[ale] OT: solaris on a laptop?

[david.muse at firstworks.com (David Muse)]

On Wed, 01 Dec 2004 07:27:31 -0500
Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> wrote:

> Hey, I've just downloaded Solaris 10 and thought about giving it a
> spin on a laptop.  Anyone ever tried this?
> 
> -- 
> Until later, Geoffrey
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> 

I ran solaris 8 and 9 on an old 350mhz Compaq Presario laptop for a
while before I could get them to run in VMWare, which they do badly, so
I may end up re-installing them on the laptop :)

The biggest issues were the graphics card and networking.  With Solaris
8, I had to run in 640x480, 16 color vga mode and since I had no
built-in ethernet, I had to use one of those old 3com 10-base-T
pcmcia ethernet cards.  I think with 9 I was able to run the graphics
card in 800x600 8 bit color VESA mode but I still had to use the same
ethernet card. I had a Zircom real port 100-base-T/modem card, which
Solaris allegedly supports, but as it turns out, there are about 10
different models of that same card and Solaris only supports half of
them.

I think ACPI didn't work either.

I never used it as an actual laptop,  I just hooked it up to my
network, left the lid closed and telnet or ssh'ed into it.  It worked
fine for years.

I haven't tried Solaris 10 yet.

Dave