While going through the backlog of blogs and news clambering around my newsfeed (I'm really worried how fast I became a workaholic, not having enough time to check the news, in just a few days time) I stumbled upon this post to the opensolaris-discuss mailing list two days ago: NexentaCore 2.0 Alpha1 "Hardy" Released.

I must admin, that even though I do have a couple of CDs laying somewhere around, I have not being following the developments of this -- or any other as a matter of fact -- distribution based on OpenSolaris kernel too keenly, especially since the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05. Nevertheless, I thought that the new release of Nexenta OS might be a good excuse to mention it now.

As we all know, the Operating System commonly referred to as Linux is actually a collection of libraries and applications (mostly of the GNU origin) gathered around the Linux kernel, thus the GNU/Linux. There are a lot of Linux distributions available on the Internet, out of which one of the most prominent are Debian and it's derivative - Ubuntu. What the folks at the Nexenta project are proposing is a Debian/Ubuntu "easy to upgrade, easy to use" environment bundled with the OpenSolaris kernel. From project's webpage:

Nexenta Operating System is a free and open source operating system combining the OpenSolaris kernel with GNU application userland. Nexenta Operating System runs on Intel/AMD 32/64bit hardware and is distributed as a single installable CD. Upgrades and binary packages not included on the CD can be installed from NexentaOS repository using Advanced Packaging Tool. In addition, source based software components can be downloaded from network repositories available at Debian/GNU Linux and Ubuntu Linux.

If you'd like to run a ZFS on your Debian system in kernel-land instead of using userspace FUSE prosthesis, I think Nexenta is the place to go. If not, I guess the whole idea is interesting enough to take a look at the project. Me, I've got enough of Debian already, thank you very much...