OpenIndiana

Project Indiana was originally conceived by Sun Microsystems, to construct a binary distribution around the OpenSolaris source code base.[7] Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux distribution.[4]

OpenIndiana was conceived after negotiations of a takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle were proceeding, in order to ensure continued availability and further development of an OpenSolaris-based OS, as it is widely used. Uncertainty among the OpenSolaris development community led some developers to form tentative plans for a fork of the existing codebase.

These plans came to fruition following the announcement of discontinuation of support for the OpenSolaris project by Oracle.[8][9]

OpenIndiana operating in console mode. View of the root directory

The formal announcement of the OpenIndiana project was made on September 14, 2010, at the JISC Centre in London.[10] The first release of the operating system was made available publicly at the same time, despite being untested. The reason for the untested release was that the OpenIndiana team set a launch date ahead of Oracle OpenWorld in order to beat the release of Solaris 11 Express.[11]

The announcement of OpenIndiana was met with a mainly positive response; over 350 people[12] viewed the online announcement, the ISO image was downloaded over 2000 times,[12] the Twitter account obtained over 500 followers,[13] and numerous notable IT press websites wrote about the release.[11][14][15][16][17][18] The broadcast bandwidth of the announcement was substantial, noted to top 350Mbit/second.[19] The network package depot server experienced 20x as much traffic interested in their distribution than they originally planned for, resulting in more threads later being provisioned.[20]

Not all reporting was positive, though, as some online articles questioned the relevance of Solaris given the market penetration of Linux.[21][22] One article was critical of the OpenIndiana launch, citing a lack of professionalism with regard to releasing an untested build, and the project's lack of commitment to a release schedule.[23] The initial OpenIndiana release was advertised as experimental and directly based on the latest OpenSolaris development build, preliminary to the OpenSolaris 2010 release.

With the OpenSolaris binary distribution moved to SolarisExpress and the real-time feed of OpenSolaris updates discontinued, concerns abounded over what would happen to OpenIndiana if Oracle decided to stop feeding source code back into the community. The OpenIndiana team mitigated these concerns when they announced their intention to move the source code feed to the illumos Foundation.[24]

Concerns were raised about possible discontinuation of free access to the Oracle-owned compiler being used to produce OpenIndiana. In response, OpenIndiana was modified to be able to compile under the open source GNU Compiler Collection.[25]

The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) remains somewhat informal, fragmented and uncentralized, requiring much end-user research for hardware selection.[26][27][28][29][30] The lack of a comprehensive centralized HCL follows from the fact that the OpenSolaris HCL was hosted on Oracle server infrastructure and the server-side code for the Device Driver Utility submission was not made available.

In August 2012, founding project lead Alasdair Lumsden stepped down from the project, citing personal reasons and frustration with the lack of progress made on the project.[31] Among the reasons for lack of progress were lack of developers and resources. In his resignation, Lumsden wrote, "For many of us this was the first open source project we had ever contributed to, myself included. The task at hand was vast, and we were ill equipped to deal with it."[31]

Since Lumsden's resignation, the project is developed by a team of volunteers and is a completely horizontal and participative community effort.

A September 2013 DistroWatch review stated that the OpenIndiana project has "seemingly been in steady decline for the last couple of years."[32] The same review concluded that OpenIndiana had not progressed significantly from the state of OpenSolaris five years before:[32]

Running OpenIndiana today feels much the same as running OpenSolaris five years ago, the tools are mostly the same, the desktop is the same. The software included is starting to show its age and I don't feel any truly significant features have been introduced in the past few years. I'm sure the developers behind the project are doing a good job of hunting down bugs and keeping drivers current, and that is great. Still, I feel as though OpenIndiana is treading water, not progressing in any meaningful way.

A May 2015 DistroWatch review of OpenIndiana similarly concluded that little major progress had been made to the system over the years.[33] The review stated that the package selection and hardware support seemed to lag behind other systems, while many of the system administration features have either replicated or ported to Linux and BSD. The review concludes that:[33]

While OpenIndiana appears to still be stable and functional, it also gives the impression of being stuck in the past, possibly due to a lack of developers willing to work on the project. OpenIndiana runs and may still be useful in situations where, for various reasons, the administrator really needs a version of Solaris, but it seems to me as though OpenIndiana has not moved forward in the past seven years. The operating system still features some great ideas and good technology, but it does not appear to have made any progress in recent years.

Claims about lack of package support may be mitigated by the fact that the 3500+ software packages provided by OpenIndiana Hipster are not split into several packages, which would artificially increase the package count (e.g. like in Linux distributions): the Image Packaging System is a file-based package management providing incremental updates and package facets, making such splitting an unnecessary burden. In the course of the first two years of its existence, the Hipster project has migrated and updated over 1500 packages: it maintains a collection of selected software packages while relying on third-party repositories like SFE[34] for add-ons. For extended selection, the pkgsrc system supported by Joyent[35] readily provides 20000+ packages for illumos systems.

The first experimental release of OpenIndiana, Build 147, was released on September 14, 2010;[38] the second experimental release, Build 148, was released on December 17, 2010.[39]

A first development release, Build 151 was released on September 14, 2011. This is the first release to be based upon illumos. MartUX 151a0[42] was released as the first SPARC build for OpenIndiana. Build 151a7 for Intel/AMD architectures was released on October 6, 2012. Build 151a8 was released August 10, 2013. OpenSXCE 2013.01 SPARC Build 151a, formerly MartUX, was released through OpenIndiana on February 1, 2013, as the second and possibly last OpenIndiana SPARC build,[43] with subsequent releases based upon DilOS.[44]

Since the development model inherited from the OpenSolaris project was unsuitable for a community project, the Hipster initiative was created late 2013 to reboot and modernize OpenIndiana. The Hipster project is a fast development branch of OpenIndiana based on a rolling-release model and a horizontal contribution scheme through the oi-userland build system[48] and the use of continuous integration.

Hipster is actively maintained: the repository receives software updates as well as security fixes, and installation images are published twice a year. Every snapshot release is announced via mailing list and Twitter.[49] The first snapshot release was delivered on February 14, 2014, and subsequent snapshots were based on a six-month development cycle.

Some notable features of Hipster:

• MATE as the default desktop environment (since Hipster 2016.10)
• Update to newer illumos KVM
• Update of the graphic stack with newer Xorg and DRM support
• Support for FUSE and NTFS-3G
• Support for multimedia software[50]
• Support for third-party SFE repository providing LibreOffice[51]
• Migration to GCC as default compiler
• Migration of legacy software consolidations to unified build system "oi-userland". 2020-02-24.

The list of features is updated for each development cycle on the Roadmap page of the issue tracker.