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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 However, there are still a number of outdated packages on the system like Firefox 24 and X.Org Server 1.14 while the default office suite is a broken OpenOffice build, due to various obstacles in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.
But GNOME 3 is horribly slow. On my PC BSD box, I use several DEs - Lumina, KDE 4.10 (which is bad, even after I've disabled Akonadi and Nepomunk), LXDE and GNOME. Only Lumina and LXDE are any good. Logging out of a GNOME 3 session takes forever. Also, FireFox and Chromium are a lot slower under GNOME than they are under Lumina or LXDE.
^^^ This.
Many FOSS projects are all about the fun of programming them, not about having a user base. Such projects get put "out there" in the hopes that someone might someday find them useful, but it doesn't really matter to the people working on them whether they ever have a substantial user base, as long as it continues to be fun to program and work on the project.
If user base was what counted to me, I'd have abandoned MSS Code Factory years ago. To this day I've never had more than 100 or so downloads in a week, and usually more like 10-20. But it's fun. It keeps me entertained. And that is what really "matters" to me; not it's popularity.
"Popularity breeds contempt."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
x86_64 and no SPARC.
Believe it or not, Linux is not the end all & be all OS. There are things that other OSes do differently from Linux that might have application for real use cases.
vxWorks is a commercial real time OS uses on the mars rovers. NASA had a reason to choose it.
Contiki is another embedded OS that does things Linux cannot.
OpenBSD does security and code review. Some of it has trickled to other OSes. (W^X)
OSX runs a Mach microkernel with a BSD derived OS.
Minix is still around too.
VMware and Android both use a Linux derived kernel but do not look like Linux.
Even Windows has its place.
I currently work with OpenStack which (mostly) means Linux. I've been using Linux since '92. But I was a Solaris admin until recently and even installed Solaris 11 a few times. There are some things Solaris does better than Linux.
I've found Solaris to be more stable and better at handling loads. I had apps that ran fine on Solaris that crashed Linux on the port.
Dtrace is an awesome tool to see what is really going on with your app. Systemtap might get there.
Zones are secure, reliable containers. It's nice to finally see them get used in Linux. It will be good if they get the security up to the level of Zones.
ZFS, well it's already on FreeBSD and I've been using it for years with ZFS on Linux. I'd like to see btrfs at the same reliability. I wish *every* CLI had as good a UI as ZFS does. I'd love a GUI that was as good!
Solaris switched to SMF from SystemV type startup a long time ago. I liked it better than upstart. Systemd has been a bit smoother than SMF was at first.
Would I use Solaris for a desktop? NO! unless I had no choice. I bet most users stopped using RHEL/CentOS in favor of Ubuntu or something else a long time ago.
Zones are like having a virtual machine without the overhead - a step beyond jails and similar to containers. Among many other things they are a good way to run legacy software from a collection of old machines that need different libraries, different hostids etc.
SMF instead of systemd?
ZFS instead of BTRFS, meaning you can boot from ZFS a mirrored pool along with the other features?
A platform that is outside the Red Hat/Ubuntu corporate circles?
Multiarch support (i86 and x86_64) that just kinda works instead of the current Linux solutions?
How about you try this as "what could this become?" rather than "why does this look like everything else I've tried?"?
How about looking at what Illumos and friends could be ported to?
Your mileage, and consequently exposure to new ideas, may vary
Actually, the illumos codebase, on which OpenIndiana is based, is far, far from dead. New features and tons and tons of bug fixes which Oracle cannot touch are flying into the codebase daily.
On top of that, SmartOS, with its zones, lx-branded zones, DTrace, ZFS and 14,000 packages is light years ahead of any available virtualization platform, including VMware ESX.
Every day I see more and more people on the mailing lists, and more and more contributors getting their contributions commited to the codebase. There is so much activity that I am hard pressed to keep up with the manic pace.