unix – Kev's Development Toolbox

June 3, 2026June 10, 2026

Installing Solaris 8 for Sparc using qemu

Following on from a previous post on installing Solaris on an emulated Spacrstation using QEMU, I’ve been attempting to install on a Sun Ultra 5 with a flakey cdrom drive, and wanted to step through the install steps first on an emulated machine (since the life of the used cdrom drive I picked up from ebay may be limited).

qemu-system-sparc -M SS-20 -m 128 -drive file=sparc_sol8_2.qcow2,bus=0,unit=0,media=disk -drive file=../solaris8_sparc_disk1.iso,bus=0,unit=1,media=cdrom,readonly=on

Adding -nographics option to the above command makes things little easier, since we don’t really need the graphical installer at this point, and this more closely mirrors what I’m seeing with my attempted install on the actual Ultra 5 which I’m installing over a text terminal connected to the serial port.

After reaching the openbios prompt, booting with boot cdrom:d -vs gets you to a Single User prompt where you can continue the required steps to format the disk first, before rebooting and continuing without the -vs option.

After boot:d :

Skipped a few steps, confirming network config.

This is the step I’m interested in using as a workaround for the flakey cdrom drive. Can I mount an NFS drive containing the content of the install cdrom and install from the network? (I’ve already gone down the path of trying to setup a jumpstart/netboot config and couldn’t get the machine to find a netboot host, so that din’t turn out to be a workable option) :

I couldn’t get this to connect to my NFS share on another Solaris 10 VM, so not sure this was as useful as I thought it might be, but I could continue and complete the install anyway.

April 13, 2026April 13, 2026

Assigned IP address on Solaris

Use ifconfig (similar to Linux), but if it’s not in your user’s path:

/usr/sbin/ifconfig -a

January 17, 2021January 17, 2021

Creating a new user on Solaris 10

useradd -d /export/home/userlogon -m -s /bin/bash userlogon

-d = home directory path

-m = create if it doesn’t exist

-s = set shell

March 7, 2020March 7, 2020

Installing SunPCI 1.3 software on Solaris 10: x86 PC single board computer in a SPARC machine

The SunPCI single board computer is an interesting piece of hardware. This was a self-contained x86 PC on a single card that could be installed in Sun Ultra machines, that along with supporting software allowed you to install any operating system that required x86 hardware and run it on your Sun SPARC machine alongside whatever you were natively running on SPARC, such as Solaris.

Rather than x86 emulation, this approach provided a real x86 CPU and everything you’d expect in a typical PC compatible machine, all on a single card.

I recently picked up a Sun Ultra 60 and was lucky that it came with a SunPCI card. After I did a fresh Solaris 10 install, I needed to find the SunPCI software and drivers which didn’t come with Solaris 10. I Googled for a while and found a link to an FTP site that had the SunPCI software… trouble is this was a couple of months ago, and I’ve since gone back to try and find the same site to include a link but I think the site has recently gone down…

The official product manuals are still available and can be downloaded from Oracle here:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/F24621_01/index.html

Getting started with the install steps, I cd’d into the folder after I’d untar’d it, and then ran pkgadd -d to start the install:

After the install completed I got this error that the SunPCI driver was not installed:

cd into /opt/SUNWspci and run ./sunpci – this tells you to run sunpcload to load the drivers:

This error about not finding the .2100 driver files is mentioned in a few posts, and most suggest (like here) to just symlink the missing filename to the same corresponding named .280 files like this:

Now it starts up and prompts to create a new C: disk image:

Create a disk large enough for whatever you’re going to install:

Booting up the card, you can see the hardware specs from the BIOS screens as it boots up – this is a v1 (I think) SunPCI board with and AMD K6 at 300MHz:

The mounted cd-rom drive appears in the SunPCI machine as drive R:, so cd’ing into the root of the Windows 95 cd install cdrom here, and run setup.exe to start the install:

Windows 95 starts running!

After Windows 95 install, install the SunPCI drivers for Windows 95, these are to support the onboard video, etc on the SunPCI card :

At this point I have Windows 95 running on my SunPCI card! Apparently you can either run with a monitor connected directly to the VGA output on the board, or run within Solaris in a window sharing the same display. I haven’t tried the dedicated monitor option yet, I’ll look into this next!