OpenIndiana Announced, the fork to Oracle’s OpenSolaris!

Earlier today, we had the announcement for OpenIndiana. Aimed to be the de-facto OpenSolaris Distribution that tries to be binary and package compatible with Solaris 11 & Solaris 11 Express. Its apart Illumos Community with 20 core developers providing (eventually) a stable branch with 100% free & open source distribution.

Not only that, you can also download a ready baked OpenIndiana distribution (based on ou_147) or if you’re like me and still using OpenSolaris DEV snv_134, you can upgrade via the IPS management tools. Having said that though, I’m not going to rush and upgrade my zeus box anytime soon as it will take time to settle in, but you can take the baked ISO’s for a spin in a VM 🙂 I have found a few references to OpenSolaris still there and there is currently no xVM Xen (dom0) support nor lx (Linux) branded zones. Not to worry, keep an eye out on the roadmap and release schedule for what they’re going to deliver.

You can get a copy of the OpenIndiana announcement presentation slides as well or follow @openIndiana on twitter. Otherwise, see the Getting Involved guide on the OpenIndiana Wiki and join in!

In a way, its good to know that the beloved OpenSolaris will still live – thanks to the community, but at the same time, how long that community will be turned on by developing and maintaining it will be interesting – though other forks of OpenSolaris are backing it (via Illumos) – like Nexenta and Schillix which has just released a version based on Ilumos. All in all, WATCH THIS PROJECT!