Nexenta
I don’t know how I overlooked the Nexenta release announcements plastered all over opensolaris.org at the release time, but now I’ve finally had a look I’m seriously impressed.
The current Nexenta alpha release could do for Desktop Solaris what I believe Ubuntu has done for Desktop Linux.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for probably around a year now, running the development version most of the time. It is constantly getting better, although lately I have been a little put off by some of the changes in terms of reduced or forced options. This is the GNOME way and some I have been happy to accept but others, such as the recent gnome-screensaver fiasco, whereby all screensaver options and power management settings have been removed, are a little odd.
But the best thing about Ubuntu is the community that supports it, the fast-paced development and the cutting-edge (most of the time) packages.
Nexenta aims to build a community in a similar fashion, and Ubuntu is the definite influence. Nexenta is essentially the recently open-sourced Solaris kernel (OpenSolaris) plus many of the community related addons (e.g. drivers, etc.) wrapped up with apt-get from the Debian project. apt-get is a powerful package management system (the very same used by Ubuntu) that handles dependencies, etc. The main userland tools are from the GNU project and GNOME and Firefox are used as the primary desktop environment.
I can’t say what it’s like yet but the screenshots and feature list look highly promising. After spending quite some time installing Solaris Express, upgrading the kernel to OpenSolaris and attempting to build GNOME 2.12 from sources I think installing Nexenta is a quick and easy solution. Admittedly, the process I’ve been on has been no problem thanks to the great documentation at opensolaris.org; rather the lack of Internet connection on my desktop machine has slowed me down—a trip to Manchester Computing each time I forgot to download a file or release notes.
This should do very nicely and provide me a suitable way to learn a bit more about Solaris, while still enjoying the great world of GNOME :)
Tags: UNIX