Q & Summary: Upgrading Sol 2.5.1 to 2.6

From: Jim Harmon (jharmon@telecnnct.com)
Date: Mon Oct 13 1997 - 17:16:11 CDT


Hi all,

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



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