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 However, there are still a number of outdated packages on the system like Firefox 24 and X.Org Server 1.14 while the default office suite is a broken OpenOffice build, due to various obstacles in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