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."

Comments

Re:Even if....

[TheRaven64]

If you read the flame wars on Debian Legal - which is usually a bad idea - yu'd see that the reason it isn't an official Debian is because Solaris' libc is CDDL, which is not GPL-compatible. The Debian people believe that distributing GPL'd code that links against a GPL-incompatible libc is a violation of the GPL (and they are probably right). 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.

Re:Get me a Redhat/Centos userland

[slifox]

The reason Ubuntu is so popular is because they took a standardized, stable, flexible, but up-to-date base (Debian) and took care of the desktop-oriented customization that a Debian user would normally have to do manually. Then they started filling in the holes in the UI, which trickled back to Debian of course.

The reason Red Hat is no longer popular (and I don't know why it ever was, since Debian has almost always been this good) is, in my opinion, because the packaging system is way too open and not nearly standardized enough. Although they have been fixing this in the recent years, when you run a Red Hat based system (Fedora, Centos, etc), you seem to end up installing packages from random places.

From Debian, if you stick with the official repositories (which is possible since they are very thorough and extensive), you are pretty much guaranteed that all your packages have passed through a standardized system where they are checked for problems, inter-dependencies, and are all compiled with the same methodology.

Additionally, Debian's seemingly-overbearing policies on legal issues are actually a good thing, as long as they have enough developers (and they do): as long as you have your "gold standard" distribution where every package meets very strict rules, you can always branch out from there by adding other trusted repositories or doing what Ubuntu has done. However, if you start from a "messy" packaging system / distribution where anything goes, its much harder to select the "standardized" subset of those packages.

Finally, Debian's developer base is very large, diverse, and relatively unified in their efforts, and their organization is *very* democratic and user-driven. There is no one central authority that has total and permanent control over the distribution. While this has the possibility for failure, they've done it in a way that seems to have worked out very well. In contrast, Red Hat is a corporation that has a vested interest in getting customers to pay for support contracts, while the Red Hat based distributions are more numerous and don't have nearly as much manpower (note: purely based on speculation). I don't know how much penetration Debian has in the enterprise, but if someone stepped up to provide paid Debian support, I think they could make a lot of money...

Anyways thats just been my view. I honestly don't mean to offend anyone who really likes Red Hat -- I just feel that Debian's packaging system is much more powerful, standardized, up-to-date, and trustworthy (the key being meeting all of these points, and not sacrificing one for another -- say more up-to-date for less standardization, etc).

Please feel free to correct me -- I am interested to hear a Red Hat admin's point-of-view on the issue.

Re:Got that backwards, and a misuse of term

[TheRaven64]

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...

Nice troll. The CDDL is roughly equivalent to the Mozilla Public License. It makes no demands on code linked to it at all. It is a per-file license, and can be linked with any other code unless the other code's license explicitly prohibits it. You can mix CDDL, Apache licensed, BSD licensed and any other per-file license together into a single program.

It is the GPL which makes this a problem. The GPL states that, if you distribute a GPL'd program, all parts of the program must be covered by licenses which impose the same conditions as the GPL and no others. The CDDL (along with every other Free Software license on this list) does not fall into this category. This means that you do not have a distribution license for the GPL'd software if you attempt to distribute it along with any software under any of these licenses (and they link together - 'mere aggregation' is allowed).

Apple would have the same problem distributing bash on OS X if their libc were APSL'd (like most of the rest of Darwin), but since it comes from FreeBSD they kept the BSDL, which is GPL-compatible.

Any GPL'd software can link against any other GPL'd software without legal complications, but you can say the same about the CDDL, the APSL, the ASL, and even a load of proprietary licenses. It's only when mixing with the GPL that any of these have problems.

If the CDDL is the problem then it is not Free.

Well, the Free Software Foundation list it as a Free Software License, and the Open Source Initiative class it as an Open Source License, so it certainly seems free.