This is rather esoteric, but I’ve seen posts asking for a solution to this problem so thought I’d document my experience here.

Problem – Trying to install Nexenta (Elatte) Alpha 6 within Parallels on the Mac. Nexenta is an open source distribution of Solaris that has the Solaris Nevada kernel and the Debian userland. It installs cleanly in Parallels beta RC1, but X fails to start cleanly. It appears that the xorg.conf is missing and the default Xorg is not sufficient.

Solution – I ran Xorg -configure to generate a new /root/xorg.conf.new
Then I followed some advice from the parallels forums as to changes to make and saved the file as /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I changed the Monitor section to be:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 31.5-100
VertRefresh 59.0-75.0
Modeline "1440x900" 108.84 1440 1472 1800 1912 900 918 927 946
EndSection

And the Screen section:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Finally I changed parallels via the “configuration” section to allow a custom resolution of 1440×900.
Net result is Nexenta is up and being graphical on my MacBook Pro. Very nice.

Advertisement