Open-source world resurrects Oracle-free Solaris project OmniOS

The open-source community has fought back and resurrected the development of OmniOS – an Oracle-free non-proprietary variant of Solaris, which had been shelved in April. The development of OmniOS, a distribution of Illumos derived from Sun's open-source flavor of Solaris, was killed after five years of work by web applications …

[Down not across]

Great news

Fantastic news.

Oetiker is very well know for most (ok, some at least) of us from great handy tools like RRDtool and MRTG.

Thank you Tobias and others for keeping OmniOS alive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Great news

It's interesting that Tobias Oetiker's involved in this; I think it adds credibility to the project. I haven't used MRTG but RRDTool & Smokeping, which I believe are derived from MRTG, are two of my favourite tools.

[Tridac]

Sounds great, but is there a Sparc version ?...

[ptribble]

There isn't a SPARC version of OmniOS specifically, but v9os is similar, and both DilOS and Tribblix have SPARC versions of their illumos distros, with some people trying to get OpenIndiana on SPARC working as well.

[Tridac]

Thanks for that, never heard of the some of those. Would be good to have a Solaris like OS available for Sparc, to make use of all the cheap but good Sun hardware, espcially if it has zones and zfs. There's quite a bit of work going on with Debian Sparc, though you have put up with systemd. However, i'm getting good results with FreeBSD Sparc. Seems rock solid, though it's not fully supported and you have to build packages. Running Xvnc at the server, with a client on X86 windows / Linux for X login and gui. Still trying to build mate etc, but so many dependencies...

[Loud Speaker]

OpenBSD offers great Sparc64 support, even on the T series machines. If only Oracle would support OpenBSD with data on the Crypto accelerator hardware...

[MarkSitkowski]

Isn't running FreeBSD the same as running SunOs 4.1.4? That was all BSD.

[DontFeedTheTrolls]

YAWN

Yet Another Waning *Nix

[PushF12]

Re: YAWN

Wow, many down-votes for a plain statement of fact.

The Illumos family is exemplar of platform fragmentation, and suffers from the same community defects as the BSD family.

Solaris lost the primary distinguishing part of its value-prop when Linux got ZFS. Linux already had alternatives for everything else in Solaris, like better raw performance, Crossbow networking, Zones paravirtualization, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: YAWN

There are literally hundreds of Linux distributions, and yet Illumos and BSD are your examples of fragmentation. REALLY?

[allanreg]

Re: YAWN

Count only the major Linux distributions: Redhat, Debian(Which Ubuntu belongs) and Suse (OpenSuse).

And they were using the same Linux kernel, unlike in the BSD/Unix world.

[iTheHuman]

Re: YAWN

Distros aren't differentiating based on their kernel, with a few niche exceptions.

[boatsman]

solaris itself is fragmentation

it was derived from freeBSD

and by the way, those 250+ Linux distro's share the same code base.

milk comes from thousands of dairy makers. it is still milk.

[MarkSitkowski]

Re: solaris itself is fragmentation

Nope. SunOs ('Solaris 1') up to 4.1.4 was derived from BSD, Solaris 2 tried to be pure SysVR3 .

[MarkSitkowski]

Re: YAWN

Evidently, Oracle doesn't share your opinion, since they neglected to port their own (indifferent) version of Linux to SPARC.

Perhaps, with the advent of Meltdown and Spectre, they'll reconsider...

[reddiesel]

That's great news. Using it now for some time as a NAS head, with replication to a remote site over wireless link.