Solaris Operating System

[alanpae]

Hi there,

Does anyone know if it's possible to run Sun's Solaris Operating System on one of the SL400's instead of Windows?

Sun has a Java based device detection tool available at:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.jsp

I was wondering if someone who actually own's one would mind running this on the system. It would be nice to know in advance if the OS is going to work or do I need to keep looking for another system.

Thanks in advance,
alan

[obpsym]

I've ran Solaris on the following Thinkpads with good results, T60P, X60, Z60M, X32, X300 and an old T22. You should post a question with the detailed specs of your SL series Thinkpad on the laptop section of OpenSolaris or check your hardware drivers here http://opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/

I'm currently running Opensolaris 2008.05 on a few machines but there are many other Solaris versions available. The only drivers I've had to download are the sound drivers, most everything like video, LAN, Wifi work out of the box. Again, doing a little reasearch helped me choose the most supported model with supported drivers.

I might be wrong but suspend might still not be supported.

Good luck.

[alanpae]

Thanks for the response. I checked the Solaris HCL before purchasing an IBM R51 series and as the HCL mentioned, everything is supported.

I checked both the Solaris and OpenSolaris HCL's before posting and could not find anything close to the SL 400 listed on either list. Since I currently do not own the machine I can't run the check tools to see what it can find and what it reports as unsupported.

Since I can't verify that either the disk or the monitor are supported on my own I was hoping someone who does own one wouldn't mind running the check tools and posting back what it says. It only takes a couple of minutes and doesn't install anything to the machine.

Thanks,
alan

[silverlokk]

Just got an SL400, in fact wrote a mini-review of it on my blog. I've also tried out the live version of BeleniX, which is an OpenSolaris distro. It boots but I don't get sound or WiFi. Also tried the check tool, and it gave me just one device without a Solaris driver. I have reason to believe it's my WiFi. However, I read somewhere (maybe on the BeleniX forums) that the iwh (?) driver works. I haven't been able to verify this because BeleniX would give me some error when I booted it.

Also got warnings about two of my devices: audiohd, 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller and vgatext, Cantiga Integrated Graphics Controller. These warnings mean that driver support for those devices is guaranteed. OTOH, my gani, RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller, is supposed to have a third-party driver.

All other devices are taken care of by bundled drivers.

[alanpae]

Guess I'll wait and see what Toshiba comes up with. Their supposed to support OpenSolaris next year and in that case everything should have drivers for it.

For sound I would try over at opensound.com. Drivers are free for personal use.

If you need help with wireless let me know.

Thanks,
alan

[silverlokk]

BTW, forgot to mention that while the device detection tool gave me a warning about my video hardware, BeleniX gave me 1280x800, which meant that its driver is better than basic VGA. I doubt I'd get video acceleration though, although that doesn't matter much to me.

[alanpae]

Thanks silverlokk,

Yea, the video detection routines don't always work so well with the detection tool however once you boot a system things generally work out better.

On my Thinkpad r51 the detection tool doesn't even recognize my adapter but I wasn't worried about since I knew the X.org driver for the adapter was already included.

Thanks for posting the results.

alan

[silverlokk]

Sorry to report that my attempt to install OpenSolaris (more precisely, BeleniX) failed again. I had tried once before, on an 80GB partition -- my HD is partitioned NTFS 40GB x 2, the first of which is my Vista boot, and the second Vista data; and the 80GB on which I tried to install BeleniX. The install did finish without any warnings as far as I could tell but BeleniX would boot, give an error that I couldn't catch, then reboot. In fact, when I tried to boot instead to Vista, GRUB (?) told me the partition was not bootable.

My second attempt was on a 16GB USB flashdrive. Again, the install went through, although it took more than an hour (!) -- maybe because I was installing off a 2GB live USB? Anyway, same thing -- some error that flashed on my screen, followed by a reboot.

As an aside, and to veer away from OpenSolaris for a moment, I did get FreeBSD (more precisely, DesktopBSD) to install, and in fact I do boot into it every now and then -- when I don't need an Internet connection. Yes, folks, the wireless isn't supported, and instructions I've seen seem to indicate that you need to be connected to the Internet to create a driver from a Windows driver using ndisgen. I love DtBSD but I'm playing around with Solaris because at least I can get Sun's support if I need it for a client. Ohwellllll.

[silverlokk]

My third attempt finally worked, although technically, it may well count as the first since I was trying to install BeleniX the other two times. This time, I downloaded the OpenSolaris combo live and installation CD, and noted that it recognized my wired Ethernet. It did have issues with sound and WiFi though, although I figured that the wired Ethernet meant I could solve those eventually. The thing is, the Intel WiFi Link 5100 is supposed to be handled by the iwh driver, which is supposed to be loaded in the kernel but it doesn't seem to be detected. Saw somewhere that an incorrect entry in device_aliases (can't seem to find it on my drive at the moment) and correcting that could solve the wireless thingy.

As to sound, I tried the opensound driver from opensound.com but still no joy. Not a high priority at the moment but I still would like to get sound in OpenSolaris eventually. Otherwise I'd still have to boot to Vista.

Speaking of which, I don't know if it had anything to do with Vista, but I first booted to my Vista partition earlier, then rebooted to Solaris, and couldn't get google and fastmail.fm resolved. I then shut down, thinking there was something from Vista that survived the restart, but still no google or fastmail.fm. So, I manually dropped dhcp on gre0, then started it again. That did it. Sure hope I don't have to do that often