Sweet and salty popcorn best describes Nexenta. OpenSolaris kernel but still using many GNU tools and such: the best of both worlds. The balls robustness of Solaris with easiness of the GNU userland, Debian to be specific, makes it easy to use Solaris. I've just got it running and I quite love it. I love Debian by itself, especially for apt-get.
So, this entire time I've been using sh on my Solaris server. Many things aren't quite the same. When I press the up arrow, I'd like to re-run the last command. So, I ran bash and ta-da there's bash. I upgraded it from 3.0 to 4.1 using Sunfreeware but things didn't work after. When I wanted to run BitchX or even nano I'd get: Error opening terminal: bash. Quite odd indeed. After some Googling, I found it. Running export TERM=vt100 fixed it immediately.
Now, to get audio working in Nexenta...
I am looking into Nexenta as well. Did you get iStat server running under nexenta?
I'm sure it'll work considering it'll compile on Solaris. I'll have to try it out when I have some time.
IStat server?