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OpenIndiana Hipster 2015.10: Keeping an Open-Source Solaris Going
An anonymous reader writes: It's been five years since Oracle killed off OpenSolaris while the community of developers are letting it live on with the new OpenIndiana "Hipster" 15.10 release. OpenIndiana 15.10 improves its Python-based text installer as it looks to drop its GUI installer, switches out the Oracle JDK/JRE for OpenJDK, and updates its vast package set. However, there are still a number of outdated packages on the system like Firefox 24 and X.Org Server 1.14 while the default office suite is a broken OpenOffice build, due to various obstacles in maintaining open-source software support for Solaris while being challenged by limited contributors. Download links are available via the OpenIndiana.org release notes. There's also a page for getting involved if wishing to improve the state of open-source Solaris.
Never looked much at Solaris but this thing is both a systemd-free zone AND has GNOME 2. Not bad, might take a look at it.
I don't normally get into OS wars nowadays, but in this case, I agree w/ AC. Not wrt FreeDOS, Haiku or Amiga, which don't play in the same space, but certainly wrt FreeBSD, Linux and Windows Server. Particularly if OpenIndiana still doesn't support SPARC.
I'm just wondering - what's the point? Are there still people out there still hung up on SVR4 vs BSD that they'd prefer something like OpenIndiana over several flavors of by now proven BSD solutions - like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, et al? And I've not even touched Linux, which dwarfs even the BSDs. The only place where I see this being an option is on healthy legacy SPARC hardware that Oracle might charge 2 arms and a leg for, and where having something like OpenIndiana enables an existing platform to fork away so that they can keep running w/o the high overhead of paying Oracle maintenance costs.
In which case, if the platform ain't there on the SPARC, then what's the point? If one is looking for an FOSS server platform for x64 iron (since OpenIndiana presumably targets server installations, and not so much workstations, since SPARCstations have been dead for a while now), then one already has choices like Red Hat, Debian, iXSystems and from Oracle itself, Oracle Linux. There ain't a compelling reason to go OpenIndiana unless the original platform is a SPARC to start w/, and one wants to do a gentle migration from Solaris to something FOSS, where alternatives are either abandoned (RedHat or Debian) or largely ignored (FreeBSD). Or if someone is still caught up in the UNIX wars time warp from the 80s - the System V vs BSD crusades, and refuses to have anything to do w/ FreeBSD or NetBSD.
You call it "Stockholm Syndrome"; I call it being "willing to learn".
Fully half of the things I see people complaining about over Gnome 3 have been fixed over the years. But they keep on bringing up bugs and issues that were with the .1 release.
Being ignorant of something is forgiveable; it can be corrected through education. Remaining willfully ignorant about something by refusing to educate yourself is stupidity.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.