« February 2010
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28

Today

2009.06: A netbook for meetings

It's been a busy few months, but things are clearing up now.

The past few weeks, I've been using an Acer Aspire One for coverage when my trusty Toshiba r500 is recharging. It's my computer for meetings, I suppose. The Aspire One is a great little netbook, and 2009.06 should recognize every device on the system. Here's an action shot of this Atom-based system on my file cabinet:

The window shown in the display is the Device Detection Utility—the absence of red bars in that list indicates that every hardware component on the system is known to OpenSolaris. The main limitations of a standard single core, dual thread ~~(but dual-core)~~ Atom netbook like this are vertical screen real estate and memory usage. In the screen shot, I've moved the GNOME panels to the left and right sides of the display; I've also disabled unneeded services by using svcadm(1M).

If you've an Aspire One, or a similar netbook, you might want to give 2009.06 a spin. The usbcopy utility, from the SUNWdistro-const package, can be used to prepare a bootable USB stick to use for the installation.

[ T: OpenSolaris netbook Atom ]

(2009-04-21 17:20:16.0) Permalink Comments [6]

Comments:

It's not really dual-core... Just dual-threaded.

Posted by Leon on April 21, 2009 at 07:14 PM PDT #

@Leon: Thanks for the correction--I've updated the entry.

Posted by Stephen Hahn on April 21, 2009 at 07:50 PM PDT #

Steven

Do you have data about power consumption? With Linux the AspireOne will run around 2:30h, can I expect the same with OpenSolaris? If yes then I can't await the 06/2009 distribution :)

Posted by dominik on April 22, 2009 at 02:12 AM PDT #

Windows user can also use
http://devzone.sites.pid0.org/OpenSolaris/opensolaris-liveusb-creator
to prepare a stick.

Posted by Andreas on April 22, 2009 at 04:35 AM PDT #

Does and suspend, or more importantly, resume from suspend :-)?

Posted by Brian Leonard on April 22, 2009 at 06:54 AM PDT #

@dominik: I have the six-cell version so the battery life has been pretty good. It's easily made it through two full hours of meetings, but I'll try to get you a data-oriented answer.

@Andreas: That's right--thanks.

@Brian: Yes, suspend and resume do work. The bug that afflicted Intel chipsets (so that, while the OS would resume, Xorg would crashed) is fixed in Build 111A.

Posted by Stephen on April 22, 2009 at 09:55 AM PDT #