I got a little bored last night and decided to drop OpenSolaris onto my old laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000). I’ve messed around with OpenSolaris before from time to time, but only in a VM — never as the main OS on a machine.
So far it’s been pretty good – the live CD and installer are really slick. The wireless in my laptop Just Worked (though amusingly enough the wired network didn’t – there doesn’t seem to be a Broadcom 4401 driver in the default install). When I installed to the hard disk it even carried across the wireless SSID and WPA key I’d configured while booted into the livecd. Getting the wired network going shouldn’t be a huge hassle – it looks like there’s a third party driver available for it, so I’ll try that out tonight.
X worked without much trouble, and came up antialiased by default. Unfortunately it doesn’t feel like I’ve got hardware graphics acceleration (I’m using a Radeon Mobility X300), so Xorg uses 50%+ CPU whenever there’s a lot of graphical updates. Fixing that may just be a matter of changing the driver X is selecting though; I haven’t spent much time looking into it.
There’s now a graphical package manager (closely modeled on Synaptic) with retrieval from Internet package repositories – a lot easier than downloading stuff by hand and installing it with pkgadd. The package manager is also used to notify users about available updates, much the same as Ubuntu.
I even managed to get my USB EVDO modem working, but I’ll go into that in detail later.
In fact, there’s been remarkably little that hasn’t worked. The only issue I’ve got currently (aside from what I’ve mentioned above) is that edge scrolling on the Synaptics trackpad doesn’t work at the moment. And again, this may just be a matter of messing around with xorg.conf.
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