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All | General | Java | Music | Solaris
« Believe it, or not | Main | It's official »
20041008 Friday October 08, 2004
Driving a Bright Red Ferrari
Yes, I'm now the proud owner of a bright red Ferrari. And what they say is true - it turns heads wherever I go. When I walk into the room with it, everyone gathers round to gawk, marvel over the paint job, ask how I like it - and how much it cost.

What's that? You're confused about me walking with my Ferrari into a room? Oh, you thought I was talking about a car. No, sorry - it's a laptop. An Acer Ferrari 3200 laptop, to be precise. It really is Ferrari red. I love it. It costs about two orders of magnitude less than the car.

Okay, big deal. Aside from the color and the logo, what's so cool about that? It's running Solaris 10, 64-bit, that's what!

Coming soon to a Solaris Express release near you.

I love my job :-)

Update to Ferrari support status, 22 December 2004

64-bit support is available in the 11/04 release of Solaris Express.

The Ethernet driver was integrated into Solaris 10 subsequent to that and will be included in the 01/05 release of Solaris Express. Of course the driver will be available in Solaris 10 when it is formally released as well.

I'm not sure about the audio driver. I'll have to check on that. If it isn't integrated yet it will be formally available in the first update of Solaris 10, and we'll try to make it available in a patch as soon as possible.

Things that definitely aren't there yet, unfortunately, are wireless support (call Broadcom and tell them to give us the specs!) and Bluetooth support (the warning messages you see during boot are related to Bluetooth). Official power management support won't be available until the second update of Solaris 10. We do have some internal hacks, though, and I'll see if we can't make those available to the community on an as-is basis. Same goes for scrolling and button support for the touchpad.

Full accelerated frame buffer support will have to wait until ATI joins NVIDIA in providing Solaris drivers. (We recently received the first Alpha drop from NVIDIA and it looks pretty darn cool! Accelerated NVIDIA drivers will be available for download in the Solaris 10 GA timeframe.) In the meantime the Xorg drivers work fine, albeit not with all the bells and whistles.

Finally, you'll probably start to see some nifty toys for Ferraris appear soon, as we've outfitted all 55 of Sun's "OS Ambassadors" with Ferrari 3400s, and they love to tinker!

If you have additional questions or comments, feel free to drop me a line.

Oct 08 2004, 06:24:18 PM PDT Permalink Comments [3]

Comments:

Hi Glenn, I am the owner of a red ferrari 3200 too and I have placed the Solaris 10 prerelease on it (32 bit-but waiting anxiously for the 64bit prerelease-), but I couldn't make the Ethernet interface to work. Do you think you can pass this to a technical guy from your staff to help me make my red ferrari go cool too? Thanks in advance, Victor (from Finland)

Posted by Victor Ake on October 25, 2004 at 05:10 AM PDT #

where is the entry in the hcl?

Posted by bbr on November 08, 2004 at 02:11 AM PST #

    Glenn,

As I posted in the comments on Alan Duboff's blog
(<a href ="http://blogs.sun.com/aland">http://blogs.sun.com/aland) about his new Acer
Ferrari 3400, I am contemplating a purchase of a
new AMD64-capable laptop.

I'd be interested to hear your report on what's
working and not right now with Solaris 10.

Thanks, in advance,

    SteveJ

Posted by SteveJay on December 05, 2004 at 02:21 PM PST #

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