Yesterday, I tried to install Solaris 9 on my old Sparcstation 10. Certainly this is not the hardware this OS was developed for (the installer complained about not enough memory, 96MB being the minimum), and two SM51 CPUs are not blindingly fast either. Nevertheless, when booting from the Software CD 1, the installer starts and works without problems. Because I don't have too much disk space either, I chose only the core install with a few additions (thankfully, the Solaris installation CD now contains a lot of basic tools that had to be built from scratch in earlier days, like a quite current perl. tcsh, wget, ncftp, less).
All in all, including package selection, installing the first CD needs about 1 1/2 hours on this hardware (and with a 2x CDROM drive). Eveything looks fine until this message comes up right before the final reboot:
Unable to run Launcher without Java.
The following CDs will not be installed: Solaris 9 Software 2 of 2 (12/03 SPARC Platform Edition)
syncing file systems... done
At no time before that point the installer complained that java was a required package for the installation to complete. Ok, the system was bootable at that point, but it's a quite bare basic solaris install without all the fine goodies (and without manpages and development libraries). Great.
I went home and watched some TV.
All in all, including package selection, installing the first CD needs about 1 1/2 hours on this hardware (and with a 2x CDROM drive). Eveything looks fine until this message comes up right before the final reboot:
Unable to run Launcher without Java.
The following CDs will not be installed: Solaris 9 Software 2 of 2 (12/03 SPARC Platform Edition)
syncing file systems... done
At no time before that point the installer complained that java was a required package for the installation to complete. Ok, the system was bootable at that point, but it's a quite bare basic solaris install without all the fine goodies (and without manpages and development libraries). Great.
I went home and watched some TV.