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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 :)

I’m half-way through installing OpenSolaris on my desktop machine at home. Total lack of Internet access has both aided and harmed my progress: because I have to travel to MC to use Internet access, I downloaded the Solaris Express b28 DVD in a fraction of the time it would have taken at home (a whopping 2.5MB/s over wireless!); destroyed it because if I forget even the slightest piece of documentation, I must wait another day to try again.

So far I’ve installed Solaris Express (Nevada) build 28. Solaris Express is essentially a pre-release version of the next full release of Solaris (in this case Solaris 11). It is tied heavily with on-going OpenSolaris work.

I have a copy of the latest OpenSolaris BFU code. This is essentially a binary archive of the OpenSolaris kernel, updates and changes over Solaris Express. What surprised me that OpenSolaris is little more than a community and a kernel. I had expected OpenSolaris would be the whole shebang.

On top of this I’ve got Sun Studio 10 and a license key to use it. This excellent development environment is provided free of charge by Sun.

This evening I will be attempting to install the OpenSolaris BFU code now I have the full (I hope) documentation. Fortunately for me the latest release (that I have) includes an Atheros wireless driver and wireless tools. Guess what wireless chipset I have? :)

I’ve also downloaded all of the necessary tools and source for building GNOME 2.12, the latest stable release of GNOME (although GNOME 2.13 has some impressive changes and advancements). I will be highly impressed if this gets much past the first or second step.

All in all I’m fairly impressed with the OpenSolaris project, the community and the work that’s going in to it. I see little difference between running Ubuntu Breezy Badger (the latest stable release) and OpenSolaris with GNOME 2.12 in terms of desktop experience. Can it really be that good?

wtf?

A big shout out to the amazing UNIX utility that is… diff.

I copied a large directory (15GB) from a USB hard disk to a local hard disk and wanted to verify the integrity of the files. After asking in a Unix forum and being pointed in two directions I thought… why not use diff?

What a great tool diff is. Not only can it compare files and show all sorts of useful output but it can also compare directories, recursively, if required.

So, my problem was solved with a quick:

The -q option specifies that output is short (i.e. should not specifically show the changes, just state that differences exist) and the -r option specifies that it should recursively compare subdirectories.

Well done diff!

Wow, I’m impressed!

Unison is a great file synchronisation tool that is capable of dealing with updates occurring to the same file across multiple different machines. It is similar to rsync in that it is something that gets run at a given time interval and not like, say, iFolder or Windows Offline Files.

I’ve been using a command line version of Unison for quite some time to keep my laptop, desktop, computer science and CompSoc accounts in some sort of synchronised state. I can be selective about what I pass between machines and I don’t even need to use any single machine as a dedicated “server”. Synchronisation is two-way (unlike rsync) and it’s an all-round great tool.

This new interface makes it even better. Resolving conflicts is now a breeze and it looks good to boot. Good work the Unison dev team!