Solaris 11.1 installation using VirtualBox

This page explains how to install Oracle Solaris 11.1 (text based) on VirtualBox.

Create Solaris 11 Virtual Machine

1. Download the Solaris 11.1 iso file.
2. Open Oracle VirtualBox and click on New.
   
3. Enter the name of your VM. Depending on the name, VirtualBox may autocomplete the Type and Version for you but make sure the Type is Solaris and the Version is Oracle Solaris 10 10/09 and later (64 bit).
4. Select the RAM size in MB. Usually, the recommended size is enough. It can be changed later, but it should not be so small that the OS can't be booted.
5. To add a hard drive, select the default option Create a virtual hard drive unless you have an existing hard drive file you want to use. Select the size according to your requirements.
6. Choose VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) as your hard drive file type. If you are also using VMware Workstation, then you can save it as a VMDK file.
7. Select Dynamically Allocated for the storage on physical hard drive. This ensures that the space will keep filling up during the installation up to a maximum fixed size. Fixed size directly allocates the amount of space specified.
8. Create the VM.
   
   

Adding iso file

1. Go to Settings and select System from the menu on the left. In the Motherboard tab, make sure CD/DVD and Hard Disk are checked and the boot order shows CD/DVD booting before the Hard Disk.
2. To load the iso file, go to Storage, select Empty and click on the CD/DVD icon on the right. Choose the iso file for Solaris.
3. Review other settings before proceeding.
   
   

Installing Solaris

1. Start the Solaris 11 VM.
2. Select keyboard layout and language.
3. Enter 1 to install Oracle Solaris in the installation menu. This gives a screen showing the control keys required.
4. Select Local Disks. It will give you a summary of the hard disk you have selected and will recommend a partitioning arrangement.
5. If you want to change the size of partitions, add or remove partitions, select the second option. Otherwise, use the entire disk.
6. For network configurations, enter a name and a configuration method. Select Automatically to allow automatic set up. You will have to enter the IP Address and other information if you select Manually.
7. Select your region, location and time zone.
8. Enter root password and create a user account. All passwords must include at least one numeric or special character.
9. Provide your email and password if you wish to receive updates via Oracle Support.
10. Select a network configuration. Confirm the details of your installation.
11. The installation will start. At around 99%, the installation may take further 15-20 minutes.
12. To complete the installation, you will have to reboot the VM. Make sure you remove the iso file before rebooting, otherwise it will proceed to the installation instead of booting the hard drive directly.
    
    

Using Solaris

Login with your username and password to start using Solaris. You may face the following issues:

If 'sendmail' has not been configured properly, it might give the error 'unable to qualify my own domain name - using short name'. To disable sendmail, run the command

svcadm disable sendmail

You might need to be a privileged user to install certain packages. To login as root, run the command

su - root

Enter your root password.

Installing a GUI

The version of Solaris 11 that is being used here is a text based version. This means that all you will see is a command prompt. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be separately installed. To upgrade to a Graphical Environment from a text environment we make use of the Solaris Boot Environments. A boot environment is nothing but a bootable instance of a Solaris OS image along with any other application software packages that have been installed into that image.

1. When the command prompt opens you will see 'solaris11 console login:' (solaris11 is my host name). Enter your username and press Enter. Then you will see 'password:'. Type in your password and press Enter. Now you have successfully logged in.

2. Once you log in, run the command and enter your password and you will now be logged onto root and will have superuser privileges.

su

3. To see the boot environment that we start off with by default, run the following command. As we are logged onto 'root' we do not need to use 'sudo' before the command. The output will show the list of boot environments along with some information about them. By default the only boot environment is 'solaris' and in the active column you see 'NR', this indicates that it is active now (N) and that it will be active on the next reboot (R)

 beadm list

BE         Active   Mountpoint   Space   Policy   Created
Solaris    NR       /            2.27G  Static   2015-01-15  20:18

4. Now we create a boot environment for our GUI by running the following command. GUI is the name given to our newly created boot environment.

 beadm create GUI

5. You can see that GUI has been created by running the following command. You will see that GUI has nothing in the 'Active' column. This is because solaris is still active.

beadm list

6. Now we have to mount our graphical boot environment into the /mnt folder.

 beadm mount GUI /mnt

7. Now to install the GUI.

bootadm /mnt install babel_install

8. Once this is done if you see the list of boot environments, you will see the Mountpoint for GUI as '/mnt' and there will be a considerable increase in its 'Space'.

9. Now we must update the boot archive,

bootadm update-archive -R /mnt

10. The next step is to unmount the boot environment,

 beadm umount GUI

11. After this we must activate the GUI boot environment,

 beadm activate GUI

12. If you now run beadm list, you will see an 'R' in the 'Active' column for GUI indicating that it will become active on the next reboot.

13. To check that GUI is marked as the default entry in the grub loader run the following command. You will see a '1' to the left of GUI indicating that it is the default option.

 bootadm list-menu 

14. To enter into the GUI we must reboot the system. To do so, run the following command (-g is for adding grace time, in this case 10 seconds. -i is to indicate the run level, it is set to 6 for reboot)

 shutdown -g 10 -i 6 

15. Now you will see a log in screen appear as you have successfully entered the GUI environment.