Part 1: Preparation

To install Solaris 2.6 the interactive way described here you need the CD set Solaris 2.6  Operating Environment - Intel Platform Edition. Its media are best used as ISO image files rather than real discs:

• Floppy Device Configuration Assistant (DCA)
• CD Software
• Local Application CD, optional

The local (self made) CD holds software collected from the Internet and is described in detail in chapter 5. It contains something like:

• Current Patch Cluster
• Netscape Communicator
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Packages from Sunfreware.com
• Many Open Source Software

I currently use VMware Workstation 6.0.4 for Linux. Probably everything here in this document will work exactly the same in older VMware Workstation versions and on VMware Server or Player for both Linux and Windows. My virtual Solaris 2.6 Computer has the following hardware:

• Two IDE hard disks with 8 GByte capacity each, connected to the first IDE channel
• CDROM drive as master on the second IDE channel
• Floppy drive
• Network card in NAT mode (pcnet32)

The maschine type is Solaris 9.

Please note: With recent VMware versions I had trouble getting the network card work in Solaris 2.6. You may notice this when not getting asked for the network parameters during the interactive installation. As a workaround, I recommend to create a custom virtual machine of hardware compatibility type 5 (for Workstation 5.x, Player 1.x, Server 1.x)

Before starting the installation you should collect all necessary network identity and some technical parameters of the new Solaris virtual machine. The example on the following pages will be made for the following values:

Okay, start the virtual computer and insert both the floppy disk DCA and the CD-ROM Software (either the physical medium or the ISO image).