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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

I see that there are a number of different Solaris-derived OSes: Illumos, OpenIndiana, OmniOS... Given the fact that basically they all share a common ancestor (OpenSolaris) and the license (they're all CDDL iirc), wouldn't it be better to just join forces, given how niche those OSes are becoming ?

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Illumos is the name of the kernel, that they all use.

OmniOS is discontinued I believe.

So that leaves SmartOS (that's basically a hypervisor server, with actual applications handled in zones/containers/vms), or OpenIndianna, which is a "normal" distro with optional gui etc.

OmniOS community edition is still maintained.

Oh! Thanks for the info. I wish I knew this 3 days ago when I decided to install OpenIndiana in a VM to play with.

It is really confusing and it seems like they all share the same illumos as their common upstream. [0] I wonder what kind of 'scope' illumos has in comparison to the BSDs. The BSD's base installations seem to be complete OSes with some additional bits from 3rd parties but the table at [0] shows that these illumos distros differentiate between the used package manager and even the default userland.

Is there a reason why these Solaris forks tend to use the GNU userland instead of pushing their own like the BSDs?

[0] https://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions

It probably dates back to when Sun hired Ian Murdock to create Project Indiana in 2007. Also, their distinguishing features are all/mostly in the kernel, so there's no point in maintaining the Solaris userland.

SchilliX appears to be missing from that list.

Jörg Schilling regularly mentions and contrasts the Schily Tools with GNU tools.

I'm not sure if it's still in development. On sourceforge (!) it looks like there are no updates since 2014, and French wikipedia(https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schillix) says it's not been updated since 2012.

M. Schilling says that it is. You'll have to ask xem for further information.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=760505445&oldid=76...

Certainly the Schily Tools bug ticketing system has seen activity within the last month, and there was a release on 2018-10-30 and one before that on 2018-10-11.

I like Tribblix.

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