Monday, November 05, 2007

NexentaOS: Gnu OpenSolaris

I'm not a big fan of Sun Solaris but I wouldn't mind to give it a try again after Solaris 9. Thanks to Sun for making OpenSolaris available(I know this is nothing new) and I chose to try out NexentaOS which you can find here -

http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki/Nexenta_OS

You are required to register before downloading the installation iso, and I quickly completed the registration and jumped to the download section, thanks to fast internet that I able to download it within 20 minutes.

Surprisingly it is pretty easy to get NexentaOS desktop installed, gnome appears to be the default desktop of choice. Interestingly NexentaOS is not using the standard Sun Solaris package management tools but Debian apt style for software management. You can find the apt repositories for NexentaOS at -

http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki/APTMirrors

Just add any of them to /etc/apt/sources.list and run the sudo apt-get update will do, debian/ubuntu users will find this familiar. Till now I haven't really look at the exciting features such as dtrace and zfs in NexentaOS while I have FreeBSD 7.0 Beta 1.5 installed for zfs testing, I'm looking forward to try them out when I have time.

Anyway here's the screenie of NexentaOS, it looks pretty ubuntu-ish -


Oops, I may need to try out the Solaris default sniffer too - the snoopy dog!

Cheers ;]

3 comments:

王同 said...

From the screenshot, it looks really like Ubuntu, especially the color.

Solaris is not using linux kernel right? What have uname -a shows? I am a bit curious about that.

You install under vmware?

Anonymous said...

as far as i know, it is using opensolaris kernel itself.

its available to view at http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/

Anonymous said...

The 404 not found errors in your terminal look interesting :)