Solaris Nevada b45 on Acer Travelmate 4151LCi installation notes

A couple of days ago I have just finished installing Solaris Nevada build 45 on the company Acer Travelmate 4151LCi. Just want to share what I went through. I was trying to see if this release can be use as daily desktop with a bit of effort.

1. Install Solaris Nevada build 45 (snv_45) on Acer Travelmate 4151LCi
There are two important thing when installing snv_45 on Acer Travelmate 415iLCi :
- We need to set acpi-user-options parameter in the grub entry. If we do not set this parameter then snv_45 will hang showing some warning about EHCI0 controller is unusable. Later after we finish installing we need to edit the menu.lst file in /boot/grub directory to apply the same parameter each time the notebook is booted.

Boot option: -B boot-media=cdrom,acpi-user-options=0×8

To edit, just press ‘e’ at the boot screen OS selection, select the entry you want to edit and press ‘e’ again.

The fact that I have to use legacy mode for ACPI settings, makes me unable to use the wifi adapter comes builtin with Acer Travelmate 4151LCi, I believe this is a regression bug, since on earlier nevada version (snv_22) I have been able to install and boot without disabling the ACPI mode on the exact same notebook.

- Graphical settings. On Acer Travelmate 4151LCi snv_45 autodetect the graphic adapter to use XFree Intel i915 GM, however those auto detected setting doesn’t work. We have to change the settings to use VESA version of the XFree Intel i915 GM.
Don’t forget to select the correct monitor size and the 1024×768 with 24 bit color.

Monitor : XVGA LCD Panel
Size : 15″
Driver : XFree VESA Intel i915GM
Resolution : 1024×768@1.6M colors

After the two settings above, the rest is easy, just choosing the hostname, root password, date, GMT, and partition in which you want to install Solaris. There is a setting to preserve the other partition contents. Choose this setting if you are installing snv_45 on a laptop multiboot with other OSes.

2. Installing network driver bfe-2.3.0 The installer will reboot after the installation is finished. And since the bfe driver (for integrated Broadcomm ethernet in the travelmate 4151LCi is not bundled, I downloaded it from :
http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/bfe-2.3.0a.tar.gz.
Just uncompress the file and follow the directions in the README.txt and you should be fine. This driver previously called the bfc driver. It is renamed to bfe in the newer release for the sake of consistency.
3. Update Firefox and change the short-cut firefox icon.
Solaris Nevada build 45 comes bundled with Firefox 1.5.0.2, I wonder why the icons didn’t show the fox, only the globe so I decide to upgrade it to the latest firefox available for Solaris 10 x86 by the time I wrote this notes.
I downloaded the pkg version of firefox 1.5.0.5 from
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5/contrib/solaris_pkgadd/firefox-1.5.en-US.solaris2.10-i386-pkg.tar.bz2
I decided not to uninstall the bundled firefox, because it is needed for some other package dependency. The newer firefox will be installed in different directory anyway.

To update the icon, I login as root, rename firefox-icon.png in /usr/share/pixmaps to firefox-icon.ori.png then I go to /usr/sfw/firefox/icons, open the mozicon50.xpm with GIMP and saved it as /usr/share/pixmaps/firefox-icon.png

To edit the shortcut I go to /usr/share/applications and edit firefox.desktop using vi to point to /usr/sfw/firefox/bin/firefox

5. Personalize login screen
I want to be able to personalize the login screen, and gdm is much more easy to personalize with many GDM themes available from http://art.gnome.org or http://www.gnome-look.org
If you want to use GDM themes especially made for Solaris you can download from Chandan’s blog
http://blogs.sun.com/chandan/category/Art
Before you can use gdm, you must first disable Solaris default login manager which is dtlogin.
To disable dtlogin just type this command as root
# /usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d
The second step is to enable gdm. An SMF xml manifest is already available located in
/var/svc/manifest/application/graphical-login
Import the xml manifest to create gdm services that can be managed by SMF using this commands
# cd /var/svc/manifest/application/graphical-login
# svccfg import ./gdm.xml
After gdm is registered as a service, we can enable it using this command :
# svcadm enable gdm
If you are root, you can choose GDM themes by calling gdmsetup
# gdmsetup
From the GUI, you can choose from the available GDM themes or add new themes from the gdm theme files that you can download from either art.gnome.org or www.gnome-look.org or chandan’s blogs.
I have modified a GDM theme from Chandan, the original one has Acer Ferrari as the background, whereas mine only has Acer Travelmate 4150i in it.
The theme has a picture of Sunray smart card/ID card in which you can put your personal photo in using GIMP.

Note: on snv_22 and Solaris 10, you don’t need to import the xml SMF manifest for gdm. You just have to enable it with this command :

# svcadm enable gdm2-login

6. Enable shutdown and reboot menu from login screen.
By default, when we enable gdm login in Solaris, the shutdown and reboot menu is disabled. Since this laptop is not a server and I want to be able to shutdown or reboot without login first as root. Here are the steps if any of you also have the same need:
First we copy the gdm factory default to /etc/X11/gdm
# cp /usr/share/gdm/factory-defaults.conf /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf
Second, using vi or gedit, edit the /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf
Search for the lines that contains “SystemMenu”
edit it to
SystemMenu=true
Next, search for the lines contain “RebootCommand”
Edit it to
RebootCommand=/usr/sbin/reboot
Next, search for the lines contain “HaltCommand”
Edit it to
HaltCommand=/usr/sbin/init 0
Now from the login screen I can click “Option” button and choose Shutdown or Restart.

7. Personalize boot (GRUB) screen
Beside GDM login, Chandan’s website also contains some nice GRUB themes for Solaris, I particularly like the RetroExpress theme with the train pictures on it.
I download sx-boot.xpm.gz and put it in /boot/grub directory.
Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst with either vi or gedit
Find the lines “splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz” and put a hash ‘#’ in the beginning of that line to remark that line.
Add these three lines below:
splashimage /boot/grub/sx-boot.xpm.gz
foreground = ffffff
background = 444444

Because I multiboot the laptop with Windows XP and JDS Linux v3, there are some entries added to the menu.lst
For Windows XP which is located on the first partition, I add this entry

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

And for JDS linux which is located

title Java Desktop System
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc6 vga=0×317 idebus=66 lapic pci=noacpi pci=usepirqmask selinux=0 splash=silent resume=/dev/hdc5 elevator=cfq showopts

I copied this entry in JDS/Linux /boot/grub/menu.lst
When I install Solaris, Solaris will write GRUB on MBR, so before that I have copied the menu.lst from Linux grub and just copy the entry to Solaris grub.

8. Edit vfstab to mount FAT32 partitions
I want to be able to mount my drive D: which is formatted using FAT32.
First I create the mount point
# mkdir /windows
# cd /windows
# mkdir D

Second step : just add this entry to /etc/vfstab
/dev/dsk/c0d0p2 - /windows/D pcfs - yes -

I really wish the next Nevada builds can run in my Travelmate 4151LCi with ACPI mode, that way I will be able to use wifi using the updated iwi driver which can work with DHCP.

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