Ubuntu 8.10 on HP NC6400 notebook

After finished backup of my existing Ubuntu 8.04 , Ubuntu 8.10 was finally installed !
One sweet thing I noticed , my WIFI LED is blinking (at last) ! It never blink in previous version which apparently due to bug.

Installation is really simple even tough for dual boot system like me !

Openoffice 3.0 did not make it but anyway it can always be download from the Openoffice website.

Now I need to restore my data and all set to go !

Upgrade Opensolaris :: Part 2

Finally :

opensolaris:~$ pfexec pkg image-update
DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB)
Completed 563/563 8802/8802 47.76/47.76

PHASE ACTIONS
Removal Phase 1068/1068
Install Phase 786/786
Update Phase 17819/17819
PHASE ITEMS
Reading Existing Index 9/9
Indexing Packages 563/563

A clone of opensolaris exists and has been updated and activated.
On the next boot the Boot Environment opensolaris-1 will be mounted on '/'.
Reboot when ready to switch to this updated BE.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Please review release notes posted at:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/relnotes/200811/x86/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

opensolaris:~$ beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
opensolaris N / 12.98M static 2008-11-16 22:55
opensolaris-1 R - 5.45G static 2002-01-01 01:05

Upgrade Opensolaris

To upgrade OpenSolaris image :

opensolaris:~$ pfexec pkg image-update

Please update pkg(5) using 'pfexec pkg install SUNWipkg' and then retry
the image-update.

No worry !

opensolaris:~$ pfexec pkg install SUNWipkg
DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB)
Completed 1/1 110/110 0.41/0.41

PHASE ACTIONS
Install Phase 3/3
Update Phase 167/167
PHASE ITEMS
Reading Existing Index 9/9
Indexing Packages 1/1

Desktop Effect

I do not see any reason why I should not enable the desktop effect ! Sweet !
To enable it , just got to "System" => "Preferences => "Appearance" and select the "Visual Effects" tab.

Device Driver Utility

I decided to pull off my newly installed OpenSolaris hard disk into a more power machine (slightly - A Pentium 4 machine with 3 Ghz CPU and 1 GB of memory).
Well , expected the OpenSolaris booted up and running but it cannot detect the network card.

No worry , go to Application => System Tools and run the "Device Driver Utility". Right click on the network card and select "View Details" and it will show quite a lot of information but what I am really interested is the URL where I can download and install the network card driver (I guess I am lucky when the myk driver version 2.6.3 just release recently).


The URL link is : http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/ which is the website for free NIC drivers for Solaris. I hope this driver will be able to make it to the OpenSolaris package repositories or perhap it is already in there ?

I just download it and do the usual : make and make install but make sure you have a working C compiler installed. I am using the OpenSolaris package manager to install the Sun Studio Express (around ~200 MB) but i guess you can also use the GCC compiler.

It is all documented in the "Readme.txt".

(6) Making binaries only for OpenSolaris users.

The driver likely work with GLD v3 in OpenSolaris, known as Nemo.
You can enjoy the new functions by recompiling the source code.

% rm Makefile.config
% ln -s Makefile.config_gld3 Makefile.config
% /usr/ccs/bin/make

OpenSolaris 2008.11(rc1)

The official releases is getting closer for OpenSolaris 2008.11 but I decided to give a try but running on a *very* old hardware : Dell PowerEdge 350. Luckily I managed to get extra 256MB to pump up the memory to 768MB. But the hard disk is dead. Really dead but I got an old IDE disk (Baraccuda) lying around somewhere.

All I can said , the installation is straightforward and I am impressed with the artwork or graphics. Really nice !

And here you go:

OpenSolaris 2008-11 desktop with Nimbus theme.



Things I like :

• GUI such as icons and theme are really well done
• Feel like Ubuntu (since I used Ubuntu since the beginning)
• ZFS filesystem as default (sweet)
• TimeSlider tool
• Device Driver Utility
• DTrace Toolkit (DTT)
  

Things I am missed :

• No OpenOffice in default installation (for a desktop distribution).
• No Tomboy. (Guess MONO will not be coming soon)
• No GIMP
• Package Manager not working (for me at least but command like to the rescue)
  
• No F-Spot