OUR EXPERT
Michael Reed sometimes feels like he’s OpenIndiana Jones when exploring an unfamiliar operating system.
OpenIndiana is an operating system that aims to recreate the Solaris operating system. It uses some of the same source code as Solaris mixed with modern open source alternatives. Solaris was a commercial, Unix-derived operating system offered by Sun Microsystems, and then Oracle, to power various workstations and servers. It is, itself, derived from various earlier Unixes such as System V, SunOS and BSD. This incarnation is a different lineage to Linux which is a ‘ground up’ Unix-like kernel created by an open source community that’s been distributed with open source tools to form a working OS.
What OpenIndiana amounts to is a Unix-like OS that comes with an easy-to-use installer and a MATE desktop. This might sound like a Linux distribution, and there are many similarities, and nearly every major feature you would expect from a Linux distribution is present. However, much of it is implemented in a Solaris manner, and there’s a lot to learn if Linux is the only Unix-like OS you’ve used. Let’s see if a Linux-head can navigate the world of Solaris/OpenIndiana...
Sunny impressions
Given the lineage of this operating system, it’s something of a surprise that the installation routine is so routine. It runs from a live GUI environment and resembles a typical Linux installation. One specifies the partitioning details along with the timezone and language before inputting details for the regular user and the root user. Click Finish, and after several minutes the user is invited to reboot the machine.
The default graphical environment, provided by MATE, didn’t bowl us over with much in
