Thursday, August 24, 2006
OpenSolaris on the HP Pavilion a642n
It has been a couple of weeks now of running Solaris on x64 instead of Sparc. This was a machine I got at Best Buy about a year ago and I prompted to replace my Sun Blade 100. So far so good, although it does feel a little weird running Solaris on non-Sun hardware. I guess this is payback for all those years where I ran Linux on Sun hardware before I got hooked on Solaris. I am still using my Sun UNIX style keyboard and mouse, so it isn't too foriegn.
After I got past the network card issue I have only had one hardware problem and that is that I can not burn DVD's with cdrw, but cd's are no problem. I gave cdrecord a quick try but had no luck their either. But I have to admit I am very lazy and don't like to read long man pages so I probably didn't use cdrecord to its fullest. But the coolest thing has to be all of those memory card slots in the front work without a hitch, that was a nice suprise. Even an iPod shuffle shows up on the desktop automagically.
Another strange experience was actually playing a video game on Solaris. Thanks to the nice folks at Blastwave I was able to download Quake 2. I bought the Linux version a while ago but I never could get it to run well enough to make it fun, I just never had the hardware necessary. Well it works just fine now with my hardware. And speaking of perfromance, this machine runs fantastic! I think Solaris boots in less time than it took to open Firefox on the Blade 100! I can build Emacs at about the same speed as my Sun Blade 1000 at work. The tru stress test will be with ON. But right now I only have 512mb so I don't expect miracles.
After I got past the network card issue I have only had one hardware problem and that is that I can not burn DVD's with cdrw, but cd's are no problem. I gave cdrecord a quick try but had no luck their either. But I have to admit I am very lazy and don't like to read long man pages so I probably didn't use cdrecord to its fullest. But the coolest thing has to be all of those memory card slots in the front work without a hitch, that was a nice suprise. Even an iPod shuffle shows up on the desktop automagically.
Another strange experience was actually playing a video game on Solaris. Thanks to the nice folks at Blastwave I was able to download Quake 2. I bought the Linux version a while ago but I never could get it to run well enough to make it fun, I just never had the hardware necessary. Well it works just fine now with my hardware. And speaking of perfromance, this machine runs fantastic! I think Solaris boots in less time than it took to open Firefox on the Blade 100! I can build Emacs at about the same speed as my Sun Blade 1000 at work. The tru stress test will be with ON. But right now I only have 512mb so I don't expect miracles.
