[HN Gopher] OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution
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OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution
Author : doener
Score : 76 points
Date : 2025-08-13 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openindiana.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openindiana.org)
| jtbayly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe the Perifractic equivalent of the Sun fanworld can buy
| the Solaris trademark and rename it!
| joshuaissac wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| As a Hoosier... I had to check the relevance... and learned it's
| basically a fork^3 of Solaris, a Sun operating system.
|
| 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
| mbreese wrote:
| From: https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/#what-is-
| the-o...
|
| _> 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.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Not sure if Ian Murdock had a say in the naming but his
| family was from Indiana.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > OpenIndiana takes its name from Project Indiana, the
| internal codename for OpenSolaris at Sun Microsystems
| before Oracle's acquisition of Sun in 2010.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana#History
| tomwheeler wrote:
| Ian Murdock, who grew up in Indiana, joined Sun
| Microsystems in early 2007 to lead Project OpenIndiana.
| jeberle wrote:
| I think what's important is that the name matches on /ian/.
| johnisgood wrote:
| There is OmniOS[1] as well, fits next to OpenIndiana.
|
| https://omnios.org.
| volkadav wrote:
| Open Maryland, Not Indiana :) (So named in this case because
| the company that released it, OmniTI, is based in Maryland.
| Source: worked there at the time) It's a good OS, as I
| imagine the other Illumos derivatives are, but sometimes the
| relatively small size of the community can be felt, e.g. in
| breadth/depth of available third party packages and update
| availability/timelines.
| chasil wrote:
| I have also used SmartOS, which imports KVM from Linux.
|
| 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
| nwilkens wrote:
| While we do still ship KVM on SmartOS, we've moved
| development over to bhyve - https://docs.smartos.org/bhyve/
|
| using our package manager pkgsrc
| [https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/], you can install the MTA of
| your choice too!
| joshuaissac wrote:
| 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.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| 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.
|
| [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
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > OpenSolaris[1] <-- Solaris[0
|
| Not sure if characterizing this as a fork is right. OpenSolaris
| (aka project Indiana) was the development version for Solaris
| 11.
| splatter9859 wrote:
| Wow. Illumos / Solaris is still kicking, eh?
|
| 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.
| geephroh wrote:
| It (Solaris) was also the origin of ZFS, if I'm not mistaken.
| shrubble wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was
| the worst possible outcome; it guaranteed that Solaris would
| decline.
| thevillagechief wrote:
| Still mad at IBM for screwing the pooch on that one. They
| basically handed the company to Oracle.
| glhaynes wrote:
| Did IBM consider purchasing Sun?
| wmf wrote:
| Yes, although IBM only wanted Java and was planning to
| cancel SPARC and maybe Solaris.
| jeberle wrote:
| Makes sense given that IBM already had the POWER arch &
| AIX, which was based on BSD rather than SysV for Solaris.
| whartung wrote:
| Kind of like Oracle did.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| 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
| splatter9859 wrote:
| Very cool! Thanks for sharing that.
|
| I'll keep the small "i" in mind as well. :)
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Like https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/prese
| ntat... ?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Some Linux people were saying "let's screw Solaris" first and
| Sun people are only human so that's the result.
| ptribble wrote:
| There was nothing about screwing anyone involved in the
| choice of the license. The license had to be something all
| the copyright and license holders were prepared to accept
| (and getting them to accept CDDL was hard enough, not
| everyone did hence the few closed components).
|
| 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).
| johnisgood wrote:
| I have to say, that I really loved OpenSolaris. I really have to
| try OpenIndiana. Can anyone tell me about their package manager?
| hualapais wrote:
| 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Thanks! Tribblix seems interesting at a quick glance. Does it
| have i3? Or is there a list of packages that I can see
| online?
| ptribble wrote:
| It has 30 desktop options, including i3
|
| The repo has a list of packages
|
| http://pkgs.tribblix.org/
| johnisgood wrote:
| I found it, thank you. :)
| simne wrote:
| Look to figure out what is it:
| https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/
|
| To be short, it is opensource implementation of SUN Solaris OS. I
| don't know if it is already developed much.
| gtirloni wrote:
| > illumos-closed package, containing binary blobs still necessary
| to build illumos-gate, was added
|
| 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/
| vinc wrote:
| 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.
| tedivm wrote:
| I've spent two minutes look at this website and I still have no
| idea what this project is.
| rwolf wrote:
| https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ looks like what
| you wanted, was not straightforward to get there from the
| homepage.
| irusensei wrote:
| 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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Oracle ruined Sun Microsystems for sure, incl. OpenSolaris.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Ahh man the nostalgia. I miss Sun. Oracle buys and ruins
| everything.
| cnst wrote:
| 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:
|
| _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.
| ubedan wrote:
| "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. ...
| Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. Now, all dead...well, with
| all dead, there's usually only one thing that you can do."
|
| I personally believe that illumos will survive for decades, and
| it very well could rise again for those users that want/need
| robust stability.
|
| One particularly notable design win was Oxide Computer Company
| as their hypervisor. They published their reasoning for
| choosing illumos here:
|
| https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0&t=2556s
| tgma wrote:
| Is there really a valid use case these days if you are not a
| hobbyist/fanboy or have existing Solaris workload compared to
| FreeBSD (or Linux if licensing isn't an issue)? ZFS seems quite
| well-supported on those.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Not that I'd really use it, but the integration of ZFS with the
| package manager on the one side and things like NFS on the
| other side made it really nice to use.
|
| If a package update failed for whatever reason one could simply
| revert to a previous boot environment and configuring
| permissions on NFS exports worked directly integrated with ZFS.
| Really nice.
|
| On other platforms there is a lot more fiddling around
| required.
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(page generated 2025-08-13 23:01 UTC)