I tried again, just to test, even if I knew it was unlikely, and even if I certainly don’t enjoy working on Solaris (well, not like I tried before, but whatever). The result is just the same: Solaris cannot get the network interface working.
I have to say, though, that there is something new in Solaris Express Developer Edition 09/7: the Developer version has a new installer that seems to be in GTK rather than Java, it also seems quite faster, but… it didn’t work for me. If I filled in the user information to create a ‘flame’ user, the result was that the shadow file couldn’t be opened, without that, it stalled after a couple of minutes reporting a failure in installation process.
The old installer of the non-Developer edition, in Java, is still slow as hell, especially to install the packages, but it worked quite fine. Although I still think that asking more than 8GB for the system is way too much: a server chroot of Gentoo takes up about half a gigabyte.
Anyway this does mean that I can’t test xine-lib-1.2-ac on Solaris yet, and thus I cannot merge it on main branch yet. This is good news for Amarok users as once the branches are merged Amarok 1.4 will stop working, unless I can force someone from the Amarok team to focus a bit on that xine branch 😉
Half a gigabyte?
It’s an updated x86_64 stage3 with the biggest packages installed by me being paludis, zsh, xen-tools and util-vserver. Granted, it’s an x86_64 multilib enabled system so i could slim-down it a little… Ok, it’s still far less than 8GB for solaris :)For those who wonder, the filesystem is ext3 and all of the big cruft (like portage tree, kernel source, build dir) is moved elsewere.Oh, and if You have an svm/vt enabled cpu you could try kvm (http://kvm.sf.net). It might be a little harder to set up (after all, it’s still just a modified qemu), but it does work very nice.And the opensolaris people claim that it supports xen now… You could just pass the sound card to an opensolaris domU and try to get xine-lib tested.Ofcourse, both of these are a little harder to set up than virtualbox, but it’s not that hard. Even I could do it 😉
Half a gig is well enough for an x86-64 non-multilib chroot, without linux sources, and with the usual stuff as you said moved away (I actually share most of it with outside the the chroot).About KVM, unfortunately the only VT-X CPU I have is the Core2Duo of the laptop, where I don’t have Linux at all. And I don’t want to fight with xen for Solaris 🙂