Linux+Solaris (was Re: Help offer)
Quoting Roberto Beccherle <roby@sunfe3.fe.infn.it>:
> By the way does anyone know if it is possible to repartition a hard disk
> whith Solaris already installed on it without damaging the disk and/or
> loosing data? (Ultra1 with solaris 2.5.1)
> If not does the method described in the howto allow also for dualbooting
> if one installs Linux on a second Hard drive?
>
> The problem is i'd like to try out Linux on my Ultra1 box but i HAVE to
> keep solaris running on it as it is at work and unfortunately not at
> home...
Hi,
First, a disclaimer. What worked for me may not work for you, so be
careful.
I have an Ultra 1 which previously had Solaris 2.5.1 installed, with a
2.1GB disk with 7 partitions, among them an 800MB home partition. I
wanted to try Debian sparc Gnu/Linux, but since this is my work machine
I didn't want to make the jump at once. I decided then to install
Debian in the partition previously allocated to home, while keeping the
Solaris usr and var partitions (my home directory was almost empty since
I use a network file system). I did that and it worked beautifully; I
can boot to debian or Solaris with no problems. Of course Solaris
doesn't recognize any more the home partition but that's not a problem.
So, I guess the answer to your question is yes, but YMMV. The fdisk
program which came with Debian handles the partioning quite nice, just
be careful not to touch any essential (like usr) Solaris partition. And
of course, the partition you convert to Linux are gone, as long as
Solaris is concerned. One other thing, I don't think the fdisk program
can handle the resizing of a partition, so if you don't have a spare
partition to work with, and you don't want to change any existing
partition, your only way is to split a partition and reinstall the
corresponding Solaris partition.
I hope this helps. Since I don't need to run any program under Solaris
in this machine that doesn't exist in Linux, and since I'm quite happy
with my present Linux setup, I'm about to completely wipe Solaris out of
the disk. A warning, though: the libm library under Sparc/Linux is
almost twice as slow as the corresponding Solaris libm, so any program
that makes significant use of it may run significantly slower in Linux
than in Solaris (this is based in my benchmarks only). I guess
this is because it's written in c, instead of carefully optimized in
assembler.
Regards,
Hermano Cabral
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