NexentaOS: A dream come true
Saturday Apr 29, 2006
This is my first blog and "NexentaOS":http://www.gnusolaris.org/ is the inspiration for this. After having used "solaris 10":http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ , "OpenSolaris":http://opensolaris.org/ and ubuntu, I was dreaming of having the best of both to improve my productivity. Solaris is known for its reliability and in solaris 10, it had an amazing set of features that a developer couldnt live without like DTrace, zones, SMF, improved TCP/IP stack, great compiler/debugger,profiler tools in "Sun Studio":http://www.sun.com/software/products/studio/get.xml , great java and "netbeans":http://www.netbeans.org/ support etc. Ubuntu had good installation, package management and ease of use features. In NexentaOS I found the best of both worlds which is indeed my dream come true.
I downloaded the iso from nexenta , burnt the cd, and started the installation process on my workstation. I tried to do manual partitioning, but as the warning said it is for advanced users only. So I selected automatic partitioning, and the desktop profile. Probably due to my old cd drive, the installation stalled midway, so I had to abort the installation and reboot. Then I tried minimal installation, which went through without any problems. After booting to the command line login screen, I tried apt-get to install the remaining packages. Somehow some of the packages were not found on the repository, so I tried adding unstable repository to /etc/apt/sources.list. This resulted in some broken packages, so I reverted back to the testing repository. Then as a last resort I booted back to the install cd, selected the upgrade option and this installed the required desktop packages and I was able to login to gnome and got a pleasant surprise at the great look and feel and the availability of the usual set of tools and software. I knew that firefox is version 1.0.7 as in ubuntu, and I wanted firefox 1.5. When I tried the tarball from "mozilla.com":http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/releases/1.5.0.2.html#links , it gave an error because moz_patch_checker.dtksh was using /usr/dt/bin/dtksh. I replaced dtksh with /usr/bin/bash and firefox worked fine.
So far so good, I now have to experience all the features of this budding offspring of opensolaris.
A screenshot is "here":http://mediacast.sun.com/share/harsha/nexenta-alpha4.png
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not for me: I had to install ksh from blastwave.or...