TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

First of all I would like to thank reader budman7 for making this review possible with a kind post of a functional CDROM. Nexenta is an odd beast. It's essentially the same GPL software found in Debian and most other Linux distributions, with an OpenSolaris kernel from Sun Microsystems rather than Linux.

I'll not get into the legal issues with distributing a non-GPL kernel with GPL software or a CDDL kernel with non-CDDL software, because I'm not a lawyer. This fact is made clearer to me in that I see an obvious conflict of licenses that is either ignored or unknown to the maintainers of Nexenta. Time will tell whether Sun or the Free Software Foundation sues them into oblivion.

Install:

It's ncurses-based, so if you've ever installed Ubuntu, you know what to expect. In fact the opening boot splash looks suspiciously similar to that of Ubuntu. I think it worthy of mention that during the install process for Nexenta you are able to swap between 3 console windows: the first being the actual install window, the second being a shell, and the third a game of Tetris.

I first thought this was a very cool idea, until I started playing it. Apparently it was a joke to include "Bastard Tetris" instead, which is a version of Tetris in which the game attempts to provide you with the absolute least usable puzzle piece each turn. It's almost as frustrating as running this installer.

On my first install attempt, I got through the time zone configuration (which ended up showing a time that was 2 hours off), and the next step told me I was going to use Sun's partitioning tool to get my harddrive ready.

I said "OK", thinking the installer would kick me to the partitioning program. Instead the screen simply refreshed and I was asked if I was done partitioning. This confused me, so I went to the console to try my usual partition tool, cfdisk. This did not exist. I rebooted and started again.

Once again I was asked if I was done with the task of partitioning that it never showed me how to do. I dropped to the console and tried fdisk. That program did exist, but since I haven't the foggiest idea what the hardware naming scheme for Solaris is, I didn't know what the name of my harddrive was in order to partition it.

I decided to boot to a Linux distribution and partition the drive myself. When I returned to Nexenta to allow it to continue, I told it I was done manually partitioning and it tried to detect the drive.

Instead I was given a never-ending string of "sed: -e expression #1, char 2: line 742: test: too many arguments" errors. Apparently the installer didn't like my partitions. I decided to start with an unpartitioned harddrive this time and reboot again.

No dice. This time in a fit of frustration I kept hitting "No, I am not done partitioning" over and over and on a whim I noticed a fleeting "No disks found" error that the installer had been hiding from me. This prompted me to plug in my IDE harddrive in the event that Solaris was too stupid to recognize my SATA drive.

BINGO! The installer picked up my IDE drive just fine. So much for being up with the latest technology, Sun. Once it recognized the disk, it offered me the option to auto-partition it, which it did without incident.

The installer then continued as one would expect it to, until it reached 13% and sat there. I was still able to swap between the 3 screens so it hadn't *frozen* per se, but it sure wasn't doing anything I could tell so I rebooted and tried again.

When I rebooted, the installer repartitioned and acted like it started installing, but then immediately took me to the root password setting and asked me to add a new user, then pick my desktop environment (Gnome was default) and install GRUB.

I figured this was too good to be true but when it asked me to reboot I did. My suspicions proved correct. Upon reboot I was greeted with a red "Bad PBR sig" error message. I decided it was high time to make sure my harddrive wasn't dying.

Disk diagnostics checked out with no errors. I decided to write zeroes to the drive just for good measure and try the Nexenta install again. Once again, the installer skipped over the actual *install* process and dumped me to the password settings and GRUB install, and once again I was left with the "Bad PBR sig" error.

Software Selection:

N/A

Most Annoying Feature:

The distribution maintainers happily gloss over the fact that pairing this kernel with GPL software is strictly forbidden by both the GPL and CDDL licenses. It won't play nice (or even play at all) with Serial ATA harddrives. It doesn't seem to like to play nicely with regular IDE drives either. It just doesn't work.

Who's it best for?

I can't in good conscience recommend this to anyone simply because it refuses to install. It's just one in a long string of recently crappy open-source OS releases that I fervently hope is broken some time soon, because I'm tired of having to toss out CD-Rs that could have been much better used archiving porn.