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mikewarot

As a Hoosier... I had to check the relevance... and learned it's basically a fork^3 of Solaris, a Sun operating system.

OpenIndiana[3] <-- Illumos[2] <-- OpenSolaris[1] <-- Solaris[0]

Note: I guessed here at <-- meaning fork of... any other options I should have used instead?

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris

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If we are going to talk about 35 years of illumos linkage, we as well go all the way. Using you notation: Solaris <—- SVR4 [0] <—- AT&T System III [1] <—- Bell Labs Version 7 Unix [2] <—- the birth of Unix at Bell Labs in 1969 [3].

Besides the direct lineage, it’s interesting to see cross pollination between different operating systems over the years. Like BSD’s socket interface spreading everywhere (including Windows), ZFS from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD & Linux, then bhyve from FreeBSD to illumos.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V#SVR4

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_III

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_7_Unix

[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

You missed the branch there for Solaris 1.x (aka SunOS) which was a BSD derivative.

One of the nifty things about Solaris was all the compatibility code they had. You could set environment variables and compile against BSD, SysV, and a variety of other "standards" - they tried to make it so that anything that could compile on a UNIX would compile on Solaris.

From: https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/#what-is-the-o...

> Why is it called OpenIndiana?

> OpenIndiana obtains its name from Project Indiana, an open source effort by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) to produce OpenSolaris, a community developed Unix-like distribution based on Sun Solaris. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux Distribution.

(I never understood the naming either)

But here's an ArsTechnica article from 2007 talking more about those origins from back when Sun was still trying to win back marketshare from Linux. It had long since lost that war, but was still trying to stay relevant.

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/understanding-...

Illumos based OS's have been kicking around a lot longer than I anticipated.

Not sure if Ian Murdock had a say in the naming but his family was from Indiana.

> OpenIndiana takes its name from Project Indiana, the internal codename for OpenSolaris at Sun Microsystems before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana#History

Ian Murdock, who grew up in Indiana, joined Sun Microsystems in early 2007 to lead Project OpenIndiana.

Yeah, just thought the wikipedia kind of cleared that up, Ian Murdock was an interesting fellow.

I think what's important is that the name matches on /ian/.

I have also used SmartOS, which imports KVM from Linux.

It is odd to boot it and see sendmail running from my native ksh93 root login.

https://www.tritondatacenter.com/smartos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartOS

While we do still ship KVM on SmartOS, we've moved development over to bhyve - https://docs.smartos.org/bhyve/

using our package manager pkgsrc [https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/], you can install the MTA of your choice too!

OpenIndiana is more of a downstream distro than a fork of illumos, much like how Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro. Whereas illumos itself is a fork of OpenSolaris.

Does Illumos have a desktop environment?

That's like asking if Linux has a desktop environment. Strictly, no, but Linux distributions do.

So OpenIndiana has MATE and a couple of other options; Tribblix has about 30 desktop options; OmniOS you can install a desktop stack from pkgsrc.

So, is Illumos just a kernel?

There is OmniOS[1] as well, fits next to OpenIndiana.

https://omnios.org.

Open Maryland, Not Indiana :) (So named in this case because the company that released it, OmniTI, is based in Maryland. Source: worked there at the time) It's a good OS, as I imagine the other Illumos derivatives are, but sometimes the relatively small size of the community can be felt, e.g. in breadth/depth of available third party packages and update availability/timelines.

> OpenSolaris[1] <-- Solaris[0

Not sure if characterizing this as a fork is right. OpenSolaris (aka project Indiana) was the development version for Solaris 11.

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