I ❤ virtual terminals
Posted by Ceri Davies Thu, 27 Oct 2005 11:47:00 GMT
I installed Solaris 10 on an old x86 server in order to get some zones(5) and jumpstart development done (the jumpstart document currently references Solaris 11. Ooh.)
Since this was a really old server, it didn’t have quite enough memory to run the installation in graphical mode (which is good, because I don’t like it), so when the freshly installed Solaris booted into a blank screen I wasn’t too concerned - I simply needed to configure X.
At least that used to be simple. It seems that someone at Sun decided that as virtual terminals were missing from SPARC Solaris, the x86 version should be crippled in the same way. Not only that, but the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace combination to kill the X server has been disabled as well. So when you find yourself with a freshly installed system with an X display that the monitor won't show you, there is no way to get into the machine to shut it down cleanly.
Luckily ufs logging is enabled by default now, and a freshly installed Solaris system is pretty acquiescent a couple of minutes after booting, so hitting the power button wasn't too much of a worry. I'm just annoyed that I spent an hour refusing to believe that the functionality wasn't there before doing it.
Note: I haven't actually fixed X; I just booted single-user and turned off the dtlogin service (still in /etc/rc2.d/ for now).
