Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Enter Nexenta

Well, I had a whole post ready to go following the announcement of Debian GNU/Solaris the other day. It didn't make it to the net, however, since I was tied up with flights and what-not. Anyway, it's now irrelevant, since it was based on speculation about the new kid on the OpenSolaris block. Who knew that they would be launching the actual software within 3 days?

So, now I've tried it out, and I've gotta say it's nice. It's not fast on QEMU (that wasn't helped by my Xserver crashing part way through the first ever boot, leaving it unusable), but it's nice, nonetheless.

I do wonder how some decisions were made, though. For example, it looks like the ls command used is the GNU version, not the OpenSolaris version. I can see that some people would like the --color option that the GNU version provides (I'm not one of them), but some functionality is lost as a result. For example, the Solaris ls has long included the ability to show the presence of ACLs and extended attributes (with -@), as well as the new -e and -E options. I hope they haven't thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

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