http://www.osnews.com/story/13501/NexentaOS_Alpha_2_Released Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 19 Jun 2013 01:22:45 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread?91023 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91023 Hi,

hm what are the advantages of OpenSolaris for a user instead of Linux? Solaris has a monolithic kernel too, right?

Greetings

Mike Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (miketech) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91028 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91028 Contact Nexenta
We are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, U.S.A.

Email us at: support@nexenta.com


That should really give me some warm and fuzzies about running my company on their Operating System.

*can you say can of worms?* Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (stephanem) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91038 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91038 To my best beliefs, it has the advantage of being based on the most advanced Unix out there (sorry Apple...)...

I cannot wait to install this on my PC, having just deleted Windows XP and decided to settle myself 100% on Unix for my operating system joys.

I am gonna love poking around with ZFS and Solaris Zones and stuff like that... Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (s_groening) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91040 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91040 the ability to play tetris while the OS/distro installs is truly awsome. I don't know if this is the first installer to have such a feature; if yes, I hope others (Ubuntu, Debian) will follow suit. Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (necrosis) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91042 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91042 Can you say Free Software? Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (thebluesgnr) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91049 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91049 You could play solitaire whilst installing Lycoris. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dark child) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91051 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91051 Absolutely yes! NexentaOS is an open source effort with supporting(Nexenta Systems, Inc) company behind it. http://www.nexenta.com

It is no different from current GNU/Linux offerings like Ubuntu/Canonical, Fedora/Redhat, etc Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (erast) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91052 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91052 BeOS let you play games while installing if you really wanted too..

'course beos took 10 minutes to install.. so you really didnt have to wait long. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (helf) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91053 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91053 The big advantage of Solaris seems to be the ability to micromanage and fine-tune the system. ZFS, for example, allows as many filesystems as you want, each taking up only as much space as they need, and each supporting independent quotas, reservations, snapshots, compression, etc. Gurus are able to track down obscure problems with DTrace. Unfortunately, as useful as Zones are, I don't think Nexenta supports them yet. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jake) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91055 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91055 I would say that it's rather strange that there is NO information about any of the staff of Nexenta, no information about any of the core developers, and no information about the company itself. They have great vision and ideals, but this all seems so "in the dark." No question this is completely open source, but almost all projects have at least this basic information. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rattaro) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91060 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91060 Now all they need to do is write a HAL for Solaris and they'll have my desktop! (I realise that I don't bring any financial benefit to the company but then again one should never underestimate the value of mindshare and I do my fair bit of adovacy). Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (CaptainPinko) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91062 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91062 ZFS and DTrace are fully supported in Nexenta as well as any other OpenSolaris features like Zones and BrandZ's...

BrandZ is especially cool since one could run multiple OS's with *zero* overhead if OS is OpenSolaris based and very small overhead if it is RedHat GNU/Linux for example. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (erast) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91063 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91063 HAL GNU/Solaris port is comming... I know some developers are working actively at the moment. Luckily, HAL for GNU/Solaris is not that hard to port comparing to DTrace for GNU/Linux for instance... Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (erast) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91065 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91065 I tried the Nextena alpha 1 live-cd. It was amazing how well this was done. I am d/ling the alpha 2 install disk now to give it a whirl. This is truly Ubuntu for OpenSolaris. Literally after trying out their first "aplha" I was really impressed.

I will see how this one goes. This seems to be one great OS so far from my experience. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 01:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bullethead) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91066 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91066 I think thats because Lycoris was built on "Lizard," which was the Caldera Linux installer, which has turned into ... duh duh duh duh.... SCO! Tue, 31 Jan 2006 01:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Adam S) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91067 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91067 That has been a characteristic of the project from the word go...a while back i brought this up in the opensolaris forum, they don't seem to think it is too much of an issue.

Each to their own i guess. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 01:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (chekr) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91068 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91068 Atleast Ubuntu has Mark Shuttleworth and Fedora has Matt Szulik as real people to go and strangle should the OS eat your datacenter.

Downloading bits (even in open source) should be not considered safe practice unless you have the name of an individual. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 01:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (stephanem) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91078 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91078 Has the whole GPLv2 vs. CDDL debate been settled? Tue, 31 Jan 2006 01:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (drewunwired) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91081 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91081 Its clarified by FSF leaders during first GPLv3 draft discussion that there is no *any* licensing issue exists in regards to NexentaOS and similar works when kernel and userland components are CDDL-licensed and the rest of OSS is a mix of other licenses like GPLv2, BSD, etc. More details are here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=5172&tstar...

So, yes, I beleive it had been settled in a good way. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 02:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (erast) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91088 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91088 I suspect that you'll need a large disk array to really see the benefits of zfs, since that's what zfs is aimed at. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 02:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (steve-parker.org) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91090 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91090 Run your datacentre on Ubuntu or FC, and you deserve to be strangled! Seriously. I have both these installed at home, but I would have to be seriously deranged to install either of these in a datacentre. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 02:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (steve-parker.org) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91092 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91092 Solaris (not just OpenSolaris) has allowed you to browse the web during the install since (IIRC) Solaris 8. The wisdom of doing so is questionable, of course - I would prefer my OS install to be done with no internet connection, and only to connect a system to the internet once fully built and patched. Within a corporate environment, allowing some access to the network can make sense. Solaris 2.5.1 (if you go with the "GUI" install) allowed for a GUI with a terminal window, allowing you to do whatever you like during the install (rather like Linux installs allow from then til now, with (typically) Alt-F2) Tue, 31 Jan 2006 02:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (steve-parker.org) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91113 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91113 I will give it a try as opensolaris v 5.11 B 30 was almost non functional to me on 5 systems. The reason was mainly hardware support any linux beats solaris and its derivatives at least 2 years in hardware support arena. I will try to compare speed of solaris and linux on X86 machines. Windows being the fastest on x86, but its like an ambulance with no brakes. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (hraq) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91118 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91118 Excellent, thanks. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (drewunwired) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91120 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91120 opensolaris is a "raw material" and do not offer some drivers developed outside by OSS. NexentaOS integrates all thes drivers together. Things like popular sound and wireless cards should work out of the box.

But really, drivers availability is the matter of time when you have stable kernel DDI. This is where GNU/Solaris makess a lot of difference comparing to GNU/Linux. You write your driver once and it will work as a binary without rebuild for each minor kernel update. For instance, drivers for Solaris 8 will work with OpenSolaris b30 which proves how good kernel interfaces beeing designed at the first place.

GNU/Solaris brings stability to the GNU world. IMHO Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (erast) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91122 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91122 the ability to play tetris while the OS/distro installs is truly awsome. I don't know if this is the first installer to have such a feature; if yes, I hope others (Ubuntu, Debian) will follow suit.

I believe that the first time that I saw that was back then at 1999 or so with Caldera OpenLinux 2.X. That was at a time when SCO didn´t suck big time as they do today. Actually, it was quite advanced compared to most distributions available at the time with its LISA Control Center (which is somewhat similar to YAST on SUSE). Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (DeadFishMan) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91130 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91130 I'd be really interested to see how well the wireless support works. I don't have a laptop to give to it right now, but maybe someone here has installed it on a laptop. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 05:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (fretinator) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91138 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91138 It works very well on my Fujitsu 6120 with ipw driver...
I found that Nexenta's wificonfig is much more consistent than GNU/Linux's iwconfig. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 06:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (erast) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91149 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91149 I haven't had time to play with ZFS, so take this with a grain of salt..

I think there are a few other features to ZFS. For one, it automagically deals with endian issues, which could be a significant boon if you have a mixed sparc/x86/(soon powerpc?) environment. Additionally, it appears to simplify the coordination of multiple filesystems, quotas, and diskspace.

Personally, I'm curious about the differences between SDS/UFS and ZFS io scheduling. UFS has always "felt" rather slow and stagnant. I believe that ZFS schedules disk activity with a very different algorithm and I hope it performs better. My experience could be a product of my antique hardware though :-)

All in all, I feel that there are gains to be had by merging the filesystem and RAID capabilities into a single layer. While there should be a proper distinction between physical devices and filesystems, I don't think that the reasoning behind the fs/volume distinction is as easy to make in 2006. I've got a lot of spindles in my life and I'd like them to coordinate a bit better without the requisite of a fancy RAID controller. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (captrb) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91150 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91150 ... depends on what duties your data centre hosts are responsible for, of course. If I had a extemely fault tolerant infrastructure, I might be persuaded to try a less mature combinations of software to get better performance. After all, isn't that how windows and linux originally gained server marketshare? Granted, the performance may have originally been in deployment time and hardware/licensing costs, but in terms of achieving a goal on schedule with a fixed budget, those are actually a factor in net performance.

Speaking of fault tolerant infrastructures, know where I can get one? I've got mainframe needs on beige budget :-) Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (captrb) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91151 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91151 ZFS and DTrace are fully supported in Nexenta as well as any other OpenSolaris features like Zones and BrandZ's...

# zoneadm -z test install
sh: /usr/lib/lu/lucreatezone: No such file or directory
sh: line 0: exec: /usr/lib/lu/lucreatezone: cannot execute: No such file or directory
zoneadm: zone 'test': '/usr/lib/lu/lucreatezone' failed with exit code 126.
# Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jake) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91156 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91156 to make Zones work in Nexenta, you need to do some scripting at the moment... It is not quite user-ready, yes, but user with developer's skills could make it work. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 08:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (erast) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91165 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91165 I was playing with this OS but the problem is that still hardware wise it's still primitive. This OS reminds me very much with ubuntu; but of course nothing to compare. It didn't recognize 2 very common sound cards that all linux distros (7) recognized them ( AC97 and Audigy 2ZS).
The screen resolution was choosen 1650x1050 which was OK, but not what I wanted 1920x1200. Then came the surprise, after a reboot the system didn't load properly, it said file system corruption then "fsck" didn't solve it. The OS said choose safe mode but safe mode was not available from GRUB menu. Anyway it will take at least 5 years to mature till them I will hibernate the burned CD of the OS. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (hraq) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91183 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91183 Just wondering why I have to register for trying OpenSolaris. It's exactly this registration crap which holds me back from trying OpenSolaris - be it Sun's or be int Nexentra's flavour. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 11:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (taschenorakel) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91187 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91187 http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/improbable.org/elatte_installcd_...
http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/genunix.org/elatte_installcd_alp...
http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/tdcsong.se/elatte_installcd_alph...
http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/http.thisway.cz/elatte_installcd...
http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/http.iasi.roedu.net/elatte_insta... Tue, 31 Jan 2006 11:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (philter) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91204 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91204 i've looked at opensolaris.org. developer's documentation of opensolaris is great. you've got there tutorials for making drivers, architecture of system. that is what, i think, makes this project very interesting to developers. opensolaris would have new hardware support very quick. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 12:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mormon) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91206 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91206 solaris != desktop Tue, 31 Jan 2006 12:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (makc) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91209 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91209 > solaris != desktop
Tell this Sun (and get smashed). Just 'cause Sun wasn't successful yet, in beating Windows on the Desktop it doesn't mean they don't try... Remember that Sun always delievered Workstations and Thin Clients beside their servers, and they all were running Solaris so far... ;-) Tue, 31 Jan 2006 13:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (taschenorakel) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91211 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91211 It would be nice if they had torrent downloads Tue, 31 Jan 2006 13:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Leoandru) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91213 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91213 When it goes stable Ill give it a whirl being the OS Junkie that I am.

Barkeep...another please.
-nX Tue, 31 Jan 2006 13:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (NixerX) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91241 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91241 Has anyone else installed this yet? I installed it last night on a spare hard-drive I had. The first thing I noticed was how long it took to install. It wasn't that big of a deal because I was watching a movie, but I've installed multi-CD distros in less time.

After it was installed, I noticed it took an extraordinarily long time to boot my machine. And once it was booted, I couldn't help but notice how slow everything was in general. Navigating menus, moving windows around the screen, starting programs, etc...

I'm wondering if it's some kind of hard-drive DMA issue? Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (blixel) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91442 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91442 "Just wondering why I have to register for trying OpenSolaris. It's exactly this registration crap which holds me back from trying OpenSolaris - be it Sun's or be int Nexentra's flavour."

You don't have to register for OpenSolaris, go to genunix.org and download it. I think you may have mistaken Sun's Solaris as being the authoritive OpenSolaris. Solaris (Nevada releases) is a distro of OpenSolaris. It is a mistake to think of OpenSolaris as a system in which you can download an iso and run OpenSolaris much like you can not download a vanilla Linux iso and expect a functioning OS. Maybe in the future things will change but as it stands now this is the case. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 20:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (chekr) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91474 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91474 I spent the last 45 minutes installing only to get
"Bad PBR sig" error at boot. Too bad cause I wont be trying again anytime soon.

The tertris game wasn't bad but it was pretty annoying, I could only manage 5 lines at level 1. Tue, 31 Jan 2006 21:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Leoandru) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?91691 http://www.osnews.com/thread?91691 Well I'm using old Sun workstations almost daily in my university. CDE is not the most comfortable desktop environment - but yes, it does the job

Back to the topic: while I highly appreciate Solaris as on OS, my point is that it isn't geared towards the mass desktop market like Windows or OSX by design.
No doubt it can work well, but it's not Solaris purpose. And market, for instance...
Ever seen a SPARC flavour in a normal user home? (:

I wish NexentaOS a good future, it can be an excellent developer workstation OS imho. Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (makc) Comments