[gnu-sol-discuss] Nexenta in regards to Gnu Solaris

[Alan DuBoff]

I recently installed Nexenta and to say that I'm impressed is an 
understatement. This has got to be one of the most incredible developments to 
surface for OpenSolaris, to date. There are more than 12,000 packages 
available through the apt library, to install on OpenSolaris. KDE 3.5.2 was 
merely a matter of "apt-get install kde". And all of this is running on build 
44 bits!

There was a time when I tossed the idea around of GNU user land with a Solaris 
kernel, and many of the Solaris yore laughed at me (and many still do) 
because of the instabilities of GNU tools, bugs that exist, etc...

But there is something to be said about GNU tools in the sense that the open 
source communities have embraced them as being a standard base set of tools 
and as such they are showing up in most all open source distributions.

Nexenta is the closest thing to being a distribution for OpenSolaris, and just 
happens to have GNU tools in the Debian fashion. Aside from the minor 
annoyances of not being a SysV complete system, there's quite a bit there. 
Even the atheros driver for my wifi is there. I have all devices working, 
AFAIK (NIC, wifi, audio all work).

What an incredible success story for OpenSolaris, in the first year!

-- 

Alan DuBoff - Sun Microsystems
Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group