Open Indiana 2019.10
On the way back from his detour to Bsd-land, Mayank Sharma runs into another promising open source Unix release.
On the way back from his detour to Bsdland, Mayank Sharma runs into another promising open source Unix release.
Sometime after the community took it upon itself to maintain Opensolaris, it decided to ditch its development tools and processes and created the Openindiana Hipster branch to modernise the OS. Hipster is compiled with GCC instead of Sun
Studio and follows a rolling release model where the release team puts out installable snapshots around every six months.
What makes Openindiana (OI) approachable to new users is that it runs familiar apps on its desktop. It uses the MATE desktop along with its cache of tools, as well as a handful of mainstream productivity apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Pidgin. While there is not much to write home about regarding OI’S default cache of apps, one that caught our eye was the Timeslider app for taking incremental ZFS filesystem snapshots. It isn’t enabled by default but is fairly intuitive to set up and use.
A new Openindiana installation has limited usability, and you won’t get far without taking an excursion to its package manager. And therein lies the rub – even after being in existence for almost a decade, the OS lacks a graphical package manager. Openindiana uses the Image Packaging System that it exposes via the PKG commandline utility. While PKG is quite similar to APT and DNF, you will have to read through its man page and other documentation for tasks such as adding repositories.
Talking of repositories, besides the main one the OS has another where it rolls patent-encumbered apps like
VLC, Audacity, Ffmpeg and others. There’s also a third-party SFE repo that contains useful apps like
Libreoffice. Once you’ve scrolled through Openindiana’s handbook and enabled the repos, fleshing out the installation doesn’t take much doing. Documentation is also one of the strong points of the project.
More of the same
OI is available in multiple editions, with one that boots into a Live installable environment, which is a definite plus as users can use the environment to acquaint themselves with the OS. Also, unlike the traditional alternative OSS, Openindiana uses a graphical home-brewed installer that’s intuitive and easily navigable. It looks and behaves pretty much like a typical Linux installer and has a partitioning tool to help users make room for the OS. It’s still a little limited, and we’d suggest that you manipulate your disk with Gparted that’s rolled into the Live edition.
In the new release, besides app updates, a majority of the changes are behind the scenes. Some of the most notable ones include the porting over of the IPS packaging system to Python 3, along with several other Openindiana-specific tools. The developers also brought over various improvements from the ZFS on Linux project, and implemented mitigations for one of the Intel sidechannel vulnerabilities that impacts hypervisors and support for disabling Intel Hyper-threading.
More than fleshing out our Openindiana installation, we had a tough time trying to figure out where to slot in the OS. If you follow its genealogy, Openindiana would be at ease running inside an enterprise server. But suggesting a rolling release OS in such a critical deployment doesn’t seem wise. With its graphical desktop and a familiar desktop environment, OI seems like a good fit on the desktop as well. However, the lack of a graphical package manager puts a serious dent on these ambitions.
Also, while you can use Openindiana as a regular desktop, it doesn’t offer any compelling reason for doing so. It isn’t any snappier than some of the other Linux powered Mate-based desktop distros but comes with the additional baggage of a learning curve. So despite any obvious lack of flaws, the OS seems destined to only adorn the desktops of hobbyists and Unix enthusiasts.