Hacky tip for Illumos

 This seems to be the weekend to do all the virtualizers -so I've installed OpenIndiana (Hipster 2021-10) which can use UEFI boot now.

I made my hard disk too small so I created another one and then realized that I have no idea how to find out what the name for the disk is. 

Then I remembered -format lists the drives it can see. So:

root@openindiana:~# format -e
Searching for disks...done


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c5t0d0 <VBOX-HARDDISK-1.0-36.00GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@0,0
       1. c5t2d0 <VBOX-HARDDISK-1.0-32.00GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@2,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C
root@openindiana:~#

So now I know I can add c5t2d0 to the end of a zpool create incantation.

As I say; hacky, but it works...

Qemu -hostfwd at last!

 I'm still trying to figure this one out, to be honest

Sparc SS-20 seems to be much improved over the last couple of years; I'm able to boot and install Solaris 7 without much trouble as long as I stick to one cpu and 512megs of ram.

The big big thing is that I've figured out the current (as of 2022) network syntax. 

Sorta.

Now instead of mucking with netdev and vlans I'm able to simply use the "-nic" parameter and put hostfwd directives there.

So here's the complete command for sparc:

qemu-system-sparc -M SS-20 -m 512 -hda (drive) -cdrom  (iso) -boot c -cpu "TI SuperSparc 60" -nic user,hostfwd=tcp::8023-:23

8023 could presumably be anything? to a degree -it didn't work when I tried "80023", though. 

I changed it to "tcp::23-:23" and that worked, but it seems like a bad idea -still, it can be done!

NetBSD on VB - no more hacks! (or at least a lot less)

 Normally doing a NetBSD desktop on VirtualBox involves a convoluted ritual on both host and guest. I still need to do VBoxManage for the host setup, but I've discovered something interesting. For the guest, all I need to do is specify a vesa setting, like this: 

menu=Boot normally:rndseed /var/db/entropy-file;vesa 0x160;boot

...and I get a nice, rich but readable console, and a 1920x180 desktop in X too; without configuring X in any way. This works in VBoxSVGA and VMSVGA. 

Best of all, I get a respectable sized console in full-screen mode -without X. Instead of a tiny 640x480 screen I get a console like this:

 

 

This is a game-changer! No more X (at least, it's optional), no more scaled mode. It's not perfect, but it's a serious improvement!