Maybe you can download a network driver, see http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/systems/details/2035.html
The audio might work better with OSS, available at http://www.opensound.com/download.cgi but I don't know if anyone has tried it on that particular hardware. The problem is there are a lot of different audio, network, and other support chips in use, and OpenSolaris is definitely playing catch-up adding drivers for them. Newer hardware tends to be better supported than whatever older hardware people have lying around. The situation has gotten a _lot_ better in the last few years, and could reasonably be expected to continue to improve; but some hardware may never be supported unless people contribute drivers, because of limited resources and the need for some sort of financial justification to invest the time and money creating and supporting drivers for less commonly used hardware. Linux drivers can't be ported due to both licensing and often architectural differences. BSD drivers can be ported (although the practicality of that may vary), and a number have been. When it comes to applications, audio apps can be a problem (Linux uses a different audio API); that situation will probably improve some, but never be 100%. And of course software to work with random consumer gadgets (like GPSs, for instance) may never exist except for Windows (and occasionally Mac OS), although some reasonable workalikes may exist on Linux (and may be more or less portable to OpenSolaris). So given all that, it's up to you to decide whether OpenSolaris is suitable for you. The best approach with anything is usually in this order: * first, make a list of everything you know or can anticipate you might want to do, and put it in priority order * second, find applications that do that, keeping in mind that there may be multiple applications for any given task, not all of which run on every platform * _last_, pick the OS that will support the most of the top priority applications That approach might well vary if you already have experience with some particular OS, or if you want particularly close inter-operation between multiple systems. Mostly, file sharing and the like will work with any modern systems now, but administration and configuration differs widely, and there has been very little progress (IMO) standardizing those areas, so supporting multiple operating systems means a lot more to learn. In the long run, that may pay off, since eventually you start learning principles rather than just recipes. But again, it's up to you to decide if that's worth the effort. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
