Infrastructure Software

As I am looking around at this forum, I saw lots of people complained about limited hardware support of Solaris x86: if your PC is not on HCL (or user reported version) list, you are out of luck!

I feel their pains! I don't deny that the HW support is improving in Solaris x86, but it is FAR FAR away from where it should be. The point is: if Red Hat, Suse,
NetBSD or others alike can be installed on a PC, solaris x86 should do. This should be the minimum goal for Solaris x86 to be success in general.

Following is my Linux Friendly (even Windows NT 4.0 can be installed easily!) PC which I can't get Solaris 10 installed, it failed from the begining:
After boot from CDROM, it shows a blue screen:
"Solaris Primary boot program v2.0", and in a second,
it changed to:
"Aolaris Primary boot program v2.0" and hung there forever.
You can find similar problem descriptions in this forum, I know I am not alone.

Here is my PC configuration: (It is not a brand-name PC, I bought the parts and installed it 4-years ago)
(1) ASUS A7A266 Mother Board, with 2DDR (or 3SDR) memory slots;
on this mother board: there are:
ALi PCI to AGP controller;
IDE ATA/ATAPI Ali M5229 PCI Bus Master IDE controller;
ALi 7101 Power Management controller;
Microsoft ACPI compliant system;

(2) AMD Athlon 1.333GHz CPU;
(3) 768MB DDR PC2100 memory, (1x256MB, 1x512MB)
(4)ATI Radeon 7200 series Video card;
(5) Realtek RTL8139 Family PCI Fast Ethernet NIC;
(6)West Digital 40GB ATA hard drive:
WDC-WD400BB-75AUA1
(7) Creative SB Live! sound card;
(8) KDS Avitron Monitor;
(9) Standard 101/102 key PS/2 keyboard;
(10) Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical;
(11)Intel HaM Plus V.90 Modem;
(12) Generic IEEE 1394 controller;

Just hope my PC (and millions of others alike) won't be left behind; Although my PC is not that "standard" and sure is not on Sun's support piority list, it is a huge gap Sun laps behind Linux,
(or even Windows NT, in terms of hardware support)
at least to the impression of those who had such similar experience. (can't install on Linux friendly PCs)

Hope when the open solaris code is available, it can make a difference and help spread the Solaris x86.