I had opensolaris 2008.05 installed on my Thinkpad X31. It worked ok, though getting the mobile broadband working was a major headache. I recently upgraded to b99, still no problem. I've now upgraded my laptop to a Thinkpad X61, and my troubles have started. The original live CD would not connect to my wireless network. It seemed able to detect it because it popped up a list of available networks and, when I chose mine, asked me for the WPA key. However, nothing happened, and a short time later it popped up the list of detected networks again.
I read about picea and decided to try the latest build (b100a) which I downloaded and tried from live CD. It also found the network, but I still could not connect to it: it kept asking me for a login and password and I couldn't find any way of changing that to WPA key. In the end I just installed it anyway, and to my surprise I was able to connect to the network and all day yesterday it worked fine. Today, however, it's back to behaving just like 2008.05 was - it won't connect at all (though it occasionally connects to my neighbour's unsecured network). Is there some easy way around this? I'd be happy to go back to a more stable release but it doesn't look like that would solve the problem anyway. I don't know what the wifi card in the laptop is though the fact that it works sometimes, and is fine with a different network, suggests to me that it is not a driver issue. Alternatively, does anyone know if Solaris Express works? It looks like a more stable platform but I have not tried it on the laptop. What sort of wifi support does it include? I'd be grateful for any suggestions for a simple solution to this issue. And now a bit of a rant I'm afraid: I have used Solaris, and SunOS before it, since about 1987. I use it at work and at home (both on sparc machines), and I would like to have it on my laptop. Some years ago I had Solaris 7 x86 running on a laptop with the xfree X server, and things should be better now because there is a lot more Sun support for x86 platform. But it is not easy! I am not a system administrator but I've solved enough setup issues over the years to feel confident that I can get most things to work with a bit of help. In the end, though, I want to use the laptop for work, and trying to get opensolaris to run on it is a job in itself. What must it be like for inexperienced users - is Sun really hoping any such might start to use this system? Solaris Express looks like it might be a better bet but apparently support for that will be withdrawn anyway. At the moment, the shutdown button on the system menu comes and goes, and without it the only way to shut down is to run init as root. Something that basic should just work. I tried the latest ubuntu live cd yesterday in my laptop. I don't really want to switch, but I have to say it was impressive how everything worked. Detecting and connecting to wifi - no problem. Even the mobile broadband worked straight away, no configuration needed: it was actually more straightforward than in windoze. If I was not already a Solaris user, I know which I'd choose. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
