Installing OpenSolaris

I've had a bitch of a time over the last couple of days getting openSolaris functional on my desktop. The big hangup was network drivers. Because Solaris didn't have a "valid" driver for my chipset, it just decided to ignore mentioning that if couldn't configure the network. I guess it is possible that someone in this century may want to install an OS sans any means of connecting to a network. However it does seem unlikely. All said it was pretty easy to figure out that something was not quite correct. But rather than rant, I would prefer to focus on the things that I found useful in helping me resolve the problem.

First, the tone of the responses in the opensolaris forum was very positive. Unfortunately the suggestions didn't go beyond the low hanging fruit that I'd already picked. The best suggestion, one that I already had tried, was to download the driver from the OEM. Unfortunately the install some how worked but the driver failed to attach. The failure was due to some problem with devfsadm. I found a working driver before I taken a deeper looking into the solaris installation package but I think that some changes in the latest release changed how drivers are to be installed. The change invalidated the options used by devfsadm to install the driver and OEMs have yet to catch up especially with older hardware.

In the end I found the NIC driver on this page after reading this blog called the Solaris User experience page. I also found the BigAdmin page to be quite helpful.

Now that the driver issue has been solved I'm happily tapping away on the Solaris machine without any issues. One of the things that I noticed is great support USB devices. All and all this edition of the Solaris Developers Express release is looking a lot better than previous releases even with the rough start.