700M is the min requisite for OpenSolaris LiveCD

In my experience, Indiana doesn't work well if you have less than 700 megabytes of RAM because the all the features in the GNOME desktop use a lot of RAM and the ZFS checksumming, snapshot and rewind features uses a bit of RAM as well. Instead of using Indiana (a.k.a. "OpenSolaris 2008.05") try this out:

  http://www.milax.org/

Milax is a minimized OpenSolaris distro with an XFCE graphical user interface (basically the Solaris equivalent of D amn Small Linux) and it can give you a text only boot up and there is a script that you can run to install it on a USB flash drive.

Give it a spin and tell us how it goes.


When you boot up the Indiana 2008.05 OpenSolaris live CD, it boots up really fast for me (way faster than my KDE Ubuntu live CD) and the reason it does this is because it loads all 700 megabytes of the CD into RAM. If you have less than 700megabytes of RAM then the live CD will try to swap and thrash like crazy while the OS is trying to boot up.

This is why you need to use Milax instead of Indiana on that kind of old hardware with no RAM. Keep in mind that the reason ZFS is so much faster than NTFS and hardware RAID cards is because ZFS uses up quite a bit of RAM. ZFS basically gives you speed and end-to-end data integrity (every block of data is checksummed several times) at the price of using up more RAM than say an ext3 file system or UFS filesystem (which has no error self correction, self-healing or checksumming) uses.