Slashdot Mirror
Taking a Look at Nexenta's Blend of Solaris and Ubuntu
Ahmed Kamal writes "What happens when you take a solid system such as Ubuntu Hardy, unplug its Linux kernel, and plug in a replacement OpenSolaris kernel? Then you marry Debian's apt-get to Solaris' zfs file-system? What you get is Nexenta Core Platform OS. Let's take Nexenta for a quick spin, installing and configuring this young but promising system."
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu pacakges, so I'm unlikely ever to run this on the desktop but I've been looking pretty seriously at this project for a while. If I switch from paid hosting to building my own web servers, I'd definitely try this out.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
debian debian debian!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
id like a dash of the proprietary with my FOSS thank you ;)
Good people go to bed earlier.
But seriously, sounds like a great idea.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
These are the types of stories I miss on /. No, politics, no civil procedure/court news, no DRM wars. Just plain old news for nerds (even if it doesn't matter all that much).
I'll look at it when there's a Redhat/CentOS userland to go with it. I'd say I'm pretty familiar with both Redhat Linux and
Solaris and the BSDs but you would have to give me some really compelling reasons I should go through the Debian/Ubuntu
learning curve.
The only downloads I see seem to be for 32 bit x86 systems. No 64 bit at this time? No sparc64?
Even if the idea behind all this is sound.. Try to consider that Nexenta has been around for 2+ years and still not finished the process to being a Debian port. Is it because the parent company is too busy trying to sell storage appliances or they simply don't have any developers to pull it off? The long term maintenance plans for the project to stay in sync with both upstream OpenSolaris and Debian/Ubuntu is fatally flawed and will cause extraneous effort. Then ask yourself.. why? If you really want ZFS + Ubuntu/debian/linux then please.. start work on that.. smf and a lot of the other useland tools *can* be ported to linux with relative ease if you guys actually knew what you were doing..
HA!
We need to prevent another monoculture in the information sector, even in open source. If everyone uses the same kernel, they will all have the same vulnerabilities. Safety in numbers means having more than one popular kernel.
Looks fun but I am still waiting for 3ware Solaris drivers. And I am not holding my breath either.
Where the f. is gnome?
If this packs the devfsadm command, I'm interested.
Anybody want my mod points?
> you... unplug its Linux kernel, and plug in a[n]... OpenSolaris kernel...
What happens?
Neither Linus nor Richard are happy.
Replacing Linux with FreeBSD's kernel gives GNU/kfreebsd. Could Nexenta's OS be called GNU/Solaris or maybe GNU/kopensolaris?
I have been working with Solaris for many years. When OpenSolaris was announced, I jumped for joy at what could be accomplished. When it was just a re-release of Solaris major, I said, ok, well, it is a certified Unix(tm) and now open source. But when they started working on Indiana, their replacement for the old Solaris system, I again jumped for joy, a chance to remove the cruft, while keeping ZFS and other Solaris goodies. When Ian jumped on the project, I thought, HOLY cow, we can get Debian GNU/Solaris. Well...... Guess what, they had to re-implement dpkg, why, well, I don't rightly know. Sure, you can install the old packages on the system and you now get a network repository, but darn it, why not just go with the darned proven system. Their current ipkg will break a system if the upgrade doesn't go well. I know dpkg can theoretically do this, but why re-code something that has had YEARS of testing and is used by almost half of the Linux community? I don't get it. Why the heck did they decide to re-implement something that could work so well? Just because it is GPL doesn't taint the core OS, it sits in userland. This must be so that they can sell proprietary Indiana builds to those who don't want to play out in the open. That is the only reason I can see. I really hoped for a good package system, but instead, we get a "me-too" system. It just doesn't make sense. And yes, I have been following OpenSolaris since it was barely usable, about nv 40 or something like that. I really wanted an old school Unix to survive, but at this point, I can't see it happening. They are now, not "Unix" they are "Not Linux" and I don't think they can handle the new market. Their Open Source strategy doesn't make sense. Their new storage line, I cannot see where this has a market. Sure, you get support, but once it is up and running well, there isn't much need for that support. There are much cheaper solutions for the SMB to MB segment, with much better support plans. I hope they survive for MySQL, VirtualBox, Java and NetBeans' sake, but I am not quite sure about it. I cannot find a revenue stream that they are first in class for anymore. Their workstations are a joke. I put together a home made Ultra 24 with the same specs for half of what they are asking. This was when they used the slower Q6600 quad cores. I see they upgraded. For outfitting a small to medium development group, I can't see going with the support premium. I know, support, etc... but hey, I can buy a service plan separately for OpenSolaris and when the H/W fails, just buy a new quad core workstation, which will be faster than the one it is replacing. I can't see the price premium. Apple is another story. Their system is integrated and will only work on their hardware. Sun is trying to compete in the commodity OS market. I just don't see it happening. Comments are welcome.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
Something to think about when you use the GPL for your own code - you may be preventing it from being bundled with other Free Software.
I guess the other software wasn't very Free then to start with if it disallows something as simple as linking with a GPL package, was it? After all, any GPL software can link with any other without legal complications...
If the CDDL is the problem then it is not Free.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This isn't the only problem with libc/compilers in Solaris. A few years ago, I was trying to use Solaris 10 to do a project in perl. The project had to do with parsing street addresses, so I was trying to use the CPAN module for that. Turns out that the Sun provided perl binary on Solaris is absolutely borked because it is compiled on the Sun Forte compiler and it won't work with CPAN, which expects to build parts of its modules against GCC and there are some fatal incompatabilities. There are some work-arounds involving shims, but they are serverly non-trivial and I never got them working properly. I was using solaris because all the data was in a berkley-db on the solaris box. I ended up runing the perl part on linux and mounting the berkley-db directory via NFS, which was far easier and reliable than trying to untangle the entire shim business. The other option, I suppose, might have been to compile a completely new perl binary against GCC/glibc and call that whenever I used my project. But still, a major tool like perl should "just work". Perl without CPAN isn't much use. I was completely flabergasted.
Soo untrue
So GNU's Not Unix, but what is it when it is sitting on a true SVR4 UNIX Kernel? GNU iNcludes Unix? Can we say "GNU/SVR4 Unix" without risking RMS having an apolexy?
The free developer release limits the entire zfs used "user" data to 1Tb. You can setup over 1Tb worth of disks, but only 1Tb can ever be be in use by the "user". I hope user data doesn't include the OS install....
Sorry for the spelling, should have been "apoplexy"
FWIW, SUSE was originally in the Slackware family. That's why the 'big 3' are Red Hat, Debian and Slackware. SUSE jumped to the Red Hat family, but it still, IIRC, has BSD init instead of sysV. I always feel like SUSE is Slackware with 'official' (Slackware has it out of the box, too) RPM support and YaST. It doesn't feel like Red Hat, but it behaves like Red Hat. Gentoo is the cousin of Slackware with the BYOC (Bring Your Own Compiler) mindset.
The way I see things flushing out right now, the Red Hat family is considered enterprise, the Debian family is considered desktop, and the Slackware family is the 'roll your own' (notably with Slax based live cds) for any niche that Red Hat or Debian aren't a good fit.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
You were using a really old Redhat if you were using rpm directly. Nowadays, since 7.3 when I came on, you use a high level package manager like yum, or apt-rpm (apt-get ported to use rpm instead of deb). I only use rpm (rpmbuild) when *building* my own packages. And when they are debugged, I put them in my own yum repository.
I've set up Nexenta on a few of my servers and it is a nice system but I just don't see the point any more, SXCE or Solaris 10 do everything Nexenta can do plus more.
Another thing that bothers me is that NC 1.0 hasn't been updated in forever, SXCE builds are released every two weeks.
Nexenta homepage: http://www.nexenta.org/
Planet Nexenta: http://blogs.nexenta.org/
IRC: #nexenta@freenode
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Please move along.
Debian's been working on kernel independence for years now, both GNU and non-GNU.
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/
http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
Of course, to get attention from fanboi sites, they chose to use Ubuntu.
Just because all their engineers have been contaminated by having access to the proprietary bits doesn't mean they can't (cautiously) assist a clean-room rewrite by outsiders.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
It is sad that you got modded Flamebait. The idea of +0 moderations is interesting.
But to be fair, I don't think that the GP was ranting. He was just short on line breaks.
He may even have had a lot of carefully inserted line breaks disappear due to lack of preview and lack of knowledge about the ./ editing interface.
The UNIX brand nowadays refers to a certification program that covers the complete OS, not just the kernel. GNU/OpenSolaris is not certified, therefore it's still Not UNIX, even if the kernel may be derived from a certified UNIX OS.
Big corporations use either Red Hat or SuSe, there is no other game in corporate Linux.
Your kind of irrelevance is a very funny one....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Uhhh, that 1 TB limit is for the free developer release of NexentaStor, a NAS product. It is not for Nexenta Core, the general purpose OS built from Ubuntu Hardy with an Open Solaris kernel.
I could bust your chops for lame fact checking, but rather bust the chops of the people who modded you informative; they obviously had no idea whether what you were saying was true or not, but coughed up mod points anyway. Wow, that's just like real life: you don't need to know what you're talking about, you just need to sound like you do :p
Linux on Sola............
no carrier
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I've googled around, and remain quite curious as to any advantage gained by inventing a new package system and utilities instead of using an existing one. I'm quite comfortable with Debian's system, but there are others as well..
I have fiddled with Nextena and really like some of their ideas. Why did Sun (Ian?!) do IPS instead? When will IPS catch up with the ZFS extension to their apt tools?
Thanks,
adric
<script>alert("I never liked JavaScript, really; it just seemed a bad idea.");</script>
just port zfs to debian and everything is hunky-dory
I was looking at this solution just 3 weeks ago and I believe it was priced at $800USD for the unlimitted with extra costs for additional storage cards. Now it's $40kUSD for unlimited and the cheapest is $1,100USD for 4TB. JEEESUS. This looked good until it flew right out of my price range.
... Open source is necessary but not sufficient to truly understand what code will do.
What part needs further explanation? Open source is both necessary and sufficient: You need the source code -- all of it. Not just the top-level application, and not just the libraries that contribute to that application, but also the compiler and even the underlying operating system and its components. It's that last one where OpenSolaris falls short.
Raven64 is distracting from the key shortcomings in the license for and system itself in OpenSolaris. It currently allows BLOBs and the weird-ass licensing, the CDDL, was chosen to allow BLOBs.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
There is practically no learning curve, even for a Vista user. For a linux user, should be child's play.
The rest of this post is speaking more to Windows users.
I've wanted to move my main machine onto Linux for some time (years?), but I'm a windows developer and a semi-avid gamer (WoW), and didn't think it'd do the job. Recently though, I found out I could run WoW on Linux via Wine, and as most of my development is in VMWare machines anyway, I thought I'd give it a go.
Ubuntu installed on my Dell Inspiron 9400 basically without any intervention on my part (well I did have to put the CD in, and choose to reformat my drive to ext3). It even found me a proprietary driver for my graphics card, and handled setting it up. There were no hardware issues.
The gnome desktop feels like you are using windows (especially many of the shortcut keys are the same, eg: CTRL-V, CTRL-C, CTRL-X). There just really wasn't any learning curve at all.
Now getting WoW running acceptably under Wine (it now works well, although I wouldn't recommend it for serious end game folks), and getting VMWare (Server) running (VMWare doesn't really go the extra mile to support debian based distros afaik), that took some work. But the amount of info online to help you is staggering; much better quality of information than for Windows. Even though the gui is very polished and you can live solely in it, instructions tend to be cmdline based, because of UNIX's command line orientation, which is off-putting for a windows person at first. Stick with it though, it turns out to be excellent, because instructions in terms of command lines and scripts are very precise. That means more advice and more depth of advice online because you can explain a complex solution in a compact way, meaning it's quicker to write up a solution, meaning more people bother to do it.
I've been a professional developer, using windows solely, for 15 years, and it's with great surprise that I found Ubuntu is a superior user experience. There are rough edges, for sure (eg: why is Pulse Audio not set up by default you crazy people), but just the app respository alone, with its unbelievably deep well of valuable free gui based software, puts it beyond the shareware/crapware shuffle of windows.
I came to Ubuntu expecting a serious uphill battle, and found an easy cornucopia.