Opensolaris – Managing Boot Environments with beadm

To get a list of all of your boot environments within Opensolaris use beadm like so…. 

beadm list 

Assuming you know the name of the boot environment that is causing issues you can use the following command (using its name) to remove the ones you think are suss. Note: you need to boot up in the environment that you wish to keep first. 

beadm destroy opensolaris-2

If you destroy an environment that is active on boot it will be changed to another be that is available. You can use the following command to set it to a specific boot environment; 

beadm activate opensolaris-1

Remember to go into package manager and set the default repository as the preferred again. Update manager may recommend updates from the dev repository still though, remove this repository to prevent this.

Best not to delete a boot enviornment unless you have to.

Opensolaris – Updating solaris with the development repository

Want to keep your opensolaris on the “edge” of developments? Most of the experience i have had is that the “dev” repository contains mainly stable releases that are being held until the next official release (every 6 months).

This is how you do it…

Launch Package Manager – and choose “settings” then “manage repositories”

Add the dev repository URL and give it a name.

NOTE: The name cannot contain any spaces!

Name : dev.opensolaris.org
URL : http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev

If you make it the preferred repository Update manager will inform you of the new updates that are available.

Update : i have had a lockup with the cifs service as well as a problem with the keyboard working in VNC (if it wasnt plugged in at boot). So i have decided to revert back to the non-development repository. See this post on how to use beadm