The future of OpenIndiana - Illumos?

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sk8harddiefast

New Member
Feb 22, 2014
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Hi. I am new to forum. My name is George and I am from Greece. I am a FreeBSD user but I want to install for my wife's computer OpenIndiana. In the past I used for a little OpenSolaris and was just wonderfull. My wife don't do a lot of things but it's ok. Because of me, knows very well what Unix is and how works. Uses Libreoffice, watch Youtube videos, listen music and read-create pdf most for here college. But I have some questions and I hope you help me because I didn't find answers on Web.

1) The future of OpenIndiana? Is a project that will die soon, will survive or is already dead?
2) Is any official OpenIndiana forum? I didn't find anyone.
3) Why his packages are so outdated? I didn't find vlc and on official repos is Mozilla 10!
4) If Openindiana is not the answer which illumos distro to choose for a simple desktop computer?
5) Finally. Illumos itself is going to live or die?

In the past I was full In love with Solaris but after Oracle buy Sun, Solaris is dead for me and don't worth to give even a try to a company that hates opensource.
So I want to give a try to OpenIndiana or any other illumos distro. But all this have any future or is better idea to install a PcBSD?
 

noki

New Member
Feb 10, 2014
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Hi

First, this is neither an OI forum, nor am I writing this on behalf of OI developers, nor am I one. (i've been in touch with packaging for some time but have no relation for now, due to time ...)

1) OI has been and continues to be driven by a small group of people who are devoting quite an amount of their free time to the project without being on the paycheck of a company that uses illumos.
In contrast to some distros OI is actually a team effort, not a one-man show. - There are illumos-based and illumos-forked distros that mostly are, I omit names ;-)

Most what has been going on has been done within the 'oi-hipster' - you have to update to hipster repos to get later bits. (I hope that's the right handle: Hipster - OpenIndiana - OpenIndiana Wiki)
I'd say: OI lives, it's weak (not many people and a large amount of software to care for) but still alive and yet one of the only distros that care about booting to a desktop or being general-purpose as much as possible.

2) There is no forum, it's all on mailing lists - maybe a bit old-school-ish but it works: openindiana.org Mailing Lists

3) Mostly because most of the efforts have been put into the more rapid moving Hipster branch. I think it was made to make the process for contributors easier since OI has so many packages to care about.
Considering there are like 5-10 people who are regularly contributing to OI, the catalog of OI is very large and porting/packaging new software is taking lots of time.

4) As desktop, I doubt there are many other choices: SmartOS isl hypervisor/cloud hosting oriented, OmniOS is targeting servers, perhaps Sonicle's XStreamOS? (Distributions - illumos - illumos wiki)

5) It depends on what has been going on at illumos.org etc. - there are companies who have and continue to bet their a** on illumos-based products. The project sees regular commits soon 4 years after forking from OpenSolaris it's still there. Up to the viewers eye to judge how alive or dying it is. I mean: The BSDs have been dying for years, yet they are still around and kicking - right? (BSD is Dying, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2007 - YouTube) ;-)

Depending on your background and what your wife needs, PC-BSD may be a valid alternative, I'd agree. Kris and the other PC-BSD devs have been putting lots of efforts into improving the BSD desktop experience.
(Remember that Kris Moore has the luck of being on the payroll of iXSystems for hacking on PC-BSD, he's not doing this on his spare time only - lucky guy!)
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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Just to add

1. as said, OI is not dead but development is quite slow.

2. beside the Openindiana mailing list, communication is mostly done via irc, see http://echelog.com/logs/browse/openindiana/

3/4. a broadly used Solaris based deskop is not dead it was never really alive.
Nowadays even Windows or Mac desktops loose massive marketshare for tablet based systems with Android and IOS, so I would not go a Solaris desktop route. Use a tablet, Windows or a Mac for basic desktop use. Maybe Linux may be a desktop option with minimal marketshare. Traditional desktops are dead for simple basic computing. For me a Solaris "desktop" is more a user friendly server management option with additional browser and email not a real desktop with alle the media and office tools.

5. Illumos based systems as a desktop are dead, Illumos based distributions as a server OS for a vm/storage related server are one of the best options at all and very alive. Indeed Illumos is more or less the upstream for any free ZFS systems. (OSX, BSD, Nexenta, ZoL etc)

see also OpenZFS
 

sk8harddiefast

New Member
Feb 22, 2014
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Thank's for reply. I tried OI but never booted. I get error kernel page fault etc. So I installed PCBSD which just made the job. Everything worked and now my wife has a computer with everything she needs :)
 

paradise

New Member
Nov 6, 2013
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FRANCE
I have installed an Openindiana in a DD for a multiboot Linux/BSD/Other, il works pretty good, light OS, lighter and easier to install than a FreeBSD.

I hope that this OS will not die !