HOWTO: Solaris 10 in Parallels Desktop 5

[Elric]

This post is about how to make Solaris 10 work in Parallels Desktop 5.0.9220

1) Installing Solaris: The Solaris 10 and current version of PD5 are not in friendly terms on ACPI-tables.

To workaroung it is required to forcibly turn on APIC for VM for the install would be able to proceed:

- Enable APIC for the Solaris VM by opening the VM configuration (menu of Parallels Desktop "Virtual Machine" -> "Configure") -> "Hardware" -> "Boot Order" and entering in the BootFlags line "devices.apic.disable=0" without quotes

After install this flag (see the screenshot) should be enabled back by changing the line to be "devices.apic.disable=1"

How to install network driver:

2) The Solaris 10 in Parallels Desktop 5.0 now boots in 64bit mode. The shipped with Parallels Desktop Solaris Network driver supports 64bit, but some actions should be taken to install it.

Connect to the VM the image "/Library/Parallels/Tools/prl-tools-other.iso". Copy the content of folder "Drivers/Network/RTL8029/SOLARIS" in VM to say /tmp. Edit the file network.sh and add the three following lines just before the line "echo "Compiling driver ...":

PATH=$PATH:/usr/sfw/bin
rm $driver/Makefile
ln -s $tmpdir/$driver/Makefile.amd64_gcc $tmpdir/$driver/Makefile

then execute network.sh under root

This should bring 64bit network driver to the Solaris 10 installation

Alternatively, it is possible to just configure the Solaris to boot into 32bit mode (not covered in this HowTo)

This should make the Solaris 10 VM fully functional under Parallels Desktop 5.0

 

[AntonyA]

Many thanks for the above post!

I was trying to install Solaris 10 and it would freeze every time - until I followed the instructions above which resolved it and got it all working!

The only problem I've got now is that the screen itself is MASSIVE! So big that it has both horizontal and vertical scrollbars, and I don't seem to be able to make the screen smaller.

Anyone got any ideas how to get this to resize into a self-contained window without the scrollbars?

Thanks in advance!

 

[RakeshS]

Solaris on Mac Mini ?

How about using something like Virtualbox or VMware Fusion instead? Virtualbox should run very well with Solaris, Sun and now Oracle made sure of that. Fusion also does a very good job at virtualising non-Windows systems unlike Parallels does. Parallels is fine when you want to run Windows but they still seem to lack a bit in the non-Windows department (Linux is fine though).
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[samparker]

How about using something like Virtualbox or VMware Fusion instead? Virtualbox should run very well with Solaris, Sun and now Oracle made sure of that. Fusion also does a very good job at virtualising non-Windows systems unlike Parallels does. Parallels is fine when you want to run Windows but they still seem to lack a bit in the non-Windows department (Linux is fine though).

thanks for this

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[SpartaM]

thanks for sharing..................