Nexenta vs Debian GNU / kFreeBSD

What is an UNIX OS?

A Unix OS is:

- some kernel
- libc - a layer between the kernel and the user programs
- packages

Nexenta is using a Solaris kernel and Debian/Ubuntu packages. Debian GNU / kFreeBSD is using the FreeBSD kernel, but on the surface it should not be much different from a standard Debian edition. Nexenta is using Solaris libc, but Debian GNU / kFreeBSD is using a ported version of GNU libc (glibc) to the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is only a kernel, not a fully operational OS. If we look at the Debian policy we will see that using another kernel is not a problem, but the important is the usage of the GNU libc. Unfortunately there is no port of GNU libc to Solaris. Nevertheless Nexenta is doing fine, although porting packages to Nexenta is probably harder than porting packages Debian GNU / kFreeBSD because of the missing GNU libc on Solaris. Both operation systems have already a considerable amount of packages.

Update: In build 107 of Opensolaris the Solaris libc has been released with some compatibility functions for Linux/BSD which will help porting debian packages in Nexenta.

My opinion is that these hybrids are quite welcome as I have doubts about the quality of the Linux kernel.
Freebsd is a pure OS meaning that the Freebsd community produces its own kernel, libc and some of the programs that comes with the OS. This makes everything in the OS much more consistent.

As of 20.05.2009:
1. Debian GNU / kFreeBSD is an official Debian port, which means that all packages and translations should be available and tested in the next Debian release - squeeze, at least I think so.
2. Luca Favatella is working on port of the Debian installer to the Debian GNU / kFreeBSD. You could track his status here.
3. Gnome and xfce4 are available on both ... but do not expect things to work right out of the box.
4. StormOS is a distro based on Nexenta and provides a xfce4 desktop.

Install Sun JDK on Nexenta or StormOS:
I am using Nexenta Core 2 RC3, Nexenta Core 2.0 has been released.

Issue the following commands:
#apt-get update
#apt-get install sunwlibc
#apt-get install sun-java6-jdk


Now you should have the jdk in /usr/lib/jvm

Install Tomcat
You need to download the Tomcat binaries from the Tomcat website. There is no deb package available at the time of writing this post. Tomcat is supposed to be pure Java, so it should work on Nexenta and Debian GNU / kFreeBSD assuming the Java JDK is installed correctly.

Install Ontotext KIM on Nexenta or StormOS
#apt-get install unzip
#unzip kim-platform-2.x

#cd kim-platform-2.x\bin
#nano config_machine.sh

set JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun"
set _TOMCAT_HOME="your tomcat location"

#chmod +x startKIM.sh
#./startKIM.sh

In order to use KIM clients (Web services or the Demo website) you need Tomcat(see above).
Copy the wars from \kim-platform-2.x\KIM Clients\ to \Tomcat\webapps. You can check my Install Ontotext KIM post for more information on how see KIM in action.