A couple of nights ago, I put OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my Acer Aspire 5515. Installation went extremely smoothly. There was only one minor hiccup: Wireless wouldn’t work at first.
Before even attempting to install, i had already visited http://opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/wireless/ath/ and downloaded the latest version of SUNWatheros and saved it to a USB drive. When I tried to install the driver however, I got a warning message saying that the driver was successfully added to the system but failed to attach. It turns out that this model notebook uses an Atheros AR5007 for wireless. So, a different driver was required, also linked to from the same page. According to that page on the opensolaris site, the AR5007 driver only works for 32 bit x86, in other words not my 64 bit setup. So, I would have to boot into 32bit mode for wireless to even be an option.
Here is what works:
1. Edit /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst removing $ISADIR from the paths.
ie replace /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix with /platform/i86pc/kernel/unix
and /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive with /platform/i86pc/boot_archive
This makes the machine boot a 32 bit kernel instead of the 64 bit one.
Please reboot after you have edited menu.lst
2. Get rid of the old SUNWatheros driver
pfexec pkg uninstall SUNWatheros
3. Download the right driver from http://opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/downloads/ath-x86-ar5007eg-pkg.tar.gz
4. Install the driver
gunzip ath-x86-ar5007eg-pkg.tar.gz
tar -xf ath-x86-ar5007eg-pkg.tar
pfexec pkgadd -d ./SUNWatheros SUNWatheros
5. Restart nwam
pfexec svcadm restart nwam
And wireless should start working almost immediately! All in all, it is a very nice machine for running OpenSolaris.
