Hacker News Reader

"Project Indiana" was Sun's code name for open sourcing Solaris as OpenSolaris.

There are other variants under development. Illumos probably is the largest one, SmartOS another.

Illumos is the kernel, and SmartOS and OpenIndiana are both Illumos distributions.

The OS is packaged the same way Linux is, with different distributions maintained by people outside the kernel devs.

I'd just like to interject for a moment...

Illumos is not just the kernel, it's a complete operating system - as is traditional in UNIX. This idea that you get a kernel from somewhere and a libc from somewhere else and a init from a third place etc. is quite unique to GNU/Linux.

I think it's not ideal to use the term "distribution" for their downstreams like SmartOS etc. because it reminds people of all these GNU/Linux distributions, but a better term doesn't immediately come to mind...

IIRC Project Indiana was mostly about replacing Solaris' SysV packages based packaging system with IPS, so it even originally referred to something that can be considered as "Solaris distribution".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com