Intel 82801 DB PRO/100 VM on OpenSolaris
A while back I bought quite an old box (a Compaq Evo) to use as a test system. This weekend I took a shot at getting OpenSolaris running on it, as the first step in my plan to move to OSOL from Ubuntu. Everything worked fine except networking. Fortunately, OSOL has one of the best pieces of software ever written installed on it by default; Sun’s Device Driver Utility.
It can be opened via the command ddu or, for the terminally-challenged, Applications -> System Tools -> Device Driver Utility.
This clever program informed me that this box used an “Intel 82801 DB PRO/100 VM” and that a third-party driver was required. Right-clicking on the Network card and selecting “Show details” brings up a dialogue which includes a URL pointing to the driver you need. In this case it can be found here. You want the latest “ife driver for intel”, it lists 8255x cards but rest assured that it works with the 82801.
Luckily OSOL detected my USB drive by default, as needing network connectivity to get network connectivity is one of the more frustrating computer paradoxes. It would be nice if it shipped with the driver needed but I assume there are copyright restrictions on it.
Installing it is easy; extract the archive, open a terminal in the directory and run pfexec make install. Restart and voila, network access. Now if I could just get domain names to resolve …
Update: To get domain names resolving I added OpenDNS’ address(es) to my /etc/resolv.conf. The default was what every other machine on my network uses and they work fine, so I’m not sure if it’s an OSOL problem, a hardware problem or a PEBCAR problem (Problem exists between computer and router).
