Nexenta: next year in Jerusalem!

I think I'm going to have to end my experiment with Nexenta.

I've been running it for a couple months now on my desktop machine, and for the most part it does everything I'd want it to do. Sound doesn't work (built-in Intel chipset, 945 I think), but I haven't really looked into it too hard; the screen resolution keeps changing back to 1400x1200 for me in IceWM, but again I haven't really looked into it too hard. Firefox runs fine, xterms work, Emacs is there, and since it's a 2.8GHz P4 (cf. the 500MHz P3 I was running before), it's all ver' fast.

But when I started using it, I had visions of helping get it released; there are 90 bugs to knock down, and I could help with that. I can — I did (a little) — but with a 9-month old kid to help take care of, my time is et up pretty damn quick. A couple of hours on the weekend is the sum of my spare time right now, and that's for everything.

Why do I mention that? Because OpenSolaris needs a lot of learning, and Nexenta/GNU/Solaris needs a lot of work to get a beta release out the door. I thought I'd learn dtrace; I thought I'd knock down a half-dozen bugs while a growing community joined in.

That turns out not to be the case. And it's a damned shame, and I'm not helping matters any by giving up. I love the idea of Solaris + Debian. I'd like to see it up and running and grabbing people's attention and all the rest, but it's just not happening right now.

And so, in a few minutes I think I'm going to install Debian on here. It has what I want and lots more. There are plenty of people involved in the project, covering for my slacking. I'll be running testing, 'cos I've been doing it so long that it seems foolish to stop now :-). When I finally get around to upgrading the server that prompted this digression, I'll make it stable. I'll probably replace SuSE at work with stable, too.

And now for teh big finish...