James Liu has an in-depth posting on how to convert a $299 Acer AspireOne into a dual boot Solaris/Windows netbook. Since I had acquried this netbook recently for a trip to China, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to jump back into the OpenSolaris/Solaris desktop world. It is certainly a better solution than dragging around a huge & expensive 17" Macbook.
The netbook conversion took about 3hrs with only a couple of false starts. Thanks to James for getting everything setup and ready to go. Here are the system features that are working with no problems:
- Startup time - about 1 minute
- Suspend/Resume - upon close of the lid
- Video Camera - works with Ekiga
- Wireless Networking
- USB stuff (keyboard, mouse, sticks, etc.)
- SD cards (but need to boot up with them already inserted)
- Windows on a dual boot partition in 40GB
- rsync command for keeping the Mac & Acer files synchronized
Here are the applications that are working great:
- Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 with Lightning Calendar plugin
- Firefox 3.0.8 with ScrapBook, ColorfulTabs, GooglePreview, FlagFox, & RSS Ticker plugins
- StarOffice 8 (OpenOffice.org)
- GIMP Image Editor
- Punchin VPN for corporate connectivity
- Ekiga Video Conference
- Pidgin IM Client
- mplayer for music & video
Here are the things that will need some more work to get going:
- Network Printer. HP Officejet C6150
- Freeciv - a free simulation game. If someone already has this compiled & working on Solaris/OpenSolaris, please provide a pointer.
- Play nice with ViewSonic 21" monitor
- Support for xD cards. This is coming soon in an OpenSolaris update.
nice laptop :)
Posted by karahan online on June 07, 2009 at 03:55 AM PDT #
Another example, how Sun management wastes its resources :-)
Posted by Lost Sun Stockholder on June 22, 2009 at 11:03 AM PDT #