Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th Jun 2006 16:46 UTC, submitted by erast
The Nexenta project, which builds a distribution combining the OpenSolaris kernel with applications from Ubuntu, has announced a new alpha release of NexentaOS: "This release provides a fully integrated Ubuntu Dapper Drake userland, OpenSolaris core (build #40), and contains overall 11800 packages. In addition, Alpha 5 contains: Sun's Java SE 5.0 Java Development Kit (via NexentaOS APT); live upgrade; and OpenOffice.org 2.0, natively compiled on Nexenta OS."
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Member since:
2006-02-20
Solaris has historically had a pretty good story with binary compatibility and stability of interfaces and underlying libraries etc. Plus Sun has a lot of control and a considerable R&D capability, so they can *in principle* make customer oriented changes that are difficult for Linux (and *BSD) vendors who have to liaise with a community and rely on the community for more changes.
So, if you don't care so much for freedom (not as in beer) but do want an OS that Just Works, then *in principle* Sun should be able to provide a more complete and polished package, just as Apple does.
OTOH Solaris isn't competitive yet from a packaging and hardware support point of view, and a number of well-known packages are AWOL. So we can wait and see, but the extra competition can only benefit us (as consumers) in the long term. Even if the main outcome on the desktop of free systems is to force Microsoft to keep prices low and address reliability and performance issues rather than solely add features, that's a very positive result. Unless you're a wannabe desktop OS vendor, anyway.