Abandoning Solaris... For a Puppy

Once again I had Capstone last night. I tried replacing Solaris with one of the OpenSolaris distros called Belenix. Let's just say that that distro is not yet ready for prime time. The live CD works great, but the installer is just not quite there yet.

Since I couldn't get Solaris (or any like-based distro) to work with the hardware that I had available, my only course of action was to go with a different distro completely. There are a plethora of distros out there, and the only official rules of the project are that each computer must have a different distro.

For the Solaris machine, I chose to replace it with Puppy Linux. I know, I thought the same thing when I first happened upon that distro. What a weird friggin' name!

The good news is that Puppy automatically detected both the NIC and the wireless card on board! Hell yeah! That means for that machine I am pretty much done. I wouldn't have given up on Solaris so easily, but we have a deadline and we were running out of time.

We also were able to get the wireless router configured using DD-WRT, and if you have never used a Linksys router that has been flashed with DD-WRT you just haven't lived! The interface is outstanding, and with that OS running the router, there is so much more functionality you get out of it!

The last things we have left to do it to get network printing working on Damn Small Linux, and configuring Suse, Slackware and now Puppy for WEP. The printing thing is pretty difficult in Damn Small Linux. It doesn't look like that distro was really meant for network printing, but rather only locally attached printers. getting that to work seems like our final obstacle. Wish us luck! If you have any tips on adding a network printer using DSL, I am dying to hear about it! Please leave me a comment!

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