A few months ago I participated in a heated discussion about combining
the OpenSolaris kernel with the Debian distribution system (thus, the
name GNU/Solaris). The general understanding was (according to my own
interpretation anyway), this is a great idea and there should be no
compatibility problem wrt CDDL (even Sir RMS said so). But the main
issue boiled down to this "minute" nitty gritty: who's going to do it?
(Let's not forget that we are dealing with a clueless company called
Sun. Or should I say, clueless Sun's management?)
However, thanks to the power of open source licensing, Sun or no Sun, a
group of Debian oldhands were able to quickly put together a distro that
tries to accomplish exactly that:
http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki
Also, if you are interested in screenshots, please visit:
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=495&slide=5&title=nexenta+os+pre-alpha+1+screenshots
I have downloaded and played their very first "pre-alpha" (emphasis
added) release (as of 11/03/05). This is definitely a very exciting
development. I plan to keep a close eye on it, & anyone interested
please feel free to drop me a line. Anyway, I can't hide my excitement.
Wayne
BTW, there is also a Gentoo-like approach to play OpenSolaris (or more
particularly, the GNOME-based Java Desktop System): Basically you
download and install the basic OpenSolaris/Solaris isos and the Studio
10 compiler from Sun, then use the pkgbuild tool to manually build a
most up-to-date JDS desktop (based on GNOME 2.12) from its source.
