On 21/09/2007, Jason Antman <jason at jasonantman.com> 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?
You're likely to have a better experience with Developer Edition. > 2) Any experience with hardware, both in terms of laptops and in terms of > AMD64? In general, I have no issues with hardware support. My network adapters aren't supported "out-of-the-box", but my manufacturer's website has drivers. So I just install them from my external USB drive. > 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? Unfortunately, unless the spare partition you have is a primary partition, you're out of luck for now. Solaris still has a mindset of being the only OS on a drive, and so doesn't support installation into an extended/logical partition yet. With that said, regardless of where you are installing an operating system, you should *always* backup your data first. It's risky business to go without a backup regardless of what you are doing. Whether you are installing a GNU/Linux distribution or Solaris, you should have a backup. > 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? Yes, you should be able to install to an external USB drive. I wouldn't recommend firewire at this time. Speed and ease of installation will both be concerns. The current installer is fairly slow already due to some architectural and other issues, but those are being worked on. I can't comment on the PCMCIA thing as I have never used anything but a network PCMCIA card and that was years ago. Ta, -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth
