Glenn Lagasse's Weblog

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Christmas come early...

Wednesday Dec 19, 2007

...or more appropriately "Hey! I got some new toys...hardware to play with".

Thanks to my very generous manager Eric Ray, I received a couple of new laptops yesterday. A Lenovo Thinkpad T61p and an Apple MacBook Pro revision C. These laptops will replace existing machines that I already have (a black MacBook and an HP 6510B). I plan to document how I use these machines starting with installation and then moving into setup and configuration. I'll do this in several posts. In this post I'll outline the hardware specifications and their intended uses.

The MacBook Pro's configuration highlights:

2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

3 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

ATI Radeon X1600 with 128 MB Ram

15.4" Display at 1440x900 resolution

120 GB Hard Drive

6X Double-Layer Superdrive

Hardware Revision C (pre-Santa Rosa)

Lenovo T61p configuration highlights:

2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (T7700, Santa Rosa)

Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN

Intel e1000g wired ethernet

160 GB 7200 RPM Sata disk

8X DVD-Writer

15.4" WUXGA TFT Display at 1920x1200 resolution

4 GB PC2-5300 667 MHz DDR II SDRAM

NVidia Quadro FX 570M graphics chip with 256 MB dedicated memory

Both of the laptops are going to be work and test machines. I'll primarily be doing day-to-day stuff (email, document creation, chat, remote access via ssh, irc) using OS X Leopard on the MacBook Pro. Since I work in the Installation group at Sun, I'll also be installing Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion so that I can test new builds of Solaris Express (internally code-named Nevada which is the basis for the next release of Solaris) and Project Indiana under those environments.

The T61p will be used more for testing various things than actual day-to-day work. I'll be triple-booting this machine. It comes with Vista Ultimate pre-installed which I'll use for testing Indiana and Solaris Express in VMWare Workstation. I'll also be loading Ubuntu as well as Solaris Express. The Ubuntu installation will allow me to play with VMWare Workstation and VMWare Server so I can test Installing Solaris Express and Indiana in those environments. I suppose I could also test Xen in this configuration as well. The Solaris Express installation will allow me to have a true Solaris Instance available for whatever I might need. As well as trying out xVM and seeing how/if we in the Install group can use that technology for testing our code. Not to mention seeing how things like Indiana might run under xVM.

With these laptops and configurations I should really be able to test a lot of different things as they relate to Installation of Solaris and Solaris derivatives such as Indiana. Which considering my day job is to help improve Installation of those things, this is a good thing :-)

Stay tuned for my next post where I'll talk about installing Ubuntu and Solaris Express on the T61p. Hopefully I can get that up before I go on holiday at the end of the week. Otherwise it will have to wait until after the New Year.

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