Today I took delivery of the four year old IBM Thinkpad X32. With it’s 1.8GHz Pentium M, 1GB of RAM and it’s “massive” 40gb HDD 
I thought it was an excellent machine to use as a portable OpenSolaris machine.I used the USB stick I had prepared last night to boot the live image and do the install, within the first hour James had messed with the driver file and stopped the machine from booting *sigh*.
A reinstall later and I was up and runnig OpenSolaris 2008.11!
At home everything was still running smoothly, the battery had lasted the travel from work (it doesn’t suspend yet…) . My only problem was that it didn’t like the WPA2-psk wireless in the house. I had two choices:
1) Screw every computer in the house ovre and change to WEP.
2) Look for a work around.
I opted for 2. My work around was very simple actually. Build 105 fixes the compatibility with WPA2, so I added the developers repository to my authority list and live upgraded the machine to build 105.
Now I can happily lye in bed, with my X32, and write this blog entry!
Build 105 seems fairly stable so far…Not that I’ve tried doing much yet. Will report findings as I go along 
Hey there, I’m wondering how that machine is turning out for you. I’m considering getting the same one as a travel machine. I’d love to hear what you think.
Hi Karl,
It’s going well. I’ve not travelled with it too much yet, it’s been up to uni with me a few times. My first concern with travelling is battery life, mine last for about two and a half to three hours on the battery, and OpenSolaris is slow to load (go make a cup of tea slow)…
Seeing as I use my MacBook as my main computer and it’s often hooked up to my external screen doing something, i like to take the ThinkPad around the house, use it for surfing the net, chatting to friends on MSN etc…
From my limited experience with netbooks, the only thing a netbook has over this is battery life. The ThinkPad has a nice sized screen with a screen resolution of 1024×768, they keyboard isn’t cramped and has a nice feel to it. The nipple gets in the way from time to time, but once your used to it it’s not problem.
Connectivity is good for it’s age, only two USB ports, but you do get a 100Mbit ethernet connection which is nice. Wireless works well, I’d possibly go as far to say it’s better than my MacBook.
The ThinkPad is really good for doing one or two things at a time…I’ve not had the need to run an Office suite yet, but Pidgin and Firefox cope well, it’s not blazingly fast, but it’s not horribly slow (apart from start up).
Support for the wireless driver came into OpenSolaris around build 105, so will be included in the 2009.06 release. Under Windows or Linux I’ve got no idea what driver support is like…
HTH
Ben
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