The joys of a new Acer laptop, OpenSolaris & Gentoo
Originally published on csvensson.blogspot.com. View saved original ↗
Its been quite some time since I wrote anything, mainly because I got a new laptop & have been experiencing the joys of trying to get it running OpenSolaris & Gentoo in a dual boot configuration. I was adament that there was going to be no trace of Windows on it, so had to ensure I could get all the multimedia functionality working flawlessly to keep me happy.
The laptop itself is an Acer Aspire 5020 series laptop (5024WLMI to be exact) with a healthly Turion 1.8GHZ, 1GB RAM, 100GB HDD, x700 Radeon & 15.4" TFT. I bought it mainly because it was very similar spec to the Acer Ferrarri 4000, but slightly more affordable. I reasoned that by having a laptop of similar spec, chances are Solaris is going to be fairly well supported.
I had the laptop just in time for OpenSolaris being made available, downloaded Nevada 16, tried to boot the CD & after a minute or so the system would panic & reboot itself.
I then started making posts to comp.unix.solaris to try to resolve the issue, & recieved valuable postings from a variety of Solaris experts including kernel developers. This really made me realise quite how willing really knowledgeable members of the Solaris community are more than happy to assist with people's issues. It also gave me hope that although no-one managed to solve my problem on the comp.unix.solaris newsgroup initially, with the level of input I recieved I was confident it would get solved.
In the following weeks I went on holiday a couple of times, and started concentrating on getting Gentoo up & running, while I posted a bug report, waited for new Nevada releases to appear (approx one every two weeks), and bounced posts between the solarisx86 yahoo group.
This is something I'm going to cover in a lot more detail shortly, the only thing I will say is that I have almost achieved everything I set out to achieve on my laptop back in June.
The laptop itself is an Acer Aspire 5020 series laptop (5024WLMI to be exact) with a healthly Turion 1.8GHZ, 1GB RAM, 100GB HDD, x700 Radeon & 15.4" TFT. I bought it mainly because it was very similar spec to the Acer Ferrarri 4000, but slightly more affordable. I reasoned that by having a laptop of similar spec, chances are Solaris is going to be fairly well supported.
I had the laptop just in time for OpenSolaris being made available, downloaded Nevada 16, tried to boot the CD & after a minute or so the system would panic & reboot itself.
I then started making posts to comp.unix.solaris to try to resolve the issue, & recieved valuable postings from a variety of Solaris experts including kernel developers. This really made me realise quite how willing really knowledgeable members of the Solaris community are more than happy to assist with people's issues. It also gave me hope that although no-one managed to solve my problem on the comp.unix.solaris newsgroup initially, with the level of input I recieved I was confident it would get solved.
In the following weeks I went on holiday a couple of times, and started concentrating on getting Gentoo up & running, while I posted a bug report, waited for new Nevada releases to appear (approx one every two weeks), and bounced posts between the solarisx86 yahoo group.
This is something I'm going to cover in a lot more detail shortly, the only thing I will say is that I have almost achieved everything I set out to achieve on my laptop back in June.
Cite this post
Conor Svensson (11 August 2005). The joys of a new Acer laptop, OpenSolaris & Gentoo. https://conorsvensson.com/archive/blogspot/joys-of-new-acer-laptop-opensolaris/
BibTeX
@misc{svensson2005-joys-of-new-acer-laptop-opensolaris,
author = {Conor Svensson},
title = {{The joys of a new Acer laptop, OpenSolaris \& Gentoo}},
year = {2005},
month = aug,
url = {https://conorsvensson.com/archive/blogspot/joys-of-new-acer-laptop-opensolaris/}
}