OpenIndiana

OpenIndiana

OpenIndiana login screen
Company / developer	illumos Foundation et al.
Programmed in	C
OS family	Unix (System V Release 4)
Working state	In development
Source model	Open source
Latest unstable release	build 151a8 / August 10, 2013 (2013-08-10)
Available language(s)	English
Update method	Image Packaging System
Package manager	Package Manager, pkg
Supported platforms	i386, x86-64
Kernel type	Monolithic
Userland	Solaris and GNU Core Utilities
Default user interface	GNOME
License	Mostly CDDL, with other licenses
Official website	www.openindiana.org

OpenIndiana is a free and open-source, Unix operating system derived from OpenSolaris. Developers forked OpenSolaris after Oracle Corporation discontinued it,^[1] in order to continue development and distribution of the source code.^[2] The OpenIndiana project is stewarded by the illumos Foundation, which also stewards the illumos operating system.^[2] OpenIndiana's developers strive to make it "the defacto OpenSolaris distribution installed on production servers where security and bug fixes are required free of charge".^[3]

History

Origins

Project Indiana was originally conceived by Sun Microsystems, to construct a binary distribution around the OpenSolaris source code base.^[4]

OpenIndiana was conceived after negotiations of a takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle were proceeding, in order to ensure continued availability and further development of an OpenSolaris-based OS, as it is widely used. Uncertainty among the OpenSolaris development community led some developers to form tentative plans for a fork of the existing codebase.

These plans came to fruition following the announcement of discontinuation of support for the OpenSolaris project by Oracle.^[5][6]

Initial reaction

OpenIndiana Package Manager

The formal announcement of the OpenIndiana project was made on September 14, 2010 at the JISC Centre in London.^[7] The first release of the operating system was made available publicly at the same time, despite being untested. The reason for the untested release was that the OpenIndiana team set a launch date ahead of Oracle OpenWorld in order to beat the release of Solaris 11 Express.^[8]

The announcement of OpenIndiana was met with a mainly positive response; over 350 people^[9] viewed the online announcement, the ISO image was downloaded over 2000 times,^[9] the Twitter account obtained over 500 followers,^[10] and numerous notable IT press websites wrote about the release.^{[8][11][12][13][14][15]} The broadcast bandwidth of the announcement was substantial, noted to top 350Mbit/second.^[16] The network package depot server experienced 20x as much traffic interested in their distribution than they originally planned for, resulting in more threads later being provisioned.^[17]

Not all reporting was positive, and some online articles have questioned the relevance of Solaris given the market penetration of GNU/Linux.^[18][19] One article was critical of the OpenIndiana launch citing a lack of professionalism with regard to releasing an untested build, and the project's lack of commitment to a release schedule.^[20]

Community concerns

With the OpenSolaris binary distribution moved to SolarisExpress and the real-time feed of OpenSolaris updates discontinued, concerns abounded over what would happen to OpenIndiana if Oracle decided to stop feeding source code back into the community. The OpenIndiana team mitigated these concerns when they announced their intention to move the source code feed to the illumos Foundation.^[21]

Concerns were raised about possible discontinuation of free access to the Oracle-owned compiler being used to produce OpenIndiana. In response, OpenIndiana was modified to be able to compile under the open source GNU Compiler Collection.^[22] Work on OpenIndiana is ongoing to make the compiled binaries both bootable and stable on a greater number of machines (motherboards, chipsets, CPUs, and HBAs).

The HCL (hardware compatibility list) remains somewhat informal, fragmented and un-centralized requiring much end-user research for hardware selection.^{[23][24][25][26][27]} The lack of a comprehensive centralized HCL might be an artifact due to the fact that the Device Driver Utility is part of the OpenSolaris binary distribution and uses an old Sun Microsystems email address now under Oracle control.^[28][29][30]

Relation to Solaris, Solaris Express, illumos

While OpenIndiana is a fork in the technical sense, it is a continuation of OpenSolaris in spirit. The project intends to deliver a System V family operating system which is binary-compatible with the Oracle products Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express. However, rather than being based on the OS/Net consolidation like OpenSolaris was, OpenIndiana will apply the illumos kernel (the first release is still based on OS/Net). The project does use the same IPS package management system as OpenSolaris.^[3]

The OpenIndiana codebase is currently based on the majority of publicly available code from Oracle, although future releases will be based upon the Illumos code. The project is also expending efforts to make its codebase independent from Oracle-owned tools such as Sun Studio, although that is not the main focus of the project.^[3]

Release schedule

The first development release of OpenIndiana, Build 147, was released on September 14, 2010,^[31] while a second development release, Build 148 was released on December 17, 2010.^[32] A third development release, Build 151 was released on September 14, 2011. This is the first release to be based upon Illumos. Build 151a7 for Intel/AMD architectures was released on October 6, 2012. OpenSXCE 2013.01 SPARC Build 151a by Martux was released through OpenIndiana on Feb. 1, 2013. ^[33]

References

External links

• Official website
• Openindiana Announcement by Joerg Moellenkamp
• OpenIndiana Officially Announced Announcement on OSNews