A Quick Look At OpenIndiana (A Unix-Like Operating System) 

OpenIndiana is Unix certified and is the only 100% open source Unix.

I remember trying out OpenSolaris waaay back and was in awe of everything you could do with ZFS. I was still using hardware RAID and was blown away that you could basically keep throwing mismatched performance and size disks at ZFS and happily added them to the pool

I always watch your distro installations for Arch and Gentoo. Not because they're the best, fastest, or least errors, but because we're in the same time zone, and that simplifies things.

Great to see a video on Openindiana from you ! 😊

This isn't an operating system for you and me. OpenIndiana was made to provide an easy way for Solaris sysadmins to migrate their servers to something supported after Oracle killed OpenSolaris, without having to go through the hassle of reconfiguring all of their configs, tooling, and code to Linux or BSD. Poking through the menus of a default MATE install doesn't really convey what makes OpenIndiana good or unique.

Finally a Linux-God takes a look at OpenIndiana. I tried it many years ago, but couldn't install any "different" software besides what was in the "Appstore". So I was interested for an explaination or method on how to install software from source. I didn't find it back then, so thank you very much showing the "sudo pkg install (appname)" in this video. I appreciate it. Back then (was it 15 years ago? I don't know) I was fairly new on Linux and just had used Ubuntu for two months or so and therefore I just knew the sudo apt-get install (appname) command, and I was a too lazy teenager to look it up so I gave up on OpenIndiana. Then I forgot about it. So, thank you very much for this video! I appreciate it!

This takes me back… haven't looked at openSolaris in years, and haven't touched (regular) Solaris for work since 2016…

Thanks for the quick look at OpenIndiana! I'd love to see you look at HaikuOS next!

I just stumbled on one of your videos and have been watching for the last hour.

In 1992, I was working for a large engineering-firm in Texas that designed plans for things like pipelines and petrochemical projects. There IT Gurus or software Engineers decided to invest a huge fortune in Unix-terminals, and a drafting software called MicroStation. I think prior to that they had both Intergraph workstations and windows-machines that had AutoCAD 14. It was all a huge clusterph*ck from everyone's perspective, but the I.T. guys insisted that the employees master the technology because nobody was going back to the days of drawing with a pencil and paper ( or mylar and ink ). At that time, the engineers, had very little computer-tech-savvy nor patience for such things, so the company hired dozens of technicians and designers and paid them pretty good to just draw things for the engineers. The people that mastered it all and remained with the company made good money. But there is no telling what became of those that failed to master the computer-technology of the 90's. There were a handful of people that believed the future was in smaller devices like the upcoming Palm Pilot ( PDA's ) that really could not do much but make a very simple table or chart.

I feel oddly connected to this OS; as it wasn't that long ago I was working with its sister, SmartOS. There exists a Linux system call translation layer that allows you to run Linux apps within zones (called LX zones) without the need of a hypervisor... You can even run off the shelf Linux based Docker containers on bare metal. I'm not sure if it's in OpenIndiana (probably is), but you can do it with SmartOS. It's by no means perfect, but it works well enough.

IAN MURDOCK's case is very mysterious :) Ian Murdock btw is the one of the creator of Debian (Debi and Ian) and also open solaris / open indiana os :) Project Indiana was originally conceived by Sun Microsystems, to construct a binary distribution around the OpenSolaris source code base.[8] Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux distribution.[5] wikipedia :)

SunOS 4 was my first Unix like operating system. I had a Sparc workstation at home and ran it for a while and then tried Solaris when it first came out. But today I'm an Ubuntu guy. Slackware was my first entry into Linux and I hopped around until 2018. But one day I decided I needed to be productive and Ubuntu LTS is where I settled.

I was waiting for this

I always aim at the timezone selector towards Zurich and I'm always astonished how often I got it right or where it's still ok like Vienna, Vaduz, Berlin or Rome. Selecting "Europe/Zurich" from the combobox is way harder.

Long time since I have looked at Solaris, but it had some cool stuff in there. I have always been interested in looking at zones which would be similar to BSD Jails or LXC containers.

HTOP has a readout of ZARC cache to show the actual ram usage.

Great video! I downloaded a USB image to install in Virtual Box but never got around to it. This will be a project for 2023! :)

Nice to see something other than Linux for a change. (Yeah, I´m a BSD user "BTW")

Gotta love the old "strong and complicated password" meme.

FreeBSD and Solaris share ALOT of features with each other including the commands and file layouts, etc. UFS is the default filesystem and pkg the default package manager. I am amazed this still exists frankly. It is a nice custom OS to learn on especially since it is a LIVE GUI based OS. Solaris on native SParc hardware was indeed always GUI driven but these x86 versions have come a long way since the days of Solaris 9! This was fun!

Never heard of OpenIndiana I'll have to check it out!

Solaris built some really great server features. Dual / slices for instant rollback of OS updates and patches if something went kaboom. ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, advanced networking, NFS3/4 & SMB built-in to ZFS, SMF, etc., etc., etc. Many of the command line tooling is radically different because it's all AT&T Bell Labs / SunOS / Solaris historically based. OpenIndiana / Illumos is real UNIX. GNU/Linux is a clone of commercial UNIX. You can install most of the GNU software. Linux was much faster to improve the sysadmins interface to the tools. Many of the commands have the same name but all the switches are radically different. UNIX systems were dinosaurs that didn't change all that much over time. Too many enterprise scripts and the like to go changing the command line utilities and breaking customer data centers. Joyent.com built their cloud tech on Illumos and ZFS / Zones back when AWS was just opening up and offering basic object storage and early virtual machines. Joyent hired many of the engineers and scientists fleeing Sun when Oracle bought them. The same people that built and maintained OpenSolaris. The father of Dtrace , Bryan Cantrill was their CTO for years. He's now running a startup hardware company called Oxide. It's worth watching Bryan Cantrill's talks on RU-vid. Especially the one where he talks about what happened when Oracle bought Sun.

Hey even the little you show here is enlighting.

Love your videos, also cool to see coverage of Illumos distros. Can you do a video on how to change DE's on linux mint? Or safely remove cinnamon and replace it with something else (My favorite window manager is FLWM btw) like a generic window manager?

OpenIndiana on DistroTube? A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one! Would you ever consider looking at non-*nix FOSS operating systems like Phantom, Haiku, Genode, HelenOS, etc.?

I like these shorter videos. Easier to pack into a coffee break!

There are a few software packages that have higher physical RAM requirements than I can ever have on my machine. This distribution came up when I was looking into the idea of using distributed ram. Is that something that's included in this distribution? And where do I find out more information how to set it up? Also if that is not something that would help me, is there a virtualization package that would emulate having more physical RAM then actually exists, to prevent software freezing?

Interesting OS, thanks DT! I noted when you were switching themes and you said it messed up the panel a bit - The problem is that it inverted the font colour (and made it a size bigger) but it didn't change the colour of the menu bar at the top ... Pretty sure that's easy to fix! Anyway, Thanks and Merry Xmas to you and yours ❤

I'm wondering if the CPU usage reading could be something to do with the way the VM is reporting things. i have an old G4 Power Mac that I installed one of the few flavors of Linux (I forget which; I haven't run it in a long time) which was still producing PPC releases back around 2009 or so, and one of the known bugs was that CPU usage would always show up in the resource monitor widget as 98-100% because of the way Apple had designed the system to report it. If the VM host is reporting it one way and OpenIndiana is expecting something else, I could see that possibly being the issue.

Hi, any chance there could be a separate video where you compare a few aspects that are similar to Linux in terms of software development, for example comparing IDE(s), tool configuration, containerization options similar to docker ? and maybe pros and cons based off your experience, it might be interesting to watch.

I used the real Solaris in school in real Sun Workstations, they were amazing.it was in the 1998 and they came with HotJava a browser totally written in Java, for the time it was slow and ugly but sometimes worked pretty well. the terminal was in cream or white background. it had "cc" as c compiler, like the og unix. because SunOS is truly derivative of the original UNIX, they didn't just bought a license for the name, also for the code. as window manager/desktop had CDE and OpenWindows pretty cool for the time.

Would this installation be a better option than Ubuntu for a laptop that is 5 years old?

It's a pity they didn't go for the more retro and unique theme of something like Oracle Solaris 10, as what we got just looks like any other distro of Linux/Unix/BSD, with its big 'Fisher-Price' icons and colors.

Damn bro giving me flash backs

If it wasnt Linux, I think I would stick to BSD as the unix-like OS 💪

Oracle is one of those companies I would love to see go belly up.

KVM/Qemu supports Unix-like systems pretty well. VirtualBox, which uses KVM on Linux as well by the way, just has much better graphics acceleration, that's all.

pretty cool. something a little different for once. nice nice

Will it run on a Sun Fire T2000? I've got one sitting in the corner collecting dust. Hmmm....

I wanted to run OpenTexas, but it's too big.

Very interesting system

UNIX-like non-Linux systems really aren't meant for desktops, but it does go to show that UNIX-like systems in general are really flexible systems provided you do some work to customize the system to fit your needs and accept the limitations thereof. OpenIndiana isn't for everyone. As far as what uses most of the resources, unfortunately SMF does have a sizeable footprint in the resources. But for a server this isn't unexpected since servers generally have a larger resource pool.

Dude is everywhere. I go looking for a name, he pops up. he's going to blow up the open source obscure landscape. (listens to the buzz)

I wonder of glances would work. top would be on theee and could be used to cress check the CPU usage.

Firefox first launch involves setting up user directories that might have explained the initial delays

always had a strange longing to use Solaris and Sun Microsystems

It is funny how even OpenSolaris kernel seems more mature and ready to become my main desktop OS than GNU/Hurd. In fact checking hardware compatibility I think I might try installing it on my Xeron E3 1285V4 as its GPU is apparently "supported" - whatever that means I guess I'll have to find out :)

I can't help but wonder if it's possible to install the latest version of CDE (or more likely NsCDE) to use the most iconic Solaris desktop on Solaris' descendent. This sounds like an awful idea, but I might try it anyway.

Hey @distrotube the reason (I think no expert)) your ram and cpu usage were so high was because it was creating an image of the system. When you do a pkg update/upgrade/install it makes copy of the current system and on the next reboot it runs from that new image. I could be wrong but as I understood it its like Fedora's silverblue..kinda like an immutable system.

Why are you using Virt-Manager over Virtualbox?

if you want to know what file system you are using just open a terminal and read the manual of the df command. There might be an option to show the filesystem in use.

Tbh, I've actually been wanting to try openindiana on barebones or modern hardware.

As a former developer with a friend at Sun I played around with the Solaris version that was compiled for the Intel platform. At that time it would run SCO binaries. I wonder if they kept that feature?

The key reason behind OpenIndiana on servers because it isn't meant or intended to be use for primary desktop usage at the first point! OpenIndiana itself and the kernel isn't alike Linux kernel. It's less optimised for architecture support, and few users (who tried OpenIndiana on VM) reported that they were not able to run apps, like Firefox because of segmentation fault. CPUs like Intel's Alderlake won't going to be a good choice if anyone would like to use OpenIndiana. That being said, server CPUs aren't bleeding edge. And OpenIndiana is stable and reliable on these. There aren't any exclusive reason to use OpenIndiana over GNU/Linux and in fact GNU/Linux does a better job than what OpenIndiana can do. Most of servers were pre-designed for Solaris and ZFS file system, back then since ZFS wasn't in Linux kernel and many of them didn't prefer *BSD because of several issues, and after Oracle bought Sun Microsystem, OpenIndiana (in most cases), stand out more than OpenSolaris. Though people still uses OpenIndiana, because of ZFS and enthusiastic reasons. Industry grade servers right now, completely moved to GNU/Linux and there's a very few industry grade servers that are run by OpenIndiana. There's also several issues with OpenIndiana especially the inconsistent development and security fixes.

If ur not sys admin DT, what are you? Genuinely asking

Can you cover these other open-source Unix and Unix-like OSes? Dragonfly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, GhostBSD, MidnightBSD, Fiwix, SerenityOS, RedoxOS, HelenOS, 9Front OS, xv6 OS, GNU/Hurd, OpenIndiana (Illumos) and then non-UNIX ReactOS, Haiku OS (open-source BeOS) and osFree (open-source OS/2) You have an amazing voice and personality for it!

this os is truly unix operating system

I've used OI for a while... The high CPU is interesting, but I wonder if zfs is running a scrub after first boot... It would probably be fine if you leave it running for an hour and then reboot it. The mate theming is an old "bug", its because they apply an image on top of the panel bars. That said, glad you tried taking a look at it. The long history of illumos and Solaris is often overlooked. Edit: SMF was really ahead of its time, and between pkg, SMF, boot0 and zfs integration, you get the ability to create boot environment snapshots, so you can reboot back to a old snapshot if you get a bad upgrade. Apt hooks on Ubuntu try to emulate it but don't even come close yet.

Might make a nice media server depending on what's available in the repositories...

Please can you take a look at Redox OS, an operating system written in Rust? It would be nice to hear your thoughts/feedback on this!

Can you look at plan 9 too?

hey dt, could you do a video on minetest? i love that game and id love to see you cover it! love ur work man!

AFAIK Linus still will not include OpenZFS in the kernel officially, because Linus does not trust the licensing still.

The default filesystem for Solaris if I'm not mistaken is UFS

Sometimes I miss the days my uVAX and VMS/X-Windows/Motif. Most of the time though I do not. Linux-based systems have become such great daily drivers and more.

It's great that people carried on where OpenSolaris left off. That last comment 😁

How fascinating. While working at Lawrence Berkely lab (physics, not IT) Sun was all over. So SYS5 was it. Later, Apollo. SYS5 as well if I remember. If I find time, I'll give it a spin for old time's sake. Probably won't find the time. Stay with GNU/Linux

The reason your blackmate theme didnt change was because they are using a silver PNG image for the panel background

So it's like linux back in 2006. Got it

Sun and Netscape.. they were such good companies. -);

Fun fact: Caja is actually pronounced like "Caha" it is Spanish for box

OI is now a rolling release so it needs to be updated after the install. It doesn’t run well in VirtualBox - very slow. Under VMware, however, it runs fine.

Hey DT, Can you tell me your all browsers themes please 🥺 ...... Because I also have 5 to 6 browsers in my machine and i all time confused with my themes please 🥺

I feel ya DT! I just tried putting this on a Proxmox VM and I think it's crashed on me at 28%... It's been sitting there for quite a while now and the mouse pointer won't even move. Started installing it halfway through your video but from what I've seen in your video, it's nothing special for Desktop users. Probably not for VM users either from what I can see...

The question is how good is the driver support for real hardware..

Great video as always. As a advocate of free and open software I was wondering if you could make a video on Free and Open alternatives to email providers such as gmail or outlook. I have done some cursory searches but have not found many and I would be nervous of trusting my email security to a group or organisation I had not heard of. I want to move away from the big companies but am unsure where to move to.

OpenIndiana is genetically UNIX

1:54 Monte? That sure looks a hell lot like GNOME 2.

Pray there will never be an “OpenOhio”

OpenOffice is back. It is being maintained by Apache Foundation.

The GUI of the installer looks like a revamped version of the original Solaris GUI installer

Interesting since the NVIDIA drivers still support Solaris so a while ago I tried running it just for fun but the NVIDIA drivers didn't work and didn't even boot I might try it again perhaps :/

Nimbus still rocks!

I don't think an external util, specially one ported from Linux, would give an accurate reading in a "foreign" OS. In this case `htop` might not be the best tool. I think that the supplied utils might be better since they have to account for certain design or architectural special cases. I think you should try regular `top` even in Linux. You can make it look just as fancy as `htop` by customizing its config file.

Can't believe you're not an IT guy!

This sunos based distros have different systems. So the cpu usage came from there

@ 4:10 "think of it kind of like how SYSTEMD manages services..." re SMF -- I said out loud, "oh, so it sucks, in other words!" ;-) Please don't hurt me, Lennart, only kidding.

Forum post demoing Proton Steam. Even Hipster has a foot in the door lol. The more non-WIN solutions out there, the better. Gone are the days where beardy glasses would cry "This is a server only OS, not a home desktop OS". It's ours now... we're coming.

I believe it should work on qemu or libvirt

I feel with the age of a lot of the software in the OS, it's potentially a security risk. I could be wrong. I wouldn't run a web server on this unless it's not important.

You prefer to show open Indiana and that's quite cool, but you never show enough NosystemD linux distributions. There are adelie linux and chimera linux along gabeeos and heads linux or even tinypaw. I am waiting for your point of view although i am sure i will disagree at some point.

Gah-nome when it's pronounced nome with a silent g. Yes I'm one of those commenters. No I have nothing better to do while I'm running smartctl tests. Yes to whatever your next thought is(this uses up your one free internet pass though).

Solaris is supported through 2034, it hasn't been killed off yet. Not an endorsement, even if you're running Itanium architecture. I had a little "staycation" in Solaris last summer on my laptop and oh boy was it a slog.

Tried to get this running in KVM, and gave up after few hours. It simply doesn't like that hypervisor, which is sad :( Maybe one day, I can dick around it's innards once it works, as it's an interesting OS to look at.

Htop is red, so it's kernel. Not user space.

As someone who was a UNIX professional before the days of Linux, this takes me back. But, it really does remind me just how far Linux has taken the nix world though, Solaris looks totally primitive now compared to the improvements that Linux has made the last few decades. They were great back in the day, but Linux is worlds apart now from all the big Unixes.

Ok, first 30 seconds and I already got a question - how can an OS maker legally call their OS "Unix"? Now... "Unix" would appear to be a registered trademark of the Open Group... and they certify operating systems. So does that mean Operating Systems certified via the Open Group can call themselves "Unix"? The whole "Unix" vs. "Unix-like" thing is REALLY hard for me to wrap my head around...

ZFS license is NOT straightened up, Canonical just throw more fire there, with shipping ZFS on their distro ;) Plus, OpenIndiana is targeted towards desktop usage :) ZFS is mainly in one of flavors of BSD, called FreeBSD, and it's derivatives, and that's it :)

*I'll stick with **_FreeBSD._** **_OpenIndiana_** is interesting though.*