Debian Wheezy experience

We are deploying new Proxmox servers and decided to try Debian 7 (testing). We had some problems with old platform. In particular, Squeeze GRUB is not fresh enough to boot from multipath device and had to be replaced with one from testing. The following issues were discovered with Debian 7:

• Installer gave some strange error during network configuration, however it can be related to missing bnx firmware (awful Debian policy, firmware is in non-free repository)
• QLogic FC adapter also tried to load missing firmware, however the system recognized FC-attached device
• Multipath-tools-boot package is partly broken - it installs /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-top/multipath which it seems do nothing, but fails to execute during update-initramfs (so I've just deleted it)
• And last, most annoying issue is absence of perl-suid package in repositories, which prevents Proxmox installation from "deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian squeeze pve"

Last issue was frustrating enough for us to revert to Squeeze with its old but well-known bugs and perculiarities.

Leaving sinking ship

We could be very optimistic, but bad things really happen. So, after waiting for half a year after Sun end, I decided to migrate my home workstation from OpenSolaris to some other solid OS.
The choice is not evident. Solaris is good in several things:
- It supports commercial soft. And I need Adobe Flash, Oracle DBMS, recent Java version.
- It supports zones. Experiments with OS is very easy. Being a system administrator, I appreciate this.
- It has ZFS. Yes, I like using ZFS mirror on my desktop PC.
- It has DTrace and truss, which help me to answer questions "What does my OS do?".

I see several alternatives: Solaris 10, FreeBSD 8.1 and Debian. I use Ubuntu on my notebook and it proved to be quite unstable.
At first glance, best choice is Solaris 10 - you shouldn't change your habits a lot. But it's a trap. I don't believe Oracle any more after 2010.H1 has come to end :)
Solaris 10 also has quite old software and awful IIIMD, and package management from 90's.... So, it's not my way. I wouldn't consider using it even for server (because it is illegal now).

Debian is good choice. It's stable. Oracle and Flash work there. And JDK has native support. But migration would look like:
1) split ZFS mirror
2) install Debian on one part of mirror
3) move data there using zfs-fuse
4) create several md-devices from other part of mirror
5) move data there
6) add first disk to md-device
7) update fstab
8) update mbr...
9) forget about snapshots, dtrace and easy ways to monitor disk pool.

So, I'd like to try hard way - FreeBSD/x86.
- Using x86 system will allow me to use wine without tambourines.
- Adobe Flash will work by means of nspluginwrapper.
- I'll migrate my data by splitting ZFS pool, creating new one with lower Zpool version from half of pool (e.g. 14 version), importing data there by means of zfs send/receive and mounting it in FreeBSD LiveCD.
- OpenJDK in FreeBSD is quite fresh, I can migrate all my projects to it (already successfully tried).
- I really like this system and have a lot of experience in it, so let's try this scenario,
- One big question is Oracle. I know that Oracle XE works perfectly in FreeBSD. Trying to install Oracle 10g - is a challenging exercise :)

Just for now I'm going to emulate all this actions in VirtualBox. After finishing this work, I'm going to share my experience.