What does "took the last drop of the gate" mean?

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

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.

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

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.

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

https://omnios.org.

> 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.

Sun had excellent documentation. But of course Oracle crapped all over it...

If you can find documentation for Solaris 9 I imagine a lot of it would be the same. And there's the Solaris 8 Administration book from O'Reilly - I'm sure you can find PDFs of that floating around.

Last time I tried it worked fine. Didn’t install the GUI environment though as I wanted a headless server environment for some testing.

It still is!

At Oxide, we have our own illumos (in my understanding, you're supposed to lowercase the i) distribution, discussed on HN a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178521

I think a lot of decisions that eventually lead to the Oracle buyout were all pretty bad and Oracle itself being where good ideas go to die. As bad as MS is at extracting value out of its windows users, Oracle seems to fleece it's enterprise customers far, far worse. I don't think I would ever choose Oracle or IBM for anything.

It would be interesting to see a little more diversity in common operating systems in the wild though. Linux has pretty much taken over the server space, and iOS/Android have split the more common usage outside that, with what's left of desktop still mostly Windows.

I still think there's opportunity for something like Flutter as a cross-platform library that actually works with multiple backing languages.

It still is, but at this point I'm not sure why anyone would pick it over Linux for something new. All the killer Solaris features (ZFS, dtrace, zones, SMF) have good enough Linux equivalents (OpenZFS, eBPF, containers, systemd) and I'm not aware of any usecases where illumos outperforms Linux anymore.

OpenIndiana also has the problem that every commercial illumos user is using it for some niche purpose (networking infrastructure, storage appliance, that sort of thing) so it's basically up to a few unpaid volunteers working in their free time to adapt it for general desktop use. I'm not sure what the state of stuff like audio support or accelerated graphics looks like if you're on modern hardware.

I’m of the opinion that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was the worst possible outcome; it guaranteed that Solaris would decline.

It (Solaris) was also the origin of ZFS, if I'm not mistaken.

Not only it is still around from Oracle, it is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging enabled.

Sadly it is still years away on ARM and x86, Linux and BSD systems.

I'm really disappointed that Solaris picked a "let's screw Linux" license, relegating some otherwise interesting technologies to only run on Solaris, on permissive OSes like BSD, and on systems that don't care about license compliance.

If only Broadcom would buy Oracle...

Oracle ruined Sun Microsystems for sure, incl. OpenSolaris.

I finally got my hands on using a Solaris machine at my last job to upgrading the backup software.

All I could explain the OS as, was as a swamp. It's wants to work but doesn't work as it should and you always were knee-deep in sludge too.

https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ looks like what you wanted, was not straightforward to get there from the homepage.

OI uses IPS packaging, which is the same packaging used by Solaris 11 (some find it over engineered). Tribblix, on the other hand, is also an illumos-based distro but is based on Solaris 10 (and prior’s) SVR4 packaging which is managed via a utility called “zap”.

Both are good distributions, but I strongly encourage you to try Tribblix if OI is problematic; for whatever reason the latest OI installers do not seem to include the same amount of driver support as Tribblix, in my experience.

Solaris, basically. Illumos was derived from the old OpenSolaris project. I don't know how much it's diverged, as I don't really follow this much. But that's more or less what it is.

Solaris is an actual System V, not a clone like Linux distros often are or a BSD.

It's got excellent support for compiling software written for different UNIX systems.

It does a lot of things with commands that other systems do with config files.

But no, there really aren't any compelling reasons why a non-hobbyist would be interested. If Oracle had continued development on OpenSolaris then yes, but they have little interest in their own version of Solaris.

Not that I'd really use it, but the integration of ZFS with the package manager on the one side and things like NFS on the other side made it really nice to use.

If a package update failed for whatever reason one could simply revert to a previous boot environment and configuring permissions on NFS exports worked directly integrated with ZFS. Really nice.

On other platforms there is a lot more fiddling around required.

"There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. ... Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. Now, all dead…well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do."

I personally believe that illumos will survive for decades, and it very well could rise again for those users that want/need robust stability.

One particularly notable design win was Oxide Computer Company as their hypervisor. They published their reasoning for choosing illumos here:

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0&t=2556s

Sony still uses FreeBSD for PlayStation.