[geeks] How is Solarix x86 on notebooks?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: nate at portents.com
>Date: Fri Mar 10 17:02:52 CST 2006
>To: geeks at sunhelp.org
>Subject: [geeks] How is Solarix x86 on notebooks?

>Hey folks,
>
>My iBook G4 just died two months out of warranty (same video chip problem
>the iBook G3 currently has an extended repair program active for - no such
>thing for the iBook G4, at least right now).  I'm pretty unhappy with the
>situation, and I'm either going to wait for Apple to come out with an
>Intel based iBook or build myself a notebook and run Linux or Solaris x86
>on it.  Specifically, I was looking at this:
>
>http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mobile/display/openbook-1559.html

Neat idea, but ultimately I suspect you'd pay a real premium to have a laptop with no "real" warranty (though dual SATA drives sounds quite nice...)

>Anyone with experience running Solaris on notebooks?  Anyone with
>experience with the AOpen OpenBook?

Solaris 10 x86 is usable on older PII 366 MHz laptops with 256 Meg RAM (think Ultra-1 level performance), and on more recent systems (Pentium 4 with 1 Gig or more RAM) should be really nice. Be careful of driver support for hardware devices.

Linux is also nice on current laptops, if you can get past any driver-support issues (granted Linux is much better than Solaris for x86 hardware support). Linux will liely support wireless - Solaris will not.

Lionel