[OpenIndiana-discuss] Some questions about OpenIndiana

[Alasdair Lumsden]

On 31 Dec 2010, at 00:32, Jean-Yves Avenard wrote:

> Hi there
> 
> Long time FreeBSD user, I recently used OpenIndiana live CD to recover
> a faulty zpool on which FreeBSD kept crashing.
> 
> Was pleasantly surprised on how smooth everything went.
> 
> I am now looking at migrating our file server from FreeBsd to a
> Solaris based distribution.
> 
> My ZFS zpool is now at version 28 which limits me with what I can actually use.
> 
> My primary concern with OpenIndiana is how new it is, only a couple of
> months old. So questions related to stabilities are obviously there.
> 
> Being a "development" version is also a worry.
> 
> To be honest, I don't care whatsoever if an OS is open source or
> closed source, as long as it works well and is stable and obviously
> cheap enough.

I know I'm biased since I founded OpenIndiana but what you want is OpenIndiana build 148.

Although it's a new project and a development release, it's perfectly stable - my business runs it on multiple production servers, and I run it on my desktop machine at work. I know lots of people that are using it. Our download site, dlc.openindiana.org, does around 4TB per month of data transfer, or around 4000 downloads per month. I'd guess there are between 1000 to 10,000 installs of OpenIndiana in the wild, although that's a finger in the air guestimate based on the download figure.

"OpenIndiana b134+" is not an officially endorsed release and was created by a third party using the OI instructions from the wiki. We're going to be in contact with the author to ask him to rename it. It's for a specific use case - namely file servers. It'll provide a stable kernel, but a very unfriendly userland - it won't play well with other package repositories and it's not going to give you a nice experience, I'd avoid unless you know what you're doing.

Nexenta is a good choice, but again it's more of a distro aimed at file servers and the userland software isn't going to be terribly up to date.

OpenIndiana is no more unstable than OpenSolaris was - I've found it to be very stable, and can highly recommend it! :)

Regards,

Alasdair