Thinkpads Forum

I have installed solaris 11 (nevada) on my thinkpad t60. It is nice. I actually like it a little more than Ubuntu. I have problems with sound though. There's a high pitch noise when you turn the volume on. It is continues. Everything else work, but I don't think wireless with wpa work.

How is Solaris working on a thinkpad ? Does processor frequency scaling works ? I'm very interested by that, i'd like to try it but i don't know if it works well on a laptop. What about battery life ?

Actually I installed it on a t61. Solaris runs really well on the thinkpad. In fact, if I can get wireless with wpa, and sound working, I might just ditch Ubuntu. Solaris doesn't have laptop mode like Ubuntu. Maybe it does, but minimal.

instead of nevada, nexenta or project indiana may be more interesting. h'm, maybe I'll have to give it a try meself....

amwus wrote:How is Solaris working on a thinkpad ? Does processor frequency scaling works ? I'm very interested by that, i'd like to try it but i don't know if it works well on a laptop. What about battery life ?

It works great on a X41, frequency scaling works and battery life is on par with windows for the same set of applications.

But it is not yet a convenient laptop OS... WAP only works for Atheros chipset (so I use WEP) and sleep/standby does not work yet. Both are work in progress and may come out in a couple of months.

Other than that, ZFS is fantastic and Zones is quite useful for development build/installs.

Posting this using nevada 77... Don't know anything about the other solaris distros.

tarvoke wrote:instead of nevada, nexenta or project indiana may be more interesting. h'm, maybe I'll have to give it a try meself....

Looks like Nexenta has debian like repositories. That's nice.

well, i'll give it a try ! Solaris is a great OS ! Would be very nice if standards laptop features worked !

Tell me when you get sound to work...

All I get is a long beep...

WPA still not working for me..

madcow wrote:Looks like Nexenta has debian like repositories. That's nice.

exactly: blastwave is nice and all, but still feels limited compared to various *bsd and linux repositories. it would be cool if canonical (i.e. ubuntu) had the resources to maintain it themselves. but at least it sounds like so far quite a lot of the ubuntu userland has gotten into nexenta. keeping up with new versions, adding new packages, always rebuilding and testing... those maintainers have a tedious and often thankless job, don't they?

because of the utter flexibility (read: perversity. no, I kid, really) of the gentoo source framework, it lends itself really well to creating odd creatures such as solaris kernel with gnu userland -- even on sparc. but using gentoo requires some dedication and masochism, I can tell you from years of experience with it.

anyway, I'm guessing your sound problems are driver related. and since it's only the userland of these beasts which can be gpl, you're not going to find ALSA support in the solaris kernel (er, right?)

sun could try to use some *bsd audio drivers since their licenses are vaguely compatible (which is why you'll see ZFS in bsd 7 but not anytime soon in linux). what exactly does bsd use? pretty sure it ain't ALSA...

and as mhm said, wireless with atheros chipset will be the best supported (again, *bsd drivers ... )

tarvoke, that makes a lot of sense. I think Linus said Sun wants Linux drivers, and Linux wants ZFS. But Sun won't go GPL.

tarvoke wrote:

madcow wrote:Looks like Nexenta has debian like repositories. That's nice.

exactly: blastwave is nice and all, but still feels limited compared to various *bsd and linux repositories. it would be cool if canonical (i.e. ubuntu) had the resources to maintain it themselves. but at least it sounds like so far quite a lot of the ubuntu userland has gotten into nexenta. keeping up with new versions, adding new packages, always rebuilding and testing... those maintainers have a tedious and often thankless job, don't they?

You can have a BSD package system in solaris. Check out http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/pac ... #platforms

pkgsrc works just like the more popular FreeBSD ports, but the maintainers actually have patches for the different platforms that pkgsrc supports.

The NetBSD packages collection supports *BSD, Solaris, linux even Interix!
From the beginning, I found blastwave lacking as well and even though there are no binary pkgsrc packages for Solaris, when I build a package I use 'bmake package' to install the package and create my own binary packages instead of just 'bmake install'. bmake gets bootstrapped when you install netbsd pkgsrc.

When 0807 was released and I had a bare system, all I had to do to get up to speed was bootstrap the new system with pkgsrc, nfs mount my old binary packages location and 'pkg_add *'


Personally:
% pkg_info| wc -l
222

% pkginfo| grep -c SMC
15

% pkginfo| grep -c CSW
68

A *must* have package in the repository is audit-packages, where you can set a cron to download a list of vulnerabilities for maintained packages and see whats a risk on your system. Imagine having something that audits all the SUNW packages based on version and prints a report with URLS and CVEs.

The only gotcha if you would plan keep the pkgsrc up to date via CVS is rebuilding and updating. To update pkgsrc with the least hassle , check out pkg_chk in the repository or use a sandbox location to build and verify from.

madcow wrote:I have installed solaris 11 (nevada) on my thinkpad t60. It is nice. I actually like it a little more than Ubuntu. I have problems with sound though. There's a high pitch noise when you turn the volume on. It is continues. Everything else work, but I don't think wireless with wpa work.

I installed the 4 Front Open Sound System driver works great: http://opensound.com/ Click on 'Download', then 'Open Sound System'. Choose the appropriate Solaris version, and install the package.

The open sound drivers work on both the X60 and T60P, there is a gui config for adjusting the output volume, from memory it's ossconfig or similar.

The adjustment is needed on both machines as the volume level is too low by default to be of any use.

I'll be installing the Solaris SXDE 1/08 on both machines this weekend.

I agree that the Solaris GUI is much more intuitive than Ubuntu etc

hi all,

i've tried to use solaris on my T60, sound driver is working with opensound, ethernet is working either, not really hoping for others to work (finger print, bluetooth, i don't need them)

does anyone know how to use ati driver for the display? even now it's already ok with vesa (i guess) at 1400x1050 but the windows moving isn't smooth....

please share the info regarding the display driver if you don't mind,

thanks & regards,

madcow wrote:tarvoke, that makes a lot of sense. I think Linus said Sun wants Linux drivers, and Linux wants ZFS. But Sun won't go GPL.

Sun hinted that they were going to release Solaris under the GPL license. If and when they do I will give it a try. Not a moment before.