> Installation

The below are appropriate for current Tribblix on x86; there are separate installation on SPARC instructions, and you can run in the cloud directly.

Once you have downloaded the ISO image, you can boot an emulator such as VirtualBox directly from the ISO. For physical hardware, you can use cdrecord or cdrw to burn the image to a DVD.

For VirtualBox, set the graphics driver to VMSVGA in the VirtualBox setup.

Booting from the DVD should take a few minutes or less, and you should be presented with a login prompt.

tribblix login:

The username is jack, the password is jack.

You can now log in and investigate. The environment here is deliberately minimalist.

You can install to hard disk. To do this you will have to become root

# su - root

where the password is "tribblix". Then run the format command

# format

which will give you a list of disks. (If you want to see removable devices as well, use format -e.)

In the simplest case, where you just have one disk and want to use it all for Tribblix, just run the live_install.sh script with the name of the desired disk, like so:

# ./live_install.sh -G c1t0d0

You can also install additional software packages at this point. Additional package sets are known as overlays, so you don't need to know anything about individual packages. There's a complete list, but here are some of the overlays likely to be commonly used:

and you simply add the name of the overlay(s) you want to install to the install command, like so:

# ./live_install.sh -G c1t0d0 develop desktop

Any required overlays will be installed automatically. There's a special overlay, called kitchen-sink that will install most things, and that's what I often use.

# ./live_install.sh -G c1t0d0 kitchen-sink

You can add additional software overlays later using the zap utility.

Then reboot

reboot -p

If it boots off the DVD, then hit 6 to ChainLoad the hard disk. This should then boot up.

When booted up the first time, you have the same user account (jack) and same user and root passwords as the live image, which you should immediately change.

EFI partitioning

The install script will use the traditional partitioning method for laying out the disk - creating a Solaris partition that spans the whole device. If you use the -G flag instead of the older -B, then it will create a whole disk pool with an EFI System partition instead, to support booting with UEFI firmware. I recommend always using -G rather than -B.

Manual partitioning

The default installation above will use the whole disk for Tribblix and all the available space for the root file system. If you want to do something different, then you can manually partition the disk. Ultimately, you'll need to create a Solaris fdisk partition, and then tell the installer to use a given slice in that partition, omitting the -B or -G flag.

If you just have one disk and want to use it all for Tribblix, use fdisk -B to delete all the current partitions and just have a single Solaris partition. You should use the disk name followed by p0, for example

# fdisk -B /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0p0

If you already have partitions, and you wish to save some of them, then simply create a Solaris partition in some free space.

Now run format again and choose the disk you're using. Type 'p' to go into the partition (slice) menu, and 'p' to show the partitions. What you need to do is make slice 0 be almost the whole disk. Type '0' to edit slice 0, type 'root' for the tag, accept the permissions, the starting cylinder should be 1 (the aim is to avoid slice 8, which should just be using cylinder 0) and then the size should be the end cylinder (which should be the same as that of slice 2 which you should be able to see) with an 'e' on the end. Then type 'p' again to make sure it looks OK. Then 'l' to label the disk and exit format.

That's the complex bit. To actually install, run the installer with slice 0 of your chosen disk as the argument. If the disk is c1t0d0, then you're installing to c1t0d0s0

# ./live_install.sh c1t0d0s0

(optionally followed by the names of overlays you want to install) and wait a few minutes for it to do the install.

Installing to a mirrored pool

If you have 2 identical drives, you can create a mirrored ZFS pool that will give you redundancy against disk failure (and allow ZFS to heal any data corruption). Use the -m flag to specify the second disk:

# ./live_install.sh -G -m c1t1d0 c1t0d0

Installing to a raidz pool

If you're installing m25.1 or later, it's possible to use a raidz pool for the system. Care needs to be taken that all the disks in the raidz pool are visible to the BIOS. Use the -z flag for raidz1, and -Z for raidz2, and specify the list of disks in quotes, for example:

# ./live_install.sh -G -z "c1t0d0 c1t1d0 c2t0d0 c2t1d0"

Installing to an existing ZFS pool

If you wish to install Tribblix to an existing pool (for example, you have an older Tribblix release, a corrupted install, or an alternative illumos distribution already installed, and you don't want to lose the data) then there's a script to do just that. It works just like the regular installer but with a different name, and takes the name of the existing pool as the destination rather than a disk device:

# ./over_install.sh -B rpool list_of_overlays...

This mechanism will give you a fresh install, although it will copy the system ssh keys and user account details from the existing system to make it easier to log in and get going. Using the -N flag will prevent this information from being copied across.

Installation using iPXE

Some cloud providers allow you to install using iPXE, or you can boot iPXE media from ipxe.org and get an interactive iPXE shell.

For a cloud provider, you simply need to tell it where the ipxe configuration script is. An example is given in the article Installing Tribblix on Vultr using iPXE.

Or, if you're booting from an ipxe.org image, once you have networking set up you can chain the configuration script. You can get a menu by chaining the following script:

http://pkgs.tribblix.org/ipxe.txt

Alternatively, you can go directly to one of the entries in the following list, depending on which version you want to boot.

http://pkgs.tribblix.org/m34/ipxe.txt
http://pkgs.tribblix.org/m34lx/ipxe.txt
http://pkgs.tribblix.org/m33/ipxe.txt
http://pkgs.tribblix.org/m33lx/ipxe.txt

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