Recently, a friend of mine asked me about setting up Studio 11 in Solaris within VMWare. So, I took some time to build an image for him.
Solaris Express, Developer Edition is easier to install than Solaris 10. It’s almost as simple as keep clicking Next or Enter key until you are done. 
I ran the installation in VMWare Server 1.02 environment. I assume you already familiar with VMWare and skipped a few VMWare setup steps. If you need help with that, read step 1 – 15 in this blog entry. Solaris Express, Developer Edition 02/07 requires 768MB of RAM. So make sure you allocate enough for this VM. Here are the steps:
1. Choose “Solaris Express, Developer Edition” at the boot menu.
2. Choose 1 for Solaris Interactive
3. Press F2 to continue (i.e. keep US-English Keyboard Layout)
4. Press Enter to continue
5. Press Enter to continue
6. Enter 1 for English
7. Select your time zone and click Next
8. Click Next to accept the time
9. Enter root password twice and click Next
10. Check Accept and click Next
11. If you don’t want localization, click click Next. Else, check any additional localization you want before click Next.
12. Click Next to accept the default disk for partition customization
13. Click Next to accept the default primary partition configuration (i.e. the first partition should be Solaris with all the space you allocated for it.)
14. You may either keep the default partition or change it anyway you like. Here is how I did mine: Choose c1t0d0 node and click Modify button. Remove /export/home partition. Specify 4GB for swap (this is necessary if you want to install Java ES 5 later. If not, specify 2 x the amount of RAM you allocated for the VM. If there are still extra space left after specified new swap space, add rest of the free space to root (/). Click OK and then Next.
15. Click Install Now.
16. Click Reboot Now at end of the installation.
On your first boot, you might want to login to the console as root for the system to automatically go through “post install setup”. You might want to also install VMware Tools. If you need help with that, see Appendix A in this blog entry. I had to comment out unwanted extra large resolution listings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf in order to keep the resolution at 1024×768. Perhaps this could be a minor RFE for VMWare team.
links for 2007-04-25 · Mansoor Nathani’s Blog said
[...] Solaris Express, Developer Edition 02/07 in VMware « Dave’s Blogs Solaris Express, Developer Edition is easier to install than Solaris 10. It’s almost as simple as keep clicking Next or Enter key until you are done. I ran the installation in VMWare Server 1.02 environment. I assume you already familiar with VMWare [...]
CB said
The post was very helpful.
Audio on the Sol Dev Express does not seem to work under VMWare (Server running on XP). Any ideas on how to get that working? Says “No volume control Gstreamer plugins and/or devices found”. Is it supposed to work out of the box?
-cb
Dave said
Hi CB,
Thanks for the positive comment. Here are what I found:
“Audio:
Solaris 10 3/05 introduces the “audio810″ driver (AMD 8111/AC97 devices)” source
See also Le’s Blog and Jordi Fernandez Moledo’s Blog for specific audio driver instructions.
Hope this helps and please let me know what worked for you. Thanks.
CB said
No luck yet. I added a sound device to the VM. The sounds card on my laptop is Sound MAX. Did not find an audio driver for it in http://blog.sun.com/roller/resources/le/audio-1.9beta-i86pc.pkg.bz2
Anyone know what driver I should install for SoundMax. The laptop is a Toshiba.
-cb
Dave said
Hi CB,
Looks like it’s not on this list:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sx/components/views/audio_all_results.page1.html
Perhaps the following feedback form might get your voice heard in Sun on the need for th driver:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hclFeedback.html
In addition, the following forum is also THE place to discuss about drivers for OpenSolaris, which is what Solaris is based on.
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=79
I did a search in that forum and didn’t find SoundMax. So, you probably should ask what existing drivers might work with your hardware or ask somebody on that forum to write one for you.
Hope this helps.
CB said
So I guess it is not possible for VMWare to “virtualize” the audio device. Then only 1 driver need be written?
How does VMware handle other devices, like NIC, wireless etc? Does it work because OpenSolaris has drivers for all there?
I am new to virtualization, but I was under the impression, that VMWare worked well, because there was no need to port drivers for it, as it translated between guest OS requirements to the host OS which usually has the drivers for everything.
-cb
Dave said
CB,
Good point. Now that you mentioned “virtualization” feature of Vmware, it reminded me of the mouse driver issue that I had with an early version of Vmware Server. The later release of Vmware Server fixed the mouse driver issue. Perhaps Vmware needs to do a bit of work here too to fix the sound driver issue you are facing.
Here are a few links I found on this:
http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/defect.html
http://www.vmware.com/company/contact.html
There is a “fully pre-installed and pre-configured” Solaris Express Developer Edition 2/07 Vmware image that you can also try:
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/downloads/solaris_apps/index.jsp
I am not sure if the pre-installed image will help, at least it is another option. Hope this helps.
CB said
I got it working. I read somewhere that it is a solaris bug with the release I had. The problem is that the audio device shows up as “muted”. And you could not click on it and “unmute” it.
I was playing around with adding dtrace privileges in /etc/user_attr and had to logout/login to enable it. When I logged back in, the audio was “unmuted”. I went back and disabled dtrace in user_attr, but audio remained “unmuted”. So I think somehow logout/login did the trick.
-cb
Dave said
Hi CB,
It’s great to hear you finally got the sound to work and thanks for sharing your trick. It sounds odd. But, if it worked for you, that’s what matters!
Anton said
Cool!