Sun provided a lot of information in the manuals with no less than 1600 pages in the two administrator guides alone:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19695-01/index.html
There is an Installing Solaris Software manual, but for an interactive install from CD it largely relies on the installer on the CD.
I added a SCSI2SD SCSI emulator to the empty disk enclosure in preparation for loading an operating system. The original hard disk in the IPX may be ok, but i figured i would cut to the car chase.
At power on, the machine starts a memory test and then eventually video comes up on the display. If no keyboard is connected, then the display will stay black and the serial port will become the console.
After resetting the NVRAM the system default to a net boot. This can be interrupted with Stop-A and the following options are presented:
Type b (boot), c (continued), or n (new command mode) >
“n” enters the Forth monitor, where there are many commands and configuration options, including boot options and diagnostic tests.
Sun (and SGI) had very thorough software documentation; very little is missed. But it’s voluminous! It really takes a lot of reading to be able to work through the operatig system ad set up.
I was able to find SunOS 4.1 (Solaris 1) and various Solaris 2 CD images online. Having created Solaris 2.4 CDs i attempted to boot from CD. No go. I was able to boot from a Linux CD which i found curious.
There are reports that PROM 2.4 is required to boot from CDs that use 2048B sectors. I only had 2.3. I thought that could be the issue.
Apparently, these machines used CDROM drives that only read 512B CDs. I tried SunOS 4.1, but again no success.
I figured there was no harm in trying the second drive and curiously, with this drive, it worked. Drive model TBC. I am at a loss to explain how the Linux CD booted if the others could not.
I went ahead and installed Solaris 2.4 as an exercise. I found the available software was not great for any version of Solaris, but it was better for 2.5.1 than for 2.4.
The IPX was already 5 years old by the time Solaris 2.5.1 was released, so i was concerned that it would be a struggle, and it is. It would be hard to use as a primary machine.
I set up two disks on a 16GB SD card. Each disk (SCSI ID 1 and SCSI ID 2) has 7.75GB (7.217GiB). i used the following parameters during installation:
512B/sector
18 heads
196 sectors
4290 cylinders 4288 + 2 spare
Total sectors = 15135120
One cylinder =196 x 18 x 512 = 1.81MBThe disk needs a label before the installation, otherwise it fails.
I kept getting an error when I tried to allocate disk space during the install, so I crashed out to the installation shell, and then partitioned manually using format.
I found it very difficult to determine appropriate partition sizes. I used these:
| Partition | Name | Approx size (MB) | Cylinders | Start Cylinder |
| 0 | /root | 23 | 13 | 0 |
| 1 | /swap | 76 | 42 | 14 |
| 2 | 200 | 111 | 56 | |
| 3 | /usr/openwin | 200 | 111 | 167 |
| 4 | /var | 1000 | 556 | 278 |
| 5 | /opt | 2000 | 1112 | 834 |
| 6 | /usr | 2000 | 1112 | 1946 |
| 7 | /export/home | 1000 | 1230 | 3058 |
Some handy bibs and bobs:
- Add users: admintool&
- Install package: admintool&
- Check disk space: df
- Root Home Directory: /
- Home directories: /export/home/<username>
- Environment variable: $HOME
- Use the admintool to create accounts: admintool&
- Use Bourne shell. Configure: $HOME/.profile
- Init change run level : init <run level>
- Shutdown is level 0
- Single user is level S
- Normal operation is level 3
- CD-ROM: /cdrom
- Floppy Disk Drive: /floppy
- Eject CD/Floppy from file manager
- Package distributions located at: /opt/software Start openwindows: /usr/openwin/bin/openwin
Boot instructions:
- Power on peripherals including external drive unit with scsi2sd card
- Power on – long wait for display to come up
- Stop-A
- n
- boot disk1
- login root/<password>
- /usr/openwin/bin/openwin
The SD card can be backed up using DD on a modern machine.