Welcome to my blog. I'll mainly post some stuff about (Open)Solaris und a little bit of this and that now and then.
So short before christmas, right in time a new toy arrived. A Sony Vaio AW11Z/B. Quite a nice bit of gear, though a little bit too big. But the AR series models I was going to get wasn't available any more. Since I didn't want anything with less than 1650x1080p display resolution and choise of brand is limited I "had" to go for the AW model.
Unfortunately it comes with Windows Vista preinstalled. That we're about to solve pretty soon :-)
First of all wait a bit until the preloaded Vista is ready to welcome you. Took like 15minutes or so before I was logged in. The notebook comes with a nice collection of software (Adobe Acrobat Distiller, Photoshop Elements etc.). We also might need Vista to watch BluRay discs. So I'm going for a dual boot.
Before we start lets create the recommended recovery dvds (yes there's 3! recovery dvds). Took well over an hour to create these. By the time I was this far I had lunch and my boss was there to take a look at the new toy.
The AW11Z/B comes with two 320GB harddisks. Those will make a nice ZFS mirrored pool. I used Vista's own hard disk and partition manager to shrink the original C: partition down to about 50GB on the first drive. I didn't touch the recovery partition (you never know when you might need it ;-)) That gave me roughly 230GB for the Solaris installation.
So now it's time to boot the Solaris installation dvd (I used SXCE build 103). Choose the text mode install and went for a ZFS root installation. I allocated 30GB to the root pool, the rest will go into homes and stuff.
About 40mins later it's time for the first "real" boot into Solaris.
Everything works just as expected. The first nice surprise is that Wifi works out of the box. (It has a Intel WiFi Link 5100).
For the Marvell Yukon 88E8055 we grab Masayuki Murayama's myk driver and are ready to go on the wired NIC too.
Sound works out of the box as well. Nivida graphics just works too.
Even the built-in webcam just works. All in all a very pleasant and easy thing to do.
Next thing is to create a solaris partition on the second harddisk, create two slices, attach on to the root pool and create a mirrored pool for all the data.
There is also a driver for the SD-Card reader which seems to work (it attached fine). I'll have to test that when I have an SD-Card.
Now everything is ready to put some data on it and install all needed software.
Though a few things remain open at the moment.
Suspend to ram seems to suspend the notebook ok but didn't wake up properly again. I'll have to check that.
The screensaver should switch off the backlight of the display after a while, but didn't.
The key for display brightness don't work so battery runtime is not where I want it to be yet.
The bios is really crippled. All one can change is the time and boot device order. I couldn't even switch off the bootup numlock. That really annoys me and I logged a service request with Sony. So far their support hasn't reacted at all within a day.
When I logged into Opensolaris (I use GDM as display manager) it didn't set the permissions on the sound and webcam device, so I had to fix that manually to have those working as non-root user.
Despite those issues great work from everyone who contributed to (Open)Solaris!
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