Installing Sun Solaris 8 x86 on VMware Workstation 17
Holy Hell, talk about an exercise in frustration. For one, I never got sound working in Solaris. Now granted, Solaris was much more known for its UNIX workstation capabilities, so multimedia was never going to be the biggest priority in Solaris compared to Windows or Mac OS. However, it still would have been nice, also considering I got sound working on the 86Box setups too.
Beyond that, the base install was very standard, at least by UNIX standards. For the first part of the install, I went with basic 16 color 640 by 480 VGA with a virtual resolution of 800 by 600. For the video to work at this mode, you do have to specify a virtual resolution even if you think its unnecessary. Now granted, in the days before HD, this would have made sense. However, we can take monster resolutions for granted now. But the Sun Solaris installer was a product of its time.
Since I'm using the VMware network adapter, the network is going to conform to the 192.168.15.x convention. Subnet is going to be the standard 255.255.255.0 address. DNS was configured post-install. The setup fails if you try to set it up it during the initial install. After the first part of the install concludes and the workstation restarts, the Solaris Installer will resume, where it will crash shortly thereafter. However, with the core OS already installed, this isn't the biggest of issues. Leave the install ISO in the drive and let the machine restart. After three failed installation attempts, the Solaris Installer will give up and you will be greeted with the main login screen.
Solaris acts very weird with massively delayed keystrokes. Very annoying. At this point, at the console login, press [Enter] to go into the graphical login. Go to the option to go back to the console login and log into the console. From there, just install the XFree86 drivers and OS patches as shown in the video. After the OS patches and drivers are installed, just run the kdmconfig command to reconfigue the Sun Solaris X11 video drivers.
After video is configured, DNS will be configured next. The gateway for the VMware network adapter is 192.168.15.2. From there, you will create the defaultrouter and reslv.conf file in /etc and edit the nsswitch.conf file (in the same directory). Make the appropriate changes as shown in the video and restart the workstation afterwards. From there, you should be able to get on the web (ironic as on 86Box, I got sound working, but not networking).
Also, Sun Solaris doesn't always start up correctly. If this is the case, just restart the VM until Solaris acts the way that it supposed to. Solaris is very weird indeed.
I forgot. Here is the ISO with the custom drivers:
https://archive.org/details/sun-8-dri...
Songs Used:
Acid World By Cactus
(75% Playback Speed)
https://www.exotica.org.uk/mediawiki/...
Cuezo Zaga By Cactus
(70% Playback Speed)
https://www.exotica.org.uk/mediawiki/...
Cold Flame By Snowman
(70% Playback Speed)
https://www.exotica.org.uk/mediawiki/...
Galactic Illusions By Cyrex
(70% Playback Speed)
https://www.exotica.org.uk/mediawiki/...
Getting EED By SoundScript
(70% Playback Speed)
https://www.exotica.org.uk/mediawiki/...
Amiga ExoticA Database
Software Used:
Recorded With OBS Studio
Composed In Kdenlive
Hardware Used:
PC equipped with a
AMD Ryzen 5 5500 CPU
6 Cores Running At 4.2GHz
AMD Radeon RX570 GPU
Windows 11