OpenSolaris 2008.5 Isn't So Bad

OpenSolaris has come along way from that nasty red and blue console based installer I remember using back in the 90s. A nice GNOME based LiveCD. 32/64 bit. GRUB & GNOME. Tolerable package management although there must be some other repos somewhere. Imagine, having to have to built pcap and tcpdump from scratch in 2008, the horror. But it worked!

What didn't work (on my T-61):

• Xen Dom0 (this is a known issue)
• Sound
• Intel 4965 has been sporadic
• Novatel 727 EVDO card (probably just haven't figure it out yet)
• VirtualBox/xVM (problems with kernel modules. probably fixable)
• Compiz (totally hangs the box)
  

Sort of weird that the JDK isn't installed. But overall they did a nice job with the GNOME theme. Fonts look better than most Linux distributions and seems quite snappy. And of all things nmap (4.20) and NmapFE are in default install. Funny.

Faster EVDO: Maybe A Reason to Try OpenSolaris?

So the Linux USB serial driver is capped at 500Kb and as I found tonight (piece of shit RCN is averaging about 50% uptime these days) it was pretty much impossible to watch 30 Rock (or any of the other streaming NBC shows) with my EVDO card plugged into my Linux router. (or now that I think of it, maybe this is a just QoS issue since I'm going from 100Mb to 500kb?) but of course when I plopped the card into XP got 1MB easy and we could watch all about the Teamster sandwiches with no problems.

But this OpenSolaris WWAN project looks promising.... Wonder if I can get my Novatel card working with Nexenta Core?

Or are there any of the EVDO routers (that take USB) that don't run Linux or have somehow managed to work around the 500Kb cap?

To answer my own question, it looks like the airpime drivers might actually do the trick.