OpenSolaris 2008.11 on VMWare - fixing font issues / console corruption on boot
I was testing out OpenSolaris 2008.11 on VMWare (installed on VMWare Fusion 2.0 for OSX). While the LiveCD runs fine, doing an installation to VM results in a machine which boots to a corrupted console and fails to launch X11.
The fix is pretty simple, though, although you need to type fast!
Boot your new VM and select the text console mode. This will still try to launch X11, but it will give you a few seconds to fix the problem.
As soon as you see the login prompt, do the following steps - type fast now:
- Log in using your desktop account (the root account won't log in from console it seems)
- Use "su" to become root
- Type "ln -s /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/misc /etc/X11/fontpath.d/misc"
If you can complete that series of commands before X11 launches, you should get into X.
On my install, after X11 crashed the first time (lacking the correct fonts) it also caused some kind of console corruption which prevented me being able to do anything useful. This last might be an issue specific to running OSol 2008.11 on the Mac.
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Running both VmWare WS 6.5
Running both VmWare WS 6.5 and 6.0.4 on 32-bit WinXP and got the same issue. Info on booting into single-user mode can be found on http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/boot_into_single_user_mode
Thanks!
That tip fixed me up here.
After an attempt to beat the clock typing this in before X11 started, we went for a single user mode boot and did the link at our leisure...
From GRUB menu, press "e" to enter edit mode and then hit "e" again to edit the "kernel" line. Add " -m milestone=single-user" to the end of the line. Press return and "b" to boot into single user mode
Then followed your instructions.
Worked like a charm.
Thanks again!
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