GNU/Solaris gaining speed
Quite some time has passed since SUN Microsystems announced to release core components of their Solaris operating under an open-source compatible licensing, thus opening doors wide for the Open Source community to adopt the system and create “open soure Solaris” distributions. Now the first downloadable version of Nexenta is here. Though being called “alpha 1” and thus pretty preliminary, Nexenta Elatte is available as an installation- same as a live cd, features of that package include a recent version of the OpenSolaris kernel, the GNOME desktop environment including a bunch of applications like Gimp, AbiWord and some others, server packages and several scripting languages like Python and Perl and, maybe most notably, the incredible packaging system taken from Debian GNU/Linux. Just downloading the live iso, really curious to see how GNU/Solaris compares to the Solaris Express packages which have been available free for noncommercial use for quite some time now… Being embedded into GNU makes it quite attractive, that’s for sure.
More info:
golem.de (german)
lwn (english)