I’ve been looking at picking up a used Sun Sparcstation from eBay. It occurred to me that I’ve never installed an early version of Solaris before, so wondered if I could give it a try under QEMU since it’s emulates different hardware, including Sparc.
There’s an awesome step by step guide on Adafruit that takes you precisely each step to get Solairs installed un QEMU. You can follow the steps in their article here, so I won’t repeat all the steps here.
The key steps before you get to the install are creating a disk image:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 sparc.qcow2 9663676416
and then booting with the Solaris iso image as the cdrom and the disk image attached:
qemu-system-sparc -M SS-5 -m 128 -drive file=sparc.qcow2,bus=0,unit=0,media=disk -drive file=solaris_2.6_598_sparc.iso,bus=0,unit=2,media=cdrom,readonly=on
After this point it’s following through the steps in the install. From the openboot ok prompt, start the boot from the cd image:
boot cdrom:d -vs
-vs here boots to a single user mode where you can format the disk first, before rebooting again without the -vs option and continuing with the install. The install will not continue if it detects the qemu disk is not formatted yet.
The commands needed to initialised the disk:
drvconfig disks format
From the Adafruit article, here’s the params for the format you need:
Specify disk (enter its number): 0
Specify disk type (enter its number): 16
Enter number of data cylinders: 16381
...defaults are fine here...
Enter number of heads: 16
...
Enter number of data sectors/track: 63
...
Enter disk type name (remember quotes): Qemu9G
Here’s qemu booting up for the first time:
Here’s the Solaris installer starting up:
After the install had completed, here’s the rather impressive for it’s time CDE desktop:
