Jason Antman wrote: > Hi, > > I'm looking to install Solaris (either openSolaris Developer Edition > or Solaris 10) on my laptop. > > It is a custom-built (but guaranteed for Linux) system based on an > AMD Athlon Mobile 3400+. Currently, it has OpenSuSE 10.2 (64-bit) > running. I have an empty 9.9 Gb ext3 partition that I could use. > > so, I have a few questions for the community... > > 1) Any thoughts on Solaris 10 vs. openSolaris Developer Edition? >
Solaris Express has much better hardware support, is a generally more modern environment and will likely be a better choice for you. > 2) Any experience with hardware, both in terms of laptops and in > terms of AMD64? > Lots of people have been running on laptops and on AMD64 laptops as well. Graphics and network cards are the more interesting components than CPU. > 3) I'm not too hot on the idea of messing with the partitions, mainly > because it's taken me a year to get the config on this laptop the way > I want it, and I don't currently have the architecture in place to do > a full backup of the 80+ Gb of data on the drive. Have many people > had issues with doing such a repartition? > You didn't say whether the free partition you had was a primary one, but that is a requirement for Solaris at this time. > 4) Is it possible to do an install to an external drive? (I guess > this would be USB or FireWire)? Thoughts on speed, ease of > installation, etc.? How about the possibility of trying to find a > PCMCIA SCSI card and running an external SCSI drive? > Installation to USB disks works fine; that's how I do most of my testing, and it's what I'd recommend of these options. Firewire support isn't in the install environment at the moment. PCMCIA hardware may or may not work, there seem to be oddities in different system chipsets there; I don't have any first- or second-hand knowledge of anyone using one of those. Dave
