[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana Intro questions

[Gary Gendel]

Lonnie,

One distro that may work for you is OmniOS CE: https://www.omniosce.org/

Like SmartOS, it can run LX (Linux) zones and uses pkgsrc which provides basic x-windows support from that.  (I've run apps like xterm etc. from a remote desktop).  Unlike OpenIndiana, native desktop functionality is limited.

Gary


On 10/23/2017 12:35 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Thanks for responding to my inquiry about OpenIndiana.
>
> Basically, I really like the small footprint of SmartOS and its ability to
> be a good hypervisor (Linux and Windows) but for a desktop project, I
> wanted to be able to have a minimal OS that basically just run the
> containers/zones and then have one of the containers have a X-Server such
> that the base OS does not have applications installed in it. Then the GUI
> zone could be passed through to the video driver thus all of the X-Server
> stuff is also in a container.
>
> This was an idea that I have been playing around with for some time as was
> going to look into possibly using SmartOS, but it is really not set up for
> this and which is where I started digging into Illumos and subsequently
> OpenIndiana to see if something like this might make a good starting point
> for this work.
>
> Thanks again,
> Lonnie
>
> On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 12:00 PM, Alexander Pyhalov <alp at rsu.ru> wrote:
>
>> On 10/23/17 06:21 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
>>
>>> Greetings All,
>>>
>>> I have recently been playing around a little with SmartOS for running
>>> containers and hypervizing VM's for which it seems to work pretty well,
>>> and
>>> wanted to also investigate the desktop side of things as well so I hope
>>> that someone on the list will answer a few rudimentary questions to get me
>>> going with my OI explorations.
>>>
>>> I know that SmartOS can be a hypervisor to run the Linux, and Windows OS's
>>> as VM's in zones, but I was wondering if OpenIndiana was able to hypervize
>>> these OS's as well?
>>>
>> Yes, it can. illumos-kvm is not a part of illumos-gate, but is a separate
>> codebase, developed mainly by Joyent. We compile and deliver it, but KVM
>> benefits from several system features (the one which comes to my mind is
>> VND), which are available in SmartOS, but not in other distributions
>> (AFAIK). OI can run KVM guests on modern Intel hardware, but SmartOS can be
>> more efficient, for example, in network virtualization.
>> --
>> Best regards,
>> Alexander Pyhalov,
>> system administrator of Southern Federal University IT department
>>
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