Invisible Text in Solaris 9 Installation

Our recently purchased Sun Blade 2000 workstation comes with Solaris 9 already on the hard disk. When the system boots for the first time, it asks a few questions about the IP address, etc to complete the installation. However, it uses the same color for the some of the text as the background. We tried two different monitors (one was even a Sun brand monitor) and got the same result. Some of the text is visible, and some more becomes visible if you move the mouse, but not the labels on the checkboxes.

A visit to the Sun web site found mention of patches for incorrect background colors, however the system would need to be functional before a patch could be applied. We are a bit surprised to find out just how eager SUN is to go out of business.

We tried a serial install also, but the system didn't listen to our replies, although we could see the first question. I am wondering now if the problem could have been flow control. We did have it set to 9600 8n1.

There turned out to be a workaround for GUI problem. You can open a terminal window during the setup with the mouse. Then we stopped the sun-gui system setup script and ran a /usr/sbin/sys-unconfig and rebooted the system. After bootup it gives the same system setup operation but without the gui (i.e.) in text based mode. The text based installer works.

Daniel Feenberg
from a solution by Mohan Ramanajan