OpenIndiana[3] <-- Illumos[2] <-- OpenSolaris[1] <-- Solaris[0]
Note: I guessed here at <-- meaning fork of... any other options I should have used instead?
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos
> Why is it called OpenIndiana?
> OpenIndiana obtains its name from Project Indiana, an open source effort by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) to produce OpenSolaris, a community developed Unix-like distribution based on Sun Solaris. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux Distribution.
(I never understood the naming either)
But here's an ArsTechnica article from 2007 talking more about those origins from back when Sun was still trying to win back marketshare from Linux. It had long since lost that war, but was still trying to stay relevant.
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/understanding-...
Illumos based OS's have been kicking around a lot longer than I anticipated.
It is odd to boot it and see sendmail running from my native ksh93 root login.
using our package manager pkgsrc [https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/], you can install the MTA of your choice too!
Besides the direct lineage, it’s interesting to see cross pollination between different operating systems over the years. Like BSD’s socket interface spreading everywhere (including Windows), ZFS from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD & Linux, then bhyve from FreeBSD to illumos.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V#SVR4
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_III
Really too bad Solaris didn’t stick around and was so horribly mismanaged by Sun.
Solaris and Vax/VMS is where I started my career decades ago, and still brings back memories.
So from that standpoint it makes sense that they acquired it. They probably just didn't care about any non-Oracle users.
It would be interesting to see a little more diversity in common operating systems in the wild though. Linux has pretty much taken over the server space, and iOS/Android have split the more common usage outside that, with what's left of desktop still mostly Windows.
I still think there's opportunity for something like Flutter as a cross-platform library that actually works with multiple backing languages.
At Oxide, we have our own illumos (in my understanding, you're supposed to lowercase the i) distribution, discussed on HN a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178521
OpenIndiana also has the problem that every commercial illumos user is using it for some niche purpose (networking infrastructure, storage appliance, that sort of thing) so it's basically up to a few unpaid volunteers working in their free time to adapt it for general desktop use. I'm not sure what the state of stuff like audio support or accelerated graphics looks like if you're on modern hardware.
Sadly it is still years away on ARM and x86, Linux and BSD systems.
Our belief was that Linux would be unlikely (and unwise as the overall system architecture is sufficiently different that it would be hard to port) to take the code. We expected - and encouraged - the concepts to be taken (as with the slab memory allocator).
Both are good distributions, but I strongly encourage you to try Tribblix if OI is problematic; for whatever reason the latest OI installers do not seem to include the same amount of driver support as Tribblix, in my experience.
To be short, it is opensource implementation of SUN Solaris OS. I don't know if it is already developed much.
https://docs.openindiana.org/release-notes/2016.10-release-n...
> There are a small handful of illumos components for which source code is not available. Over time, we have replaced most of the closed source components from the Sun era with new open source versions. This work is ongoing
https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close...
> From this, however, project founder Garrett D'Amore took the last drop of the gate and announced illumos in mid-2010.
It was for a university lab and it was the only ever contact I had with Solaris 10 and later versions or forks. I was mildly interested once since it had KVM but support was Intel only so that kept me away.
I remember some hypervisor and storage products based on Illumos like Nexenta and Soylent OS. I'm guessing those projects faded into obscurity.
Which is a shame. A lot of people was optimistic about OpenSolaris when it came out but Oracle gutted it.
All I could explain the OS as, was as a swamp. It's wants to work but doesn't work as it should and you always were knee-deep in sludge too.
Solaris to Linux Migration 2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15177118 - Sept 2017 (129 comments)
In the BSD land, things aren't that much better, either.
Netgate, the makers of pfSense, are now using Ubuntu for Netgate TNSR product.
iXsystems, the descendants of BSDi, have moved FreeNAS / TrueNAS from FreeBSD to Linux. They're basically d/b/a TrueNAS now, and it's all Linux now.
You used to need Solaris or illimos or FreeBSD for production-ready ZFS support, but now OpenZFS is provided exclusively for Linux and FreeBSD; note that Linux already comes first in the title; it would seem like it's only a matter of time before FreeBSD support may follow Solaris and illumos.
Joyent, the commercial shepherds of OpenSolaris descendants like SmartOS, were acquired by Samsung, but the entire Solaris part of the equation, including Triton DataCenter orchestration, were subsequently offloaded to mnx.io, a tiny cloud hosting provider based out of a small town in Michigan. (Frankly, without Triton, I don't even understand what remains of Joyent at Samsung? Just the physical servers with the third-party software? It's basically just a name for Samsung's data centre ops and their presumably-Linux-based Private Cloud?)
Apple used to use NetBSD for AirPort WiFi routers, but the whole router line has been discontinued. (I thought Apple actually already dropped NetBSD but couldn't find a source right now.)
Last not least, DJB used to run OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, but then switched to Ubuntu after possibly being annoyed that too many steps were required to make FreeBSD work as a desktop: http://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html (my fav is that in FreeBSD the audio doesn't work unless you recompile the kernel). I think he initially may have abandoned OpenBSD because it was crashing too often for undetermined causes: http://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html.
FreeBSD is still used by Netflix OpenConnect Appliance, which is a huge win, but feels like too many eggs in a single basket:
Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738 - Sept 2021 (293 comments)
But that's about it. Linux has won.
jtbayly•4h ago
mindcrime•4h ago
sgt•3h ago
joshuaissac•2h ago
sgt•1h ago
doublerabbit•1h ago
Times I've heard it's time to migrate from with no one willing too and so the swamp just becomes swampier.