Additional Installation Tasks

You might need to perform the following additional tasks before or after an installation.

Configuring Date and Time Before and After an Installation

Oracle Solaris 11 keeps the Real Time Clock (RTC) in Coordinated Universal time (UTC) format. The behavior on x86 platforms is different in Oracle Solaris 11 than in Oracle Solaris 10. The interactive installers enable you to configure the date and time during the installation. As part of that process, the RTC is updated with the time in UTC format. However, AI does not adjust the RTC date and time during an installation. To ensure that the time stamp of installed files are correct, configure the time in the BIOS in UTC format before beginning the installation. On x86 platforms, when using the pkg update command, the OS continues to keep time in RTC in the local time format. This method is used to avoid time inconsistencies between Oracle Solaris 11 BEs and BEs from previous releases.

How to Switch From Local Time Format to UTC Format

1. Set the time lag between the kernel and RTC to 0 (zero), as follows:

   # rtc -z GMT

2. If the date/time requires an adjustment, use the date command. See date(1).

How to Switch From UTC Format to Local Time Format

Use the following procedure when the switch from UTC to local time is complete, and each time you reconfigure the time zone setting by using the sysconfig command.

1. Run the rtc timezone command with the -z option.

   # rtc -z timezone

   For example:

   # rtc -z US/Pacific

2. If the date/time requires an adjustment, use the date command.

Maintaining Local Time on a System Running Multiple Operating Systems That Keep RTC Time as Local Time

If you maintain and boot several operating systems on the same Oracle Solaris 11 system, and those operating systems keep RTC time as local time, there are several ways that these operating systems can coexist, from the RTC time point of view:

• Switch from local time to UTC format in the OS that keeps RTC time in local time format.

  For example, if you are dual-booting Windows 7, set the registry key as follows:

  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation] \
  "RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001

• Switch from the UTC format to local time on a freshly installed Oracle Solaris 11 system.

• Enable the Network Time Protocol (NTP) in operating systems that assume that the RTC format is running in local time. In this case, the time is synchronized automatically.

x86: Adding Custom Entries to the GRUB Menu After an Installation

In Oracle Solaris 11, the GRUB Legacy boot loader uses the menu.lst file to maintain both Oracle Solaris and custom menu entries, for example a Linux menu entry. After installing Oracle Solaris, any custom menu entries that were not preserved during the installation can be manually added to the GRUB menu by editing the menu.lst file.

Starting with Oracle Solaris 11.1, GRUB (GRUB 2) uses a different boot loader and a different configuration file, grub.cfg. This file contains most of the GRUB configuration, including all of the Oracle Solaris menu entries. The file does not contain any custom menu entries. Unlike the menu.lst file, the grub.cfg file is managed solely by using the bootadm command. Do not directly edit this file. GRUB 2 includes an additional configuration (custom.cfg) that can be used to add custom menu entries to the GRUB menu after an installation. If you want to add custom boot entries to the GRUB configuration, you must first create a custom.cfg file and it must reside in the same location as the grub.cfg and menu.conf files, /pool-name/boot/grub/.

During the boot process, GRUB checks for the existence of a custom.cfg file in the top-level dataset of the root pool, in the boot/grub subdirectory. If the file exists, GRUB sources the file and processes any commands that are in the file, as if the contents were textually inserted in the main grub.cfg file.

On a system with 64-bit UEFI firmware, entries in the custom.cfg file might appear as follows:

menuentry "Windows (64-bit UEFI)" {
   insmod part_gpt
   insmod fat
   insmod search_fs_uuid
   insmod chain
   search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root cafe-f4ee
   chainloader /efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}

On a system with BIOS firmware, entries in this file might appear as follows:

menuentry "Windows" {
   insmod chain
   set root=(hd0,msdos1)
   chainloader --force +1
}

See Customizing the GRUB Configuration in Booting and Shutting Down Oracle Solaris 11.1 Systems.