Here is a summary of the steps I’m taking:

• Installation of IDE (Netbeans)  (done in Part 1)
• Installation of hypervisor software to run Opensolaris on the MacBook (VirtualBox) (done in Part 1)
• Installation of OpenSolaris into VirtualBox
• Installation and configuration of Deployment environment (MySQL and Glassfish)
• Configuration of VirtualBox for secure network connection of Host-System and IDE towards MySQL/GLassfish
• Configuration of Netbeans to Deploy to MySQL and Glassfish on Opensolaris within the VirtualBox
• Test of the Development and Deployment environment with a simple application

So no on to the next step.

Step 3: Installation of OpenSolaris

By now, you probably have downloaded an ISO-image of the OpenSolaris version (see the last section of post if you need a refresh). Given that you have the ISO-image available, start up VirtualBox. Once started, you’ll press the “New” Button to start the Wizard for creating a new virtual machine. Follow the Wizard which is easy: Give your machine a name, then choose Operating System “Solaris” and Version “OpenSolaris”.

Wizard for adding a new virtual machine

As for memory configuration: in order to balance between NetBeans and other IDE-Tools or further aspects running on MacOS compared to Opensolaris in VirtualBox, I decided to go for 1024MB for the virtual machine.

Important Tip: In order to get your mouse detached from the VirtualBox , press the left Cmd/Apple-Button and this will release your mouse. If you again want to continue, simply click into the VirtualBox Window and the mouse will focus again into that window.

The virtual Disk depends on what you want to do with OpenSolaris. As the purpose for this configuration was to act as Deployment-Testenvironment, I have decided that 16GB is fine, might even be on the upper limit. So I went with the recommendation of the Wizard. In order to save space, I went for the dynamically expanding storage which is a great feature of VirtualBox: only taking so much of real diskspace on my MacBook Pro as is really needed.

Once you have finished all parts of the Wizard, VirtualBox will show you a summary of the virtual machine

Virtual Machine is ready for start

Now you are ready to get OpenSolaris installed. When you click “Start” on the VirtualBox overview screen, you are presented with the “First Run Wizard”:

The "First-Run" Wizard

As we have downloaded the CD in form of a Media-File (ISO-Image), choose that option in the lower part of the presented window. Initially the wizard will show the VBox GuestAdditions to be the target file, so you need to click the small button on the right and in the following windows add the downloaded ISO image and select it. The resulting window will look similar to this:

Opensolaris ISO Image selected

And if you click the final “Next” button, a summary is presented and you can startup the virtual machine.

The virtual machines then starts and the OpenSolaris installation commences.

After you’ve selected your keyboard and the desktop language, you get the initial desktop of Opensolaris, which looks like this:

OpenSol Initial Desktop

In there you find the “Install OpenSolaris” icon. Double click and you start the Opensolaris installation. Use the respective buttons on the bottom of the Installer-window to get the next screens respectively.

As for Disks: I prefer to give OpenSolaris the whole Disk as we anyway have a dynamically growing virtual disk.

Below are further screenshots of the OpenSolaris Installation Wizard:

Once the installer is done, OpenSolaris will ask to reboot.

Remember that we still have the OpenSolaris ISO image mounted and so when the reboot happens, it will be like you would again boot into the Install CD.

When the reboot happens, there will be a new entry on the Boot-Menu:  “Boot from Harddisk”. Select this option presented to start from the disk onto which you just installed OpenSolaris (Be aware that if you don’t actually choose this option, the system will automatically boot into the LiveCD (in our case the ISO-image) again.

Don’t worry about the next step: Opensolaris will boot from the harddisk and present this window and might run for some minutes with this window:

Window during first run from fresh installed Harddisk

This is part of the installation still.

The next effort we need to do is install the VirtualBox Guestadditions. This will allow for smooth integration with MacOS.

This is what I did: I did a shutdown (using “System->Shutdown” from the OpenSolaris menu) to bring down OpenSolaris. This also stopped the virtual machine after OpenSolaris was shutdown. I then ensured that for the next start, we have the Guest-additions ISO Image mounted. For that I clicked in the summary pane of the virtual machine on “CD/DVD-Rom” which opened a pop-up window. In that I selected  “VBoxGuestAdditions.iso”. Then I restarted the virtual machine so that I can perform the task of adding the Guest Additions.
Note: I’m sure there is a more elegant way than first holding the system, getting the CD mounted etc. , not sure why I needed to do that. Also, for any other effort it is simple in VirtualBox to un-mount and mount a real CD or a CD/DVD-image.

The essential task on hand (adding the Guest-Additions) itself was simple:

• Once you are logged into Opensolaris, you will see a CD-icon labeled with  “VBOXADDITIONS_3.0.10.54097″
• I double-clicked on this icon to open the File-Browser for the CD
• On that File-Browser there is a “Open Autorun Prompt” Button. I clicked this
• A pop-up window asked me to confirm I want this to be run. And I confirmed
• Then the autorun worked without any further questions. At the end I was asked to press enter in the Terminal window that had opened
• I then restarted OpenSolaris and now have a snappy graphic (it was slow before) and a complete mouse integration

Next steps in next post are further configurations of OpenSolaris and Installation of Glassfish and MySQL.

So see you at the next post