Hey all,

So I've seen the main download available is Hipster, and saw a new snapshot was released. I also saw that Hipster is a rapidly evolving unstable development branch.

I draw from this that I should just continue to run my regular package updates and not do much more to my original Hipster 2016.10 machine.

I also didn't see mention of a stable branch - so OI is just incomplete for now? Or is the wiki I was looking at out of date?

Many thanks,
wagscat

OpenIndiana is pretty much a project in development right now. Hipster is the only thing they distribute in ISO form, and it's the dev branch with releases every 6 months. It's kinda the Fedora of the Illumos world.

I'm on their mailing list, and I can't quite tell whether they intend to stabilize at some point or if they see themselves as a dev branch forever (although I haven't asked, either).

Currently, as far as I know, the only stable Illumos distribution now is OmniOS (https://omnios.omniti.com). SmartOS/Joyent seems to be partially dead (it appears to have evolved into a container-only OS). There are a few others listed on illumos.org.

OmniOS seems to be more geared toward enterprise-class use cases. I guess I should just keep updating my Hipster install and it will always be up to date, as a rolling release distro that releases occasional ISO Snapshots?

If you're just running it as a personal OS, yes, probably that's your best bet.

I didn't know your use-case. There are other distributions you could try out. I've never used them, but they might be worth checking out, like DilOS.org. It's Illumos with APT; pretty active.

But aside from all that, yes, I think rolling along with Hipster is basically the intended use case, at least for now.

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I'm using it mainly for personal goofing around. I may install it on physical hardware one day; I've always had a spot in my heart for Solaris. It sounds like OpenIndiana is my best bet. Thanks!

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Just installed Hipster in virtualbox and find it interesting, but not ready for daily use yet. I haven't figured out how to install extra software yet.
Something like synaptic would make a huge difference to me. Usually I install aisleriot or pysol just to make sure I can install something. I did figure out how to add a couple of repositories and run an update-upgrade. I just don't see much talk about Hipster or a forum. Wish the project luck and will keep it in virtual for now.