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Driver support, licensing, and program support. I run OpenSolaris snv95 on my "soon-to-be" fileserver, but I know people who've tried installing it without luck on their hardware. It's getting much better (I'm running the new 780G AMD Chipset), but still not all the way there. My Realtek 8111c nic is still buggy and auto-dhcp doesn't seem to work. Other things like USB+ZFS craps out after so much use because of "memory" issues. 4GB of ram doesn't seem to work either, and I'm not the only one with this issue.

I'm not a big fan of linux (I'm more of a BSD guy myself), but I do believe it does have its rightful place in this world to keep other communities in check.

What are you talking about?
Nexenta and OpenSolaris share the same kernel.
There's no better driver support and no Linux here.
If ZFS "craps out" on your OpenSolaris box, chances are Nexenta won't make it any better.

OpenSolaris drivers quality (especially storage drivers) generally better then in Linux. The problem is that not all white-box HW is supported - but this is matter of time.

I have no idea where you pulled that load of baloney from. A lot of Solaris's drivers have been neglected for years, and throwing in the word 'quality' won't make them better. A big part of Solaris's problem, still, is that it doesn't have the hardware support of Linux, especially on commodity x86 stuff. This comes from Linux's history (it's the reason it exists) of being a kernel and OS intended to run on that kind of hardware (and years of work), and the Unix vendors' (like Sun) insistence on not porting their operating systems to commodity hardware when they could get people to buy their really expensive stuff instead. That worked for many years and Sun got rich off it, but it has caught up now.

Much of the point of OpenSolaris is that Sun can't fill that gap themselves, and they would love Linux's drivers and kernel developers as a result.


In all probability, it's going to be a long time. Linux has run on lots of off-the-shelf hardware for a long time, but even a few years ago, filling in the gaps of this network card, that network card, this onboard chipset, these TV cards etc. took years, a lot of driver developers and creating the environment in which to do it. There's still a lot to do as well.

I just don't see a kernel community developing for Solaris that is going to be able to achieve that.

Because it gives people normal Linux/Debian environment

apt-get is a Debian feature, not a solaris feature. The 18000 apps that come with it are not a Solaris feature either.

It mentions the GNU userspace, that makes it easy for Linux users to jump over to the Solaris kernel.

If it would work - last time I tried things blew up pretty soon.

You'll still need to learn the Solaris tools to take advantage of the solaris specific advantages.

Another interesting project in that area is portage-prefix trying to implement Gentoo's portage with Solaris.

After using, or rather trying to use, Nexenta I sort of doubt the 18000 apps figure, are you sure that is not for Ubuntu? Anyway, it doesn't matter if they have 18000 apps, you only need a handful or so of important ones to bi missing to make life miserable.

For me the deal breaker was Java. Sun java won't install. I suppose you could try to port openjdk but a lot of the dependencies are just not there yet, so that would be a major project.

Most of the tools for administrationg it is Solaris oriented. E.g. SMF for starting and stopping services, ldapclient to set up LDAP,... I would think the only thing an Ubuntu user would find familliar is apt-get, exept that there are a lot fewer apps to get. Apart from apg-get Nexenta feels like Solaris and have very little in common with Ubunto from the adminster point of view.

The main advantage over standard Solaris of Nexenta is that it boots from ZFS, but so does OpenSolaris from Sun. OpenSolaris have a lot more complete set of libs (and important to me, Java). My guess is that it is much easier even for a Linux person to start out with that instead of Nexenta and then port whatever GNU he nees you need than going with Nexenta.

Give this a try:

http://wimpi.coalevo.net/2008/08/how-to-jdk6-on-nexenta-core-platfo...

That's the point, you don't have to port GNU stuff to Nexenta, because it is already using the GNU userland.

Actually, there are quite a lot of GNU packages that comes with OpenSolaris, or even standard Solaris as well. E.g. gcc, gmake, gtar,.. The difference is that it is often easier compile the GNU things that are not there, on real Solaris than it is on Nexenta. In fact you may not even have to compile them in real Solaris as most things can be pkg-get:ed from blastwave.org.

In theory Nexenta should be easier, as you should more or less just be able to port/recompile an Ubuntu package if its not already compiled for Nexenta, but in reality, you end up with a Gentoo like feeling where you spend a lot of time compiling your software.

You also have to remember, that there are some things from Linux that is missing in the Solaris kernel and vice versa. This means that there will be a few Ubuntu packages that not port easily without doing some real programming.Then take dependencies on these packages into account and you will realize that easy life on Nexenta is not apt-get:able.

So, if you wan't the GNU stuff on a Solaris kernel OpenSolaris or even standard Solaris is a better starting point at the moment. This may of course change in the future when more precompiled packages becomes available to Nexenta.

In spite of all my troubles with Nexenta, I kind of liked it. I think that this was mostly because it came without a GUI, that I had to turn off (not much use of a GUI in my server room), and that it booted directly from ZFS. However, persons coming to Nexenta with the hope and expectation that it will feel like Ubuntu will get very disappointed.

uh, the article states, and I quote:

"Nexenta uses Debian's dpkg packaging system, and provides everything provided by Debian/Ubuntu environment"

According to Nexenta's wiki, it can use ubuntu's repos directly:

http://www.nexenta.org/os/BuildingPackages

But I guess there is a four step process to port them, so I guess you do have to port them, but it looks extremely easy.

Actually they use more: stuff like gdm, kerberos or the syslog also count as applications.

And it's not like those 5-6 apps you mention are the same apps for everyone anyway.