OPEN INDIANA

Linux veteran Michael Reed wonders if he can pass for a native in the weird and wonderful land of Solaris-derived OpenIndiana.

OpenIndiana is an operating system that aims to recreate the Solaris operating system. It uses some of the same source code as Solaris mixed with modern open source alternatives. Solaris was a commercial, Unix-derived operating system offered by Sun Microsystems, and then Oracle, to power various workstations and servers. It is, itself, derived from various earlier Unixes such as System V, SunOS and BSD. This incarnation is a different lineage to Linux which is a ‘ground up’ Unix-like kernel created by an open source community that’s been distributed with open source tools to form a working OS.

What OpenIndiana amounts to is a Unix-like OS that comes with an easy-to-use installer and a MATE desktop. This might sound like a Linux distribution, and there are many similarities, and nearly every major feature you would expect from a Linux distribution is present. However, much of it is implemented in a Solaris manner, and there’s a lot to learn if Linux is the only Unix-like OS you’ve used. Let’s see if a Linux-head can navigate the world of Solaris/OpenIndiana...

Sunny impressions

Given the lineage of this operating system, it’s something of a surprise that the installation routine is so routine. It runs from a live GUI environment and resembles a typical Linux installation. One specifies the partitioning details along with the timezone and language before inputting details for the regular user and the root user. Click Finish, and after several minutes the user is invited to reboot the machine.

The default graphical environment, provided by MATE, didn’t bowl us over with much in the way of personality. We’re not putting down MATE, because it’s a good choice for low-resource usage on a fully featured desktop, but in OpenIndiana it’s configured to look exactly like Gnome 2.0. Yawn. Arguably, this combines a lowest common denominator usability with the familiarity of a standard business desktop that most people will be able to understand at a glance.

Along the top of the screen, we have an application launcher bar with Applications, Places and System pull-down menus. Unfortunately, these bars aren’t searchable as they are with a standard MATE desktop. Further along, we have the usual control panel and status area, and along the bottom of the screen there’s the standard task switcher.

Basic applications are present, such as the simple Pluma GUI text editor and the Caja file manager. Speaking of which, early on, we found out that our NAS, which uses the Samba protocol, was detected and usable. These smaller utilities sit alongside standard applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird and a VNC desktop sharing client. Beyond this, there are the usual cosmetic configuration applets that you’d expect from a MATE desktop.