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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."
Open Solaris is OSI approved Open Source.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You must have missed the memo. Sun has been open sourcing projects left and right: OpenSolaris, Java and VirtualBox to name a few high profile examples. Sure OpenSolaris isn't GPL'd, but Java and VirtualBox are.
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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..
Let me clarify this before someone gets confused -by "Their" I only meant Opensolaris.
NetBSD and FreeBSD include binary blob device drivers -but you can compile a working system without them.
You can't compile a working system without using the binary-only components of OpenSolaris.
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.
Also, I'm fairly sure that under OpenBSD at least, they include proprietary device firmware blobs, but the device drivers themselves are open source.
Gentoo was never the big thing. For geeks perhaps. In the enterprise, it has always been Red Hat or SUSE, and that certainly hasn't changed, and is unlikely to change quickly. What you read on Slashdot, or the stats you see on Distrowatch, are not a good measure of relative use of distros.
no... it's pretty clearly based on Hardy.
Hi, I'm one of NCP (Nexenta Core Platform) developers. The Ubuntu part of Nexenta is the userland. So over 5000 apps that you see in our repository are ports of 8.04 counterparts.
Theres some more information for developers in an article I wrote over at OSnews.
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Sun has been open sourcing projects left and right: OpenSolaris, Java and VirtualBox to name a few high profile examples.
Actually Innotek GPL'd Virtualbox before Sun acquired them.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
Let's get this straight, an article about the new version of Nexenta (2.0alpha - you did RTFA, right?) comes out, and you complain that nexenta hasn't been updated ;-) ? The reason for the delay is nexenta tracks ubuntu's long term releases.
I agree with you on Nexenta's irrelevance, though. Nexenta just isn't worth it unless you need untrained monkeys to administer the thing.
That was seven years ago, and since then the changes between versions of OS X have been small, in terms of "learning curve". They've added a shitload of functionality, but if you'd take someone from 2001 and switch their 10.0 desktop for a 10.5 one, they *would* know their way around the system.
Then again, some stuff under the hood *did* change (NetInfo anyone?) and sometimes that means relearning stuff. Maybe you meant that.
But an OS is never completely fixed. I'll leave out Vista (which was quite a change from XP) since that's been done to death, but for example KDE has the same issue: I've seen stuff shift around in the control centre more than once, and not always for obvious reasons.
That aside, please leave radical changes that occurred when dropping ancient OSs out of this. We're not talking Win3.11, OpenWindows or CDE either.
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