Install the GUI into a Text only Install of Solaris 11

In my previous video we saw the we could install Oracle Solaris 11 using the Text only DVD which will install without the GUI and the Live DVD which boots into Solaris from the DVD and will allow a Graphical Install. We choose the text only install and now we will look at how we can make use of the Boot Environments (BE)s to provide a perfectly safe and reversible way of upgrading the the GUI.

We can create new BEs on our system, these use the clone facility of the ZFS filesystem . We can then choose the make a BE active on the next boot to test the changes, if we are happy with the changes we can delete the old BE or clone. All of this is on a live system that takes testing to a new level. Whilst a BE is active changes are written to that BE and not anywhere else. So long as we can keep our testing to a minimum it is possible to rollback to the previous working environment

To display the current BE state.

beadm list

The letters N represent the current BE and R for the BE to be used on the next reboot

To create the new BE so we can install the GUI to that environment and not effect the original Solaris BE we issue the command

sudo beadm create GUI

We could activate this BE and then reboot but to save this beadm will allow us to mount this to a directory

sudo beadm mount GUI /mnt

and now we install the package set babel_install which i the full GUI with language overlays, the -R option says to treat the /mnt directory as the root as we are not booted to the BE

sudo pkg -R /mnt install babel_install

Once the install has completed we can un-mount the BE

sudo beadm umount GUI

and then activate the BE so it will take effect on the next boot

sudo beadm activate GUI

we can also check the GRUB menu at this stage to see that GUI has become the default stanza at boot time

bootadm list-menu

If we reboot now

sudo shutdown -y -g 10 -i 6 "Bye"

As we reboot we see the GUI load. We can now test that the GUI is functional and if required we can delete the original BE

sudo beadm destroy solaris

The video will demonstrate all this for you