OSNews has been reporting on the Debian/Ubuntu/GNU/Opensolaris hybrid for several years. But for those of you who've never looked more closely at this interesting OS, a Nexenta developer has laid out some of its more noteworthy features and advantages.
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Member since:2008-06-24
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.
Member since:2006-12-18
Member since:2006-01-31
Member since:2005-08-11
Member since:2007-08-03
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.
Member since:2005-07-06
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.
Member since:
2005-07-06
But this is touting the Solaris advantages, not necessarily the Nexenta advantages. Why pick this over another Solaris distro?