OpenIndiana

Reader supplied reviews for OpenIndiana Average rating 7.2 from 9 review(s) What are your thoughts on OpenIndiana? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 2018.042017.102017.042016.102016.042015.102015.03 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Comments (maximum 2,048 characters): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 2017.10 Rating: 7 Date: 2018-04-24 Votes: 18 Was always curious about OI as a desktop OS, going back to OpenSolaris days, the open version of, well, Solaris. When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, in a foolish move, they severed support for OpenSolaris. Enter OpenIndiana (OI) a fork of OpenSolaris. Installed OI on an old Gatway laptop, though it took some doing and help from the IRC channel on Freenode. When I finally did get OI installed, I was pleasantly surprised that my wifi worked out-of-the-box and the audio playback was fine too (needs LAME to playback MP3's, though). There are multiple software repositories, the main one only has a handful of packages. But there are independent repos where I picked up additional software like VLC Media Player, Filezilla, Inkscape, Audacity, LAME, LibreOffice and so on. While not overflowing wih packages, you can get the bare minimum you need to get-by. I use the laptop for a coding and web-dev-course and it is serving me well thus far. The OpenIndiana site has some decent documentation, but the IRC suggests you also acquire books on OpenSolaris to better understand this OS. (i.e. The OpenSolaris Bible and Pro OpenSolaris). I agree. You will need a larger hard drive for this OS because of the way back-ups are partitioned. I was going to use a small SSD drive I had laying around, but opted for a 300G HD, which served me well. After one particular update, I had no GUI to boot into, but someone on the OI IRC taught me how to roll back a version and boot into a stable environ until the bad update got sorted. So I began to better understand the importance of the partition structure. The gateway laptop is a single core piece of crap with two gigs of RAM and an HDD (as mentioned) and OI is running just fine as a desktop. The community is small, you will have to be patient for answers on the IRC and there is also a mailing list for support too. I like the OS, the community is small and under-loved and needs more developers and feedback. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2017.10 Rating: 7 Date: 2018-04-23 Votes: 5 Was always curious about OI as a desktop OS, going back to OpenSolaris days, the open version of, well, Solaris. When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, in a foolish move, they severed support for OpenSolaris. Enter OpenIndiana (OI) a fork of OpenSolaris. Installed OI on an old Gatway laptop, though it took some doing and help from the IRC channel on Freenode. When I finally did get OI installed, I was pleasantly surprised that my wifi worked out-of-the-box and the audio playback was fine too (needs LAME to playback MP3's, though). There are multiple software repositories, the main one only has a handful of packages. But there are independent repos where I picked up additional software like VLC Media Player, Filezilla, Inkscape, Audacity, LAME, LibreOffice and so on. While not overflowing wih packages, you can get the bare minimum you need to get-by. I use the laptop for a coding and web-dev-course and it is serving me well thus far. The OpenIndiana site has some decent documentation, but the IRC suggests you also acquire books on OpenSolaris to better understand this OS. (i.e. The OpenSolaris Bible and Pro OpenSolaris). I agree. You will need a larger hard drive for this OS because of the way back-ups are partitioned. I was going to use a small SSD drive I had laying around, but opted for a 300G HD, which served me well. After one particular update, I had no GUI to boot into, but someone on the OI IRC taught me how to roll back a version and boot into a stable environ until the bad update got sorted. So I began to better understand the importance of the partition structure. The gateway laptop is a single core piece of crap with two gigs of RAM and an HDD (as mentioned) and OI is running just fine as a desktop. The community is small, you will have to be patient for answers on the IRC and there is also a mailing list for support too. I like the OS, the community is small and under-loved and needs more developers and feedback. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2017.10 Rating: 10 Date: 2018-03-07 Votes: 1 This is the very first OS that installed without a glitch on a ThinkPad W541 (beside of course wireless card. best is to get a supported dongle type). To fix audio with comment found here: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=xstreamos Otherwise, truly a gem. I am switching. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 9 reader reviews of OpenIndiana...