2009.06: A netbook for meetings

It’s been a busy few months, but things are clearing up now.

The past few weeks, I’ve been using an Acer Aspire One for coverage when my trusty Toshiba r500 is recharging. It’s my computer for meetings, I suppose. The Aspire One is a great little netbook, and 2009.06 should recognize every device on the system. Here’s an action shot of this Atom-based system on my file cabinet:

The window shown in the display is the Device Detection Utility—the absence of red bars in that list indicates that every hardware component on the system is known to OpenSolaris. The main limitations of a standard single core, dual thread (but dual-core) Atom netbook like this are vertical screen real estate and memory usage. In the screen shot, I’ve moved the GNOME panels to the left and right sides of the display; I’ve also disabled unneeded services by using svcadm(1M).

If you’ve an Aspire One, or a similar netbook, you might want to give 2009.06 a spin. The usbcopy utility, from the SUNWdistro-const package, can be used to prepare a bootable USB stick to use for the installation.

[ T: OpenSolaris netbook Atom ]