Gentoo LogoWith the impending release of OpenSolaris, I was pleased to discover that Gentoo Technologies, Inc, traditionally a maker of the GNU/Linux distro, Gentoo, will be making their package management system, portage, available to Solaris. This will probably be called "portaris" and will allow one to download, compile and install applications in the same ease that one can do it on Gentoo, but on OpenSolaris. This decission has stemmed from an unofficial project that allows portage to run on Solaris 8 and 9.

This isn't the only project of this kind, pkgsrc, from NetBSD has been around for sometime and has also available for Solaris for nearly as long. This does pretty much does the same thing as Gentoo's portage, and it is actually what inspired Gentoo's portage.

I've never used pkgsrc, but I can say that Gentoo on OpenSolaris will make OpenSolaris sooooo much more useful to the average Joe-Schmoe. I can picture it now - GNU/OpenSolaris... just like GNU/Linux but with the far superior and maturer Solaris kernel instead of the relatively new Linux kernel.

I know this sounds quite sad, but I can't wait. Sun open sourcing Solaris has got to be one of the best things for open source.