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Posting here instead of unix exchange because although unix is the suject, this should apply to other non-nix OSs.

Our development team has been asked to automate some tasks that happen to interact with an industrial equipment running, get this, Solaris 2.5.1, which as far as i can tell is equivalent to SunOS 5.5.1. considering none of them are experienced with this version of solaris, which came out in 1995, I am now tasked to provide a development environment, including a VM or otherwise a machine running that version of Solaris.

I have acquired an iso for the install CD, along with images of the 3 boot floppies that came with the CD. I managed to boot by following the official doc for installing that version (put floppy 1, then 2, then 3 + CD and boot into the CD from floppy 3). i originally experienced a problem when first booting into the CD, where the hyper-V VM would crash when launching the installer. I have fixed that by reducing the max amount of memory allowed in NUMA settings from all 256GB to only 512MB.

Now the installer (sometimes) boots correctly, but the display is all wrong. I can just about make out the "F2 continue" prompt, so i can technically go through the installer, but selection any option is hell and i'm not even sure that the options are displayed next to their appropriate checkboxes. I'm pretty sure at some point i'm being asked to select graphical options but there are upwards of 50 of them and I can't read half of them.

The screenshot shown is the interactive installer. the installer can also use a jumpstart script, which I don't have nor know how to acquire. I suspect there might be a resolution for my problem here, but it's ever so slightly out of my reach.

My question is: Is there any way for me to somehow load or otherwise enforce drivers in order for hyper-V to correctly interpret the display information being sent out by Solaris? Am i just better off finding an early 2000s machine and trying to install it on there? I expect this problem is not exclusive to Solaris but is just an artifact of old OSs not quite being compatible with modern hosts.

Some extra info:

  • host is Win server 2012 R2, Hyper-V. The VM is running in a cluster, if that matters.
  • the VM is Gen 1 and has 1 core and 512 MB of ram assigned, dynamic allocation off, Hyper-v compatibility mode on, NUMA settings are 1 core, 512 MB RAM.
Luis Daniel Albarran
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Themoonisacheese
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    First question - is the original system running Solaris 2.5.1 for x86 or SPARC - I was in a similar situation a few years ago and our system was on SPARC so that massively limited my options. I find VMware ESXi not bad at all for running x86 versions if that helps. – Chopper3 Mar 04 '22 at 09:42
  • Have you tried to use `qemu` or `virtualbox` virtualization rather than `hyper-v`? – shodanshok Mar 04 '22 at 09:55
  • Chopper3: it is an x86 disc, as obviously a version compiled for SPARC has no way to boot on a x86_64 hypervisor @shodanshok : i have tried our Hyper-V cluster and VMWare workstation player (same crash as before the NUMA adjustments, but i can't modify those settings there) but not virtualbox nor qemu. i might set up a proxmox machine for easier qemu, i think it's my best bet. – Themoonisacheese Mar 04 '22 at 10:04
  • I have spent the afternoon trying to get it working under qemu, here's how it went: proxmox is no go, since you can't use floppies (you can but not really). i used virt-manager, but i can't manage to boot properly from floppy3>CD without being dropped in a grub-like shell with "bogus filesystem". i have already spent more time on this than is comfortable for my managers, so i'll call it a loss for now unless someone has stroke of genius on this. the devs are going to have to be careful with the production system, eventually break something and prompt the brass to buy a newer machine. – Themoonisacheese Mar 04 '22 at 14:55
  • Try ESXi, the free version – Chopper3 Mar 04 '22 at 15:02
  • Solaris 2.5.1 on x86 was ***extremely*** rare. Are you ***sure*** the system is x86 and not a SPARC system? If it is x86, there's a really good chance it'll run on Solaris 11.4 on a new x86 system. Solaris isn't Linux - Solaris has **real** compatibility guarantees. Per [**Oracle Solaris Guarantee Program (valid for Oracle Solaris lifetime)**](https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/solaris-guarantee-program-1426902.pdf): – Andrew Henle Mar 05 '22 at 14:25
  • (cont) "A binary application built on Solaris 2.6 or later that makes use of operating system interfaces as defined in stability.7 run on subsequent releases of Oracle Solaris, including their initial releases and all updates, even if the application has not been recompiled for those latest releases." Solaris 2.5.1 isn't far off 2.6, so there's a really good chance you can run your old binaries on a new instance of Solaris 11.4, either SPARC or x86 as your old binaries require. – Andrew Henle Mar 05 '22 at 14:25

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