Earlier this year I bought a Fujitsu-Siems Amilo M 7400 laptop. Initially I put JDS on it then SuSE 9. With Solaris x86 getting a lot of attention of late I thought it might be time to give it a go. I tried using using the latest build of Solaris 10 (available externally through Solaris Express). The installation from the DVD went fine, though ther seems to be a little quirk with the video console driver after you quit X (Intel 855), but hey X works so I’m happy.
The network port (Broadcom 440x) was not picked up. However Bigadmin pointed me here for the drivers, which worked perfectly. Kudos to Masayuki Murayama.
Next important thing was audio (Intel ICH4). Again there were no drivers with solaris but Bigadmin pointed me to the website of Jurgen Keil at tools.de. The i810 driver there works fine.
Wireless (centrino) does not work. USB is fine, plugged a compact flash USB card from my camera in and vold picked it up and an icon appeared on the gnome desktop, as should ideally happen.
So how does this compare to installing JDS or SuSE. For those I didnt have to get extra drivers, so in that sence it was harder, though Bigadmin being able to point me to the packages was a big help. It was about the same level of effort as installing Linux on my PC at home a few months ago, then I had to download graphics drivers and the nforce drivers to get the audio and networking working, in fact that was a little more tedious as the drivers didn’t want to play nicely with the kernel I had compiled, once I reverted to the distro kernel it worked fine.
hi Al, I had the same problem with my little toshiba m100 – after quitting X, the console would just sit and flicker : completely illegible. The solution was to use the XFree86 drivers instead of the XSun ones – they’re selectable from kdmconfig out of the box on S10, so it should all be hunky dory. Things aren’t totally perfect yet – for me, there’s still something odd going on with the console, but at least it’s usable now. (I can do a demo on request)