Nexenta
Nexenta makes its first steps into the big world. We invite you to join us and participate too! Help us make Nexenta the best operating environment in the world! Help us test Nexenta on your laptops, desktops, and servers. Help us improve our web portal, translate Nexenta into your own language, add new applications, enhance existing ones and define a set of software to be used in the future releases. [via Dave Johnson and Tim Bray]
Download. Unzip. Burn. Boot. I’m to the login prompt on a T42P ThinkPad in under an hour. I didn’t initially know where to find the user and password despite the fact that Tim had directly linked to this information. Doh!
The resulting desktop is the Ubuntu desktop with a different background.
Firefox starts slowly from CD (it runs much faster once installed on your hard drive). The initial homepage indicates that Nexenta will adopt Ubuntu’s six month release cycle — excellent.
Attempting to wander out into the Internet, I find that WiFi
isn’t configured.
System=>Administration=>Networking dies as some variant of
fork isn’t available on OpenSolaris. Dropping down to
the command line:
ifconfig
has a different syntax — instead of telling you what the status
of the various interfaces are by default, it wants to tell you its
syntax. Apparently, I need to know the name of the interface
I want before I can get any information. Peeking into the
/etc directory, I see that that too has a different
arrangement, enough so that I don’t know how to look for the
networking configuration.
I plug in Ethernet, and it isn’t automatically
recognized. I can’t do ifup eth0 as I
don’t know the name of the interface. The shutdown
command also has a different syntax.
Rebooting with the Ethernet cable already in works just
fine.
glxgears isn’t on the live CD, nor is there a
sources.list configured for me to find OpenSolaris
Debian packages. Suspend/hibernate also doesn’t appear
to be there.
None of this is surprising for pre-alpha — to the contrary, seeing this much working in this short of a time is nothing less than astonishing.