Q & Summary: Upgrading Sol 2.5.1 to 2.6
First, I'd like to offer some notes about my upgrade of Solaris from
2.5.1 to 2.6.
SUMMARY:
SPARCStation5, 64MB RAM, (2) 1GB HD's, external CD
Solaris 2.5.1, full recommended patches.
Numerous GNU packages installed.
Cool things:
o The cdrom-boot install program easily determined that
my existing partitions were inadequate to install the
"Full install" upgrade of 2.6
o The upgrade program recognized all existing patches,
and identified all existing Solaris stuff.
o The upgrade program has the ability to let you
reconfigure the EXISTING partitions as PART of the
upgrades, using NFS, rcp, or other means, and the
repartition utility allows the user to modify the
constraints to setup the partitions, similar to
a freshly-initialized disk.
(I didn't try the web-install interface, but hear it's really
good.)
NOT so cool things:
o The calculated partitions were not big enough, and a
number of packages (32 of them) weren't added the
first time I tried the upgrade.
(almost all in the /usr partition.)
o The documentation says the install program will
recognize a failed or incompleted installation, and
will restart the install at the point where it failed.
It doesn't. It began a complete upgrade installation
the second time I ran the program.
o The second time through, only (2) packages didn't
have room to install. (this is because the installer
renamed all the existing man-pages and other files
as "<file>:2.6", taking up twice the space it needed
to.)
o The upgrade program takes much more than the 2 hours
they claim, especially if you use a 2x CD and
repartition interactively.
o The documentation does NOT tell you how to load
individual packages FROM THE SOLARIS INSTALL CD.
The instructions DO show how to install from any OTHER
pkgadd-ready CD.
o The Solaris 2.6 INSTALL CD does not allow interactive
access to the file systems when you have automounter
and vold running (multiuser mode) You HAVE to be in
the CD-Boot environment to see the filesystems and
find the individual packages.
More COOL stuff:
o The Install environment (available after the install
and before reboot) is rich enough to use most of the
basic Solaris (SysV) commands, including ln (I moved
my /usr/share directory to the second disk, /usr1/share
and then symlink'd /usr1/share back to /usr/share) and
pkgadd will work IF YOU ADD the "-a none" option, to
override the default installation path info (admin dir)
which was necessary to allow me to specify the file-
systems I wanted to get the pkg's from and where to
install them.
(This allowed me to add JUST the two failed packages
without reinstalling everything after moving the
/usr/share stuff. --man pages mostly)
o The summary files are VERY clear and easy to use for
identifying any failed modules and how to fix them.
(These are VERBOSE to the max.)
Now my question:
I'm getting a couple odd messages... I run Netscape 3.0
on a SPARCServer, redirecting the gui to my SparcStation.
(set DISPLAY=hostname:0.0;export DISPLAY)
When I start Netscape I get a message that the "Insert Key"
binding couldn't be made.
Any ideas how to correct that?
Thanks all...
--
Jim Harmon The Telephone Connection
jim@telecnnct.com Rockville, Maryland
