Nexenta, Can you say SolaBuntu (part1)

This time around I will be playing around with nexenta OS. Nexenta is a marriage between OpenSolaris and Ubuntu, or what I like to call SolaBuntu :) Solaris has a pretty decent record in the data-center. It is a solid and widely trusted paltform, however, it was showing its age pretty badly. Many of the most commonly used tools were outdated. And most users begin their *nixy knowledge with Linux, and when faced with Solaris they don't find the GNU tools they have grown accustomed to, and thus don't like the platform. OpenSolaris has been started to fix some of those issues, however, nexneta takes this concept to an extreme. It basically takes the ubuntu userland and plugs underneath it an opensolaris kernel. Nexenta also integrates unique solaris features such as zfs with ubuntu tools like apt-get to provide system wide transactional safe upgrades. I really really like this feature. It basically means you can dist-upgrade your entire system, and once up on the new version, if something is badly broken, you can very easily boot back an earlier snapshot (pre-upgrade) image of your system. We will explore those features later, however, for now, let's get started installing NCP2 alpha. As usual I am choosing to go with the latest and greatest and least stable version ;)

Download the iso, burn it, boot it and you're faced with grub



As you can see, this is based on Ubuntu Hardy. Simply hit enter and the solaris kernel boots on your system. After the boot, you get a splash screen welcoming you to nexenta



Now I'm gonna throw a lot of images, just to give you a feeling of the installer, but I'm also gonna skip some pretty obvious screens that would be mostly obvious (a la are you sure ? Yes/No). Next you choose your country



Now here is an interesting tidbit, the whole installer is running inside a screen session. So, a CTRL-A followed by a 2, takes you to screen window 2, as you can see you can use the format command to view and partition your disks as needed. Window 3 is for logging the installer actions. The log is not very verbose however!



Afterwards, you get to choose your disk, then confirm it



Afterwards, the disk is zfs formatted, and package installation begins .. Go make the usual cup of nescafe



After this step completes (around 20 minutes), you get to specify the root password. "root" can be used for direct login (no need for sudo or pfexec here).



You also create a normal user, set its password. You specify the machine name "nexy" in my case, and domain name. Afterwards, boom the installation is complete. You're ready to boot your new environment



After the reboot, grub starts, load the opensolaris kernel, and a few seconds later, you get the default login screen, which is not a pretty GUI! The default installation is a minimal installation without X.



Once logged in, you can start enjoying apt which is IMO the best main stream package manager. Let update the repos



Let's see how good the repos are. apt-cache show the system has access to around 4700 packages. This is of course not comparable to debian or ubuntu's repos, however, it still is fairly impressive considering how young the project is. If you're feeling excited, one of the best ways you can help is by becoming a packager for nexenta, so go ahead and join their hackathon.



One of the things that make nexenta an attractive opensolaris based system, is that it provides a solid array of open-source software tools that are up2date! This is pretty important at least to me. Let's check a couple of common packages



Your system is now ready, you can apt-get install any software package that's available and start running your nexenta based server. I have to say that my overall feeling is that nexenta core platform is more oritented towards being a server OS more so than a desktop one. Not that you can't install desktop apps, but rather that's what the default install offers, and that's what the core dev team seems to be focused on. NCP-2 alpha is definitely promising, and I really like the idea of an ubuntu/debian/GNU system on a solaris kernel. However, the project is very young, and I did face some bugs along the way, the is to be expected however as this release is still alpha quality. Hopefully along the upcoming posts, I will take that system for a ride and blog about it. Let me know about your experiences as well.