Step by step install:

Hardware install:

• Install 32 meg expansion card first. Solaris needs at least 16 megs to install. Install memory by flipping over the laptop, locating the rectangular panel with two screws. Remove the screws and open the panel. Remove the two screws at the sides of the compartment. Insert the memory card with the holes lining up with the screw holes. Replace the screws and put the panel back on and screw it on.
• Install your PCMCIA ethernet and modem cards. The ethernet card should go in slot zero, the lower slot. If it is placed in the top slot the automatic configuration won't work. Make sure both cards are inserted completely.
• Attach the floppy drive to the port under the flip down panel by the PCMCIA slots.

Software install:

• Obtain the Solaris 2.5 CD-ROM. You cannot do a net install as PCMCIA devices are not supported as boot devices by Solaris.
• Obtain the Solaris 2.5 Driver Update 1 (or latest) disks from the SunSoft Support Resolutions Server . You'll need the boot disks and the distribution disk(s). At this time there aren't any applicable updates on the video disk for this platform so we don't need it. Copy these disks to floppies as per the instructions.
• Insert the Boot Disk 1 into the floppy drive and the Solaris 2.5 CD-ROM into the cd drive, and boot up. Switch floppies to Boot Disk 2 when asked to.
• At the boot device selection screen select the CD-ROM drive as your boot device, usually by entering "10".
• When it asks you to select a interactive or custom jumpstart install enter "1" for interactive. It'll choose this anyways if you don't do anything within 30 seconds.
• Wait a few minutes for the kernel to load and boot. Don't worry about errors of the form "WARNING: forceload of foo/bar failed".
• Once loaded you'll be put into a menu system where you have to identify what kind of hardware you have. Here's what to select:
  • Keyboard Language: US-English
  • Graphics Card: Toshiba T4900CT
    (shortcut: hit "t" to skip to the head of the "t" section)
  • Screen Size: 9-inch
    (actually 11 inches, but closest they have)
  • Color Depth: 8
    (only choice!)
  • Display Resolution: 800x600
    (NOTE: internal display is 800x600 only. If you select 640x480, it uses only a fraction of the display. If you select 1024x768, the internal display will be blank and the external video connector must be used.)
  • Virtual Screen Resolution: 1024x768
    (NOTE: Virtual Screen is what the size of the desktop is. The video driver will pan a 800x600 window around this area depending on where the mouse is. This is done in the hardware framebuffer so it's fast and worth using.)
  • Monitor Type: Notebook LCD-SVGA 35.5 kHz
  • Pointing Device: PS/2 style built in mouse
    (NOTE: this is for the built in keyboard mouse. You can also plug in a normal mouse to the serial port and use it instead by selecting the appropriate serial mouse.)
  • Number Of Buttons: 2
  On the final screen make sure you've entered the correct choices.
• After this if things went right, Openwindows will start up and from this point on it will look like a regular Sparc install. From here on out I'll only cover the differences. For the install selection process windows may appear that are not fully visible on the screen since you are using a Virtual Screen. To see the obscured parts simply move your mouse in that direction.
• The first omission you may notice is that you aren't asked about network options, like address, naming services, etc. This is because the PCMCIA ethernet device is not a standard device on the CD boot. After we've booted up the installed system, we'll run sys-unconfig to wipe out the settings and reboot. For now don't worry about setting the correct hostname, etc.
• When selecting the Solaris software to install, click on "Customize..." and add the following packages and clusters:
  • Under PCMCIA Support:
    • 3COM EtherLink III PCMCIA Ethernet Driver
    • PCMCIA Card Services, (Root)
    • PCMCIA Card Services, (Usr)
    • PCMCIA serial card driver
    (Everything except "PCMCIA memory card driver")
  • Point-to-Point Protocol
  • Basic Networking
• When selecting the disk for install to use, you will be asked whether to use the entire disk for Solaris. Unless you plan to run another OS on the system, select the entire disk. This is independent of Solaris partitioning which you will do later.
• Everything else left in the initial install should be just like a Sparc install until after it has done the normal installation. It will then ask for the Driver Update Distribution disk. Follow the on-screen instructions. The system will install some patches and then reboot.
• When the system comes up, install the bundled Openwin patches by running install_cluster in /cdrom/cdrom0/s2/Patches/OW. Run with the -nosave option if you don't want to save backouts.
• Now run sys-unconfig to wipe out the current settings and reboot. Now that the ethernet drivers is loaded we can set up the network address and such. If you aren't going to be using the ethernet address for now, you can skip this step.
• When it boots up again, select "PC Console" as a terminal type. Then go through the device setup as outlined above again and then enter the correct networking info.
• Like many PC ethernet cards, the Etherlink III card in the laptop has a small buffer and performs really awfully using the default NFS buffer sizes (8k). If you place any manual NFS mounts in your /etc/vfstab, be sure to add the options rsize=1024,wsize=1024 to change your packet sizes to 1k. This will result in much better performance. If you use the automounter, change your /etc/auto_master to:

  # Master map for automounter
  #
  +auto_master
  /net            -hosts          -nosuid,rsize=1024,wsize=1024
  /home           auto_home	-nosuid,rsize=1024,wsize=1024
  /xfn		-xfn		-nosuid,rsize=1024,wsize=1024
  

  Then restart the automounter.
• CONGRATULATIONS! Your laptop is now up and ready to go!

Notes:

• Link light on hub will not come up until the interface is activated. Light on card's pigtail indicates that the card has been activated, it is not a link light.
• Haven't figured out how to enable sound or the modem card yet.