Acer Aspire One + OpenSolaris 2009.6 = a great combination.

It's been rather too long since my last post, so here's another quick MS Windows-alternative related update.

I've been running an excellent Acer Aspire One since January, which I've tried a number of Linux distributions on. I pretty much settled for Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix, but decided last week to try OpenSolaris 2009.06 preview (build 111a). I've always been a fan of OpenSolaris' beautiful Gnome themed desktop, plus the feeling that it's a fully integrated Desktop. However, it's always fallen short, for me at least, on hardware support. Even the most recent official release will not even recognise the network card on my desktop PC - crazy!

Well, a huge amount of work must have gone into the latest builds of OpenSolaris, as, out of the box, everything works perfectly on my Aspire One, and even though I'm running a 'preview' release, the desktop is extremely stable, and very attractive. I'll be installing the official release when it comes out in June, and thoroughly recommend it to anyone wanting an attractive Ubuntu alternative.


Thanks for reading,
Nick