> 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
I've been using OpenIndiana for a file server in my homelab since it came out and it's been quietly doing its job ever since without much issues. Coming from Linux it's not easy to find the equivalent commands of what I do on my other servers but it's also what I like about this project, it's another flavor of Unix to learn.
mikewarot · 3h ago
As a Hoosier... I had to check the relevance... and learned it's basically a fork^3 of Solaris, a Sun operating system.
If we are going to talk about 35 years of illumos linkage, we as well go all the way. Using you notation: Solaris <—- SVR4 [0] <—- AT&T System III [1] <—- Bell Labs Version 7 Unix [2] <—- the birth of Unix at Bell Labs in 1969 [3].
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.
> 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.
Illumos based OS's have been kicking around a lot longer than I anticipated.
weinzierl · 1h ago
Not sure if Ian Murdock had a say in the naming but his family was from Indiana.
giancarlostoro · 44m ago
> OpenIndiana takes its name from Project Indiana, the internal codename for OpenSolaris at Sun Microsystems before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010.
OpenIndiana is more of a downstream distro than a fork of illumos, much like how Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro. Whereas illumos itself is a fork of OpenSolaris.
johnisgood · 2h ago
There is OmniOS[1] as well, fits next to OpenIndiana.
I don't know about Illumos but setting up a Solaris 10 machine to provide block devices through multi path iSCSI was a breeze with all the tooling it had. No config files needed it was all command line.
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.
johnisgood · 4m ago
Oracle ruined Sun Microsystems for sure, incl. OpenSolaris.
doublerabbit · 58m ago
I finally got my hands on using a Solaris machine at my last job to upgrading the backup software.
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.
cnst · 11m ago
Sadly, everything is converging on Linux these days, and even the majority of the people who used to promote Solaris, DTrace and ZFS, have seemingly moved on, mostly to Linux, somewhat to FreeBSD, too, per Brendan Gregg:
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 being annoyed that too many steps were required to make FreeBSD work as a desktop: https://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html (my fav is that in FreeBSD the audio doesn't work unless you recompile the kernel)
FreeBSD is still used by Netflix OpenConnect Appliance:
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.
steveklabnik · 1h ago
It still is!
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
tracker1 · 2h ago
I think a lot of decisions that eventually lead to the Oracle buyout were all pretty bad and Oracle itself being where good ideas go to die. As bad as MS is at extracting value out of its windows users, Oracle seems to fleece it's enterprise customers far, far worse. I don't think I would ever choose Oracle or IBM for anything.
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.
ndiddy · 1h ago
It still is, but at this point I'm not sure why anyone would pick it over Linux for something new. All the killer Solaris features (ZFS, dtrace, zones, SMF) have good enough Linux equivalents (OpenZFS, eBPF, containers, systemd) and I'm not aware of any usecases where illumos outperforms Linux anymore.
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.
pjmlp · 1h ago
Not only it is still around from Oracle, it is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging enabled.
Sadly it is still years away on ARM and x86, Linux and BSD systems.
shrubble · 2h ago
I’m of the opinion that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was the worst possible outcome; it guaranteed that Solaris would decline.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
Solaris was the development OS for Oracle for years. I presume that's now shifted to their own linux distro but for many years that was the case, to the point that if you were a serious Oracle customer you ran it on Solaris (and Sun hardware) because all the bug fixes and updates came out first for that platform.
So from that standpoint it makes sense that they acquired it. They probably just didn't care about any non-Oracle users.
thevillagechief · 2h ago
Still mad at IBM for screwing the pooch on that one. They basically handed the company to Oracle.
glhaynes · 1h ago
Did IBM consider purchasing Sun?
wmf · 10m ago
Yes, although IBM only wanted Java and was planning to cancel SPARC and maybe Solaris.
geephroh · 2h ago
It (Solaris) was also the origin of ZFS, if I'm not mistaken.
JoshTriplett · 30m ago
I'm really disappointed that Solaris picked a "let's screw Linux" license, relegating some otherwise interesting technologies to only run on Solaris, on permissive OSes like BSD, and on systems that don't care about license compliance.
wmf · 9m ago
Some Linux people were saying "let's screw Solaris" first and Sun people are only human so that's the result.
tedivm · 1h ago
I've spent two minutes look at this website and I still have no idea what this project is.
To be short, it is opensource implementation of SUN Solaris OS. I don't know if it is already developed much.
johnisgood · 3h ago
I have to say, that I really loved OpenSolaris. I really have to try OpenIndiana. Can anyone tell me about their package manager?
hualapais · 2h ago
OI uses IPS packaging, which is the same packaging used by Solaris 11 (some find it over engineered). Tribblix, on the other hand, is also an illumos-based distro but is based on Solaris 10 (and prior’s) SVR4 packaging which is managed via a utility called “zap”.
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.
jtbayly · 3h ago
I can’t figure out what this is from anything on the site. I suppose I need to know what Illumos is? My best guess is that it is an OS?
mindcrime · 3h ago
Solaris, basically. Illumos was derived from the old OpenSolaris project. I don't know how much it's diverged, as I don't really follow this much. But that's more or less what it is.
sgt · 2h ago
Maybe the Perifractic equivalent of the Sun fanworld can buy the Solaris trademark and rename it!
joshuaissac · 1h ago
Solaris is still developed and sold by Oracle, and expected to be supported for a very long time. The current version, Solaris 11.4, is planned to be supported until 2037 at the earliest. The previous major version, Solaris 10, was released in 2005 and is supported until 2027. So they are unlikely to sell the trademark any time soon.
sgt · 51m ago
Who are still using Solaris though? And I say that as a previous SunOS and Solaris user for a couple of decades. Great technology. That's where I first got to play with dtrace and containers/zones.
doublerabbit · 46m ago
Banks, large institutions and other enterprises all seem to keep the lights on for Solaris.
Times I've heard it's time to migrate from with no one willing too and so the swamp just becomes swampier.
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.
https://illumos.org/docs/about/history/
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris
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
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_7_Unix
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana#History
It is odd to boot it and see sendmail running from my native ksh93 root login.
https://www.tritondatacenter.com/smartos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartOS
https://omnios.org.
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 being annoyed that too many steps were required to make FreeBSD work as a desktop: https://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html (my fav is that in FreeBSD the audio doesn't work unless you recompile the kernel)
FreeBSD is still used by Netflix OpenConnect Appliance:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
So from that standpoint it makes sense that they acquired it. They probably just didn't care about any non-Oracle users.
To be short, it is opensource implementation of SUN Solaris OS. I don't know if it is already developed much.
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.
Times I've heard it's time to migrate from with no one willing too and so the swamp just becomes swampier.