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PS: forgot to mention; there's perfect, and there's good. and there's "cluess first year CS student".

there may not be time for "perfect". but there's no excuse for a professional (sysadmin/coder) to write code like a n00b. Ever.
If they do, then they are simply not a professional.

yes, sadly, there are too many non-professionals writing code, and scripts. The best path out of that hole, though, is for them to take the first step of saying, "I'm not going to do that any more", and then go learn how to do it right.

see: http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/ksh-sampleprog.html

for examples of different levels of professionalism, for the same task.

Wasn't there still some problem like the DRI DRM not being ported or something?

DRI & DRM are not yet ported, but are being worked on. Without them you lose some hardware acceleration. (Though you don't need them for full hardware acceleration on nVIDIA cards if you use nVIDIA's recently released Solaris x86/x64 driver.)

This [link to Phil Brown's community agpgart driver] didn't work for me when I tried a few months back.

Solaris now includes its own agpgart driver, based in part on Phil's driver, as of the Solaris development build released today, and provides the source as well in OpenSolaris - see http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts /i86pc/io/agpgart/

Since Solaris 10 defaults to Xorg on x86 machines, most video cards with open source drivers are now supported.

Wasn't there still some problem like the DRI DRM not being ported or something? This didn't work for me when I tried a few months back. I'll certainly be trying again soon though. :)

but wouldn't it be better to have some factual basis?

Yep. Utah GLX Lives!

Har har har

Yes, it works in VMware. It correctly detects the PCnet32 network card in vmware but not the video card. You have to do a text install (abort the x configuration) otherwise it will come up at 640x480 and the dialog boxes will be off the screen. Then use XFree86 to select the vmware video card. Other drivers are here:

Sound drivers for onboard audio and pci sound blasters

some usb devices

Network drivers Solaris should autodetect the video in Microsoft Virtual PC because it uses an S3 TRIO32/64 chipset, but it uses a Tulip network chip, so you'll need the nic drivers above.

For certain Sound Blaster hardware, you can use the sbpci driver. Also, what Sun SPARC system are you using that doesn't have built-in sound? I haven't used Sun equipment in a few years, but back when I did, just about every model had some sort of built-in sound.

In BIOS: Disable printer and serial ports. Set PCIC mode for PCMCIA.

Also, I used the Chips 65550 video driver and specify an 15" XGA LCD and X works fine. I had to resort to an older 3com card (can't remember which one).

Apparently, you havent discovered pkg-get

a pkg-get workalike, that can be configured to download either "companion CD" packages, or sunfreeware packages. I prefer to configure it to point to companion CD packages, because they actually have dependancies, so then it really works like apt-get.

Actually, you can use pkg-get with solaris packages. Point it at a CD or nfs-shared dir.

Also, while sunfreeware.com frames the pkg-get page, its home page is actually http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html

Additionally, if you for some reason prefer the 'companion CD' packages to the sunfreeware ones... you can use pkg-get for them too. configure it to point to one of

• USA: http://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/solaris/companion/
• DENMARK: http://mirrors.sunsite.dk/solaris-companion/
• JAPAN: http://SunSITE.tus.ac.jp/pub/sun-info/solaris-comp anion/

Even though sun doesnt officially "support" laptops, Solaris still runs on a heck of a lot of em.

http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/x86-laptops.html

But no, it's not ON the companion CD :-)

You can get pkg-get and pkgadm from my website. (it's not actually "from" sunfreeware, just linked to from there. I wrote it)

http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html
http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkgadm.html

But no, it's not ON the companion CD :-)

You can get pkg-get and pkgadm from my website. (it's not actually "from" sunfreeware, just linked to from there. I wrote it)

http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html
http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkgadm.html

WHich is why sunfreeware.com, and the "companion CD" exist.

For the former, use http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html to make it even easier.

For the latter: It's important to know that sun seems to keep ADDING to the "companion CD". So the one that comes with later versions of solaris, have more, and newer versions of, free software.

You may want to look at Crossfire. Crossfire is a multiplayer graphical adventure game that has a java client. See http://www.bolthole.com/jcrossclient/