Some of the distribution creators tend to specialize in certain areas very similar to the variants of Ubuntu like Edubuntu, Kubuntu, and even Mythbuntu.
For OpenSolaris, Korona is very similar to Kubuntu. I worked on MythTV porting to OpenSolaris but now you have MythDora (Fedora/MythTV-based) and Mythbuntu. For NAS projects, you have EON and PulsarOS (PulsarOS is now Linux-based which either focused on FreeNAS/OpenMediaVault or CIFS/Samba solutions. For advanced storage and storage management, you have Nexenta. Now don't confuse the Pulsar project with PulsarOS. Project Pulsar was OpenSolaris porting to the PowerPC platform. PulsarOS is based on OpenFiler/FreeNAS/SAN-type solutions. Various OpenSolaris distributions explored various filesystems like BTRFS/GFS and package management solutions like Conary, apt-get, Pacman, Source Juicer/Package Factory/IPS, pkg-get/pkgutil, and many other concepts. You also have variant packaging tools using p7zip, tar/gzip/bzip2, and dpkg/RPM. Why a developer, like Thomas Brandstetter over at PulsarOS, found it hard to support OpenSolaris in certain cases: Ref: http://www.digitalplayground.at/index.php?option=com_simplestforum&view=postlist&forumId=1 "1.) Opensolaris is a dependency hell. You can't create a proper core system, without getting into serious trouble. 2.) Opensolaris isn't full open source. (There are still some binaries, drivers and libraries that are closed source) 3.) Lack of many device drivers. 4.) No power management features for embedded boards (like VIA)." So at the deepest level, understand that the OpenSolaris kernel is just an engine that can be placed in various 'black box' solutions and distributions. It may not fit every solution or business case. Yet, it can do many things better than some of the existing 'free' kernels out there providing a well funded and high-end engineering pool of resources to support it. Making a great OpenSolaris distribution really is in the hands of the creators - as the OpenSolaris kernel is only a small piece of the larger solutions at hand. ~ Ken Mays -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
