nexenta
nexenta is a non-sun developed opensolaris distribution, it is basically debian around an opensolaris kernel and it is what I was testing today, I must say I'm overall impressed with it, except for a few minor details it's incredibly usable despite being alpha.
The installation went without a hickup, not many questions asked, It was a long process, luckily they provide you with a little tetris like game in another window so you can play while the install process does its job, nice touch
Incredibly most of my hardware was detected and working except for the sata on board controller, even the via rhine nic and the sound blaster cads were working (I had to install extra packages in my nv_28 to get those two working).
The only hardware problem I had was my nvidia card which wouldn't work despite having installed the nvidia drivers, the ones in their package repository are old and present a known issue with nevada builds older than 33 that will cause some problems with the frame buffer driver, nexenta is based around nv_34 I think; luckily that has already been fixed in a new version of their driver but the package repository has not been updated.
The other problem I had was X, seems like nexenta does not ship the regular xorgcfg, xorgconfig and scanpci and instead guesses the config via a getconfig perl script. it does not even need a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file but it'll use it if it's there, I had problems changing the default keyboard layout even using an xorg.conf file
The one thing that looked weird to me was the fact that while the desktop is a really good looking gnome, most of the programs are KDE programs, it's a really odd package selection but thanks to synaptic, the graphical package manager, it is easy to solve, and there are tons and tons of packages ready to download and install through it as well
All in all I really like what I saw, and I really look forward to seeing a more stable and user friendly nexenta for new users to try, good job guys
off to sleep now, this is probably full of typos
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