 [s3] hda12 [s6] hda13 [s7] hda14 >

Meaning (in this case): the third partition (hda3) is a Solaris partition with six slices (s0, s1, s2, s3, s6, s7). They are mapped to Linux devices hda9 to hda14.

Try mounting your Solaris partitions. When mounting UFS partitions, you always have to add an -oufstype= argument, in this case -oufstype=sunx86. Therefore, the command to mount a partition is something like:

  mount -oufstype=sunx86 /dev/hda14 /mnt

Now, test your partition. Please note: The write support on UFS partitions is very experimental. Please do not trust any data you write on your UFS partitions!

If you want your Solaris partitions automatically mounted at boot time, you can add a line like

  /dev/hda14 /solaris ufs ufstype=sunx86 0 0

to your /etc/fstab

In addition, of course there are always other ways of sharing data:

Is supposed to work using a program called "lxrun". I have not got around to testing it yet. See the Solaris web site for more information.

Are as far as I know unsupported.