Mine the Harvest

OpenSolaris 2008.11 Acer Aspire One Install

by on Mar.09, 2009, under IT Adventures, Netbooks

innomat_os_blu_180

After my previous post about installing Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) on my Aspire One, I decided to give the Indiana 2008.11 release a try. The community edition was working fine, but I wanted to play around with IPS which I had trouble making work on SXCE, and also I just wanted a Gnome base install and the opportunity to see how 2008.11 installed and worked on the Aspire One.

The install is of moderate difficulty (easy of course once you have done it.) There are a few speeds bumps you may hit however and so I wrote this how to. This takes you step by step through installing OpenSolaris and you will end up sporting Solaris on your Aspire One. Compiz, ZFS, TimeSlider, DTrace, and working wifi are all your’s to be had.

+5 Geek Bonus to any who complete this quest, so saddle up, burn that .iso and start your quest.

One particulary fun thing to do is try a remote install from another system by X Forwarding the GUI Installer. That was kind of fun. (Screenshot of this to come.)

When the 2009.06 release is out I may attempt to use the Solaris Distribution Creator and make an .iso of an Aspire One Image that is ready to roll and put it up on bit torrent.

I encourage you to test drive OpenSolaris, and hope you find the guide usefull. Please leave feedback on how it goes and I’ll try to help – if I can (I’m a Linux guy and still pretty new to Solaris). Also, do check out Dave Clack’s excellent blog. Dave has worked with the Sun engineers helping to bring us driver support for the Aspire One and helped me with with my SXCE issues.

I would also like to thank Aaron Houston (Sun: Menlo Park) for hooking me up with some OpenSolaris advocacy materials – including a great device driver guide, some metallic “Powered by OpenSolaris” stickers and other goodies – another post to come on that.

Cheers,

Pete

2 comments for this entry:
  1. Paul Ross

    Hi,

    I tried booting 2009.06 b111 off a usb stick on my acer one. Its the 8gb, 512mb model – same as yours prior to ram upgrade?

    I get gnome loaded up (both normal driver and vesa) but then the mouse freezes and the machine hangs.

    You have had sucess – I wondered if it is using the usb stick instead of cdrom, this particular build, or just the lower memory of my machine?

    Cheers,
    Paul

  2. admin

    Hi Paul,

    I suspect it might be the USB media you are booting from, as the same hardware specs were what I used at first, with the same build. Do you find anything of interest in the X logs that may indicate what happened? Can you boot into single user mode and view the logs and post what you find?

    Pete

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