Solaris on Tecra 550CDT: Basic Installation

• In PC CARD section, change the value for parameter Controller Mode to PCIC Compatible; otherwise you won't be able to use PCMCIA cards in Solaris.

• Disable on-board serial port and built-in modem by setting parameters Serial and Built-in Modem in section I/O PORTS to Not Used; this will free up two IRQs - 4 and 3, resp. - that you'll need later for additional PCMCIA network and modem cards (or a combo card).

Just in case, here you can find the full listing of Tecra BIOS settings currently in effect on my laptop. Not everything should be copied literally, of course, but at least you'll have an example of knowingly working configuration.

As soon as you're done with BIOS setup, the basic installation (of everything that comes on the OS CD ROM) of Solaris/x86 2.6/7 goes smoothly and without any surprises. Tecra presents its external floppy drive as a regular floppy, so you can boot from it and subsequently access in a usual way. Solaris installation mini-kernel correctly identifies both IDE controllers with HD (primary master) and CD ROM (secondary master).

I did two installations: with and without Windows95 OSR partition. I'm not an expert at all in multi-boot configurations, but having both OS was really easy. This is how I did it (of course, it doesn't mean that this is the only way of accomplishing the task):

• Boot anything that has fdisk-style utility and remove all partitions. (I wanted a better OS layout than 2G for Windows and 2G for Solaris that could be achieved by preserving the factory set partitioning scheme).

• Install Windows95 creating for it partition of the desirable size (I decided that 500M will be quite enough).

• Install Solaris creating UNIX partition for it on the rest of the hard drive.

Actually, that was it: at boot time I had Solaris boot manager menu to chose either Windows95 or Solaris. Just in case, here goes a fdisk output showing the disk partitioning for that dual-boot configuration:

       Total disk size is 990 cylinders
       Cylinder size is 8064 (512 byte) blocks
                                 Cylinders
Partition  Status  Type     Start  End  Length   %
=========  ======  =======  =====  ===  ======  ===
    1              DOS-BIG      0  152    153    15
    2      Active  Solaris    153  988    836    84

Now, back to Solaris installation. There're two components whose configuration must be bypassed (deferred) and done later.

One is the video system. Both Solaris/x86 2.6 (even with DU3) and 7 don't support S3 Virge/MX chipset used in Tecra 550CDT, so you'll want to either perform installation in character mode, or initially configure X Window system for standard VGA (640x480x16). Note that Solaris doesn't look terribly attractive (and I'd say is not very useable) in plain VGA mode, but for the installation it's more or less OK. The actual/final configuration of the video system will take place later, as a part of installation procedure for X server you chose to run.

Second is the PCMCIA network (and modem as well) card. Solaris.x86 installation mini-kernel doesn't include support for PCMCIA services, so even if you have a card in the slot, it won't be recognized/utilized until after you boot the "full-blown" OS from the hard drive. What that means is that you install the OS as a standalone (non-networked) configuration, do reboot (after which your PCMCIA network card will, or at least should as long as it's supported by Solaris, be recognized) and then run the usual sequence sys-unconfig/reboot to configure your freshly installed system as networked.

Adding network support can be done manually, without doing sys-unconfig (which is a rather drastic measure by itself); if you want details on the procedure, email me or run a search across DejaNews archives: this topic has been discussed quite a few times on USENET already.