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 However, there are still a number of outdated packages on the system like Firefox 24 and X.Org Server 1.14 while the default office suite is a broken OpenOffice build, due to various obstacles in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

Comments

What target platform?

[unixisc]

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.

Re:What target platform?

[tbuskey]

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.

Re:Things I want to understand

[0x000000]

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.

Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers.

[msobkow]

^^^ 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."