Wednesday, December 27, 2006
OpenSolaris on the Ferrari 5000
The good news is that OpenSolaris build 54 installed on the Ferrari 5000 and the Nic worked. The bad news is that's about all that worked really well. The big problem for me is that there is no audio which will probably not be solved anytime soon. The ATI audio chip set spec has not been released so the open source world can write a driver for it. I don't expect it to be released either. The problem is with the big "Windows Vista Premium Ready" sticker on the front on the Ferrari. If you haven't read already, Vista has some crazy ideas about protecting copyrighted content. So my advice is that if you are an OpenSolaris or Linux user and looking at a new Laptop check the drivers carefully if it comes with Vista. I think that is going to be a problem for us in the future.
This isn't really a bash against Microsoft, just me complaining. However, I always feel that getting the OS and hardware from the same company is always the best situation. Then the driver problems go away. Unfortunately, Sun doesn't make an x64 laptop, and why is that Sun? Yeah, yeah, I know, economics...
This isn't really a bash against Microsoft, just me complaining. However, I always feel that getting the OS and hardware from the same company is always the best situation. Then the driver problems go away. Unfortunately, Sun doesn't make an x64 laptop, and why is that Sun? Yeah, yeah, I know, economics...