Toshiba laptops with OpenSolaris preloaded

As much as I'd like to try OpenSolaris, I've never even gotten it to boot all the way on any machines I have at my disposal. That's kind of a deal-breaker, not being able to actually use the operating system.

But there actually are laptops that ship preloaded with OpenSolaris. Toshiba has four of them (OK, three, but one has two configuration options).

They're pricey for the most part: $1,599, $1,199, $1,099 and a netbook that curiously dual-boots OpenSolaris and Windows XP Home for the much-lower price of $379.

I'd almost go for that $379 model, even though it ships with only 1 GB of RAM (that's a limitation that Microsoft puts on vendors who want to offer XP instead of Windows 7 on their netbooks). You can boost the memory to 2 GB for $39, and I'd probably do that.

That's if I a) had money to burn and b) used Solaris all the live-long day and really wanted the same environment on my netbook. As it stands, I don't user Solaris much at all. I do have Solaris 9 for my 1995-era Sparcstation 20, but that 55 MHz, 128 MB beast can't do all that much in Solaris or even OpenBSD. I can't run a "modern" Web browser, and I probably have a better dual-processor board in my boxes of SPARC parts, but not being able to enter the world of Firefox 3.0.x is kind of a deal-breaker.

And OpenBSD won't recognize a second CPU in SPARC 32-bit, I think. I've never had any luck running Firefox in OpenBSD or NetBSD in SPARC 32. They either won't build all the way (OpenBSD) or the available, machine-built package won't run (NetBSD).

For desktop use, anyway, I'm not hankering for what OpenSolaris is offering, but the mere fact that they do have a working Adobe Flash Player is something that most BSD projects can't quite do (except in Linux emulation and not so well at that).

However, just having a preloaded version of OpenSolaris, and on a laptop at that, is something I admire about the whole project.

One thing does worry me about the Toshiba laptops. The one-year OpenSolaris subscription is included in the laptop prices. A three-year subscription at the time of purchase is an additional $499. Ouch. Hopefully you can get software updates past one year without having to drop that additional $499.

At the risk of over-repeating myself, I do think this is pretty cool: I've always said the only way for Linux to get any traction on the desktop is with preloads. OpenSolaris is already there, at least in a limited way. Now all the project, or Sun, has to do is make the case for why desktop users should want a machine with OpenSolaris.

If you can make that case, I'm all ears.