I got my eagerly-anticipated OpenSolaris LiveCD in the mail and scheduled in a couple of hours to play with it. I have been largely very impressed with it and find it compares favourably to my Ubuntu 7.10 LiveCD in many key aspects (like being about 3 times faster on the boot and over an order of magnitude faster on shutdown).

Unfortunately, it's not all roses here. Or maybe it is all roses, including thorns. I simply cannot get networking functioning on my laptop at all. It looks to me like OpenSolaris correctly identifies the hardware as an SiS900-series Ethernet NIC. There's a device for it. It acts as if the device is active and functioning. Whatever it's doing, however, results in my router putting up the Orange Light of Doom on the port it's connected to.

(I'm not even sure what the Orange Light of Doom means, having never seen it before.)

The same laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 initializes the network port just fine -- as I said, I've never even seen the Orange Light of Doom before this. This hints to me that something is badly wrong in the code that initializes the NIC and puts it into some kind of bizarre state. I have since tried to make the Orange Light of Doom come up while running Ubuntu by doing things like connecting a cross-over cable instead of a straight cable to see if this makes this work out. Nothing doing. If I have the wrong kind of cable with the wrong pinout connected, I just get an empty port, not one lit in funky colours.

It occurs to me that one of these things is true:
1. I'm doing something terribly wrong and someone is currently laughing loudly before telling me the blindingly obvious as to how to fix this.
2. OpenSolaris is getting confused and needs some manual tweaking to get my NIC working.
3. OpenSolaris, for some reason, doesn't yet support this hardware and Sun's Engineers need some information to provide driver support for the hardware.

If #1 is true, could someone please tell me what I've done wrong? If #2 is true, could someone point me to the resources that show me how to activate my SiS900 NIC? If #3 is true, could someone drop me a line so we can work on solving this? (Given that the hardware is supported under Linux, it looks likely that perusing the Linux source will give clues as to what needs to be done in OpenSolaris to support this recalcitrant hardware.)

ok you already know of that page, but I'll add this thread since I've had a problem like this with an integrated SiS900:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=52539&tstart=90
read this thread