Your Debian fell into my OpenSolaris!

About three months ago, I wrote about the exciting possibilities of combining Debian and OpenSolaris. To be honest, when I wrote that I assumed that such a Xanadu would be a couple of years off at least – combining these systems is non-trivial. You can thus imagine my surprise last week when I first heard of the Nexenta project. If you haven’t heard, this project is doing exactly what Jeff, Adam, Mike and I were wishing for: Debian package management on an OpenSolaris kernel. Of course, hearing about a new technology is one thing; seeing it is quite another – I wanted to get my hands on actual bits before I got too excited. Well, today Nexenta released their ISOs. And, to make a pleasantly short story even shorter, I am writing this now running Nexenta on my Acer Ferrari 3400. But don’t take my word for it; check out this screenshot – and note in particular my use of DTrace to examine the package management system. Oh be still, my beating heart!