I was home sick today, but apparently not sick enough. I decided to try out the test Solaris 10 x86 DVD I'd burned (to prove that a DVD burner worked) and stuck in my bag for some reason.
So, I created a new 10gb virtual disk for it, stuck in the DVD, and installed from text mode. Great, it all went just fine. Instead of immediately making a snapshot like I usually do, I figured I'd install vmware tools and patch everything up. That's where things went sour. The system registration tool didn't fire up, and smc from the command line got me this (linebreaks inserted):
Warning: Cannot convert string \
"-monotype-arial-regular-r-normal--*-140-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1" \
to type FontStruct
warning: Unable to load any usable ISO8859-1 font
Warning:
Name: FONTLIST_DEFAULT_TAG_STRING
Class: XmRendition
Conversion failed. Cannot load font.
Java Accessibility Bridge for GNOME loaded.
java/langNullPointerException
And no smc window. After some faffing, I did some searching, and found, among others, this, which pointed to a bug report. As best I can tell, it would seem that installing the vmware drivers on the guest OS caused some issue with X, breaking all the Sun admin tools.
This may have been a mistake of mine, I'm not sure, but it doesn't exactly leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling. If Sun don't test their tools under VMWare using standard configs, they ought to be, and this would likely have been picked up right away.
So I'm using the disk space for an install of Ubuntu 7.04, which I'd intended to do anyway.