Sign in / up

back to article 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 …

COMMENTS

Post your comment
House rules Send corrections
Add to 'My topics' unstar *
  1. Down not across
    Thumb Up

    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.

    23 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      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.

      1 0 Reply
  2. Tridac

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

    5 0 Reply
    1. ptribble
      Reply Icon

      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.

      3 0 Reply
      1. Tridac
        Reply Icon

        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...

        3 0 Reply
        1. Loud Speaker
          Reply Icon

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

          2 0 Reply
          1. MarkSitkowski
            Reply Icon

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

            0 0 Reply
  3. DontFeedTheTrolls
    Coat

    YAWN

    Yet Another Waning *Nix

    3 18 Reply
    1. PushF12
      Reply Icon
      Flame

      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.

      2 14 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: YAWN

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

        9 0 Reply
        1. allanreg
          Reply Icon

          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.

          0 0 Reply
        2. iTheHuman
          Reply Icon

          Re: YAWN

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

          0 0 Reply
        3. boatsman
          Reply Icon

          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.

          0 2 Reply
          1. MarkSitkowski
            Reply Icon

            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 .

            0 0 Reply
      2. MarkSitkowski
        Reply Icon

        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...

        0 0 Reply
  4. reddiesel

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

    1 0 Reply

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

Forgotten password ?

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like