Solaris

My father brought home a 500GB SATA hard drive he had kicking around his office. I've been toying with the idea of installing Solaris on my desktop for school / programming purposes for some time now, and this supplied the necessary push. I am currently writing this post from a fresh install of Solaris 11 (build 81, fresh out of the bit mines.)

The install process was relatively painless compared to previous attempts to install this OS. I ran into two significant errors - one, the partitioner seems buggy, and will fail if you attempt to do anything besides letting it use the entire drive for the Solaris install. That's fine for me, since I intended to do that anyway. There were also some problems with the DNS configuration after install, but they were sorted out fairly quickly. I'm told they'll be fixed in the next build.

Now, I am a fairly avid fan of the combination MMORPG / CORPG game called Guild Wars released by ArenaNet. While I play a fair number of other games, I don't mind dual-booting for them, as I only haul them out when I have friends over for LAN parties. Guild Wars, however, I play on a fairly regular basis, and I generally like staying logged in to keep track of anything important going on.

This causes a problem - while Guild Wars does run under WINE, sort of, WINE does not run under Solaris. I am left with the unhappy choice of being forced to dual-boot or abandon Guild Wars, a choice I am loathe to make.

I'm looking into virtualization (I hear VMWare has 3D support now, and even runs on Solaris!) as a possible alternative to WINE, but I don't hold any great hopes for this working out. Still, maybe I'll get more programming done if I'm not moderating guild drama all the time... heh.