Nexenta Review

Install:

The installation of Nexenta isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world, but it’s not the hardest. It’s on par with a more advanced Debian installation. My only real gripe with the installer was it was slow. It took 2 hours to install under VMWare with no other programs running. That’s just way to much, especially when I can install Fedora in about an hour and a half and install my complete development environment.

User Interface:

The user inteface is the quite similiar to Ubuntu. It is based on it after all. The only other thing that annoyed me was the fact that they still included all the KDE applications in the Gnome menus and they didn’t bother to put them in another submenu. It just seems to clutter everything up and really bother me.

Package Management:

Nexenta uses apt for its package management.  This is much better and easier to use than the regular Solaris tool, pkg-add which doesn’t fetch any of the dependencies when you go to install a package.  One thing that I found disappointing is that they don’t have a package of the Sun Studio Compilers.  You’ve got to go and download it yourself, they have gcc as the default which doesn’t easily build open solaris kernels.  You’ve got to have some extra tools and packages.

Overall Nexenta is a pretty decent Unix distribution.  It is a huge step up from Open Solaris and the Java Desktop System.  It just can’t really compare to most of the Linux distributions that are available, especially in the installation process.