Solaris 10 (finally) running on Acer Aspire 9424
With a new job comes a new laptop. I went for Acer Aspire 9424WSMi. It of course comes with Windows Media Center preinstalled. Because I’m gonna work with production Solaris machines, I decided that it would be best to install Solaris on it. Here is the results of my attempts :
1. Tried to install official Solaris 10 06/06. Installation successful but laptop crashes very early during boot. Too early to find out the guilty device driver.
2. Installed Solaris Express 11/06. No problem whatsoever. Nvidia card recognised, beautiful desktop out of the box. Networking fine thanks to an updated version of the rge Realtek Gigabit Ethernet Driver. Would have loved to stop there BUT… I need to install JES on top of Solaris and for whatever unexplained reason, the JES installer crashes at launch time. Couldn’t find anything on the internet on the subject. Of course, one can try to install every JES product manually. But I need many so that wasn’t so practical. Strangely enough, in the stacktrace output of the installer error, it showed a method called “checkOsVersion”. Would that be the reason ?
3. Installed official Solaris 10 11/06. No crash during boot. Great. But no network. The “rge” driver is not the updated release so that it cannot take my NIC. Tried to use the “rge” driver of Solaris Express/Opensolaris but that failed as well, some network projects having been integrated with some dependencies between them.
And the solution is : on December 19, an updated “gani” driver showed up on the Free NIC drivers for Solaris superb page. some “modload” later, I could type :
#ifconfig gani0 plumb
#ifconfig gani0 dhcp
and I had got the net work…
Still to be done : I have no wireless yet. This is normal because the laptop uses a Intel 3945ABG chipset for which even OpenSolaris doesn’t have a driver yet (in development right now).
But I have enough to start working…