There was even a convenient and deceivingly helpful little WiFi network prompt that showed me all of my local networks. I found mine, and clicked connect. The screen went away, I assumed I was connected, but alas to not avail, I was not.

For some reason, the little WiFi tool (that shall remain nameless) could identify that my network used WPA security, but couldn’t connect to it. Helpful, but only in a deceiving way. At first I didn’t think much of it. Even Ubuntu has its WPA woes a few releases ago.

So then I embarked on the “chicken-egg-chicken-egg” scenario of downloading drivers from the internet that enable my computer to connect to the internet. One Ethernet cable and a Google search later, I found the OpenSolaris laptop support page with a mini tutorial on how to install the wpa_supplicant (again, very reminiscent of the Ubuntu olden days).

Got everything downloaded and installed, but when I tried to start the wpa_supplicant daemon, I got this nasty, brutish error:

ld.so.1: wpa_supplicant: fatal : libssl.so.0.9.7: open failed: No such file or directory


“Okay” me thought to myself, “I need libssl”. But when I went to check, I sure enough had OpenSSL already and its version was 0.9.8a

At this point I was crying and screaming on the floor. My new toy wasn’t going to work. Why does this always happen to “me”?!? The last thing I wanted to do was start symlinking “shit” around in an OS I wasn’t familiar with.

What happened next is what highlights a fundamental difference b/w men and women (note: I am man). A woman by the name of Karen Tung simply asked how to fix this problem on an OpenSolaris forum. I guess its like the proverbial “let’s stop and ask for directions”…”go to hell, I’m not lost” scenario.

Here is the solution, reposted in its infinite glory:

# from the terminal...
# change to the root account.
# the root pw on the livecd is 'opensolaris'
su root
dladm create-secobj -c wpa mykey
# enter your psk twice
dladm connect-wifi -e "<essid>" -k mykey <interface>


If you don’t get any “shitty” feedback like a segmentation fault, you should get that overly persistent, initially deceiving WiFi dialog popup (within a few minutes, hang tight). Find your ESSID you entered above, enter your psk ONE MORE TIME and you should be cool. You should receive a dialog confirmation saying something like

Brought interface interface up, got address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Now you can post on your blog from the liveCD…like someone I know…