# OpenIndiana - Illumos future?



## sk8harddiefast (Feb 23, 2014)

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3) Why his packages are so outdated?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 Is very bad to install an OS with outdated packages that in the end you know that will go to be dead.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.


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## zspider (Feb 23, 2014)

Could always look at OpenSXCE. I'm sure Martin could use some help too.


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## sk8harddiefast (Feb 23, 2014)

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


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## rusty (Feb 23, 2014)

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


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## CurlyTheStooge (Feb 23, 2014)

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...





> I thought OpenIndiana because
> 1) Easy Gui Installer
> 2) ZFS
> 3) Stability
> ...



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.


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## sk8harddiefast (Feb 23, 2014)

@@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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## sk8harddiefast (Feb 23, 2014)

Ok. I am going to install PCBSD. OpenIndiana just won't boot. I get Kernel page fault bla bla bla


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## CurlyTheStooge (Feb 23, 2014)

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.


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## apple (Feb 25, 2014)

gpatrick said:
			
		

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



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


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## rusty (Feb 26, 2014)

To be fair, the thread was never about Oracle Solaris.


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## sk8harddiefast (Feb 26, 2014)

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.


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## Crivens (Feb 26, 2014)

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.


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## _martin (Feb 26, 2014)

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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## zspider (Feb 27, 2014)

matoatlantis said:
			
		

> *EDIT:* off topic in off topic: @zspider: good avatar!  Suddenly I have an urge to watch Ed Edd 'n Eddy



Thanks.


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## TomHsiung (Feb 12, 2018)

OpenIndiana is good. It has many pre-built features. Also, OpenIndiana has a nice desktop GUI.

Tom


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## ronaldlees (Feb 12, 2018)

TomHsiung said:


> OpenIndiana is good. It has many pre-built features. Also, OpenIndiana has a nice desktop GUI.
> 
> Tom


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)


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## marino (Feb 12, 2018)

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.


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## xchris (Feb 13, 2018)

zspider said:


> Could always look at OpenSXCE. I'm sure Martin could use some help too.



OpenSXCE's latest release was on 2014


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## hukadan (Feb 13, 2018)

xchris said:


> OpenSXCE's latest release was on 2014



So was the post you just quoted.


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## xchris (Feb 13, 2018)

hukadan said:


> So was the post you just quoted.


lol epic fail... did not notice the date!


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## marino (Feb 13, 2018)

me neither!


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## Oko (Feb 14, 2018)

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).


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## vermaden (Feb 14, 2018)

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


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.



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.



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.


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.


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.


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).


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.



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).


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 ...


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## Oko (Feb 14, 2018)

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


```
/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


```
# =====================================================================
# 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


```
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"
```


```
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.


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## Sensucht94 (Feb 15, 2018)

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



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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## Cthulhux (Feb 15, 2018)

Sensucht94 said:


> I recently decided to move it to Void Linux armv7hl, as I wanted to give musl a try



Void Linux is nice for what it tries to do (mainly, provide a Linux distribution that chooses the best instead of the most commonly used tools). Most of the _disadvantages_ of Linux when compared to BSD and Unix are still there though.

On-topic: Since illumos and its distributions are the only free _real Unices_ (as in: directly derived from SysV) in existence, I admit that I have a soft spot for it. The only problem with it seems to be that every single illumos distribution is tailored for exactly one purpose. SmartOS desktops would not make much sense, neither would OpenIndiana servers, probably. Is there even a way to install OpenIndiana without a GUI?

That said, I really like Tribblix and I can imagine having it as my daily driver soon. 



Sensucht94 said:


> 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



From what I have (read and) seen, Tribblix seems to be "OpenIndiana done right", especially in terms of performance and simplicity. But that is probably a matter of taste.


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## vermaden (Feb 16, 2018)

Oko said:


> vermaden Thank you for that great post.


Welcome, just my random thoughts on the topic.



Oko said:


> Alpine Linux can do root on ZFS although I am not running it in such configuration.


It would also require `beadm` rewrite for Linux for Boot Environments 



Oko said:


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


https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine
If I would be forced to use NFS on Linux, it would probably be clustered Ganesha NFS:
https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/wiki



Oko said:


> I am not sure I would retire that FreeNAS box in favor of Alpine Linux.https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine


https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine
If You use FreeNAS instead of plain FreeBSD then You will probably miss that web GUI from FreeNAS 



Oko said:


> Alpine Xen Dom0 is really where the distro truly shines (firewall and embedded of course if Linux is preferred over OpenBSD).https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine


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

For single host for sure, what about highly available Xen on Alpine Linux?

What about web management?
Xen Orchestra?
https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xo-features/webinterface

We use Oracle's Xen variant - Oracle VM for X86 which is free for both personal and corporate use - of course its not that secure and minimal as Alpine Linux, but it provides clustering (HA) and a web manager (Oracle VM Manager) for 'central' management.

We also tested oVirt recently on 3-node cluster, also worked quite ok with Hosted Engine setup (manager is hosted on any of 3 oVirt hosts).



Oko said:


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


Thank You.



Oko said:


> 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.


Oracle VM by default sets about 10GB if I recall correctly 



Oko said:


> (...) makes you really wonder why FreeBSD people where wasting  time  with bhyve . Migrating and backing up DomUs is peace of cake.


Why use OpenBSD why there is Linux? Why use Alpine Linux while there is CentOS? Same for Bhyve or XEN on FreeBSD. I definitely prefer to use Bhyve or Xen (when it will be ready) to ANYTHING on Linux, but first it have to be ready, and to be ready it first need to be 'not ready' and not mature, because its developed from scratch and it also has best license possible - the BSD license. Why OpenBSD created 'vmm'? Probably for the same reasons.


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## giahung1997 (Feb 16, 2018)

Why made yourself in trouble when using musl based distro like Alpine but skip Devuan or AntiX? I'm using MXLinux17, it uses OpenRC and works flawlessly.


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## ronaldlees (Feb 16, 2018)

giahung1997 said:


> Why made yourself in trouble when using musl based distro like Alpine but skip Devuan or AntiX? I'm using MXLinux17, it uses OpenRC and works flawlessly.



Why fish with a new lure, except to catch different fish? Or more fish?  But really, both those distros are pretty thin on the community side, so you're pretty much on your own with any issues.  I mean, don't get me wrong - they're trying - and Alpine does have a forum, albeit there's not a lot of activity on it.  IMO - there was less activity on the Devuan forum the last time I checked.  I have Alpine on one of my setups, and it's OK for what I'm doing, and I haven't been bothered by musl issues too much.  I have a Devuan/Pi setup for programming my Photon, and it's OK for that.  Each distro has its strengths and weaknesses.  Think wide!


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## aragats (Feb 16, 2018)

giahung1997 said:


> I'm using MXLinux17, it uses OpenRC and works flawlessly.


Debian still supports OpenRC. Everything depends on your purposes as ronaldlees mentioned above.
At work I have to use Linux in a commercial device we develop. I decided to use Debian with OpenRC: it's much easier to deal with such a popular (in all meanings) and well supported distribution. I tried Apline and found 2 major things I didn't like: (1) I didn't get any responses to my questions posted on their mailing lists regarding ARM, (2) they don't provide certain essential (to me) packages which I don't want to build for a number of reasons, e.g. _mono_.


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## giahung1997 (Feb 17, 2018)

ronaldlees said:


> Why fish with a new lure, except to catch different fish? Or more fish?  But really, both those distros are pretty thin on the community side, so you're pretty much on your own with any issues.  I mean, don't get me wrong - they're trying - and Alpine does have a forum, albeit there's not a lot of activity on it.  IMO - there was less activity on the Devuan forum the last time I checked.  I have Alpine on one of my setups, and it's OK for what I'm doing, and I haven't been bothered by musl issues too much.  I have a Devuan/Pi setup for programming my Photon, and it's OK for that.  Each distro has its strengths and weaknesses.  Think wide!


I don't use Devuan directly so I don't know, just saw it has a new version on Distrowatch.com some days ago. I use MXLinux17, based on AntiX but use XFCE4.


aragats said:


> Debian still supports OpenRC. Everything depends on your purposes as ronaldlees mentioned above.
> At work I have to use Linux in a commercial device we develop. I decided to use Debian with OpenRC: it's much easier to deal with such a popular (in all meanings) and well supported distribution. I tried Apline and found 2 major things I didn't like: (1) I didn't get any responses to my questions posted on their mailing lists regarding ARM, (2) they don't provide certain essential (to me) packages which I don't want to build for a number of reasons, e.g. _mono_.


Debian default to SystemD. It depends on SystemD so much even on MX now I've libsystemD.


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## Sensucht94 (Feb 17, 2018)

I may sound crazy, but I dislike OpenRC too; Runit and Busybox-init are much more reasonable, and much more alike BSD/RC-init (in phylosophy and "feel", despite using runlevels like SysV)


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## giahung1997 (Feb 18, 2018)

Sensucht94 said:


> I may sound crazy, but I dislike OpenRC too; Runit and Busybox-init are much more reasonable, and much more alike BSD/RC-init (in phylosophy and "feel", despite using runlevels like SysV)


It's about of taste. TrueOS use OpenRC, too


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## vermaden (Mar 9, 2018)

Looks like Delphix just dumped Illumos in favor of Linux for their OpenZFS appliances:
https://medium.com/@eschrock/kickoff-to-the-future-27331c0ab461


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## Cthulhux (Mar 9, 2018)

Ew.


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## priyadarshan (Mar 9, 2018)

vermaden said:


> Looks like Delphix just dumped Illumos in favor of Linux for their OpenZFS appliances:



The company I work for has been testing ZfsOnLinux for quite a long time.

We met with some serious bugs, but I guess those are edge cases that are not met in general.

Interestingly, our CTO has been evaluating Illumos, both SmartOS for servers and OpenIndiana as available choice for the engineers.

Some engineeres jumped to OpenIndiana, as it has a very smooth Mate environment.

Time Slider made many smile.


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## hotaronohanako (Mar 9, 2018)

priyadarshan said:


> The company I work for has been testing ZFSOnLinux for quite a long time. We met with some very serious bugs, but I guess those are edge cases that are not met in general. Interestingly, our CTO has been evaluating Illumos, both SmartOS for servers and OpenIndiana as available choice for the engineers. Some engineeres jumped to OpenIndiana, as it has a very smooth Mate environment. Time Slider made many smile.



Would you please give some details about the bugs you are refereing to?


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## priyadarshan (Mar 9, 2018)

hotaronohanako said:


> Would you please give some details about the bugs you are refereing to?



We experienced data corruption on different hardware combinations.

We contributed to this ticket for a while, but, given the fact that the very same hardware with same load and use case was fine with FreeBSD or illumos, we stopped testing Linux.

Currently we are using FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE quite happily. Some servers are being switched over to illumos, due to different kernel features that better meet our company products. SmartOS, by the way, is in the priocess of adopting Bhyve, substituting KVM. That will help too.


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## danh (Mar 10, 2018)

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
> 
> ...





> SmartOS is another semi-viable product on that page


That is an ignorant statement.  Semi-viable?  



> OmniOS  is dead.


Another ignorant statement that is completely untrue.

Here's a tip:  If you don't know what you're talking about, then don't say anything.  Not sure how you received all of those "thanks" because if they're anything like the nonsense you posted here, it is probably just a bunch of opinion without any facts to back them up.



> Their Rasmon monitoring tool was a joke


You're a joke.  Seriously, how can you possibly be taken seriously spewing this?


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## Crivens (Mar 10, 2018)

danh, meet Oko. He may be abrasive at times but also knows some things. Keep it civilized, gentlemen, so there can be some learning along the way.


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## danh (Mar 10, 2018)

Maybe he does have some knowledge, but he should stick to what he knows instead of spreading outright lies.

OmniOS Community Edition 

One of the maintainers is Tobias Oetiker who created RRDTool and MRTG.  He uses OmniOS in his business.  I am very confident that whatever knowledge or skill is possessed by Oko is surpassed tenfold by Tobias.  On March 8th a fix for Meltdown was available for testing.  This really doesn't appear to be a dead project like Oko says it is.  This kind of talk doesn't help the OmniOS CE project, rather it hurts it.  So Oko needs to be knowledgeable of the facts before making bold and incorrect statements.


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## ralphbsz (Mar 10, 2018)

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 ..


Sorry, that statement is flat out false.

Brendan is not recommending that former Solaris users switch to anything in particular.  He points out that switching from Solaris=Illumos to Linux has become easier, and then he goes into the details of how to do it.  He does not say that Solaris users *should* switch to Linux, nor does he recommend it.  Matter-of-fact, he explicitly mentions BSD, and calls it "another compelling choice".  

Please do not put words in people's mouth.  If you know a little bit about large commercial users of BSD, you will understand why the wrong statement you made might be very harmful.  Please go and edit your post and remove those statements; I will ask the moderators to remove where they were quoted.


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