Notes on upgrading to Solaris 11

This is just a posting about the snags I encountered while upgrading from Solaris 11 Express to Solaris 11 11/11. The biggest problem that I encountered is that I simply could not upgrade using the package upgrade utility. It would install everything fine, but once rebooted grub would complain about a missing kernel (which has a Xen label buried in it). So I decided to try to use Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Automated Installer. That would be mistake number 2.

The automated installer not only blew away all my partitions, but, I discovered painfully, is missing more than half the packages needed to get X running (note to Oracle: I hate you). My first thought was to download the repo images on the download page and the missing binaries would be on there. No go.

The solution to getting X working on Solaris is making sure your network connection works (at least the automated installer got the config files right - mostly) and using pkg list -a. You will need to install practically everything remotely related to X including the themes and the display drivers (why does an over the wire automated installer NOT do this for me?) before you can get X working. Once you've got the X working you can then leisurely install any and all remaining packages using the graphical installer.

HOWTO install Oracle Studio 12.3Beta on Solaris 11 using pkg (NOT tgz)

The normal installer is broken so installing via GUI is not possible. However, I did some digging and a bit of guesswork which resulted in me finding the solution. The first part of the solution is to extract the installer files from the shar that you downloaded from Oracle (SolarisStudio12.3-beta-solaris-x86.sh in my case) which is accomplished by running: sh ./SolarisStudio12.3-beta-solaris-x86.sh --extract-installation-data .

This will result in 20 different files being unpacked in to the current directory. To install them you need to call them using: pkgadd -d filename. Filename is replace by each of the 20 files such as cc, c++, etc.

Kudos to Tech-Recipes for the pkgadd command. http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/350/install-a-solaris-datastream-package/

HOWTO get Drivel working with Blogger/Blogspot

I was tearing my hair out trying to find the answer to this one because I want/need to use Drivel for posting unless I want to logout of my Google apps account. I couldn't get it going until I found this on the Drivel mailing list (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/drivel-list/2010-July/msg00002.html):
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blogger.com does not work as Blogger 2.0, only as blogger 1.0. I've just tested this: http://drivel-dev.blogspot.com/2010/07/another-test-for-blogger-10.html Change to Blogger 1.0, drivel will then select: http://www.blogger.com/api/RPC2 for the server address.
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Major kudos to Neil Williams.