OpenIndiana 2015.10 "Hipster" Released To Continue On The OpenSolaris Dream

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 4 October 2015 at 01:09 PM EDT. Page 1 of 1. 20 Comments.

A new update to OpenIndiana is available, the operating system powered by Illumos that's derived from what was the OpenSolaris code-base prior to it being killed by Oracle. OpenIndiana 2015.10 "Hipster" is the name of this new release.

With OpenIndiana 2015.10, the IPS packaging system was updated with fixes and some new functionality. OpenIndiana is also being prepped to support non-GRUB boot loaders, and the text installer has seen some updates as it's written in Python while their C-based GUI installer isn't being maintained and they now plan to drop their GUI installer in the next version if people don't end up supporting it. Also significant to this OpenSolaris-derived OS update is that the Sun JDK/JRE Java environment was completely removed in favor of using the more-open OpenJDK code.

Some of the package updates for OpenIndiana 2015.10 include Perl 5.22, Qt 4.8.7, GCC 4.8.5, Compiz 0.8.10, PulseAudio 1.1, X.Org Server 1.14.7, Mesa 10.5.9, and Joyent's KVM 20150903. As many Phoronix readers will note, some of these package versions are quite far behind upstream like X.Org Server 1.14.7, PulseAudio, and Mesa, due to (Open)Solaris compatibility issues in some cases. Their graphics stack is behind right now due to lacking Radeon kernel mode-setting support and KMS being required by newer versions of the Radeon DDX that in turn support the modern X.Org Server releases. The best graphics support for OpenIndiana still is with NVIDIA when using their proprietary driver; the NVIDIA 340.93 release is packaged by in this new OI release.

Firefox 24.8.1 is shipped by OpenIndiana 2015.10 as the newer version had issues on OpenIndiana with plugins support. The OpenOffice.org office suite is broken with OpenIndiana 2015.10 but the release notes recommend installing LibreOffice from the SFE repository. The default desktop is GNOME 2.32 with Compiz as the compositing window manager. I've been playing around with this new OpenIndiana Hipster release on an Intel Haswell Xeon system this morning and it's been going alright, but in the end decided against trying to run any new performance tests of it versus various Linux and BSD distributions, etc.

Those wishing to learn more about OpenIndiana 2015.10 can see the release notes.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.