As this is my last week working at the University of Hertfordshire (after nearly six years) I decided to upgrade my miniboot system while I still have access to Sun hardware. It took a good few hours but the new version will install a minimal version of Solaris 10 onto a spare disk slice on an Ultra 5 and takes up just 111MB. As before it supports basic IP networking and X11.
There was one small problem with "myinstall" which was easy to fix (setting $PROD wasn't working because it was expecting the Solaris version number to be a single digit) and I ended up having to add eight additional packages to "pkgs-32" in order to get everything running (although there were two which might not have been strictly necessary). Expect a few error messages during the first boot - they are not serious but you might want to try debugging them. Enjoy!
In 2002 I developed a script to install a minimal version of Solaris on a spare disk slice. The install procedure is stripped to the bone and it creates a small, fast booting system that does not use any of the standard rc scripts. I tested it again today by putting Solaris 9 4/03 on a spare 100 MB disk slice on my Ultra 5. It booted fine, and gave me a usable system with fully functional network connection and X server. I embarked on the project for purely educational reasons - if you want to play with it then download miniboot.tar and have fun! These are the files you will get:
.profile - just adds /usr/openwin/bin to $PATH
.xinitrc - xinit config file
README - instructions
inittab - my custom inittab
myadmin - stops pkgadd from prompting
myinstall - my install script
pkgs-32 - list of 32 bit packages to install
rcD - my custom shutdown script
rcU - my custom startup script
www.zenatode.org.uk Ian Gregory 2010