[SPARCbook] Ultrabook 1 Solaris 8 Success.... Well Mostly

[Borgen_Gary]

I successfully installed Solaris 8 on my Ultrabook 1.

With all the patches installed, the Ultrabook booted fine into 64-bit OS
Solaris at kernel patch level 108528-03.

Not satisfied with the CDE interface I decided to try install Gnome 2.0.0
from the Sun web site.

The patch installation of 108528-14 kernel, required by Gnome,  rendered the
Ultrabook unbootable in 64-bit mode.  However, it still booted fine in
32-bit OS mode (boot with  'boot -as' and  select the 'kernel/unix' 32-bit
kernel.  Then edit the boot.conf  file to boot only 32-bit OS).

I applied all the patches and low and behold, Gnome works (again in 32-bit
OS mode).

Next, not satisfied with Netscape Navigator 4.8 (I couldn't even access the
Sun site to get patches and was forced to use command line ftp), I
downloaded Firefox 1.0.7.  After installing all the required patches, it to
is working fine.  Nice to have a modern browser.

I tried the 108528-29 kernel patch (latest) to see if that was any better.
It wasn't.

If anyone has any insights into the kernel issue, let me know.

I may try and back out the -29 and -14 patches and work my way up the patch
tree from -03 to see where it breaks.

By the way, Sun Development Studio 11 is now available as free download.
I'm trying to install that now.