Apologies in advance for the noise.

How do I go about finding out whether the Rhine II ethernet drivers  
(on some VIA integrated chipset, I believe) are part of Indiana?

I tried the x86 Solaris download about a year ago and got stuck on  
the drivers for my on-board ethernet port (Rhine II). Found the  
drivers, downloaded them, couldn't figure out how to get them onto a  
partition readable by Solaris.

Decided to try again this year, requested the Solaris Express DVD in  
the hopes that the driver had been upgraded to being part of the  
current distribution. No such luck.

I figured out (once, can't seem to recall at the moment) how to mount  
a FAT32 partition, so I have the drivers moved to the Solaris file  
system, but I haven't been able to compile them. They are dependent  
on several "system" include files that were not part of the toolchain  
that was in the Solaris Express DVD, and it appears that the files  
provided for downloading didn't include the driver architecture  
common files (or something like that). I did find the include files  
referenced, but not the driver common files.

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I don't like to load binary that I  
haven't compiled myself into the system. I figure that it takes a lot  
more evil guts to hide backdoors and such in source code than in  
binary. Not that I distrust anyone in particular, just don't like to  
start making exceptions to security rules if I can avoid it.

Thus, the question above. If I could confirm that Indiana does  
contain the Rhine II drivers in the distribution (compiled, I would  
hope, by someone the community knows and trusts using methods the  
community considers sufficiently secure), I think I would go ahead  
and download and play with Indiana, but if I find myself stuck at the  
same question of trusting a binary blob whose author I don't seem to  
be able to contact by e-mail (I've tried.), I think I'll wait another  
year to try again.

(As an alternative, if someone here can point me to the right mailing  
list for questions about drivers in Solaris Express, I'd be happy to  
go bother them, instead. I haven't been able to discern a mailing  
list for Solaris Express, although I admit I haven't looked today.)

Any help appreciated.

Joel Rees
(waiting for a 3+GHz ARM processor to come out,
to test Steve's willingness to switch again.)


_______________________________________________
indiana-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss

Reply via email to