Solaris "laptop friendly" release doesn't like Dell laptops

Now I know the pain of not "running Sun on Sun" (our old mantra in the office).....

Have a nice shiny laptop here, running windows but with a ton of free space on the drive. Decided over the weekend in a fit of madness to throw solaris on it, so I took one of the DVDs I burned before I left (S11 intel) and threw it on. For one thing it took forever to pick up the installer GUI (had to reboot maybe a dozen times before it picked it up), and then it wouldn’t recognize the network card, but I was sort of expecting that not to work. Then I went to reboot into windows, and discovered that I couldn’t login.

It seems that while the installer was smart enough to pick up that I had a windows partition and added it to the grub boot menu, it didn’t quite know what to do with the Dell system restore partition that you get with all dells these days. That partition is supposed to be marked as hidden, but now it wasn’t and so it came up on windows as C: and my C: drive went to E:. Problem with this was that the windows login was expecting to find the home dirs in C:\Documents and Settings not E:\Documents and Settings – so no-one could login, and the machine didn’t seem to be able to reset it to C. Took the admin here most of the morning to try to fix it (partition magic couldn’t even fix it) and in the end we took the nuclear option and just wiped it and re-installed the whole damn thing. So, all the crap I’ve set up on the lappy in the last week, and all the work stuff that was pre-installed for me, was hosed.

So, to list my problems:

• First prob was the installer kept freezing on "setting up java...." or some msg like that, no matter what install choice you picked - took maybe 20 or 30 reboots to get past it - and even then it still took maybe 10mins or longer to come up
  
• Second prob was the network card (Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx) wasn't picked up. 'ifconfig -a' gave me nothing, then I managed to use the GNOME network admin tool to get it picked up, but after that the machine wouldn't boot up as it kept timing out on some pci device (am assuming it was the network card as it worked before I config'ed it). Reinstalled again as I couldn’t get past it and the next time when I tried to run the network admin tool it froze and eventually crashed gnome - every time.
  
• The machine comes with an 80Mb partition for the Dell System Diagnostics at the start of the drive which is supposed to be hidden, but Solaris set it as unhidden. Straight away, windows picked it up as c:, the c: drive as e: and kept dying on login looking for c:\documents and settings. There seemed to be no way to reset this - even if we set the partition back as hidden windows couldn’t pick up the main partition as c:. This is probably more a windows problem than a solaris one, but solaris shouldn't have caused the prob in the first place.
  

And this was build 55b, the build that was supposed to be Solaris Developer Express, the “laptop-friendly” release!

Bloody windows update!

Well, I just found another reason to love windows update. I tried it out on my shiny new laptop this morning, running XP SP2, and it came up with 41 "critical" updates. So, I went and installed them and it asked me to reboot my computer, as normal. I'm used to this by now. I also discovered another annoying little feature -

After I rebooted tho, I was still getting the little yellow shield in my taskbar saying "there are updates available for your computer". So, I clicked on it and it came up with 13 updates to MS Office. I went back to the windows update webpage and got it to check again for updates, and it came back with nothing. You'd think that if you have an update mechanism that it would behave consistently! If one finds some patches, both of them should find them.

It gets even better then. After I installed the MS Office updates, I was asked to reboot my machine! For an office update! I don't mind rebooting after some security patch to a windows service or something like that, as it's a change to the OS, but for frickin' office? Does that mean that office is so tied into the system that it updates windows components as well? Hmm, wasn't there a court case about that sort of behaviour? ;-)

New Job.....

Well, here I am on my 2nd day in my new job. Am having great fun here, as the first thing I noticed when I got in this morning was that the network was down, so no-one could do anything. The external access is back up now, but the internal access isn't for some reason. In other words, I can browse the web but not get at any of the docs I need to get to so that I can know what I'm doing. Then again, it's not that anyone has actually told me what I'm supposed to be doing/learning anyway, so am just browsing the network trying to find something that could be vaguely relevant to a role that I'm still not sure of the details of. And apparently, when I do get stuff to do, I'll just be dropped in on the deep end and left to fend for myself. Fun!

First Day.

Well, I have the first day in the new job over with anyway. It was strange finishing up in Sun on friday, clearing out my desk and all. Shows how good morale is on our place, as I only got about 7-8 people out to my going-away do on thurs - and 4 of those weren't even from Sun! We went out to the bar on the business park on fri evening tho for a few, which made my actual wrapping-up in the office a bit anti-climactic, as it was a case of coming back from the pub at about 7, picking up my bag, taking a last look around the empty desk and leaving my work badge on my bosses desk.

This morning was a bit strange, as I was up at the usual time, but was getting on the "wrong" platform on the DART station and going in the "wrong" direction! Got into the office anyway, and I had a momentary panic that I'd be told "Oh, we didn't actually get your contract back in the post, so we thought you turned down the job. Sorry!", but they were actually expecting me, which was good. Got a bit of an intro session with the HR girl, then got led to my new desk (actually my boss's desk as my desk still hasn't been set up yet) where my shiny new laptop was waiting for me!

After that tho, I was pretty much left to my own devices It seems there's no formal training course or intro session, so I was left to take a wander around the network and intranet and figure things out for myself. This wasn't really helped by the fact that I didn't actually get a login on the intranet or get read access to the shared network drives until the afternoon! Also, my new boss had some urgent business to take care of at home so had to take a last-minute flight back to Italy, and as a result I was left with a document which vaguely describes what I'll be doing, but not how. This should be fun next week when I'm dropped right in the deep end and left to fend for myself!

Lunch was a bit odd too - we don't have any canteen, so its a case of heading off to the local shop. Luckily there are a good few places to go in Blackrock, but it seems that the group doesn't go for lunch as a group, everyone just heads off and fends for themselves. This posed a bit of a problem for me, as I don't have a swipe card yet so if I left I couldn't get back in! Headed out with one of the lads eventually, about 2pm, and got a panini in some local deli.

All in all, it feels weird not to be in my desk in Sun, and I'm not 100% sure it has dawned on me yet that I'm not going back, that this is my future career. I'm sure it will eventually, but at the mo it's sort of a strange limbo feeling, sitting at "my" desk, reading docs that I'm not 100% sure are relevant or not - and using windows! I'm not 100% sure of the logic of working on a product that runs on Solaris and Linux from Windows boxes using stuff like putty and VNC. If we're working on Solaris, why aren't we running Solaris? Maybe I just still have the whole "run Sun on Sun" thing in my head, but it still feels strange to me.

So, first day, mixed opinions. Should get better anyway - I hope!