Posting here instead of unix exchange because although unix is the suject, this should apply to other non-nix OSs.
Our development team has been asked to automate some tasks that happen to interact with an industrial equipment running, get this, Solaris 2.5.1, which as far as i can tell is equivalent to SunOS 5.5.1.
considering none of them are experienced with this version of solaris, which came out in 1995, I am now tasked to provide a development environment, including a VM or otherwise a machine running that version of Solaris.
I have acquired an iso for the install CD, along with images of the 3 boot floppies that came with the CD. I managed to boot by following the official doc for installing that version (put floppy 1, then 2, then 3 + CD and boot into the CD from floppy 3). i originally experienced a problem when first booting into the CD, where the hyper-V VM would crash when launching the installer. I have fixed that by reducing the max amount of memory allowed in NUMA settings from all 256GB to only 512MB.
Now the installer (sometimes) boots correctly, but the display is all wrong.
I can just about make out the "F2 continue" prompt, so i can technically go through the installer, but selection any option is hell and i'm not even sure that the options are displayed next to their appropriate checkboxes. I'm pretty sure at some point i'm being asked to select graphical options but there are upwards of 50 of them and I can't read half of them.
The screenshot shown is the interactive installer. the installer can also use a jumpstart script, which I don't have nor know how to acquire. I suspect there might be a resolution for my problem here, but it's ever so slightly out of my reach.
My question is:
Is there any way for me to somehow load or otherwise enforce drivers in order for hyper-V to correctly interpret the display information being sent out by Solaris? Am i just better off finding an early 2000s machine and trying to install it on there? I expect this problem is not exclusive to Solaris but is just an artifact of old OSs not quite being compatible with modern hosts.
Some extra info:
- host is Win server 2012 R2, Hyper-V. The VM is running in a cluster, if that matters.
- the VM is Gen 1 and has 1 core and 512 MB of ram assigned, dynamic allocation off, Hyper-v compatibility mode on, NUMA settings are 1 core, 512 MB RAM.
