Yesterday I decided to try out the live cd of Opensolaris 2008.05 and decided to install it on my laptop after playing around with it for some time. The install process was painfully slow, but was very easy. If you already had Ubuntu (or any other OS for that matter), then OpenSolaris’s Grub menu would not have autodetected the other OS like Ubuntu does. There would be only one single entry for Open Solaris.
I wanted my Ubuntu back and so searched the web for info regarding this and found one. He has given steps to first install Solaris and then Ubuntu, but this holds true the other way round too.
You would need the desktop live CD of Ubuntu for this, so that you can recover Ubuntu’s grub.
- After booting to Ubuntu Live system, open up the terminal and type
sudo grub. - You will get a grub prompt - here type
find /boot/grub/stage1
- Use this information to set the root device (this may be different for you)
root (hd0,0)
- Then install grub
setup (hd0)
- And
quit
This would get back the Ubuntu’s old grub, but now you have to make an entry for OpenSolaris.
Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add this new entry at the bottom
title Open Solaris root (hd0,1) chainloader +1 makeactive boot
This would enable you to boot to Open Solaris too now. There were problems with my Atheros drivers as usual and I have to find a way to install the madwifi drivers as I did on my Ubuntu. If anyone got wifi working on Acer Aspire 5050 with OpenSolaris, please do leave a comment here.
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I had 8.10 Ubuntu installed and tried opensolaris. My laptop is an Acer Aspire 5100 and wireless worked fine - for a time.
I installed a few things, namely webmin, openoffice and possibly ssh and now the internet connection is dead. How this happened is anyone’s guess so I am now toying with the idea of bringing my Ubuntu back to life.
Will post back if I get anywhere…