Sunday November 13, 2005

Awhile back, I blogged about my experiences putting Solaris 10 on my laptop. I'm reporting in again, because I recently installed Nevada (which might eventually be called Solaris 11) along with a couple of extremely useful scripts that will greatly improve your Solaris laptop experience. The cool thing is that these scripts (and Nevada itself) are available on the Open Solaris website, so it's okay for me to blog about them.

The two scripts are inetmenu and frkit. While both are useful, inetmenu is the true godsend in that it automates the act of attaching to a network and makes it very easy to deal with the variety of networking environments a mobile user encounters: it can automatically configure using a static IP, DHCP with NIS, and DHCP without NIS. And it knows about wireless as well (if configured).

Check out the Laptop Community on the OpenSolaris site for more information on mobile Solaris. You'll find frkit, inetmenu, wireless, and other information there. Go wild and have fun!

By the way, I'm blogging this on my Nevada-enabled Tecra M2 laptop at Sun's HPC Consortium meeting in Seattle, connected via local wireless and VPN'ed into Sun. Smooth as silk.