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Old 06-04-2017, 10:28 AM   #1
KenJackson
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Is anyone using a distro of illumos?


There are 12 distros of illumos referenced on their web site.

Has anyone installed any of them and using it happily?

I installed OmniOS on an old machine and briefly experimented with it, maybe a year ago, but I was concerned about the disjointed updates. OmniTI has a repository, and there was a third party repository I added (maybe from SmartOS), plus I installed some packages from pkgsrc. You have to jump around a little to get what you want, but packages from the various sources didn't mesh well together.

I had been toying with the idea of moving my main Linux desktop into a virtual machine hosted by KVM on OmniOS.
 
Old 06-04-2017, 06:49 PM   #2
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I have explored around a few of illumos distro's. Like you I have explored a tad bit in OmniOS, but I didn't make it too far. DilOS looks promising, but it need some work, its nice to have the debian way of installing things, but it doesn't create a alternate boot environment. It also doesn't have a page to search the repository.

Currently the only thing that I use that is illumos is OpenIndiana, as I use it for my home server. Its all right, and it gets the job done. Sure the heck is challenging since I came from a Linux environment, but I say it was well worth the challenge. As well as rewarding.
 
Old 06-16-2017, 03:39 PM   #3
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What is the advantage of running illumos over Solaris? Isn't it just a Solaris clone, but Solaris is free now and you can just download it from the ORACLE website, unless you're using it on a server that's making a lot of money.
 
Old 06-16-2017, 06:49 PM   #4
KenJackson
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Laserbeak View Post
What is the advantage of running illumos over Solaris?
I'm totally outside the Solaris world, though I've always been interested. Do you totally trust Oracle?

When Sun released OpenSolaris I was delighted. I love Linux and the competition among distros, but I figured having competition from a different strong platform with it's own zealot followers would only make the free software world stronger. But what did Oracle do? They swallowed it whole and slammed the door shut.

I haven't even followed what's going on with Solaris, but it sounds like it's free as in beer but not free as in freedom. (Right?) If it becomes real popular, is Oracle obligated to keep it free? And since it's free, are they motivated to keep the quality up? Can skilled user/developers improve the product and submit changes? (Is the source available?)

My understanding is that illumos reproduces the Solaris world, but without Oracle's input, Oracle's control or Oracle's trademarks. Illumos is free just like Linux.

That seems like a big advantage.
 
Old 06-17-2017, 08:42 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by KenJackson View Post
I'm totally outside the Solaris world, though I've always been interested. Do you totally trust Oracle?

When Sun released OpenSolaris I was delighted. I love Linux and the competition among distros, but I figured having competition from a different strong platform with it's own zealot followers would only make the free software world stronger. But what did Oracle do? They swallowed it whole and slammed the door shut.

I haven't even followed what's going on with Solaris, but it sounds like it's free as in beer but not free as in freedom. (Right?) If it becomes real popular, is Oracle obligated to keep it free? And since it's free, are they motivated to keep the quality up? Can skilled user/developers improve the product and submit changes? (Is the source available?)

My understanding is that illumos reproduces the Solaris world, but without Oracle's input, Oracle's control or Oracle's trademarks. Illumos is free just like Linux.

That seems like a big advantage.
Solaris is the first UNIX flavor I ever learned, so it has a special place in my heart, although Mac OS X does too since as far as the desktop goes, Apple has always been my choice.

As far as the rights to Solaris goes, you can use Solaris 11.3 for personal use. I haven't really researched licensing fees if you use it for a commercial website, but if you're making tons of money off the site hosted by Solaris you're probably SUPPOSED to pay ORACLE some type of fee, but I don't know what it is. Of course, almost anything you develop in Solaris is easily portable to a free UNIX distribution, so you can get around this. So you could develop in Solaris then move to FreeBSD or Linux for production. Of course, if you're just playing around with UNIX, there's no reason you can't just use Solaris for free.

Last edited by Laserbeak; 06-17-2017 at 08:46 AM.
 
Old 10-03-2017, 11:54 PM   #6
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I just started digging into illumos distros. Tribblix looks actually rather nice, somewhat like a Slackware edition of illumos (no shiny cruft, maintained by a single guy, reduced to the very essentials). I'll fire up a new Acer with it when it arrives some time this week. If anyone is interested in my findings, please just let me know, I'll happily take notes then.
http://tribblix.org

edit: illumos does not support ath10k WiFi chipsets yet, so a laptop with it is of limited usability. Other than that, it works like a charm.
For now, I'll pause the tests.

Last edited by YesItsMe; 10-08-2017 at 06:28 PM.
 
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Old 10-05-2017, 04:49 AM   #7
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SmartOS is interesting as it is mainly for virtualization. Bryan Cantrill is behind it.
 
Old 10-05-2017, 05:16 AM   #8
YesItsMe
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SmartOS is not really meant to be used as a "system to work with" according to its description.
 
Old 07-09-2019, 06:56 PM   #9
AveryFreeman
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Old thread, but I thought I'd chime in

Been an OmniOS user for the last year, it's incredibly stable and the features like beadm, windows domain compatibility, and zfs have been great not to have to implement 3rd-party.

I'm using it for a file server, though. Not sure how well it'd fare on a laptop.

For that, If you're wanting to go Illumos I'd recommend OpenIndiana. It's a rolling distro whereas OmniOS does point updates.

FWIW It might be a neat OS but I think you'd probably be sad with the lack of software availability compared to Linux or even FreeBSD for a desktop system. Unless you're really into security or stability, like someone who'd run OpenBSD as their daily driver (read: not most people).

Any interest in the Illumos projects is great, though, because it's important to keep these guys going. They have a lot going for them and the more people who realize this, put them to use, and increase the size of the community, the better IMO.
 
Old 07-09-2019, 07:07 PM   #10
wagscat123
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OpenIndiana isn't too bad. It can be a little stale in terms of packages, but runs reasonably well despite only really having "Development" releases (at least when I last checked). It comes off as a slightly updated OpenSolaris
 
Old 07-10-2019, 02:17 PM   #11
YesItsMe
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I noticed that pkgsrc is notoriously outdated. Sigh...
 
Old 07-11-2019, 02:58 PM   #12
AveryFreeman
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wagscat123 View Post
OpenIndiana isn't too bad. It can be a little stale in terms of packages, but runs reasonably well despite only really having "Development" releases (at least when I last checked). It comes off as a slightly updated OpenSolaris
?? OpenSolaris hasn't been developed since v10 ?? That's like 2009 (!) Illumos is WAY more up-to-date than that.

AFAIK OI is more like running FreeBSD-CURRENT (or like Debian testing) Arch, TW, etc. because it's rolling (that's why it's always in development), and OmniOS more like running OpenBSD or Debian stable - point releases, carefully curated packages that might not be the newest but are stable and secure. Not all new software makes it through but it's emphasis is on stability and security, which is fundamentally incompatible with opening the flood gates on all the newest packages.

It's hardly a new methodology, more of a worldview as expressed through OS maintainers. Debian talks about this in their "don't break Debian" philosophy - "don't suffer from shiny new stuff syndrome".

https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDeb...Stuff_Syndrome

If you want the newest packages that have to be installed from PKGBUILD scripts and don't mind them being broken 50% of the time, install Arch. (or broken 10% of the time, install FreeBSD ports).
 
  


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