Tuesday April 08, 2008

Solaris, my evil girlfriend

Ever have girlfriend you can't live with, yet can't stay away from? Mine is trying to run Solaris on an obsolete Dell 1100 laptop, a topic on which I have blogged more times than I like to think about. 

I went to visit her again recently, after resolutely staying away for several months. Staying away was easy for a while, because I had a voluptuous new girlfriend, Mac OS X aka The Leopard Girl. She had been keeping me very happy for months, but one day last week I felt a need to take a walk on the wild side, and, feeling guilty yet excited, went back to Mistress Solaris.

Back in the day when our relationship was still working, we had been happily cohabiting on Build 57. We had even taken our relationship to the next level by downloading and installing applications from Blastwave. We had a few laughs, but then I wanted more....

A few weeks ago, I downloaded Solaris Express 1/08. The Leopard Girl, my enabler, made it all too easy to download and burn a DVD. I should have seen the warning signs of a sick menage a trois developing. 

Solaris Express (Build 79b) installed easily, up to a point. I thought there might be a chance to revive our relationship. Then, with a pouty grin, she refused to start the X-server, sticking me with just a command line. I checked her xerrors file, and she claimed she was missing a config file. A likely story. 

Last week, against my better judgement, and again enabled by The Leopard Girl, I downloaded and burned OpenSolaris Build 85.  Then our relationship really fell apart. The install hung after only a few minutes with "Extracting windowing system. Please wait...." And I waited... and waited....

Sigh. Now, like a fool, I'm sitting by the phone, I mean the computer, waiting for Build 86 to come out. I can't stay away.