I finally started the DTrace experiment I've been planning for a while, yesterday.
The experiment had a rocky start, since the primary platform I planned using, SXCE Nevada b84, refused to install inside VMware. The solution I found today was to remove the virtual IDE hard drive the VMware image creation tool added to a new Solaris project, and add a virtual 16GB SCSI drive. Since the SXCE installer was very unhelpful with its error messages, it took a bit of tinkering.
Overall I'm installing three Solaris distributions: Nexenta Core 1.0, Indiana PR2 and SXCE b84.
Indiana had a reasonably pleasant installation experience, nonwithstanding the networking problems which necessitated disabling the nwadm tool and twiddling with the VMware .vmx configuration file. Its challenges lie in the new packaging tool, IPS, which seems to be in a prototyping stage, since it doesn't offer any kind of dist-upgrade functionality, and its undecipherable package names seem to be stuck in the MS/DOS land of 8.3.
SXCE still offered the option of using CDE, which is a bit like a car door offering the option of slamming on your fingers, and it shared Indiana's networking problems. Its overall user experience is worse than Vista's.
Nexenta Core had the most pleasant installation and use experience, and that's what I'd like to use, but I fear its tools don't have DTrace support compiled in. Have to see about that.
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