Here we go again
USB is a fscking *solved*problem* for every OS on the planet except Solaris. I used to be able to mount the flash memory and SD card in my mp3 player on my home system until I installed the current set of required and security patches. Now the USB subsystem gets confused trying to connect them to device nodes. WTF? Of course all my music is on that
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I haven't seen these sort of USB faults since Solaris 9, to be honest. It's an odd one.
Processing RAWs is probably never going to be a winning proposition on anything except Windows or MacOS. RAW tools are complex and there's a world of quality difference between the different tools out there. While, for example, dcraw might work for a lot of things, it's just not cutting it compared to the vendor supplied tools or Adobe Camera Raw.
My home desktop (given I work from home, too) is a Mac for graphic stuff and a pair of Sunray thin clients - with Sun VDI - to deliver the right desktop for the task at hand. Might be worth giving it a stab - being able to pull out the card associated with your Solaris session and tossing in the card for another platform is pretty convenient.
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As for the USB faults, this is another one of those "Sun screwed up a driver again" things.[1] I did a patch install a month ago, and one of the generic patches I installed was 140092-03 (ehci, uhci, scsa2usb and hidparser), in hopes of getting a better behaved set of USB drivers. Silly me. Guess I'll back it out this weekend.[2]
[1] That was a recommended (I think) patch for the nge driver for NVIDIA NICs that caused the driver to stop working. Sun was shipping x86 workstations with the NVIDIA chipset at the time, and they finally fixed it in update 6. But in update 6 the USB support is b0rked (my office desktop runs sol10u6, and I tested my mp3 player on it Weds).
[2] At least I can back it out on the home system (which runs a patched sol10u2 and also has an NVIDIA chipset, so I knew about the NIC problem before I built the office box, which got sol10u6) and still have a working NIC
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Think of the plus side on this particular fault though - at least you *can* back this one out. I played the "Let's try Ubuntu on the LifeBook" game a while ago, and every OS update was a magical experience to see which bit was broken for a while next. I don't think I ever got everything working at the same time without manually twiddling files post-patch. No easy "patchrm" there.
I guess you'll get to find what breaks next, with 10u8 just released. A quick upgrade and a whole new world of excitement!
Worth even more cackles, the nxge (Neptune) NIC driver had a similarly bad start. Not to mention ce (Cassini), which started as a big pile of bugs clevered labelled "driver".
And the Sun guys wonder why nobody ever patches their production systems unless it's a remote root exploit ... and even then, preferably not.
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Re fan management: Yeah, that must be it- the motherboard fan (a tiny thing) had been making awful grinding noises for months. When I finally got around to buying a replacement, I discovered that I'd have to completely disassemble the system to have any hope of removing the malfunctioning fan. I decided that was Too Much Work and instead disconnected that fan and installed an extra case fan I had lying around. So I guess now I put up with beeping under load as a result.
At least the most recent USB related patches returned the drivers to their previous not quite working state. But still- "deep fried, with ketchup."
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