In a past post, I discussed installing Oracle 8i on Solaris 2.6 inside the QEMU SPARC32 CPU architecture emulator. This worked well, but due to the need for the host machine to emulate another CPU architecture, even an “antique” one, the CPU demands are high. A more efficient way to experiment with Solaris on a virtual machine is to install the x86 version on VirtualBox, which is the only hypervisor I’ve been able to get it to run on. Recently I downloaded an ISO of Solaris 8 x86 and decided to install it on a VirtualBox VM, while also installing Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition. I also patch Solaris 8 in this post and install OpenSSH. Finally, I included a brief section on getting Solaris 7 up and running with Oracle 8i.

Continue reading →