Installing Oracle^® Solaris 11.3 Systems

Installing With the Text Installer

When installing the Oracle Solaris operating system, consider the following information:

• See System Requirements for Live Media and Text Installations.

• If you are installing Oracle Solaris on an x86 based system that will have more than one operating system installed in it, you can partition your disk during the installation process.

  • The installer uses GPT formatting when installing onto a whole disk or an unformatted disk. However, existing GPT partitions or DOS partitions are retained by default and displayed by the installer, so you can retain and install into an existing partition. For more information, see Guidelines for Partitioning a System During an Interactive Installation.

  • In this release, the Oracle Solaris installers use GRUB 2 for x86 systems. GRUB 2 supports booting multiple operating systems on one or more drives. For information about GRUB 2, see Introducing GRUB 2 in Booting and Shutting Down Oracle Solaris 11.3 Systems.

  You also have the option to use an open-source or third-party partitioning tool to create a new partition or make adjustments to pre-existing partitions prior to an installation. See Guidelines for Partitioning a System Prior To Installation.

• The Oracle Solaris installers cannot upgrade your operating system. However, after you have installed the Oracle Solaris operating system, you can update all of the packages on your system that have available updates by using the Image Packaging System. See Adding and Updating Software in Oracle Solaris 11.3.

• You can use the text installer to install the Oracle Solaris operating system onto an iSCSI target if the iSCSI target can act as a boot disk and if the system has the necessary support for iSCSI booting. If your system supports autodiscovery of iSCSI disks, the installer provides that option. Alternately, you can manually enter values to specify the iSCSI target in the installation screens. To use iSCSI, the network interface for the system must be configured with a static IP address before starting the installation process. Note the following considerations when performing an iSCSI installation:

  • An iSCSI boot on SPARC platforms is supported with OpenBoot level 4.31 or later, and does not require a specific NIC. The boot command in OpenBoot takes a series of keywords to identify the destination iSCSI target or uses the parameters stored in the network-boot-parameters NVRAM variable. The command uses the format boot net:keyword=value.

  • On x86 platforms, the host that is being booted must use NICs that are iSCSI Boot Firmware Table (iBFT) capable or have a main board BIOS that is iBFT capable. To configure iSCSI boot properly, refer to the documentation for your specific NIC hardware.

  For further information, see How to Perform a Text Installation. Also, see the iscsiadm(1M) man page.

• The text installer can perform an initial installation on the whole disk, an Oracle Solaris x86 partition, or a SPARC slice.

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  Caution  -  The installation overwrites all of the software and data on the targeted device.

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• Live Media contains a set of software that is appropriate for a desktop or laptop. The text installer installs a smaller set of software that is more appropriate for a general-purpose system. In particular, the text installer does not install the GNOME desktop. To install additional packages after an installation performed with the text installer, see Adding Software After a Text Installation.

Networking Configuration With the Text Installer

The networking panel in the text installer prompts you to select a network interface to configure. Only one wired network interface may be configured. You can also select to skip the network configuration process.

When an interface is selected, you can choose to allow DHCP to configure the interface or choose to manually configure the interface with a static IPv4 address. For static addresses, the IPv4 default route can also be provided. In both cases, IPv6 autoconfiguration is enabled on the interface.

How to Navigate Within the Text Installer

Use the function keys listed at the bottom of each panel to navigate between the panels. Use the arrow keys to move between fields in a given panel. If your keyboard does not have function keys or if the keys do not respond, press ESC to view alternate keys for navigation.

At any time during the installation, you may back up to a previous panel.