NexentaOS has come a long way over the last year, and has recently released Nexenta Core Platform 1.0 which is considered stable. In doing so, the developers are providing a minimal core set of well tested packages somewhat akin to Debian’s netinst that can be used for building up servers or entire distributions. In fact, they’re encouraging this by providing a distribution builder. This opens up many possibilities for extending what you can do with the OS, and I hope to start experimenting with it soon to produce an updated XFCE4 desktop.

In the meantime, I’m making my experimental APT repository available. This is just a collection of packages I’ve had to compile over the last year or so to support work related projects. Some of these packages require manually patching and other changes to get compiled properly and I am remiss in getting these submitted upstream. My next goal is to get as many of these as possible (within the repository guidelines) into the official Nexenta APT repository and actually start maintaining some of them. Anyway, I hope some of these packages prove useful to others.