Well, after a bit of fussing, fighting, kicking and screaming, Sparky, my old dual-processor SPARCstation 10 is back up. His hard drive crashed about a year and a half ago, and being the procrastinator I am, it's taken me this long to put a new one in and reinstall Solaris. Of course, I complicated it by trying to use my nice Sun 18.1 LCD panel as my monitor while doing this. Problem is, Solaris defaults to a graphical install if you have a framebuffer, and the default resolution/frequency of the graphics subsystem is wrong for the LCD panel. Result: endless frustration.

But I did finally figure out that, if I held my mouth just right, I could Ctrl-C the setup process before it goes into the OpenWindows install. Once I was at the command line, I hunted for an install program, and found one at /sbin/suninstall. This app is the character-mode install (Sun calls it CLI). I got Solaris installed without problem using this guy.

However, there's the problem of Solaris going to dtlogin immediately after startup, and that process is not breakable, unfortunately. So, my hope of dumping my ancient, screwed-up Sun tube in favor of the LCD has died along with my enthusiasm for figuring this sort of thing out.

At least I'm now set to make sparky a mirror of buzz, my Apache server. That is an interesting problem and will help me maximize uptime for my loyal reader (that's right - no 's').