OpenSolaris on a tiny laptop - first impressions
Hurrah, my Eee pc arrived this afternoon - thanks gbax.com!. Getting my hands on one of these this side of Christmas was a challenge - Asus it seems just can't make them fast enough, but the excellent customer service from GBAX put other (larger) retailers to shame.
I haven't had much time to experiment around with the machine so far, but I have been able to plug an external disk with the Indiana preview on it, to see what's supported.
Out of the box, it boots as far as a gdm login screen, and with an external USB keyboard, I can get to a full desktop session. In general, it's pretty responsive and it didn't feel like I was running on a slow machine.
As suspected, the wired nic isn't detected, and neither is the wireless one - I'll post prtconf and scanpci output in a while, it might just be a case of tweaking driver aliases (since Solaris has support for the ath wifi card I think)
The laptop's keyboard also doesn't work on boot - from a bit of playing about, doing a modunload of kb8042 and modloading it again, followed by "devfsadm -i k8042" makes the keyboard work, but on rebooting, the same problem occurs. I haven't worked out what the problem is yet, but it's early days and I don't have time to experiment more tonight.
Otherwise, when running linux on the box, everything just works - the keyboard will take a bit of getting used to, but I wouldn't give up the form-factor of this little device!
Will post more if I manage to get more stuff working under Nevada.
Oh - prodding at this a bit more, loading kmdb on boot makes the keyboard work (?) but no joy on the wired or wireless nics. The OpenSolaris ath driver page at
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/wireless/ath
suggests that we're using MADwifi-based drivers, and from
http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility/Atheros
I think the Atheros AR5BXB63 card isn't working yet. More investigation needed - there's a thread on laptop-discuss now at
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/laptop-discuss/2007-December/thread.html#9516
Posted by Tim Foster on December 22, 2007 at 07:20 PM GMT #
Some info from various Solaris commands running on this box is available at:
http://mediacast.sun.com/share/timf/solaris-eeepc-info.tar.gz
Posted by Tim Foster on January 02, 2008 at 10:17 AM GMT #
btw. the latest ath driver on opensolaris.org is reported to work now :-) I'll test it as soon as my machine comes back from the repair shop!
Posted by Tim Foster on February 01, 2008 at 10:14 PM GMT #
Great!
Finally I've found a reason to buy an eeepc =)
Posted by youth on March 07, 2008 at 03:00 PM GMT #
Quick update: have wireless and audio working now with internal drivers on my fixed laptop, I'm guessing they should hit opensolaris.org pretty soon.
I've OpenSolaris developer preview installed to a 4gb SDcard,
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/indiana-discuss/2008-February/004738.html
- and ZFS root is lovely :-)
I'm told the webcam should work too under Solaris, but I haven't got updated Gstreamer bits to test it.
All that's left is ethernet support, and suspend/resume, and we've got full OpenSolaris support. Performance is a little sluggish when booting off the slower SD card, but all in all, I'm pretty happy with OpenSolaris on the Eee.
Posted by 192.18.1.36 on March 07, 2008 at 03:23 PM GMT #
Say - Did you ever happen to get the wired network working?
Did you look at using the NDIS wrapper stuff to try to create one from the XP driver for the NIC?
And - Can you make the external display port work at the same time as the built in screen, and it is just mirror, or can it be a different desktop?
Cheers!
Posted by nathank on April 29, 2008 at 04:09 AM IST #
I'm told the webcam should work too under Solaris, but I haven't got updated Gstreamer bits to test it.
All that's left is ethernet support, and suspend/resume, and we've got full OpenSolaris support. Performance is a little sluggish when booting off the slower SD card, but all in all, I'm pretty happy with OpenSolaris on the Eee.
Posted by laptop batteries on November 28, 2008 at 01:31 AM GMT #