One of the difficulties with pushing out a release for OpenSolaris Project: NFS version 4.1 pNFS is that we could only release source and BFU. We could not release a live image.

To complicate matters, part of the NFS code is in the closed repository. The impact of which was we had to also release a special closed-bins.

The difficulty lay in two areas:

1. We weren't allowed to take the DVD image, install our bits, and send that back out. Note, if you search for kanigix on my blog, you'll see I provide recipes for making your own customized DVD, but I don't distribute DVDs.
2. People, even ex-Sun employees, didn't want to install a stock system and BFU the updates.

We started to get requests for VMWare images. And we still weren't allowed to hand those out.

But OpenSolaris is adaptive to pressures in the community. I just asked again and was pointed towards the Hadoop project and especially this one: OpenSolaris Project: Hadoop Live CD.

My understanding is that we aren't trying to make a distribution, we aren't trying to steal thunder, instead we are trying to get systems out there to enable interoperability testing.

So now I'm working on a framework to get OpenSolaris + pNFS on a VirtualBox image.

Stay tuned as I go down the wrong path several times, but emerge with a working process.