Ok, so i'm back up and running my new favorite OS! Phew! It took a lot of installing and reinstalling, but i'm glad i did it! At one point i was tempted to give in and just go back to linux, but that was just a brief moment of heat-induced delirium courtesy of the ferrari 4000 blast furnace-- man this thing gets hot after 4 hours of compiling! I soon came to my senses a5nd pushed on!
So here's what worked and what didn't. Keep in mind this would have been much simpler had i access to a wired ethernet connection. Because I didn't i had to install knoppix (twice!) in order to get working wifi and download the Solaris (non-Express) 06/06 and the snv_42 bits. Oh, and did i mention I love ZFS?! It rocks! Firstly as I noted in the above post, the Express version of Solaris 10 U2 (06/06) completely hard locks this machine when paired with the cardbus driver from opensolaris.org. If you don't use that driver the card is dead in the water-- if you do the machine is dead in the water. ;( So next I tried applying the snv_41 build i had done with my previous Solaris Express 05/06 (snv_38) system-- ZFS is really fantastic. Just imported the pool and did a bfu! Unfortunately this didn't help and more hardlocks were the result. Next after a few linux installs (knoppix) i got the 5 DVD images of Solaris 10 U2 (non-express version this time). This was installed and with the addition of said cardbus driver I was back in action with working wifi, but non-functional sound now! :( I also grabbed the snv_42 bits and tried to build those on this platform, but what resulted were a bunch of error messages in the log... i guess they weren't lying when they said you need a Solaris Express version to do a nightly build ;). So after storing all this crap in my ZFS pool along with the saved html pages from blastwave (thanks Dennis for such a good tutorial!) i once again installed Solaris Express 06/06, snv_40. This time i didn't try to make the card work-- I even took it out of the machine. My sole purpose was to build snv_42 and hope that it would get me back to a working Solaris Express system. After getting it built and bfu'd, i rebooted and inserted the wifi card..... lo and behold the lights came on as soon as i inserted it (didn't need to install the cardbus driver!!!) and inetmenu showed all of my wireless nets (didn't even have to update the atheros driver!!!) So now i've got a working system again... well i haven't run frkit yet, but i'm pretty certain that it won't cause any trouble. I'm also wondering if i should try installing that vermillion stuff again.... but i'm learning, so if i hose my system again i'm sure i'll be able to re-build it even faster next time. man this opensolaris thing is addicting! ;) This message posted from opensolaris.org
