[Z4i]

I'm kinda a connoisseur of operating systems, especially free Unices (plural of Unix, for those that don't know). This is a thread for the rest of us who don't use Windows (non-free non-Unix), OS X (non-free), or Linux (non-Unix) on our minis to share experiences, fixes, and suggestions.

I've tried using OpenBSD and OpenSolaris on mine, and so far OpenSolaris is far better in my opinion.

I tried OpenBSD first, because this is after all a fairly weak computer, and using it on more powerful computers for desktop use can be a waste of the graphics hardware (OpenBSD as of 4.5 does not have any graphics acceleration).

I probably could've installed it from a flash drive but my method instead was to install it to a VirtualBox VM and "netcat | dd" it to the SSD once it was configured with all the software I wanted. It worked, (i.e. it boots and runs X) but a lot of the hardware wasn't supported. I didn't test the webcam, but I did see it detected and recognized in dmesg. The wifi doesn't work, but I knew that wouldn't work, and am no large fan of Broadcom wifi chips, so I bought an Intel 5300 that I still haven't gotten yet. I know OpenBSD works in a/b/g with that chip, but not with the BCM4312 that it came with. I couldn't get the system to sleep or hibernate, ever, though I was able to change the CPU speed. Ethernet worked fine in OpenBSD, but do yourself a favor and configure it when you install OpenBSD, took me a bit to figure out how to get DHCP to find an IP address for it at startup.

OpenBSD was underwhelming, so I went and backed up the SSD again and put the OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_111a installer on a thumbdrive and installed it from there. This went pretty good. Things work on it like they worked in Linux 2 years ago (e.g. it'll detect everything and have drivers for most of it, but some things may take manual configuration, to get working properly, and there are a few glitches here and there).

Trying to install the NDIS driver for the BCM4312 makes the system restart while booting (quite effectively preventing you from logging in). Update: I'm a moron, I was using an older version of the ndis driver creation tool, designed for a different release of the OS. It works now! Fortunately Solaris' multiple boot environment feature makes it easy to recover from this, as long as you create a "safe" boot environment as soon as possible (basically, once you log in, just "pfexec beadm create default" will add an entry to GRUB to boot Opensolaris in the default configuration).

If you use OpenSolaris much, you'll know that it's not lightweight like Linux or *BSD. It will run on 1 GB of RAM, but in the default configuration more than 3/4 of the memory is taken up with no applications running, and you run out pretty quick. You can disable some services to try to free a bit of it up, but it's not terribly helpful. Ultimately, after turning off the swap (turning off swap helps your SSD last longer, disable atime updates also), I found it necessary to buy a 2GB sodimm and stick it in. Not hard or expensive at all.

OpenSolaris works beautifully on it now. Compiz works (needs to be turned on, but once turn on, it just works), ethernet works, the webcam works, LCD dimming works (didn't in OpenBSD). Hibernation and sleep needs to be turned on by manually editing files in /etc, so it doesn't work out of the box, but it does work.

Now for what doesn't work. The system has no objections to hibernating, but when resuming, the mouse will sometimes be completely nonfunctional. Everything else on the system seems to work except that when waking up. Update: My mistake, it does work, but not until after you put in the password. Also, power detection works only somewhat. It appears to detect the battery power remaining at boot and then not pay any attention to it thereafter. Update: BIOS update fixed this problem.

I haven't tested the bluetooth because I have nothing to test it with.

One of the biggest advantages vs *BSD is that flash works fine in OpenSolaris, because Adobe is retarded and makes Flash Player 10 for Solaris x86 but has nothing for *BSD users. You can't blame *BSD on that, but it does make it less suitable unless you're already adapted to the workarounds with linux emulation or youtube video conversion (I used to do that and it worked fine for me, but now I'm used to browser-embedded flash 10 in native Firefox now).

Overall I'm surprised OpenSolaris works so well for being an OS that even most Linux users haven't heard of.

I haven't tried FreeBSD on it yet, so I'd like to hear any input from people with FreeBSD on their mini. Other operating systems welcome too!

[anidel]

Thank you for this post!!

I was actually looking at Home - Nexenta Project Wiki installation...

How did you install it on your Mini 9 ?
I mean how you've configured the usb stick ?

Or you've used the netcat method that you've used for OpenBSD also for Solaris ?

UPDATED: just noticed the OpenSolaris LiveUSB Project (http://devzone.sites.pid0.org/OpenSo...iveusb-creator)

UPDATED2: ahhh even better USB images already available.. please ignore my whole post !

[anidel]

For those interested in FreeBSD there's this nice and easy way to proceed:

How To Install FreeBSD 7.x From USB » Zelut’s Blog

I'll try to install both OSes these days and see what works and what not..
But probably the lack of Flash from Adobe for *BSD is a key in choosing which one to use.

Aniello

[Z4i]

Originally Posted by anidel

Thank you for this post!!

I was actually looking at Home - Nexenta Project Wiki installation...

How did you install it on your Mini 9 ?
I mean how you've configured the usb stick ?

Or you've used the netcat method that you've used for OpenBSD also for Solaris ?

UPDATED: just noticed the OpenSolaris LiveUSB Project (OpenSolaris Live USB Creator (Windows/.NET) ‎(PID0.ORG DevZone)‎)

UPDATED2: ahhh even better USB images already available.. please ignore my whole post !

Hehe, no big deal :P

I actually installed OpenSolaris from the USB stick rather than with netcat. I wasn't sure if it would boot afterward because the way Solaris names devices in an incredibly unambiguous fasion (not like Linux or OpenBSD) could have caused either a kernel panic or even GRUB to fail to find the kernel, so I installed it normally :P

And I haven't played with Nexenta very much, but whenever I have it was painfully slow. That was in a VM though, so do tell me how it goes!

And yes, the flash thing is big for a netbook. I have no idea what Adobe releases Solaris Flash Player but not FreeBSD. I would suspect more people have FreeBSD desktops and laptops than Solaris ones, I could be wrong though.

[anidel]

I'll play with those OSes in the coming days, and I'll make sure I'll update this thread...

Thanks

[zeos]

i would be super impressed if you put haiku or plan9 on a mini

[Z4i]

Plan 9 or Haiku could probably be run on it, but I doubt they'd have the drivers necessary to do very much with it.

That said, I'm tempted to try it :P

[anidel]

eheheh that'd be nice.. What about GNU Hurd then ?

Anyway.. I've downloaded the .usb file:

root@libra:/space/Dell# file osol-0906-111a-x86.usb
osol-0906-111a-x86.usb: Unix Fast File system [v1] (little-endian), last mounted on /export/home/dc/build_data/tmp/, last written at Mon Apr 20 17:29:11 2009, clean flag 1, number of blocks 831300, number of data blocks 779777, number of cylinder groups 174, block size 8192, fragment size 1024, minimum percentage of free blocks 7, rotational delay 0ms, disk rotational speed 120rps, TIME optimization

Initially, I thought it was a simple dd so I run dd from Linux to the USB device driver, but it won't boot. As I can see from the file output it is a live img, right?

Looks like I've got to prepare the USB stick in order to boot from it.. any links?

[Z4i]

I tried that too and discovered that it didn't work :P

Opensolaris has a package called SUNWdistconst that contains a converter from iso to usb (creating the images on genunix), and another tool that (according to it's output) copies, and then installs grub to the flash drive's MBR. I don't know why they chose to do it like this, but alas. It's also an opensolaris package, which makes it a catch-22 for many people. AFAIK it's also not the same as the mainline grub.

I'll make a dd-able image for you if you'd like. You'll need a 1GB or larger flash drive.

[anidel]

Originally Posted by Z4i

I tried that too and discovered that it didn't work :P

Opensolaris has a package called SUNWdistconst that contains a converter from iso to usb (creating the images on genunix), and another tool that (according to it's output) copies, and then installs grub to the flash drive's MBR. I don't know why they chose to do it like this, but alas. It's also an opensolaris package, which makes it a catch-22 for many people. AFAIK it's also not the same as the mainline grub.

I'll make a dd-able image for you if you'd like. You'll need a 1GB or larger flash drive.

That would help a lot!

I do have a 8Gb USB stick around, so that'll work.

If you can make and pass it to me I'll thank you.
I'll thank you half now, and the remaining half once I've received the stuff