I've become very interested in looking at the opensolaris end of things, and seeing how Nexenta uses apt, I'd figure I'd try it. However, I can't find a lot of good docs in terms of hardware support, so any experience/opinions would be appreciated!

Is there a working Intel 3945 wireless driver for Nexenta and how would I get it configured?

I'm stuck with an ATI X1600 card and there's no 3D driver for Solaris. Can I still use my 1680x1050 resolution with an open-source driver?

Since this is a laptop, does Solaris come with good power management or will it suck down the battery due to the cpu running at 100%?

Thanks in advance!

The reason why you do not see H/W documentation is Nexenta is really a userland project. It is using the OpenSolaris kernel so the OpenSolaris site is the place to look for H/W and other kernel related features. Latest Nexenta build (elatte Alpha 7) is using OpenSolaris build 61.

The 3945 driver was integrated in OpenSolaris build 64 so is missing in Nexenta. I'm not sure how feasible would be to add it afterward.

The ATI will very likely work at full screen resolution.

Power management is starting to be integrated in build 70, but there is an add-on since a long time to provide this functionality http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/frkit/ . It may work on your laptop if its CPU is single core but it isn't supported on Nexenta so it may just not install there.

You probably had better luck with installing Solaris Express on your laptop in the meantime and wait for a more recent Nexenta or for Indiana to be released as the package management system looks important for you.

Thanks for the reply! However, I tried Nexenta and it was extremely sluggish (probably because debugging was turned on since it's still in Alpha). Therefore, I tried BeleniX (which is built against build 67, so wifi is suppored) and it worked really well as a LiveCD on my older computer (I was almost shocked to see such as good Solaris based distro).

I have PC-BSD on that machine and the 3945 driver for BSD is still in the alpha stage, so I can't put BeleniX on that machine. Since I wasn't willing to download 3GB+ of data (yet), I decided to pop BeleniX on my laptop, just to make sure things were compatible. Upon boot, I got this:
& then it hangs. Turning off ACPI and turning on debugging didn't reveal anything or help it boot up. Any idea what went wrong?

As for package management, I like apt, but I checked out blastwave.org and that looks manageable.