Solaris 8 x86 on an LX50

Submitted by Philip Brown
Last revised: Jan 8, 2003

For folks looking to install Solaris 8 x86 on an LX50, they need to be aware of a few things:

1. Get the special 'point patch(es)' mentioned at
   http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/lx50/lx50installhelp.html

   This will give you an ITU floppy, which you use in the Add Driver section of initial installation boot.

   The ITU image will also give you some "normal" patches. In the floppy image, under DU/sol_28/i86pc/Patches there are two .Z files. Uncompress them, move them to .zip names, and then unzip them to get two patches, which you can then apply against a net boot tree if you want to do a net boot instead of doing the floppy + ITU boot.

   I actually got PXE working, with a lot of coaxing. But it's probably easier for people to do the floppy + ITU boot.

2. You must use a PS2 keyboard, you cannot use a USB keyboard. Even if you go into the BIOS, and specifically set USB Legacy mode, it will not work for Solaris purposes.

   The other alternative is presumably to set the BIOS to redirect console text to serial port, and do a serial port install. But I have not tried that.