Re: Installing Solaris from Windows

From: aryzhov (aryzhov_at_my-deja.com)
Date: 07/20/04 

Date: 20 Jul 2004 01:13:31 -0700

Torsten Robitzki <firstname@lastname.de> wrote in message news:<cdh6hk$fe9$06$1@news.t-online.com>...

Good question, makes the fantasy work :-)
Dave is right, setting up a wine box as boot server
may be a bit too challenging. I still would try to investigate
the following:

 - Netra can boot using DHCP/BOOTP instead of RARP/BOOTPARAMS.
   Windows probably can serve DHCP. Not sure about BOOTP.
   Then, you need NFS. Kinda tricky with Windows, but there
   are some solutions around (sunpc? what is it called nowadays?)

 - There is a nice thing called Cygwin, http://cygwin.com/
   that would run a fair piece of Linux from under windows,
   and that piece might be capable of doing RARP/TFTP/BOOTPARMS/NFS
   as well as read ISO images (I didn't check, though).

 - A more reliable way would be to install a normal Linux on a free
   disk partition of Intel box, and configure it either a
   RARP/TFTP/BOOTPARMS/NFS
   or DHCP/TFTP/BOOTP/NFS server. However, accessing the root piece
   of Solaris install CD using Linux's lofi still may be a problem...

 - Download Solaris x86 and install it on a free partition of your Intel
   box. I still doubt you'll be able to read the boot slice of the
   Solaris SPARC CD using Solaris Intel machine... If you really get stuck,
   I can convert that piece to isofs and probably put on the Web
   (after reading the license once again, of course)

I guess it's time for Sun to start thinking about friendly installation
methods for Windows users. This thread is IMHO very important to get some
ideas and progress in this direction. Torsten, could you keep updating us
on how it's going?

Regards,
Andrei