Toshiba To OEM Laptops With OpenSolaris

ruphus13 writes to tell us of Sun's latest attempt to drive OpenSolaris adoption. The company has inked a deal to pre-install OpenSolaris on Toshiba laptops. "Slowly but surely, major laptop vendors are taking to the idea of shipping systems with pre-loaded open source operating systems. The latest case in point is Toshiba — one of the longest-standing players in the market for portable computers — and its new plan to pre-install Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris on its laptops. The machines are supposed to ship in early 2009."

Re:To OEM, or not to OEM... Is that a verb?!

[Sockatume]

You can use it as a verb, albeit rather confusingly: "to OEM" something means they take another, "original equipment manufacturer" product and package it and sell it under their own brand, usually as part of a larger product. So a system builder would OEM an Intel CPU, and a Microsoft mouse, say. It's a kind of reselling. The OEM doesn't OEM anything strangely enough. I'm not sure it works with software, as the original branding is left alone, it's usually just called preinstalling or bundling. On the other hand the original branding of the mouse or CPU is also left intact, and the latter prominently displayed on the packaging.

Actually, I can see why they're doing this

[Lord Crowface]

I'm typing this from OpenSolaris 2008.11 and I'm actually surprised how "desktop-friendly" Solaris has actually become. The default GNOME-based desktop is gorgeous and works well. Hardware support may not be all that broad, but when hardware is supported it's REALLY supported: even booting off the live CD, my Atheros wireless card, NVidia 3D card and crappy on-mobo sound were "auto-magically" detected and set up. Performance is also quite snappy, even on my aging Athlon XP 3000+ with a measly 1 GB of RAM. In short, OpenSolaris is more than up to the task of working on Toshiba's new laptops.

just remember...

[thatskinnyguy]

Just remember

svcadm disable nwam <br>
svcadm enable network/physical:default

That will fix most of the problems you will run into with Solaris. Other than that, it's a solid OS. Why they would put that Network Auto-Magic shit in, I have no clue.

Re:I really like Solaris but...

[digitalhermit]

Its more marketable than 'pure' linux because there is a large company supporting it, as opposed to an amorphous community which technically doesn't have anything really tying it together beyond the OS.

True.. "Pure" Linux is an amorphous mass. But just compare *ONE* Linux company (RedHat) to Sun in terms of market cap:

Sun [yahoo.com]
RedHat [yahoo.com]

And RedHat just represents *ONE* Linux company. There are many out there. IBM and Oracle both support Linux. Linux has a much larger commercial support base than does Solaris or OpenSolaris.

Re:Actually, I can see why they're doing this

[dkalley]

OpenSolaris is up to the task on old Toshiba laptops also. I have 2008.11 running on an old Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1553 and haven't had any problems. I really didn't expect everything to work so I was pretty happy with the install.

Re:Solaris to beat Linux

[ChrisA90278]

Solaris uses "CUPS" for printing. CUPS has come a long way. For one reason because Apple alsouses CUPS in Mac OS X nd has put some effort into making it work. Including hiring the project leader and paying hiom to work full time. Most linux diistros use CUPS also.

I have had the same resilt with CUPS. It finds prints well even networked printers all over the building

Re:I really like Solaris but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The obvious 3 letter answer is ZFS, especially with the new time slider desktop GUI. [sun.com] But that isn't the entire answer. Linux is still ahead of OpenSolaris on number of packages, drivers and hacker niceties, but when it comes to long term API/ABI stability required for real businesses (who presumably intend to be around more than one Linux x.x.0 release), OpenSolaris wins. It is far less likely to force you to rewrite your business code and upgrade your entire application stack every 6 months.

Add the security, scalability advantages such as RBAC/Zones and observability advantages such as dtrace and it really should be on every developer's desktop even if only as a tool to help your Linux/Windows/BSD/OSX development.

Re:No BIOS support

[Hal_Porter]

The stupid in those links burns my eyes.

The first link means that the Bios had a bug that only shows up in Vista. They released a fix but didn't test with XP and because of that they only recomended Vista users to upgrade. Or maybe they tested with XP and something broke. Still if they tell people using XP not to upgrade, don't complain if upgrading breaks shit. There is no conspiracy. Companies 'not supporting' something means they haven't tested it and don't guarantee it works, not that they've sabotaged it.

The second link. Sounds like a Bios bug. They released a patch for it.

Buying a machine that doesn't support the software you want to use and then ranting and raving to some lowly tech support person when it doesn't work is dumb, entitled and obnoxious. They don't have a say in what is supported - that's a decision taken by the marketing department based on the relative popularity of the OSs. Ranting that your favourite OS is unsupported will just make them write the fact it is unsupported in bigger letters, not spend money testing and bug fixing to make it supported.

Plus, it's Linux. There are always ways to get it to boot on anything, supported or not if you do the work as people pointed out to the OP in the second link. All this hackactivism attacking of tech support people is just an attempt to punt the work onto them.

To give you some idea of how awful this behaviour is consider how you'd react to some Windows zealot email bombing your Linux only project with bug reports that it doesn't work on Windows.

Re:Xubuntu v OpenSolaris on old laptop: my experie

[Zemplar]

MAJOR work has been done in OpenSolaris 2008.11 (now available) to support a wider array of hardware since even the 2008.05 release. There's a good chance your wireless device will now be supported on OpenSolaris out-of-the-box, as they say.

Due to licensing restrictions, of which most people forget MP3 is proprietary, you need to get a license to download the MP3 GStreamer plugin on OpenSolaris. The license is free from Fluendo's website [fluendo.com], but requires registration. Registration, downloading, and installation takes just a few minutes and is completely legitimate.

IMHO, there are many compelling reasons to run OpenSolaris over GNU/Linux which overcome the slight advantages you've described in Ubuntu's installation process (which really is slick).