OpenIndiana Hipster 2015.10: Keeping an Open-Source Solaris Going

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OpenIndiana Hipster 2015.10: Keeping an Open-Source Solaris Going

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 4, 2015 @09:16AM from the Open-all-the-states dept.

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 However, there are still a number of outdated packages on the system like Firefox 24 and X.Org Server 1.14 while the default office suite is a broken OpenOffice build, due to various obstacles in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.

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"Killed off"? by msobkow · 2015-10-04 09:21 · Score: 1

How do you "kill off" an open source project if the public is willing to take over the development and maintenance? Sure you may be continuing with a non-open-source branch of the code for your own products, but that doesn't stop anyone from working with the last released code base.

--
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
1. Re:"Killed off"? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 09:29 · Score: 1
  
  How do you "kill off" an open source project if the public is willing to take over the development and maintenance?
  According to the summary the public has not been very interesting to step up.
2. Re:"Killed off"? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 10:20 · Score: 1
  
  Theoretically, true. However, in practice, whenever the key movers of any software project abandon it, the project practically dies - regardless of whether it's FOSS and has sources that can easily be obtained.
3. Re:"Killed off"? by guruevi · 2015-10-05 04:23 · Score: 1
  
  OpenSolaris wasn't fully open source. There are large portions (such as the kernel) that had to be replaced with truly open code and there are still large projects that made OpenSolaris usable ("Open" HA) that were never released.
  People are working on OpenIndiana, it may be slow and packages may look outdated but that's quite on par with Solaris releases, these things are rock solid.
  
  --
  Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Systemd by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 09:27 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
1. Re: Systemd by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 09:46 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  If you think it has SysVInit then you are in for a big surprise.
2. Re:Systemd by unixisc · 2015-10-04 12:55 · Score: 1
  
  For that, you could look at either Gentoo or Slackware - neither of which have gone the systemd route - or you could look at the BSDs. All of them - at least the BSDs - are way more mature than OpenIndiana. If you want GNOME2, it's probably a good idea to select MATE for your system.
3. Re:Systemd by fisted · 2015-10-04 15:09 · Score: 2
  
  Does BSD have Dtrace?
  Yes why?
  
  --
  CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
4. Re:Systemd by unixisc · 2015-10-04 16:06 · Score: 2
  
  In what sense is BSD more mature than OpenIndiana??? BSDs may have a larger userbase and more developers at this point; but OpenIndiana hasn't deviated much the Solaris kernel (which has been used for an obvious long time). Does BSD have Dtrace? Perhaps its your belief that the major BSDs are more mature "distributions" than OpenIndiana...
  And that's what makes a huge difference - that they have a larger userbase today, and more developers today. Just b'cos the Solaris kernel has been there since the 90s doesn't imply that it's necessarily still superior. Particularly since we are talking about different platforms now. Solaris was born on and finetuned for the SPARC: the x86 version was there as an afterthought. And that's what OpenIndiana is succeeding.
  The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD - are now in versions 5-10, and have been actively maintained. OpenIndiana, OTOH, as the above story goes, is still barely being held together. The fact that OpenIndiana doesn't even start to address the biggest part of the Solaris market - the installed SPARC base - is the biggest thing going against it. It's like if Windows were to drop support for the x86/x64 and become an ARM only platform.
5. Re:Systemd by laffer1 · 2015-10-05 05:06 · Score: 1
  
  Version numbers are made up. FreeBSD was on 4.x for a very long time before they went 5-11. NetBSD similarly waited a long time to go to 2.
  
  --
  MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Help OpenIndiana, drop the desktop by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 09:31 · Score: 1

It still perplexes me why do they insist on keeping the desktop aspect of OpenIndiana alive instead of focusing on the server aspect where it can shine the most?
Why all the desktop stuff? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2015-10-04 09:37 · Score: 2

I know that Solaris did have a workstation presence at one point; back when each vendor with a pet Unix had a line of workstations to run it, usually on their pet CPU architecture; but it seems very, very, strange that they'd be focusing on desktop features at all(especially if they don't have the resources to do them properly; especially with web browsers outdated and/or broken is worse than nothing).

You certainly hear about cool stuff that Solaris has; and others either lack or have only by virtue of pulling from Solaris(Dtrace, Solaris Containers, ZFS, probably some others); but 'desktop experience' sure isn't one of them. Especially when 'the desktop' also tends to imply needing workable support for a variety of desktops and laptops of various degrees of unfriendliness, it seems a strange place to put any resources.
1. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? by calidoscope · 2015-10-04 10:09 · Score: 1
  
  Solaris had been running on x86 since about 1990. One motivation for running on two different processors is that the porting process uncovered a fair number of bugs, I would go so far as to say the reputation of the open source UNIX software from the late 1980's and early 1990's was due to the process of porting to the various flavors of UNIX.
  Sun was in the process of migrating away from CDE when Oracle bought them, so implementing a desktop was more a matter of porting GNOME and KDE to run on Solaris. The Firefox ports to Solaris were done by a Sun's software group in China and Sun was paying Adobe to support Acroread and Flash on Solaris.
  
  --
  A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
2. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 10:32 · Score: 1
  
  I know that Solaris did have a workstation presence at one point; back when each vendor with a pet Unix had a line of workstations to run it, usually on their pet CPU architecture; but it seems very, very, strange that they'd be focusing on desktop features at all(especially if they don't have the resources to do them properly; especially with web browsers outdated and/or broken is worse than nothing).
  You certainly hear about cool stuff that Solaris has; and others either lack or have only by virtue of pulling from Solaris(Dtrace, Solaris Containers, ZFS, probably some others); but 'desktop experience' sure isn't one of them. Especially when 'the desktop' also tends to imply needing workable support for a variety of desktops and laptops of various degrees of unfriendliness, it seems a strange place to put any resources.
  Is that what they are doing? Then this project seems even more useless. Earlier above, I asked why would anyone prefer OpenIndiana to, say, FreeBSD or Linux. But this would make that question even stronger - why prefer OpenIndiana to Ubuntu or Mint or PC-BSD or even OS-X (since there're probably people trying to get OpenIndiana working on an Airbook or a Mac Pro).
  Also, I recall when I used to see Unixstations being used: usually, they were used for CAD work in my previous employers using VHDL or Verilog and so on. This would seem a good use for it, except that I read that those applications have migrated to Lintel or Wintel. So again, there isn't a good reason to go there. And dated version of things like FireFox - heck, I am currently typing this on Firefox 40.0.3 on a PC-BSD laptop under LXDE.
3. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 10:36 · Score: 2
  
  True, but the Unix on Intel market had pretty much fallen off since the late 90s, which is why we had the saga over SCO. As one may recall, Sun had acquired Interactive Unix, and had that as well as Solaris on the x86. However, that market moved pretty completely to Linux, so there is little reason for Sun to keep supporting it, except for legacy users. Wondering whether there are any - even Solaris on Sparc is tough to find these days.
  I also thought that Sun had already moved to GNOME 2, having changed the scope of the project from what Miguel de Icaza had in mind, to something incredibly simplistic. I also had no idea that KDE was on their sights as well.
4. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? by drinkypoo · 2015-10-04 14:54 · Score: 1
  
  Solaris had been running on x86 since about 1990.
  Solaris for x86 was a pathetic joke, Linux was already becoming a thing (and you could get Motif for it) and anyone who spent money on Solaris for x86 was making a grave mistake as hardware support was never any better than piss-poor.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
5. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 15:18 · Score: 1
  
  Which is what begs the questions about OpenIndiana, which is there on x64 but not there on SPARC.
6. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? by drinkypoo · 2015-10-04 22:53 · Score: 1
  
  And while we are at it: illumos on intel is as fast or faster than GNU/Linux on identical hardware.
  This is not about performance. This is about Solaris x86 or or that matter OI hardware support, which is a pathetic joke, and anyone who says otherwise is also a pathetic joke.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
7. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? by drinkypoo · 2015-10-05 00:49 · Score: 1
  
  no matter how much you claim that illumos or I are "pathetic jokes", that is a pretty damn big hardware support list.
  Linux farts in the general direction of that list. You're proud that this software runs well on one processor! Let me just golf clap for you now.
  Look, if you like it, if you want to play with it, if it amuses you, hell if it solves your business problems, that's great. But contemporary hardware support belongs to Windows and legacy hardware support belongs to Linux. Everyone else trails distantly. For some cases this is largely irrelevant, but it's unfortunate in the real world where flexibility is often the difference between success and failure.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
8. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? by kriston · 2015-10-05 02:57 · Score: 1
  
  This just isn't correct. Solaris on x86 still has the most complete and robust implementation of pthreads and the best symmetric multiprocessing support.
  However, now that the kids are moving projects to Nodejs, there's not much need for pthreads in the open-source community, so nobody cares.
  
  --
  Kriston
When JDK7 is defunct, OpenJDK continues ... by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 09:42 · Score: 1

1. To see the date of http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk...
2. hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk...
3. cd *jdk7u* && sh get_source.sh
It requires installed Ant ALSA CUPS and FreeType.
4. It can be auto-compiled using the defunct JDK 7 or the alive OpenJDK7, it does not require JDK 6 for bootrapping, and should be specified ALT_BOOTDIR=path to the jdk.
Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 09:47 · Score: 1

The vitality of an open source project isn't defined by its developers. It's defined by its users!
Look at Firefox starting with version 4, or GNOME 3. They have a number of developers, but users just don't want to use Firefox or GNOME 3. GNOME 3 hasn't seen much use, due it being ineffective and almost unusable for many desktop users. Many potential GNOME 3 users have been opting to go with KDE, XFCE, MATE, and other environments instead of GNOME 3, even on systems where GNOME 3 is the default environment. We've seen something similar happen with Firefox, where many of its users fled to Chrome and other browsers, thanks to all of the unwanted UI reworking and other unwanted changes. This has left Firefox at only about 8% of the browser market.
While Firefox and GNOME 3 may still have developers working on them, and even have some users remaining, their dwindling number of users means their vitality is dropping significantly. They are, in essence, causing themselves to be "killed off".
1. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by msobkow · 2015-10-04 10:12 · Score: 2
  
  *shrug* Gnome 3 is different, but it isn't that bad if you take the time to learn how to work with it. I was frustrated with KDE 5 after many years of being a KDE advocate, so I gave Gnome 3 a serious try a few months ago and am now quite comfortable with it on my desktop. Contrary to the bleating of people who whine about it being "touch-oriented", I don't find it to be so at all.
  But I'm not a "normal" desktop user. I've used so many desktop environments since the '80s, starting with the Amiga and Atari, that I really don't have much for specific expectations of "how a desktop should work." OS/2 Warp, Windows, Mac Classic, Motif, Sun's desktop, the environments provided by HP and IBM workstations, KDE, XFce, Gnome 2, Gnome 3... there really isn't much in common amongst them other than that they all had windows of some sort. :)
  
  --
  I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
2. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by unixisc · 2015-10-04 10:23 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
3. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by jedidiah · 2015-10-04 10:32 · Score: 1
  
  Each of those represent a set of preferences. People know what they like and what they want. They certainly won't have crap shoved down their throats if they have an alternative, and Free Software provides that.
  When GNOME3 was released, the forks pretty much started immediately.
  It's not unlike what happened when Oracle bought Sun.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
4. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by msobkow · 2015-10-04 11:09 · Score: 1
  
  A "serious try" meant spending more than five minutes playing with it. It only took a day or two to get used to.
  Many desktops, like Motif, took weeks to learn in comparison.
  
  --
  I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
5. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by msobkow · 2015-10-04 11:11 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
6. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by msobkow · 2015-10-04 11:17 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  ^^^ 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.
7. Re: Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by kiphat · 2015-10-04 11:18 · Score: 2
  
  I've been using Gnome 3 since its incarnation. It had some struggles but overall it's now quite solid. As a desktop user I find it quite usable and is currently my preferred DE.
8. Re: Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by unixisc · 2015-10-04 12:36 · Score: 1
  
  No, actually, I've created different user accounts for different roles that I play in course of my usage. And I use different DEs in each. One of them uses GNOME3.
9. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by dbIII · 2015-10-04 14:40 · Score: 2
  
  Gnome3 is so slow that Wayland fanboys use it to to try to prove that remote access via X is slow. It's only accelerated video cards that make it usable on the desktop. Try to put it on another screen and that crutch gets kicked away. Meanwhile plenty of workplaces are using Gnome2 remotely as if the applications were on their desktop (eg. in RHEL6/CentOS6)
10. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by drinkypoo · 2015-10-04 15:02 · Score: 1
  
  Many desktops, like Motif, took weeks to learn in comparison.
  What? Motif didn't have a desktop. It only had a window manager and a session manager, and some libraries. Did you mean CDE? That was Motif-based. However, it only took a few minutes to learn, because it was very simple to use. It included a dock and a file manager.
  SCO and Caldera both shipped Motif-based desktops, but neither one was part of Motif. I don't know if they have any relation, or not.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
11. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by DNS-and-BIND · 2015-10-04 16:32 · Score: 2
  
  Ahhh...okay. I get it. Now I understand why Firefox has gone off the rails. They don't give a shit about the users, they're there to entertain themselves. It all makes sense now.
  
  --
  Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
12. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by Blaskowicz · 2015-10-04 21:26 · Score: 1
  
  In particular it is dumb that a linux DE mandates 3D acceleration, given how brittle and slow it can be and given that linux is often installed on random old computers.
  There may be some 2D fallback, but then it doesn't count as it isn't the same desktop. Or fast software opengl (llvmpipe) which again doesn't count because it uses up all CPU, for a result of still slow.
13. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by msobkow · 2015-10-04 21:50 · Score: 1
  
  No, I mean trying to figure out how Motif/CDE did menus so I could customize them. Frustrating as hell before I got that working... no Googling for answers back then -- you had to actually RTFM, and the manuals sucked most horridly.
  
  --
  I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
14. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by msobkow · 2015-10-04 22:01 · Score: 1
  
  Now you've got me wondering if I'm actually thinking of twm. It all started so long ago... over half a lifetime ago... *LOL*
  
  --
  I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
15. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by msobkow · 2015-10-04 22:07 · Score: 1
  
  This article isn't about Firefox, you single minded oaf!
  
  --
  I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
16. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by Stephen+Chadfield · 2015-10-05 00:08 · Score: 1
  
  I loved CDE. Went out of my way to find Motif apps for everything. Even Netscape Communicator was Motif based! So sad that it faded like it did.
17. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by drinkypoo · 2015-10-05 00:22 · Score: 1
  
  Now you've got me wondering if I'm actually thinking of twm. It all started so long ago... over half a lifetime ago... *LOL*
  Ha! I know exactly what you mean. Anyway, speaking to the point, IIRC mwm had no menu configuration. twm certainly did. I actually recall Motif being Open Source, though. ISTR that when I got Motif for Linux, I actually got sources and the installed compiled them, including mwm. I'm now very hazy on the details, and I think it unlikely that I have preserved the relevant files so many years later. Once Lesstif became a thing, my interest in actually having Motif around waned, and once xv was surpassed as an image viewer there was no more actual need for it anyway.
  Wikipedia says that even Open Motif wasn't a "proper" Open Source license, but it clearly provided source code so I don't know what all that nonsense is about.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
18. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by calidoscope · 2015-10-05 15:18 · Score: 1
  
  FWW, Motif was an HP development where a fair amount of effort was put into making a more or less intuitive Window manager that was a bit better looking than what M$-Windows looked like at the time (ca 1990). Visual User Environment was built on top of Motif, and that morphed into CDE in the mid 1990's.
  There have been a few open source apps built on motif, Nedit and Xephem come to mind. Tcl/Tk was first built on Motif.
  
  --
  A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
19. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by armanox · 2015-10-06 05:07 · Score: 1
  
  Extremely slow, mind you, because most desktop systems that do not support the required level of 3D acceleration have fairly slow CPUs in them (usually Pentium IV and Pentium III systems. May God have mercy on people trying to use a Pentium II or older for a desktop these days)
  
  --
  I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
20. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. by unixisc · 2015-10-07 13:44 · Score: 1
  
  I think Open Motif was more Open Source than Motif was. Just that Motif was more popular amongst the non-Sun distros - OSF/1, AIX, HP/UX et al than Open Look ever was. As for the Open Source licensing, that falls under the anal-ysis of licenses by RMS and Eben Morgan, and unless something was built based on GPL, it was never gonna be good enough
Things I want to understand by fnj · 2015-10-04 09:59 · Score: 1

1) Can someone make it very clear just what the relationship of OpenIndiana to IllumOS is?
2) How exactly does NexentaOS fit in? And NexentaStor? And StormOS? And SmartOS?
3) At least several of those I mentioned are open source/free, and I believe there are others. Why so many forks? Which one looks like the leader?
The product formerly (freely) available as OpenSolaris had a lot to recommend it. FreeBSD has been playing catchup and has come a long way, but is still lacking in various ways. Linux is an excellent product, but glaring probems exist in the direction it is going, and I don't see it ever coming close to matching the OpenSolaris feature set in my lifetime.
1. Re:Things I want to understand by 0x000000 · 2015-10-04 10:37 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  1) Can someone make it very clear just what the relationship of OpenIndiana to IllumOS is?
  IllumOS is the base operating system, much like Linux, except that it comes with a full user land too.
  
  2) How exactly does NexentaOS fit in? And NexentaStor? And StormOS? And SmartOS?
  Those are all distributions of Illumos. All of them contribute to Illumos and build on top of it by providing their own packages/packaging systems and system that run on top of Illumos. Think of them like Ubuntu/CentOS/Debian to Linux.
  
  3) At least several of those I mentioned are open source/free, and I believe there are others. Why so many forks? Which one looks like the leader?
  Illumos is the "leader", and the base operating system that all of those products use (AFAIK). Each of them have different options/features. NexentaStor for example is built to be a ZFS based storage appliance solution, SmartOS is for datacenters/virtualisation and things of that nature. They each bring something unique to the table. Each of them is built by a different company that offers different types of support.
  
  The product formerly (freely) available as OpenSolaris had a lot to recommend it. FreeBSD has been playing catchup and has come a long way, but is still lacking in various ways. Linux is an excellent product, but glaring probems exist in the direction it is going, and I don't see it ever coming close to matching the OpenSolaris feature set in my lifetime.
  OpenSolaris is still around, just with the name changed to OpenIndiana. OpenSolaris after a pkg mirror location upgrade was readily renamed to OpenIndiana, and this was the upgrade path that I took personally.
  Hope this helps clarify things a little.
  
  --
  cat /dev/null > .signature
2. Re:Things I want to understand by unixisc · 2015-10-04 10:45 · Score: 1
  1. Illumos is the SVR4 kernel that Solaris is based on, and it's also used by OpenIndiana. I believe that the version of the kernel as it was when OpenSolaris was killed is what got used for OpenIndiana. Not sure whether that one has been developed further
  2. Not heard of any of the others, but StormOS was a Debian based Linux distro from the 90s and early 2000s, from what I recall
  3. All of these are fringe platforms. If you are talking about the x86, there is so much more established Unix-like OSs out there that these OpenSolaris spinoffs are a joke. For starters, there's Linux - be it Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo or Slackware. If one has a beef about systemd, then one can either go Gentoo or Slackware for Linux, or look at the BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD. If you are talking about SPARC, then except OpenSolaris, none of the above platforms exist on SPARC as it is. For SPARC, the best alternative OS out there is probably OpenBSD: while the Linux kernel still maintains SPARC, the popular distros, like Red Hat and Debian seem to have dropped it
3. Re:Things I want to understand by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 13:09 · Score: 1
  
  2. It was illumos based, rather recent. See: https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/StormOS and http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions
  StormOS – originally a Desktop focused distribution based on Nexenta Core Platform 2.0 (NCP2) with thousands of packages backported from Ubuntu Jaunty and later Debian Sid. Project was abandoned after rebasing on NCP4 and becoming unmaintainable. (Superseded by http://osdyson.org).
  3. I'm not really sure they are a joke, as there are some decent sized companies betting on them. Community size isn't that large, but then again the developers seem pretty adamant about keeping it alive and their features seem really interesting.... who says you can't have the best of all the worlds though :) ZFS snapshots (first class support), Zones (specifically running LX branded http://cr.illumos.org/~webrev/DavidJX8P/lx-zones-restoration/ ), and KVM for all the other stuff you would want.
4. Re:Things I want to understand by fnj · 2015-10-04 14:22 · Score: 1
  
  Rather than get into a discussion of what "fringe platform" even means, here is the unbeatable trifecta that OpenSolaris had way back when, and its successors still have:
  1) DTRACE
  2) ZFS seamlessly integrated
  3) Zones
  FreeBSD has DTRACE and seamless ZFS, but jails and Bhyve are a very, very faint suggestion of ZONES.
  Linux is way behind in that there is no DTRACE and there never can be a seamless ZFS (a GPL casualty), but KVM and Containers are excellent competitors to Zones.
  I use ZFS both on FreeBSD and Linux (ZFSonLInux kernel module, which has to be integrated by compiling from source). I couldn't even begin to imagine trying to do without it.
5. Re:Things I want to understand by unixisc · 2015-10-04 16:09 · Score: 1
  
  jails and Bhyve are a very, very faint suggestion of ZONES.
  In what way?
6. Re:Things I want to understand by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 19:42 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  1) OpenIndiana is the direct successor of OpenSolaris the distribution; it is built from the illumos OS/Net consolidation, which is the kernel + AT&T System V userland). illumos himself is the fork of OpenSolaris, but is binary compatible with both OpenSolaris and Oracle Solaris;
  2) NexentaOS is also built from illumos, but instead of the AT&T System V, it uses APT from Ubuntu, DPKG packages, and GNU userland. It's almost Debian with the illumos kernel; NexentaStor is the commercial storage appliance built on top of these building blocks. SmartOS is also built from illumos with Joyent bits on top, NetBSD's pkgsrc, System V and GNU userlands, and is most akin to VMWare ESX in functionality, as it can run Solaris binaries, Windows operating systems, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux operating systems and binaries (the latter via lx-branded zones). Since SmartOS uses pkgsrc, it has all the packages FreeBSD and NetBSD offer, some 14,000+ packages plus Solaris software. StormOS is yet another distribution based on the illumos kernel. SmartOS is the flagship distribution, as it has explicitly, from the ground up been designed to host huge, geo-spanning datacenters, since Joyent uses it to power their massive cloud hosting business. And yet, SmartOS, in spite of all of that, is and was free open source software since the beginning.
  3) Why so many forks? Why are there so many GNU/Linux distributions? For that same reason.
7. Re:Things I want to understand by fnj · 2015-10-05 04:11 · Score: 1
  
  jails and Bhyve are a very, very faint suggestion of ZONES.
  In what way?
  Jails are just chroot on steroids. They have no console device, and no resource control. Setting them up, updating them, and working with them has been a tedious manual process (this is starting to be alleviated by ezjail, and by Warden in PC-BSD).
  Zones have proper resource limits. The filesystem remapping is sparse, with a bunch of stuff linked read-only to the global filesystem. Those particular files thus get automatically updated when the host is updated. They have proper consoles. Creation of a basic zone is largely automated.
  Please forgive the link to a PDF.
What target platform? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 10:15 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:What target platform? by tbuskey · 2015-10-04 13:18 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
2. Re:What target platform? by tbuskey · 2015-10-04 13:49 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.
  Oh, forgot KVM inside Zones for OpenIndiana.
  Run Linux on KVM inside a Zone. Use dtrace on your Linux binaries.
3. Re:What target platform? by dbIII · 2015-10-04 14:34 · Score: 1
  
  I'm just wondering - what's the point?
  1/ To use software that only runs on Solaris.
  2/ Zones and all the other features.
  
  That said, I do not run it myself because the stuff I need to run that only runs on Solaris also only runs on SPARC.
4. Re:What target platform? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 15:10 · Score: 1, Troll
  
  The list of things that you gave all have very specialized niche usages. Like vxWorks or Contiki or Minix. But OpenIndiana is different. It offers an alternative to people who used OpenSolaris on Intel. Which was my question. Had this been available on SPARC, there would have been a sizeable potential market for this. But it's not. And Solaris on Intel has ceased to be a player for quite a while - even Oracle uses something they take from Red Hat instead of something Sun had developed in-house.
5. Re:What target platform? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 15:12 · Score: 1
  
  Which was my very point - how many OpenSolaris installations and applications are there for Intel? I could have seen the purpose had it been available on SPARC as well. Most Solaris only software is also SPARC only software. But as an Intel only, Solaris is an also ran. Like if I need ZFS, I can go w/ FreeBSD. Is Zones something unique to Solaris?
6. Re:What target platform? by dbIII · 2015-10-04 15:52 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
7. Re:What target platform? by Cogline · 2015-10-04 16:01 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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
8. Re:What target platform? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 16:16 · Score: 2
  
  All of which is there in the BSDs, which are still actively developed. In contrast to this project, that's barely getting any attention
9. Re:What target platform? by fnj · 2015-10-05 03:24 · Score: 1
  
  Wrong. FreeBSD has DTRACE and ZFS, but not Zones. None of the othe BSDs are even close.
10. Re:What target platform? by hsa · 2015-10-05 04:14 · Score: 1
  
  My VMware does not use a Linux derived kernel, being a virtualization platform and all..
11. Re:What target platform? by laffer1 · 2015-10-05 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  FreeBSD has jails and bhyve though. There are options.
  As a side note, MidnightBSD also supports ZFS.
  
  --
  MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
12. Re:What target platform? by unixisc · 2015-10-07 13:34 · Score: 1
  
  I didn't say that routers are niche. But something like, say, DD-WRT is a niche OS for routers. Meant for only that. Also, vxWorks may be available on Intel - just about every OS is these days - but that doesn't stop it from being niche. Heck, it's valid to say that aside from Windows, OS-X and Linux, everything on the x86/x64 is niche
13. Re:What target platform? by unixisc · 2015-10-07 13:35 · Score: 1
  
  I thought that ESX is Linux. Isn't it?
Re:oh joy, here come the haters by jedidiah · 2015-10-04 10:29 · Score: 1

> Nobody knows it, but god damn do the linux fan-boys hate it!
Quite frankly, I am indifferent to it.
Without this article, I wouldn't even know that it's still around.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Hipster by unixisc · 2015-10-04 10:46 · Score: 1

That would require someone who used to play w/ the likes of SunOS, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, et al. I doubt that OpenIndiana would fall into that category?
Blame it on the D by aNonnyMouseCowered · 2015-10-04 11:35 · Score: 1

I suspect it's because you're using a BSD. I don't mean that as an insult to the BSDs but to the Linux-centric cruft the Gnome developers have been adding to their beloved DE, not the least among them the hard-coded dependency on SystemD(ead).
Just stick to Lumina (hope it gets a proper Linux port) or LXDE or its even more awesome-looking QT-based successor.
1. Re:Blame it on the D by unixisc · 2015-10-04 12:41 · Score: 1
  
  Too bad that the QT based successor seems to be Linux only. I actually asked one of the BSD guys in a LinuxFest whether Razor-qt could run on PC-BSD, and he said no - due to the Linux based dependencies. Which is fine - Lumina does a good job, as does LXDE. As for a Linux port of Lumina, think that can happen - since Lumina is based on Fluxbox.
2. Re:Blame it on the D by fnj · 2015-10-05 03:46 · Score: 1
  
  Razor-qt is not only linux-only, it is all but dead, as is LXQt. Which is, frankly, fine as long as Lumina continues to be perfected.
why? by JustNiz · 2015-10-04 11:40 · Score: 1, Informative

I have nothing but love for old Sun OS's but can someone please explain why anyone these days would choose to run Open Solaris over Linux?
1. Re:why? by ArchieBunker · 2015-10-04 12:09 · Score: 1
  
  Better hardware support than Linux and you possibly have old applications that cannot easily be ported to another architecture.
  
  --
  Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
2. Re:why? by tbuskey · 2015-10-04 13:29 · Score: 1
  
  Solaris is pickier about hardware than Linux.
  Hardware gets ported by the vendor to Windows. Sometimes Linux, but there are lots of people that will also do it.
  For Macintosh, Apple has to licence a port, but is specific about which hardware is supported. And sells a decent number of units to make it not much more $$ than the Windows version.
  Solaris has so few users that the cost of the port for a graphics card doesn't get spread across many units. The driver is the cost. If Oracle doesn't sell the hardware, you will rarely see a driver for it.
  Many common (scsi) cards in Solaris had 32 bit support and never got 64 bit support.
  If you pick your hardware before you install Solaris, it will likely work very well on Linux.
3. Re:why? by fnj · 2015-10-04 14:24 · Score: 1
  
  I have nothing but love for old Sun OS's but can someone please explain why anyone these days would choose to run Open Solaris over Linux?
  I'll give you three reasons:
  1) DTRACE
  2) Seamlessly integrated ZFS
  3) Zones
4. Re:why? by drinkypoo · 2015-10-04 15:03 · Score: 1
  
  Better hardware support than Linux
  
  Are you insane? Nothing has better hardware support than Linux, not even netbsd (though there was a time.) OpenSolaris isn't even playing the same fucking sport.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
5. Re:why? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 16:10 · Score: 1
  
  Better hardware support than Linux and you possibly have old applications that cannot easily be ported to another architecture.
  Only true if you're talking about SPARC
6. Re:why? by unixisc · 2015-10-04 16:12 · Score: 1
  
  Then one can get FreeBSD, w/ an iXsystems contract if support is important, and one will readily get 1 & 2, w/o having to fork out 2 arms and a leg to Oracle. As for 3, in what way are Zones superior to Jails, Bhyve and Capsicum?
7. Re:why? by hjf · 2015-10-04 18:05 · Score: 1
  
  Many common (scsi) cards in Solaris had 32 bit support and never got 64 bit support.
  Yes. Adaptec AHA-2940. Holy shit. That was like THE most common SCSI card.
  Also the error was cryptic, and the installer (being 32 bit at the time - 2006 IIRC) let you install it but it wouldn't boot after install - there was no 64-bit driver for the card.
8. Re:why? by fnj · 2015-10-05 00:58 · Score: 1
  
  Then one can get FreeBSD, w/ an iXsystems contract if support is important, and one will readily get 1 & 2, w/o having to fork out 2 arms and a leg to Oracle. As for 3, in what way are Zones superior to Jails, Bhyve and Capsicum?
  I do have FreeBSD and I am very happy with the first two :-) I do not require support. But I find jails very obnoxious to work with and not really practical and feature-complete. They remind me a lot of the chroot-daemon band-aid in linux. They are getting better, with ezjail, PC-BSD's Warden and the like. Bhyve strikes me as a pale imitation/prototype of a proper VM framework. When I read the how-to, I just throw up my hands at the unreadiness. Maybe at some point it will reach a stage of usability. At this point it is nothing more than a science experiment, like KVM was initially. I would use the KVM port before BHyve at this point. But neither one of those does what Zones do - or linux containers, for that matter - lightweight but not TOO lightweight.
  Capsicum is good tech. It looks promising. It will be something to watch in FreeBSD 11 when that arrives, and in the future.
9. Re:why? by armanox · 2015-10-05 17:57 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, nVidia and Intel GPUs are fully supported in Solaris (on x86).
  
  --
  I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Re:Hipster by ls671 · 2015-10-04 11:48 · Score: 1

Hmm... see this picture from taliban3.gstatic.com and judge for yourself!:
https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic...

--
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
wrong window system by NostalgiaForInfinity · 2015-10-04 12:08 · Score: 1

Come on, if you're going to go Solaris, at least ship it with SunView or NeWS as the window system!
1. Re:wrong window system by unixisc · 2015-10-04 15:26 · Score: 1
  
  Those were there on SunOS - the BSD based version of Sun's Unix, but went away when Sun went to the SVR4 based Solaris, where they went w/ CDE. I really wish there was an FOSS version of NeWS just like there is a GNUSTEP and derivative 'NEXTSTEP's
Meh by snowsnoot · 2015-10-04 15:16 · Score: 1

RHEL.. Because it is the best and most well supported choice. Is anyone really deploying Solaris in anything serious these days? Or anything other than RHEL? I don't see the point.
1. Re:Meh by unixisc · 2015-10-04 16:13 · Score: 1
  
  People above mentioned Dtrace, ZFS and Zones. The first 2 are there on FreeBSD and the last 1 - a variation of that is there on FreeBSD as well.
2. Re: Meh by snowsnoot · 2015-10-05 00:06 · Score: 1
  
  Don't get me wrong, Solaris is better than AIX or HPUX but it still feels archaic compared to Linux. Dtrace - OK if you are debugging badly coded apps, or you could just open a support case with your vendor who wrote it; ZFS - I prefer to let the array handle all that stuff and use 'normal' filesystem like ext4; Zones - why bother, just run another VM. In my experience the tools provided by RHEL are sufficient and the apps we are running are more widely supported on RHEL. Because it is the more common choice in Enterprise envirinments makes it carry a lot of weight as well.
3. Re: Meh by snowsnoot · 2015-10-05 00:11 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe its the right choice for what you are running.. I respect that. But I like simplicity and reliability as well as wide support for apps and virtualization. RH Satellite is a nice management tool as well. Its just easier for us to run with the sheep because everyone is familiar with it and it works. We are app driven, the OS is just an u derlying layer so we need it to be easy. Go ahead and trailblaze though.. That's how things end up getting included in mainstream Linux - albeit eventually.
4. Re: Meh by DarkOx · 2015-10-05 01:52 · Score: 1
  
  I prefer to let the array handle all that stuff and use 'normal' filesystem like ext4
  Spoken like someone who has only worked in a tiny shop on boxen that mostly have direct attacked storage. While I agree checksuming etc is stuff the array ought to do all the other features like snapshops and volume management are damn nice to have in the file system layer. Firstly because that kind of stuff is damn convenient to have in the hands of the sysadmin rather than the storage admin who are often different people. Being able to create a quick atomic snapshot is highly useful. Being able to do it on a device that can't have consequences for other servers is even better. I don't want to fool with the SAN over SSH doing after hours work and potentially causing a calamity while I am miles away from the office, messing with one host on the other hand is a lot less blood pressure elevating.
  Even adding additional storage is nicer. Just have the SAN guy attach another LUN and add it to the pool. Easy and safe to do live, much safer than: have storage guy do some array re-size operation, than have server guy do some partition or logical volume manger fiddling, followed by a file system grow. If you even can do that with mounted file systems. Don't be silly ZFS and (my preference) BTRFS are the way forward. Hell even on a single host when properly configured BTRFS confers most of the advantages of a VM! In terms of easy snapshot / rollback and ZFS could too.
  
  --
  Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
5. Re: Meh by fnj · 2015-10-05 04:20 · Score: 1
  
  ZFS - I prefer to let the array handle all that stuff and use 'normal' filesystem like ext4.
  You have my permission to continue to operate in the dark ages with inferior performance and reliability. It won't give you data-integrity and metadata-integrity checksumming and self-repair, snapshots, cloning, and architecturally-guaranteed freedom from corruption. Watch out for those RAID write-holes, which are absent in ZFS.
  
  Zones - why bother, just run another VM.
  You might as well say "hell, just install another dedicated machine". Yeah, it will work if you don't care much about efficiency. Zones are much lighter weight than VMs.
6. Re: Meh by fnj · 2015-10-05 04:24 · Score: 1
  
  While I agree checksuming etc is stuff the array ought to do
  If you mean parity data computation, I disagree. If you mean data-integrity and metadata-integrity checksumming and self-repair, I categorically and utterly disagree. Most RAID controllers have pathetic parity data computation performance. The CPU can chew through that much faster without even noticing. Back in the days of the single core 486 and Pentium, MAYBE it m,ade sense.
7. Re: Meh by snowsnoot · 2015-10-05 04:47 · Score: 1
  
  Fair enough, but RHEL w/Satellite is what works for us, and we have a good support agreement (i.e. not as expensive as you might think). Also we're not using RHEL/KVM as the hypervisor, but VMware.. you're probably going to go ballistic now lol. Either way, I'm all for trailblazing but when it comes to what we do, well established is an imperative. Perhaps we'll look into SmartOS if it can manage to gather some traction in the future, and btw thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try one day soon.
8. Re: Meh by DarkOx · 2015-10-06 03:04 · Score: 1
  
  Most RAID controllers have pathetic parity data computation performance.
  You are right about that point. Which is why ZFS "does it in software" that said, because existing implementations do the job poorly is not a case against the design decision to provide those functions at a given layer. metadata-integrity needs to be done at the filesystem layer. The storage layer does not and should not know about filesystem internals. As far as parity and general data integrity the storage system can and should do that. I mean if the FS layer says give that block this bit pattern, it really should expect that block to have that bit pattern later.
  
  --
  Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Virtual machines - zones vs jails by unixisc · 2015-10-04 15:57 · Score: 1

So on FreeBSD, the equivalent things are jails and Bhyve, the latter of which is their virtual machine. In what way are zones superior?
1. Re:Virtual machines - zones vs jails by dbIII · 2015-10-04 18:31 · Score: 1
  
  It has more VM-like behaviour than a jail but is not a full VM with the overhead that requires:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers
2. Re:Virtual machines - zones vs jails by dbIII · 2015-10-04 18:37 · Score: 2
  
  Examples are being able to have solaris8 and solaris9 zones on a solaris10 machine with each zone having a different network address without the overhead of actually running three different operating systems. A trivial use is running legacy software and preventing copy protection software locked to an interface address or hostid from colliding with the same poorly written copy protection software for licencing another application running on the same machine - as far as it can see it is not running on the same machine.
3. Re:Virtual machines - zones vs jails by unixisc · 2015-10-07 13:37 · Score: 1
  
  On FreeBSD, you have jails for not just FreeBSD, but also for Debian and Gentoo Linux. In what way is the Solaris container superior, other than supporting multiple versions of the OS?
4. Re:Virtual machines - zones vs jails by unixisc · 2015-10-07 13:40 · Score: 1
  
  So it's a one size fits both approach vs 2 sizes for 2 different use cases?
5. Re:Virtual machines - zones vs jails by dbIII · 2015-10-07 15:35 · Score: 1
  
  Very different so superior for some situations but not others.
  For example a zone can have it's own network address.
6. Re:Virtual machines - zones vs jails by dbIII · 2015-10-07 15:41 · Score: 1
  
  No. It's for when you'd want a VM to run a similar OS or separate hardware but without the overhead of either. A full VM has far more overhead and in some situations all you really want the VM for is put a bunch of applications in a separate space with their own IP address, so that's where you use a zone.
  A very similar thing is in development on linux and is called a "container", which is also how zones started to be described a couple of years ago.
7. Re:Virtual machines - zones vs jails by unixisc · 2015-10-08 23:19 · Score: 1
  
  So can a jail in PC-BSD Warden
Re:FreeDOS, Haiku, Amiga by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-04 18:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.
Re:FreeDOS, Haiku, Amiga by fnj · 2015-10-05 03:41 · Score: 1

Actually, the illumos codebase, on which OpenIndiana is based, is far, far from dead.
But the frontpage of the OpenIndiana site has had a fork stuck in it for two years. There is some activity in the wiki, but if you only looked at the front page all you would see would be a time machine talking about "the latest" 2013 release, and a download link to same. There is no excuse for this. You could get the front page updated at the cost of buying a high school kid a couple of pizzas.
The frontpage of the IllumOS site just redirects you to a wiki which claims it has been "last updated" in 2013, though there is clear 2015 content. The blog link takes you to, again, 2013. This isn't quite as egregious, given that IllumOS, as far as I can figure out, isn't really a distro at all. It is a codebase feeding a number of distros.
I won't lower myself to the "Netcraft confirms" quote, but all this doesn't look healthy or encouraging at all.
Better hardware support than Linux? by SIGBUS · 2015-10-05 07:32 · Score: 1

Are you kidding? I've found that Illumos is not at all friendly to white-box hardware. Examples:
Some 2-port AHCI cards mysteriously fail after a random amount of time (oops, there goes my L2ARC device until I reboot).
AHCI hot-swap on my motherboard SATA ports is a game of Russian roulette. I'll randomly get write errors on other drives when I slot a drive in. At least hot-swap worked well on my SAS HBA.
Hardware sensors that work fine with lm_sensors on Linux are not at all usable on Illumos, which expects IPMI.
KVM on Illumos? Not if you have an AMD CPU.
USB3? LOL!
A couple of weeks ago, I finally ditched my home OpenIndiana system (was running 151a9) and threw CentOS 7 on it with ZFS from the official ZoL repo. Yeah, it has systemd. So far, I've found that systemd isn't any worse than SMF; I can live with it. Things that wouldn't work in OI work nicely on C7. The ZFS pool imported without a hitch, though I had to rework my sharenfs options and do a little tinkering to get sharesmb to work with Samba. It was worth the effort. I no longer need to use crazy ACLs to get my shares to work as expected, another plus. I might try later to run a ZFS root, but for now I'm using MD-RAID mirrors for the OS itself.
Aside from the better hardware support, a big advantage of CentOS is that I don't have to worry (as much) about something breaking when I update the system. OpenIndiana's new Hipster approach is fine if you're the type who would run Debian Sid on a server, but that's not my style. Add to that, there's no clean upgrade path from 151a9 to Hipster.
I wish them well, but my foray into Solaris-land is over.

--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!