Screen brightness on ThinkPad SL400

In an earlier post, I wrote that when I plugged in the ThinkPad, the screen screamed at me — i.e., it became considerably and uncomfortably brighter. I found out a few weeks ago that I could change this behavior. All I had to do in Windows (both Vista Starter and 7 beta) was right click on the battery icon on the system tray, then adjust the screen brightness when the TP’s plugged in. Works in OpenSolaris, too.

So that’s one minor annoyance out of the way.

Netbooks for sale at grocery

I dropped by the grocery at Pioneer Center and found a booth selling computer equipment and supplies. The equipment included a couple of netbooks — the Acer One and the Asus Eee PC — in various configurations, starting at about PhP12,000. The MSI Wind PC, the one built around a motherboard with Splashtop, was for sale for about PhP12,000, a hefty PhP3,000 less than the price at the malls. Splashtop is a mini-OS in ROM that takes you to a Web browser, email client, and Instant Messenger client within five seconds or so of bootup. I have a Flash video of Splashtop in action from my presentation at Y4IT, also available on an earlier post in this blog.

I daresay that netbooks are moving into the same territory as household appliances such as microwave ovens and air conditioners, which are also available at the Pioneer Center grocery. The next time you pop in for your week’s supply of milk, oat meal, and meusli, don’t be surprised if you bring home instead a netbook, and forget one or all of the other items. Anyone else see netbooks in a grocery in your area?

Strange results from OSol Disk Usage Analyzer

Disk Usage Analyzer says that my total filesystem capacity is 464.4 GB. That’s really odd, because my hard drive is on 160GB, and I’ve split that almost evenly between Vista and OpenSolaris. So I should only have about 80GB. Could this be why BeleniX barfs on it?

WiFi, OpenSolaris, and the ThinkPad SL400

One issue I was having with my WiFi was that on bootup, it connected to my NETGEAR wireless access point (AP) but I wasn’t connecting to any Internet sites. When I noticed this, the first thing I did on startup was open up a terminal window and ping google.com. I’d get an unknown host error, which means something with the DNS. I’d then bring up inetmenu and apply DHCP on iwh0, my wireless interface. That worked, but it was a pain because my wireless should go up without manual intervention.

So, I moved around the lines in my /etc/driver_aliases so that iwh “pciex8086,4237″ would be the first line, and so far that seems to have done it.

OpenSolaris on TP SL400: WiFi and audio now working

Life keeps getting better: took some work, but I finally got WiFi and audio working on my ThinkPad SL400. The WiFi took more work than it should’ve because the iwh driver was loaded but wasn’t working. Turned out that alias in /etc/driver_aliases had parameters that OpenSolaris couldn’t work with: pciex8086,4232 and pciex8086,4235; I added a line that read pciex8086,4237, and my WiFi light went on. The Network Interface Priorities icon on my toolbar needed a bit more tweaking because the priority interface was my wired Ethernet. Not really a big deal except that it would try to use that first, time out after several seconds, then try the wireless. Switching the priorities around saved me some time connecting to the Net.

As to the sound, hdaudio was loaded as the sound driver but I wasn’t getting any sound.  OpenSound sounded (no pun intended) like the solution. At first, it complained that “hdaudio” was already in use as a driver or alias, so I edited /etc/driver_aliases again and removed the entry for hdaudio. Tried OpenSound again, and this time it said it couldn’t install osscore but completed the installation anyway. osstest confirmed that the installation did indeed complete. Now I can listen to my CDs or MP3 files, and I can view YouTube videos.

So, I’ve got the two most important features enabled: WiFi and audio. Next up,  getting the UltraNav scroll feature to work.

More on Solaris on SL400

My third attempt finally worked, although technically, it may well count as the first since I was trying to install BeleniX the other two times. This time, I downloaded the OpenSolaris combo live and installation CD, and noted that it recognized my wired Ethernet. It did have issues with sound and WiFi though, although I figured that the wired Ethernet meant I could solve those eventually. The thing is, the Intel WiFi Link 5100 is supposed to be handled by the iwh driver, which is supposed to be loaded in the kernel but it doesn’t seem to be detected. Saw somewhere that an incorrect entry in device_aliases (can’t seem to find it on my drive at the moment) and correcting that could solve the wireless thingy.  And what I can’t figure out is why OpenSolaris would install but BeleniX would not. Looks like something the BeleniX project should look into. Unfortunately, the error that BeleniX displays stays onscreen for only a few seconds, not enough time for me to take note and report to the BeleniX team.

I’ve already installed and tried out OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox. It was due to the latter that I discovered I had a 64-bit OS.

Having used DesktopBSD and KDE, I’m still finding my way around GNOME. What I liked about DesktopBSD was its graphical mount tool. If GNOME has one, I still haven’t found it. Of course, there’s always the command line. And GNOME does automatically mount my removable media, i.e., CD/DVD and flash drives, and display icons on the desktop.

As to sound, I tried the opensound driver but still no joy. Not a high priority at the moment but I still would like to get sound in OpenSolaris eventually.

Speaking of which, I don’t know if it had anything to do with Vista, but I first booted to my Vista partition earlier, then rebooted to Solaris, and couldn’t get google and fastmail.fm resolved. I then shut down, thinking there was some hardware that Vista’s settings survived the restart, but still no google or fastmail.fm. So, I manually dropped dhcp on gre0, then started it again. That did it. Sure hope I don’t have to do that often

 So far, so good. When I solve the sound and, especially, the WiFi problems, it’ll be all good.

Installed OpenSolaris on ThinkPad SL400!

Quick update: I managed to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on this ThinkPad SL400. Still have to get sound and WiFi working though. I’ve gotten the Flash plug-in installed on FireFox, and I’m in the process of installing OpenOffice.org as I write this.