The battery of my old notebook is nearly dead and a new one costs about 100 euro. I only need it to be mobile then I travel (mobile internet or image-tank for my camera). That's why I bought a cheap 8,9" netbook (a Acer Aspire One A150X - 1,6GGHz ATOM, 1GGB, 160GB) as a replacement. It came with Windows XP Home preinstalled - after some cursing and deleting a lot of crappy demo-software I managed to make it usably. Then made a complete image of the harddisk (just in case something goes wrong - I don't want to start with the original installation again).

Next I booted from a external DVD-drive and changed the size of the second partition from 146 to 100GB (BartPE-CD with Partition-Magic). Using the OpenSolaris build 111a LiveCD for Eee PCs from Masafumi's Blog: http://masafumi-ohta.blogspot.com/2009/04/latest-opensolaris-build-112a-livecd.html I installed the operating system (with the text based installer) on the now free 46GB.

Most things worked perfect out of the box (graphic-card, lan, wlan, audio, camera, usb). Only the sd-card-reader on the left side needs a driver-update (the one on the right side works). I added several repositories for software-updates (blastwave, sunfreeware,...) - Installed Netbeans, OpenOffice, VideoLan (LWS-Version that I copied from my other machine - I do really miss the repository LifeWithSolaris), a lot of gstreamer codecs, Songbird, ... Updated to build 111b.

There's still plenty of space left on the harddisk and I'm really impressed how good it handles under OpenSolaris. I tried some of BBF's 720p mp4 videos - no problems at all. Sound quality is good - the windows driver doesn't do so well (generates noise). I got to like the ZFS filesysstem - It's really handy to go back to an older snapshot when you realize you didn't want do delete "that" file.

There were some minor problems, but nothing that was hard to fix - like Firefox crashes because of some gstreamer plugins (found those easily with gst-inspect).