Looking Nevada and feeling Indiana ...

To explain, first....

Solaris is becoming opensolaris, licensed under a Stallman-compliant but Torvalds-grumbly license to keep the coolest parts out of Linux. This process is lead by Ian Murdock, former head of Progeny Linux, whose goal was, in part, making an installer for Debian that didn't suck. Progeny died, Ubuntu make the Live CD, and Murdock went to the LSB and then to Sun, where he's in charge of the process of s/S/opens/.

The old code base is code-named Nevada, the new code base is code-named Indiana, because that's where Ian lives. And it has a dev release Live CD. And I tried it out.

Years ago, I had a specific Celeron box. It was the only PC I had that had a real ATX motherboard rather than a proprietary Compaq oddball thing. So, when I tested things, I tested them on that one. BeOS wouldn't use the network card, so I didn't stick with BeOS. (Otherwise, Be was so choice. It had speed on a 500MHz chip that I would now barely expect on a 2GHz chip.) Later, I installed Windows .Net 2003 server. Again, no networking. If it couldn't network it was of no use to me.

Now, I have the opensolaris live CD. That specific 500MHz machine has been dead for a year. I tested it on this machine, a Compaq desktop I got from a friend whose company was salvaging old desktops. 2.26GHz. Over four times as fast. That'd fight the image that it's Slowlaris. And it looks good. It got that machine to run 1600x1200 on a screen that Ubuntu Feisty refused to run at more than 1024x768.

But, it couldn't find my NIC. What good is a machine that cannot talk to another machine?

But that's a good thing about a live CD. You can test the hardware and see if it works.

I'll try it on my #1, a Dell GX260, soon. In the mean time, can anyone point me to a FreeBSD live CD?

ETA: It works fine on my work machine, a newer HP/Compaq. I'm writing on it right now. It doesn't to TwinView or Compiz. Which is fine, I guess. It's supposed to work, not look pretty.

The live view, this time, required a login and won't give a gterm. It didn't do either when I tried it before. Odd.