Is there any other Unix like distros that can read and write to ZFS filesystems. I know its currently unstable in FreeBSD :( The reason I am asking is I love ZFS but don't get on so well with Solaris.
If you are still looking for a way to get ZFS on an OS other than Solaris/OpenSolaris you might want to take a look at the new FreeBSD 8.0 that should be released shortly. ZFS support should finally be stable. Many changes have gone into the kernel to help improve ZFS stability and performance, many of which were already available in 7.2-RELEASE. I run FreeBSD with ZFS using the current 8.0-BETA3 and it is absolutely amazing.
I went to a presentation by a Sun engineer who was booting OpenSolaris in his MacBook, and running Mac OS and Ubuntu in separate VirtualBox. That allowed him to get some of the advantages of ZFS while still getting to run Mac OS X and/or Linux. It was a pretty slick idea.
you probably already figured that the linux fuse zfs is a toy. Nexenta is based on opensolaris but got debian apt-get. you can try this.
personally I think OpenSolaris is fine, takes a while to get used to - but worth the effort.
If you are still looking for a way to get ZFS on an OS other than Solaris/OpenSolaris you might want to take a look at the new FreeBSD 8.0 that should be released shortly. ZFS support should finally be stable. Many changes have gone into the kernel to help improve ZFS stability and performance, many of which were already available in 7.2-RELEASE. I run FreeBSD with ZFS using the current 8.0-BETA3 and it is absolutely amazing.
I went to a presentation by a Sun engineer who was booting OpenSolaris in his MacBook, and running Mac OS and Ubuntu in separate VirtualBox. That allowed him to get some of the advantages of ZFS while still getting to run Mac OS X and/or Linux. It was a pretty slick idea.
Basically no. The only full support for ZFS is inside Solaris.
You might have better chemistry with Nexenta which is the Solaris kernel, with GNU user land tools.