A couple months ago, I added a Google Alert to my list of searches that I want to be notified on. That is, when the Google search engine finds news matching my search criteria, they email me with a link to the story. I do this for several obscure topics I'm interested in.

The new alert search criteria was: opensolaris illumos nexenta "project indiana"

If there was any new article published on any news site which Google searches which mentioned any of those four terms, they should have sent it to me. So how many hits have I received on this alert? None.


I was delighted when Sun announced OpenSolaris and said they were going to compete with Linux. I thought it would be great to have a head to head competition between free OSes. That couldn't help but invite more realistic comparisons with Windows and draw more attention to both Linux and OpenSolaris (and to the BSDs, I guess).

Then Oracle swallowed Sun whole, burped and stomped out the OpenSolaris flame.

Does the fire still burn anywhere? Is there yet hope that Illumos will fill in enough gaps to make a totally free Solaris-like OS viable, usable and desirable?

KJ,
More like Larry, et.al. swallowed, and then barfed up the OpenSolaris (O_S) project, and DeskStar too ...no revenue in "free"!

I installed (I believe) the "last" O_S release (2009.06 snv_111b X86) on the recovery partition of a Toshiba NB205, including the GRUB, a combination modeled after the product Sun was trying to peddle at the peak of their attempt to get traction with the program; pre-Oracle. The folks at Sun that I corresponded with seemed pretty bummed when it looked like Larry was going to complete the acquisition.

I had noticed that the O_S default Package Manager links to OpenSolaris.org fail. But the system not seeming to be "broken", I've had little incentive to "fix-it", and I'm really only just-now growing my admin skill set.

The last I'd read from the O_S user-group was that, after the "regurgitation" by Ellison, SourceForge was going to be beneficiary/benefactor of the project. The direction of it wasn't clear to me. But I've not seen anything further than the original mention, or sought it either - too consumed with building a new Desktop box running Slack-13.37 & working on final tuning now, specifically attempting to get the O_S/NB205 to run as a remote client to the Slack-DT, so I can get away from "the desk" environment.

I just worry about the O_S licensing paradigm.
The one attached to my release sure doesn't convey like a GNU-Public clone. Perhaps that has/will change as the program goes forward.
Illumos is news to me, so a good "heads up" kudo to you! Also, without the Linux-euro-linkage; will the support community be as large? Like most nascent projects it seems they are still trying to get traction.
But I have to believe there's a rich community of Sun X-ers that will likely try to keep it alive.

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Yeah, it's a shame at what Oracle did to the potential open-source Solaris community. Nexenta became integrated with Illumos, which hasn't released any news since May (and the forums appear dead). BeleniX seems to be gone, along with a couple others. The only one I have hope of further development is on the OpenIndiana project, and even that's kind of iffy.

I am running a LiveUSB version of OpenIndiana Build 151a and it seems quite nice. Have any of you guys tried it yet?

Please, tell more (H/W, config hi-lites, incl boot)!

@3dBdown Not much to tell really. If you are working on the windows side d/l the .usb image, get OpenSolaris Live USB Creator by Hiroshi Chonan from here: http://devzone.sites.pid0.org/OpenSo...iveusb-creator

There are linux tools available dd, etc. to do the same. I may do a h/d install later.

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@mjolnir, Thanks!