This page is a place to keep track of solaris compatible laptops. Philip Brown collected this information from newsgroup postings, and form submissions through the website.
Last update: 2008. Kept around for historical purposes now.

I used to suggest that people contaact me to add entries for your laptop, but at this point, most laptops WILL work with solaris.

Table of Contents

1. General Install hints
2. Note on PCMCIA cards
3. Note on graphics
4. Note on ethernet cards
5. Note on sound cards
6. Note on docking stations
7. Installing via serial port
8. Last ditch install plan
9. Hibernation/Suspend mode
10. Laptops listed in Alphabetical order, by Manufacturer ( "The List" )
11. General solaris laptop hints

General Install hints

1. Disable everything you wont be using, like parallel ports, etc.
2. Turn off any "Plug-n-Play OS" BIOS mode
3. Switch the PCMCIA port to "PCIC mode" if possible
4. Read any notes specific to your laptop, in the table down below.
5. (remember to use "cd 1 of 2", not the "installation cd")
6. Once you are in the installation program, select "bypass" when it comes to selecting a video card. You'll probably need to install the Xsun+XFree modules anyway, and running the install in 16-color mode just isn't worth it!

AFTER you have everything installed and working, then on Solaris 8, try

# eeprom ata-dma-enabled=1

and reboot. You'll then have reasonable speed disk access, if your controller and drive are fully ATA compatible. Otherwise, reset the value via the DCA at boot-time, by changing boot-properties.

Note on PCMCIA cards

Solaris currently can only use PCMCIA cards in "PCIC" mode, the legacy mode.
Well, strictly speaking, it can use CardBus mode in some situations, but only if the "CardBus base address" has been initialized by the bios or some other means. And even if you do set it by hand, there are other nasties that basically mean it will only work about 5% of the time.

If you have a Sun "supported" PCMCIA card (listed on Sun's HCL), but cannot force your slot to the old mode in the BIOS, you can try the FREE initpcic patch, from ftp.xig.com. According to the README file for it, you may get use out of it if "prtconf -D | grep pcic" shows something. If so, get the software, and follow the directions carefully about setting it up.

An alternative is to take a look at the lynnsoft.com page for solaris. They have written various drivers for cards in the new PCMCIA CardBus mode, under solaris. Unfortunately, the drivers are not free; they run about $100. However, there is an impressive range of products they support, above and beyond the range of cards supported by Sun, including some 802.11b wireless networking cards.

Note on graphics

The latest Xsun patches have "generic VESA/SVGA" support. (patch 109401), so it should work with almost any video card. You can also tweak it to support 1400x1050

For support for Dell's new super-hi-res screens (nv based), you can try just pkgadd -d DELLwxga.pkg, and then selecting one of the "Dell W*XGA" LCD Monitors from kdmconfig.

For a wider general range of card suport from Xsun, you may want to install the xfree86 'porting' kit from Sun. Despite its 'porting kit' name, it actually comes with compiled binaries that are plug-n-go, for any card that xfree4.2.0 supports. You can also get a patch for suns patch, to better support some ATI cards, from Juergen Keil's site

Unfortunately, the support is not 100% perfect: using a geforce2 with the kit will display most things, but certain very rare apps will have corrupted graphics (As of Dec 14, 2001). Unfortunately, one of these "rare apps" is Netscape 6.1, but the good news is, you can allegedly work around this issue by calling it with --no-xshm

FIX for solaris 9 x86: install patch 112786

Another option is XiG's commercial X server. XiG'd drivers support a few cards that xfree does not. Their drivers are production quality, and if you pay a little extra, you can get 3d acceleration for your laptop, too.

Note on ethernet cards

Try to get an Intel one, either built-in, or through a "miniPCI" board. Solaris has excellent support for just about any intel NIC. All others are hit-or-miss whether they are supported.

If you are pretty sure you have an intel-compatible card, but dont know what ID to put in, then use my prtdev utility, to find a PCI ID for your ethernet controller that looks like 8086,xxxx. You'll be looking for the "True VendorID/DeviceID" information.

As a last resort, you can try some third-party free drivers for on-board ethernet and PCMCIA cards:

Garrett D'amore's Ethernet drivers
Masayuki Murayama's drivers(some PCMCIA drivers here also)
Realtek solaris ethernet drivers , including a special "solaris express", aka solaris 10, driver.

How do you get the drivers on the box, if you dont have a working ethernet port? The easiest way is via floppy after the OS install, if you have one. An alternative is to use a modem to dial in to an ISP and download them "directly". Or, use the serial port with a null-modem adapter to get them "indirectly", from another local computer. You'll probably want to connect to another unix box, and use "tip", to get a uuencoded version of the neccessary archive. See elsewhere for directions on using tip.

Note on sound cards

You have three options for sound on your laptop:

• (free) Sun's limited built-in drivers
• (free) Juergen Keil's audio drivers
• (commercial) The OSS drivers from www.opensound.com

Note on docking stations

Usually, solaris will be able to see devices on the "other side" of a docking station, but sometimes, it does not initially know about it. You may be able to solve this problem by adding the appropriate entry to /etc/driver_aliases. One entry that has been reported to be useful, is

pci_pci "pci104c,ac22"

If that does not work, you can attempt to find a more appropriate value by doing the following:

1. When your laptop is not in the docking status, run "prtconf -D > /tmp/pre-dock "
2. When your laptop is IN the docking status, run "prtconf -D > /tmp/post-dock "
3. Run " diff /tmp/pre-dock /tmp/post-dock"

This should give you a candidate or two to try for editing and using the example pci_pci line, above.

Installing via serial port

If you are having extreme difficulty with your video card (or keyboard) during the install, and you know there is a patch for it once you have the OS installed, you may choose to try installing via a terminal on the serial port. Details for this are included in this file

Last ditch install plan

If for some reason, you "have to" install solaris on a particular laptop that does not have a boot-supported cdrom or ethernet device, a final option is to use vmware. It has been reported that you can install vmware on linux or ms-windows, and configure vmware to give the upcoming solaris install access to a (f)disk partition, and access to the MBR. You also need to configure vmware to present a CD ISO image as a cdrom drive. Once all this is done, you can install solaris within vmware. [Within vmware, boot off the fake cdrom drive, and run the install to the fdisk partition designated above]. Once that is accomplished, you can reboot the "real" machine, and boot into solaris directly, without going through linux or vmware. You may not have access to the cdrom or network device.. but you'll have solaris on the laptop :-} [presuming that the internal hard drive is scsi or ATA attached.]

Tweaking iprb from cdrom

If you find yourself with only a CDROM, no floppy, no install on hard drive, a non-standard iprb pci-ID, but but you *need* access to the network [eg: you want to install a flash archive over the net], you can use the following hack proceedure, presuming the pci id for your adapter is compatible with pci8086,1031:

1. boot to cdrom "normally", but exit install when you get the chance
2. mkdir /tmp/overlay
3. cd /etc ; tar cf - . | (cd /tmp/overlay; tar xf -)
4. cd / ; mount -F lofs /tmp/overlay /etc
5. rem_drv iprb (This wil remove ALL iprb entries from driver_aliases
6. add_drv -i pci8086,1031 iprb

You should now be able to do "ifconfig iprb0 plumb", etc. I have used this trick to do a flash install over the network by running "suninstall" by hand after configuring the interface appropriately.

The slow alternative method for no-floppy, would be to do a core install, edit /boot/solaris/devicedb/master and /etc/driver_aliases, reboot, and use the DCA **on the local disk** to then do a full jumpstart over the network. [You'll want to go into "Boot tasks" and set boot strategy to RARP though]

In theory, there might be a way to get PXEboot to work, if your laptop supports it. But it is waaay complex to setup, and I dont know of anyone in the field who has suceeded in setting it up on a non-supported ethernet device.

Hibernation/Suspend mode

Extra Goodies!

Laptops listed in Alphabetical order, by Manufacturer

usba "pci8086,2482"
usba "pci8086,2484"
usba "pci8086,2487"

A listing of a laptop in a particular configuration/solaris version does not neccessarily mean it is the ONLY way to get it working.  A listing simply means that someone has emailed me that this specific config does actually work.

Along those lines, if you have some more information about an existing entry, PLEASE EMAIL ME!

Other solaris laptop hints

Random tip: To disable ACPI in solaris 8 intel, edit /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc and add

setprop acpi-user-options '0x2'

[on a boot floppy, the file to tweak would be /solaris/bootenv.rc]

You can also do this by going into "boot tasks", just before selecting your boot device. Pick the "edit properties" option, and enter the acpi-user-options by hand.

If you just need to disable "APIC" information (this helps with soundcards sometimes), you can tweak only /etc/system by adding

set pcplusmp:apic_use_acpi = 0

set pcplusmp:apic_forceload = -1

Random tip: make sure to have solaris 8 patch 108529-10, for longer battery life.

3com ethernet: In trying to get the 3com ethernet card to work, it may be neccessary to create the file /kernel/drv/pcelx.conf
containing the line

force-8bit=1;

Additionally, you may have to disable the parallel port, if present.
Courtesy of Kenneth Simpson
 

To add an entry for your laptop to the laptops list, the best way is to use the submission form

If you are interested in what other UNIXen may run on your laptop (or palmtop, or...) you might be interested in http://www.tuxmobil.org/(previously, www.mobilix.org)

For laptop vendors, I am available on a contract basis to configure Solaris x86 for your laptops, provide a custom image, and assist you in any productizing issues

Written by: Philip Brown
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