OpenIndiana - Illumos future?

sk8harddiefast

sk8harddiefast

I want to install for Angie's computer, OpenIndiana. In the past I used for a little OpenSolaris and was just wonderfull. Αngie 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3) Why his packages are so outdated?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?

I thought OpenIndiana because

1) Easy Gui Installer
2) ZFS
3) Stability
3) Prebuilt compiz effects
4) Support automount usb etc
5) Updated packages are not our primary job. Just to do here job nice and easy.

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 or DesktopBSD just to support it in his new start? I would like to have a future. Is very bad to install an OS with outdated packages that in the end you know that will go to be dead.
I need your opinions.
 
Could always look at OpenSXCE. I'm sure Martin could use some help too.
 
You believe that OpenSXCE is better option? Is more updated and has brighter future? Which are the differences on all this distros (Stormos, omnios, openindiana, opensxce etc?)
All seems almost the same on eyes. All are coming with gnome2, zfs, all comes with illumos kernel. But witch one of them is OS with future?
I created a poll :)
 
I don't think OI will die anytime soon, last year the "hipster" branch was developed to reboot things after some stagnation. You can browse their github here.
No forums as far as I know, all done via mailing list, which are pretty busy - http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo

You could consider using SmartOS's pkgsrc packages which are regularly updated - http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/packages/SmartOS
Instructions to install - http://www.perkin.org.uk/pages/pkgsrc-b ... lumos.html note: you'll want to change the 2013Q3 to 2013Q4 to get current builds.
Some more instructions - http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/whats-ne ... 013Q2.html

Edit:
Via the videolan wiki page I see there's also OpenCSW packages for OpenIndiana
http://sfe.opencsw.org/prelim-sfe-startpage

Hope that helps
 
sk8harddiefast said:
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...
Click to expand...
I thought OpenIndiana because
1) Easy Gui Installer
2) ZFS
3) Stability
3) Prebuilt compiz effects
4) Support automount usb etc
5) Updated packages are not our primary job. Just to do here job nice and easy.
Click to expand...

Apart from ZFS, what's that OpenIndiana can do which PCBSD(has ZFS) or if I may suggest any 'stable' Linux distro (e.g. Debian) can't do as a desktop?
Not to sound like an Linux evangelist, for the above mentioned simple day to day tasks I'd not bother to install OpenIndiana, rather install PCBSD or a stable Linux distro as in Debian or Slackware(no GUI installer) and get done with that.

As you are a BSD user already, why not install PCBSD and save the headache.

Regards.
 
@@rusty thanks for the informations!
@@CurlyTheStooge Just I want something different. Now is running Ubuntu. Is very slow, very unstable and for some reason I don't want to install Linux (Maybe elementary).
I have FreeBSD server (FreeNAS), FreeBSD desktop and for Angie's computer I was thinking something like OpenIndiana because I missed this OS and I would like to have on computer running it. Also is easy to use because everything is on GUI and if has any problem, I will help here because we live toguether.
Well. I don't reject Desktop or PCBSD just I played yesterday with OpenIndiana on VBox and if we overlook the outdated packages is amazing and with @@rusty informations could be just a perfect choise :)
Just I was afraid a little about his future. When you install an OS you want to have a support. To have updates and bug fixes and is very logical
 
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Great. I read that PC-BSD is vanilla FreeBSD underneath and installer even gives the option to install plain FreeBSD, cool. Your entire PC ecosystem is now FreeBSD centric.

Regards.
 
gpatrick said:
1) The future of OpenIndiana? Is a project that will die soon, will survive or is already dead?
Click to expand...
There are a few dedicated people who work on maintaining packages and there are (in)frequent updates.

2) Is any official OpenIndiana forum? I didn't find anyone.
Click to expand...
There is a wiki, but there isn't anyone who will likely answer. But you can join the oi-discuss and oi-dev mailing lists and you will probably get answers.

3) Why his packages are so outdated? I didn't find vlc and on official repos is Mozilla 10!
Click to expand...
Some packages are updated, but yes, most are outdated. opencsw.org maintains packages that can also be installed. There is documentation on the wiki on how to setup OI to use pkgin, but I haven't tried it.

4) If Openindiana is not the answer which illumos distro to choose for a simple desktop computer?
Click to expand...
OmniOS is an illumos distribution but is for a server. SmartOS is another illumos distribution by Joyent and is a hypervisor which I use to host my domains and use kvm with OpenBSD for my mail servers. Aside from that, as mentioned there is OpenSXCE which Martin has gone to great lengths to develop.

5) Finally. Illumos itself is going to live or die?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

I say as said Sirdice Moderator, Solaris as an OS is pretty much dead. Oracle killed it. You will still find quite some older Solaris' boxes but I doubt anyone would, willingly, buy new.If you know enough of FreeBSD you will have no problems finding your way on Solaris, if you happen to cross paths with one. reference: http://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php ... vs+solaris
 
Yeap. Solaris is something that I didn't have in my mind. I always loved Solaris. Was a nice looking, serious hardcore Unix with a lot options and tremendous stability. All this before Oracle. Oracle bought Sun only for here patents. Nothing more, nothing less. Killed OpenSolaris which was amazing and Keep Solaris only to provide Oracle databases. Oracle's only care is about money and enterprises. And today Solaris is a dead Os. Not because is not powerful. Just because Oracle is against open source and because Solaris is not free or free but without updates.
 
Oracle is not against anything, only for more profit. And all this in slices of 3 month each, because if you want to push a serious amount of money into something new, the shareholders will frown at you. Been there, saw it, got the TShirt. You may like to watch this very interesting thing detailing what will happen to Oracle. It will happen, has happened in the past and will continue to happen to such companies.
 
It's the same old story. It always boils down to the following: what purpose should that computer (notebook/server/node) serve ?

I've an OpenIndiana server in my LAB doing iSCSI storage for bunch of HP-UX servers in ServiceGuard cluster and providing LUNs for HPVM (HP virtual machine) nodes. It works perfectly. It had an uptime for ~2 years without any problem. I didn't even know it's there. Just awesome (ZFS luns were managed by my perl login shell providing very simple cmd-storage interface). (Frankly I'd use Solaris 11 but that would break our HP rules due to .. well, y'know :) )

Don't count on it if you want a fancy-schmancy GUI, all the brand new /open-source/ packages, etc. In your case go for an OS you like and you can always spawn a virtual machine of OpenIndiana on it if you like.

Is OpenIndiana dead ? No, not really. It evolves slower though. But don't forget: FreeBSD is on steroids due to guys from OpenSolaris (Illumos).

EDIT: off topic in off topic: @zspider: good avatar! :) Suddenly I have an urge to watch Ed Edd 'n Eddy :)
 
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matoatlantis said:
EDIT: off topic in off topic: @zspider: good avatar! :) Suddenly I have an urge to watch Ed Edd 'n Eddy :)
Click to expand...

Thanks. :P
 
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TomHsiung said:
OpenIndiana is good. It has many pre-built features. Also, OpenIndiana has a nice desktop GUI.

Tom
Click to expand...
I've used OmniOS (based on the Illumos kernel) for an in-house server. There are a slew of Illumos derived distros: EON, Illumian, NexentaStor, OmniOS, OpenIndiana, SmartOS, Tribblix, etc.

If you're looking for a GUI on your Illumos distro, IIRC only OpenIndiana and Tribblix have the GUI - and the web pages I've seen favored Tribblix for some reason. OTOH, if you don't want a dead-end system, you might just run FreeBSD! (hint)
 
I'm nearing completion for Ravenports package support for Solaris 10u8+ and Illumos derivatives:
http://www.ravenports.com/

I'd say about 90% of the packages are building now.
There are some key big ones I'm still working on.
I guess I could release an initial repository depending on what is needed and demand.
Check the "catalog" in the linked site.
 
Here Brendan Gregg who was a kernel and performance Solaris engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition by Sun is recommending to all former Solaris users to switch to Linux

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to-linux-2017.html

IIRC vermaden was a serious OpenSolaris user so he probably can shine more lite to the future of Illumos kernel. IMHO as somebody who grow up using Solaris (my third UNIX after Tru64 and short affair with Irix) starting with Solaris nowadays is an example of necrophilia. Illumos kernel IMHO has no future.

Of course one can always decide to purchase NexentaStor if they were previously invested heavily in Solaris but in my experience most companies which have no in house expertise to run vanilla FreeBSD these days will prefer TrueNAS in spite of Corral fiasco and PC-BSD to TrueOS monkey business which affected only IXSystems unpaid customers.

SmartOS is another semi-viable product on that page

https://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions

which is a niche virtualization platform. It could be of some interest to people who want something along the lines of Proxmox but are more familiar with Solaris. Due to the fact that these days few interesting applications run on Solaris it would be very hard to take advantage of the most technically appealing things like Solaris zones and Crossbow on SmartOS (I wish Jails and VNET were that good). KVM is a Linux thing and running it on SmartOS sounds dumb to me. The very fact that SmartOS uses NetBSD pkgsrc as the official package management should be a big red flag. There is nothing wrong with pkgsrc on the NetBSD but that thing contrary to NetBSD's PRBS is not portable as marino can attest. That is why DragonFly BSD switched to D-Ports. (Minix and Draco Linux still use pkgsrc).

Personally when it comes to virtualization I am heavily vested in Xen and my choice for Dom0 is Alpine Linux.

OmniOS is dead. As much as I liked Jason Dixon as OpenBSD contributor his OmniIT Labs never produced a useful working open source tool (I hope paid customers did better). Their Rasmon monitoring tool was a joke

http://labs.omniti.com/labs/resmon

I don't see anything on that page that deserves any further comment. By the way Ubuntu 16.04 "ships with ZFS" and due to the fact that most OpenZFS contributors use Linux at work I would not be surprised that ZFS becomes first class citizen on Linux now that Red Hat removed BTRFS vaporware from their OS. Obvious problem is that Oracle owns ZFS but for now all of us who are using it chose to ignore that fact (myself included).
 
Oko said:
Here Brendan Gregg who was a kernel and performance Solaris engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition by Sun is recommending to all former Solaris users to switch to Linux

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to-linux-2017.html
Click to expand...
I assume that this blog post is more job related then technology related, its a lot easier to find Linux job then to find FreeBSD job, and its a lob easier to find FreeBSD job then Illumos job.

He also mentions BSD's several times but his 'focus' on Linux technologies are superficial at most.

He mentions Docker with Zones in mind but he does not mentions that Docker has ZERO separation without SELinux (or AppArmor), which are PITA to configure and use. Same with networking, Solaris/Illumos has great resource control via projects, along with creating a separate SMF service with two processes with separate CPU pool and different CPU scheduling for that pool ... but Linux only has network namespaces and cgroups ... its like comparing SR-71 Blackbird (Solaris) to Cessna 172 (Linux). Because something is popular it does not make it better. Going that route, lets eat sh!t, millions of flies can not be wrong ...

So this blog post is 'job' biased (which is not bad but You need to keep that in mind while reading it).

I use FreeBSD since 2005 (FreeBSD 5.x) and I use it till this very day and will be using it in the future, but is my job FreeBSD focused? Unfortunately no. Can I use FreeBSD at work? Sometimes when its appreciated and better suited then Linux or better suited then IBM AIX etc., for example for storage servers with ZFS and its features, sometimes for Jails, sometimes for other features ...

Oko said:
IIRC vermaden was a serious OpenSolaris user so he probably can shine more lite to the future of Illumos kernel. IMHO as somebody who grow up using Solaris (my third UNIX after Tru64 and short affair with Irix) starting with Solaris nowadays is an example of necrophilia. Illumos kernel IMHO has no future.
Click to expand...

Illumos future is not great, but still better then 'official' Oracle Solaris after all these RIF layoffs of almost entire Solaris and SPARC teams. I would compare that to numbers, if Linux ecosystem size is 100, then FreeBSD ecosystem size is 10 and Illumos ecosystem is 1, (which is very generalized).

Do Illumos has future? Sure. SAMSUNG has bought SmartOS 'cloud os' (Joyent) which is great in what is used for and I doubt it will 'die' anytime soon, many Stock Markets use SmartOS for their services as its mentioned in this video:
https://containersummit.io/events/sf-2015/videos/wolf-of-what-containers-on-wall-street

Same for Delphix which uses Illumos in its database appliances.

Oko said:
Of course one can always decide to purchase NexentaStor if they were previously invested heavily in Solaris but in my experience most companies which have no in house expertise to run vanilla FreeBSD these days will prefer TrueNAS in spite of Corral fiasco and PC-BSD to TrueOS monkey business which affected only IXSystems unpaid customers.
Click to expand...

I would omit NexentaStor personally, FreeNAS is far better solution here (and free for all purposes).

Oko said:
KVM is a Linux thing and running it on SmartOS sounds dumb to me.
Click to expand...
If something is dumb, but works, its not dumb. Why write your own hypervisor while You can port one? FreeBSD's Bhyve also has been ported to Illumos recently. 'Funny' thing about KVM on SmartOS/Illumos is that its Intel only, does not support AMD.

Its also one of the most important things that are missing on Oracle Solaris, X86 virtualization. In Sun times there were xVM project which integrated XEN and Solaris and worked pretty well, but as Oracle took over Sun they killed it and created Oracle VM for X86 which is base on Red Hat Linux clone - Oracle Linux and that still leaves Solaris without ANY X86 virtualization possibilities in 2018, which IS dumb.

Oko said:
The very fact that SmartOS uses NetBSD pkgsrc as the official package management should be a big red flag.
Click to expand...
Probably the same thing as with KVM, You can do it yourself from the ground up and 'waste' more time or get something that already works and polish it a little, for the purposes of SmartOS (almost non changable virtualization/cloud host) this seems to be good choice, it would be other case if they would like to be 'general' distribution like OpenIndiana or like FreeBSD.

Oko said:
Personally when it comes to virtualization I am heavily vested in Xen and my choice for Dom0 is Alpine Linux.
Click to expand...
You should post some HOWTO on FreeBSD formus, I would be very interested to see how its setup, as Alpine Linux seems to be sh!t free Linux, or at least from most of the typical Linux sh!t like systemd or glibc.

Oko said:
OmniOS is dead. As much as I liked Jason Dixon as OpenBSD contributor his OmniIT Labs never produced a useful working open source tool (I hope paid customers did better).
Click to expand...
OmniOS has just been 'phased' to community with introduction of OmniOSce (Community Edition) and they already started to provide 'paid' version (which is good progress in they journey). Will tehy survive? Maybe. Its more about Illumos ecosystem then about OmniOSce.

For example, If You want 'desktop' Illumos, then You get OpenIndiana, if You want cloud, then You get SmartOS, if You want server Illumis, then You get OmniOSce, there is 'almost' nothing more ...

I would prefer that Illumos would go the FreeBSD way with general purpose core and maybe some variants, but the model of central 'general' core of Illumos and 'external' distributions seems to not work that well.

Oko said:
I don't see anything on that page that deserves any further comment. By the way Ubuntu 16.04 "ships with ZFS" and due to the fact that most OpenZFS contributors use Linux at work I would not be surprised that ZFS becomes first class citizen on Linux now that Red Hat removed BTRFS vaporware from their OS.
Click to expand...

But can You install Ubuntu on ZFS root? Nope. So its the same 'ZFS on Linux' bullsh!t as on every other Linux distribution. You can not use ZFS Boot Environments with Ubuntu (or any other Linux). ZFS on Linux is still sh!t.

Oko said:
Obvious problem is that Oracle owns ZFS but for now all of us who are using it chose to ignore that fact (myself included).
Click to expand...
Oracle owns their own ZFS but Oracle DOES NOT OWN OpenZFS, so Oracle is not a problem here.

BTW, OpenZFS 'joint project', which takes Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux and Mac OS X 'distributions' into OpenZFS still keeps the 'core' source in Illumos ...
 
vermaden Thank you for that great post.

Alpine Linux can do root on ZFS although I am not running it in such configuration. However the fact that it uses musl and BusyBox makes it running on the desktop challenging to say at least. Even worse musl doesn't play well with NFS but it is not impossible

https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine

I am not sure I would retire that FreeNAS box in favor of Alpine Linux.

Alpine Xen Dom0 is really where the distro truly shines (firewall and embedded of course if Linux is preferred over OpenBSD).

You asked me about howto. Just download Alpine Linux pre-build Xen Dom0 image

https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/

Installer is straightforward text based like OpenBSD. Pretty much you can just do ok, ok and get functional Dom0 with bridge already configured. Familiarize yourself with apk package management. Add man pages and such. The only gotcha I found is that 256 MB of RAM for default Dom0 is insufficient for the very large installations I am running on the physical server with 80 cores and 1 TB of RAM which hosts more than 10 virtual computing nodes. Just edit

Code: 
/boot/extlinux.conf

and replace 256MB with let say 4 GB (way too much but it is ok). When creating DomU keep in mind that RedHat removed support for PV as of 7.4 so use HVM. Actually I tent do use HVM for everything. This is
ubuntu-16.04-hvm.cfg for Ubuntu installation I am using to run Observium

Code: 
# =====================================================================
# Example HVM guest configuration
# =====================================================================
#
# This is a fairly minimal example of what is required for an
# HVM guest. For a more complete guide see xl.cfg(5)

# This configures an HVM rather than PV guest
builder = "hvm"

# Guest name
name = "observium"

# 128-bit UUID for the domain as a hexadecimal number.
# Use "uuidgen" to generate one if required.
# The default behavior is to generate a new UUID each time the guest is started.
#uuid = "XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX"

# Enable Microsoft Hyper-V compatibile paravirtualisation /
# enlightenment interfaces. Turning this on can improve Windows guest
# performance and is therefore recommended
#viridian = 1

# Initial memory allocation (MB)
memory = 32768

# Maximum memory (MB)
# If this is greater than `memory' then the slack will start ballooned
# (this assumes guest kernel support for ballooning)
#maxmem = 512

# Number of VCPUS
vcpus = 8

# Network devices
# A list of 'vifspec' entries as described in
# docs/misc/xl-network-configuration.markdown
vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:0d:98:96, bridge=br0' ]

# Disk Devices
# A list of `diskspec' entries as described in
# docs/misc/xl-disk-configuration.txt
# disk = [ '/dev/vg/guest-volume,raw,xvda,rw' ]
disk = [
        'file:/xen-images/observium.img,xvda,rw',
        'file:/xen-images/ubuntu-16.04.iso,xvdb:cdrom,r'
        ]


# Set boot order (d =CDROM, c= HDD)
boot = "dc"

# Use VESA-compliant display with more VRAM
vga = "stdvga"
videoram = 64

# Guest VGA console configuration, either SDL or VNC
#sdl = 1
vnc = 1
vnclisten="0.0.0.0"
# vncconsole=1
vncdisplay=0              
vncpasswd='howto'


and this is the configuration file for the same image in production

Code: 
builder = "hvm"
name = "observium"
vcpus=8
memory = 32768
vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:0d:98:96, bridge=br0', 'mac=00:16:3e:0d:98:97, bridge=br1' ]
disk = [ 'file:/xen-images/observium.img,xvda,rw' ]
# disk = ['file:/vm/myvm-disk1.img,xvda,rw','file:/vm/myvm-disk2.img,xvdb,rw']
boot = "dc"
on_reboot="restart"
on_crash="restart"

Code: 
xl create ubuntu-16.04-observium.cfg

and you got yourself a virtual server. I am using combination of images like above and block devices for the DomUs. You can even do block device on the file system via LLV2. I have yet to try to put DomUs images on the top of ZFS pool which if it works as advertised makes you really wonder why FreeBSD people where wasting time with bhyve . Migrating and backing up DomUs is peace of cake.

By the way Henning Brauer got me into Alpine Linux on BSDCan few years ago as that is what he uses in his private company when they need virtualization.
 
Oko said:
Alpine Linux can do root on ZFS although I am not running it in such configuration. However the fact that it uses musl and BusyBox makes it running on the desktop challenging to say at least
Click to expand...

I had a minimal home-server (squid3, OpenSMTPD+Dovecot2, minidlnad, LPD, Transmission-daemon, vsftpd, rsyncd, with NPF) running on NetBSD/earmv6hf on Rpi3 as HostDMZ+a BeagleBone Black + a couple of USB HDDs (yes, merely a toy compared to what you guys run in your houses, especially Oko). I recently decided to move it to Void Linux armv7hl, as I wanted to give musl a try, and installed Busybox to replace CoreUtils as well: well I agree with Oko, it's damn hard, 3/4 of time I passed on it was trying to solve missing libraries and headers, or trying to compile software not included in repo tweaking with the makefiles according to musl wiki, given I didn't want to resign myself to build a glibc chroot env. It performs better undoubtedly, and probably for a headless embedded server like mine it's perfect, but trying to avoid runtime errors in GUI programs is quite the challenging task, and I think running a musl desktop is at least as hard as running a FreeBSD desktop.

Still, I can foresee it will likely become the leading Linux lib C in a future not so far as one may think

Regarding Solaris, well, it was OpenSolaris to initiate me to the Unix/Linux World (if we gloss over the ~2 years I used Corel Linux as a kid), so I'm particularly attached to it; I'm always on the edge of giving OpenIndiana a try on desktop, but this and other thread on FreeBSD forums or Demon Forums dissuade me from doing so; I wish Illumos had faced a brighter future, and it's sad to see such beautiful system die out this way; rumors aside, I wonder what lead to this point, but I guess now current state of things can't be helped anyway
 
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