> wound up getting the Compaq Presario T2080 (with Atheros > wireless ) at Best Buy.
>What I did get a > chance to do though > was download and fire up Nevada b67 via the BeleniX > 0.6.1 LiveCD (also, > I stuck with Xfce and the Realtek ethernet NIC for > now) and everything, > including LAN/WAN/DHCP discovery worked great! > > Eric 1. Over the years, we have been quite fond of Athlon-based (both 32- and 64-bit) HP notebooks. Since about one year or so ago, we have not had any problem running Solaris Express on any of our HP notebooks. The only problem is wireless. Next time around we will be paying attention to getting only those with Atheros card. All our notebooks are with ATI or nVidia video card. 2. On one of the notebooks we tested, with Casper's frkit script running, the power consumption measured with a Wattmeter was 14 W for Solaris Express, versus 18~19 W for Linux (SuSE/Fedora) and WindowsXP, during idle. 3. Linux (SuSE/Ubuntu/Fedora) has problems with some of the models, and I don't trust Windows when browsing the web. This leaves Solaris Express the only option. 4. During this year's Computex Taipei, one of the most appealing products was the "Asus Eee PC 701 notebook": http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3829 * Display: 7" * Processor: Intel mobile CPU (Intel 910 chipset, 900MHz Dothan Pentium M) * Memory: 512MB RAM * OS: Linux (Asus customized flavor) * Storage: 8GB or 16GB flash hard drive * Webcam: 300K pixel video camera * Battery life: 3 hours using 4-cell battery * Weight: 2lbs * Dimensions: 8.9 in x 6.5 in x 0.82 in - 1.37 in (width x depth x thickness) * Ports: 3 USB ports, 1 VGA out, SD card reader, modem, Ethernet, head/microphone * Bootup time: 10 seconds * Price: $250 Even though the hardware design is ugly and the software (Asus' own version of Linux) is IMNSHO stupid (apparently Asus didn't use their best engineers to put together their own Linux "distro"), I am definitely going to get one when it becomes available. But this is not my point. My point is, perhaps we can try to work with Asus to design a better, Solaris-based, system (at least on the software part). Most hardware manufactures don't have a clue how to deal with GPL, I believe they will feel more comfortable with CDDL once properly educated. Plus, (paid) support for desktops (which necessitates low per-unit cost) is always illusory in Linux. Solaris/Sun should be in a much better position to address this critical issue. This message posted from opensolaris.org
