Solaris beats Mac OSX in WiFi hot-spot duel

So, there I was this morning at one of the local coffee shops with a WiFi hot-spot.  I booted my Solaris laptop (a Toshiba Tecra) running SXDE 09/07 and noticed the nwam service didn't find the WiFi network as it usually does.  Next, I restarted nwam using SMF (svcadm restart nwam), but, it still did not connect to the network.  So, to get me back to the nwam GUI pop-up window where I could select a network, I cleared out the /etc/nwam/known_wifi_nets file (as suggested in the man page; man nwamd) and resarted the nwam service one more time.  Immediately, the GUI popped up showing me the available WiFi network, I selected it, and nwam successfully brought up the network interface.  Total time elapsed: maybe 2 minutes.

Then, a few minutes later I overheard another customer complaining about how his computer couldn't connect to the WiFi network.  He grumbled something about how there must be something wrong with the store's WiFi system because his Mac laptop "never failed to connect to a network."  At this point I interrupted and told him I had successfully connected to the store's network with my computer.  He looked at me incredulously and asked how I did it.  One word answer: Solaris.

If you haven't tried Solaris on your laptop or desktop, you should.  It runs on 933 different server, laptop, and desktop systems at last count and that number grows each week.  Besides that, it's free!