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.