OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.04 has been released.
All OpenIndiana system software was rewritten in Python 3. Installation images now don’t deliver Python 2.7 interpreters or libraries, however some software still requires Python 2.7. We’ve moved to GCC 7 as the default compiler.
OpenIndiana Hipster is a rolling release distribution of illumos, which in turn traces its roots back to OpenSolaris. The original intent of illumos was to replace the closed source parts of OpenSolaris with open source ones, but after Oracle discontinued OpenSolaris, illumos grew into a full-blown fork of OpenSolaris.
Looking at the release notes, it’s maybe not the best to install directly on laptop hardware as hardware sleep is disabled due to issues on modern hardware. But for desktop, VM and server use it might be worth a closer look. In any case it’s fantastic that OpenSolaris lives on in this form and I wish both the OpenIndiana and Illumos projects all the best. The more diversity we have in actively developed open-source OSes, the better, and I expect few others are quite as polished and chock full of enterprise features as are the descendants of Solaris.
AWESOME!!! When is the next stable release? I thought the project died. The things that kept me from adoption was the lack of updates as it required a full reinstall for updates instead of a “pkg_add -u”. I hope teh project grows to a supportable infrastructure… Next on my bucketlist… ReactOS.
Hipster follows a rolling release model with snapshot releases every 6 months (so roughly this coming October). The last release under the old development cycle was build 151 sometime in 2011.
This (apparently) isn’t unique to this release, but reading the release notes I guess they have Joyent’s implementation of KVM on Illumos. That’s pretty cool!
Glad to see LibreOffice in this release, for the first time IIRC. Not something I use a hell of a lot, but the closer it gets to being a drop-in replacement for Linux, the better. (Nothing wrong with Linux, but it’s good to have alternatives.)