'Project Indiana' OpenSolaris Preview Debuts

Published: November 1, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems is taking its first public steps toward the delivery of its binary distribution of the OpenSolaris open source Unix operating system that underpins its Solaris Unix distribution by putting out the OpenSolaris Developer Edition. The software is the first milestone toward the delivery of a full OpenSolaris binary distribution in early 2008.

While the open source nature of the BSD and Linux operating systems attracts a certain number of nerds, techies, and hackers, there is much larger population of IT people (including developers, system administrators, high-end users, and students) that could compile an operating system and install it but which has better things to do with their time. That's why BSD Unixes and various Linuxes have been available in binary compiled format as well as open source for many years, and it is also why Sun has figured out that if it wants to increase participation in the OpenSolaris development release, it has to provide a binary distribution for free just as it has done for more than two years for the Solaris 10 commercial variant of its Unix. This is what Project Indiana is all about, which is why Ian Murdock, the former Debian Linux leader who Sun hired earlier this year as its chief operating platforms officer, is the perfect person to get this particular job done.

The OpenSolaris Developer Preview, which Sun was planning to release either late Wednesday or early Thursday, is only going to be available on X86 and X64 platforms, with support for Sparc platforms "coming soon." The binary distribution makes use of the graphical installer that Sun has already put into its Solaris 10 8/07 Update, and like prior releases of Solaris, the Project Indiana preview also uses Gnome as a graphical user interface. But the preview is about more than making a binary. It is about making a variant of Solaris Unix that is easier to use for Linux enthusiasts than prior Solaris releases have been.

First and foremost, the contributors on the Project Indiana effort have grafted the GNU Userland add-ons for the Linux kernel onto the Solaris kernel. In plain English, according to Murdock, the Bash shell and Perl and Python scripts as well as the whole Linux command line interface are now part of Solaris, and can be used as an alternative to the existing Solaris command line interface. Sun intends to support both CLIs, by the way, so don't get nervous, Solaris warhorses. By using the GNU Userland, scripts written for Linux now work on OpenSolaris.

The Project Indiana preview also sports a new packaging system called Image Packaging System, which is a network-based, repository-driven packaging system akin to those available for popular Linuxes. The existing Unix SVR4 package system is also still part of OpenSolaris, too, and the IPS packager has been tweaked so it can import the thousands of SVR4 applications out there in the world that run on Solaris. Murdock says that Sun will work with application package maintainers to give them the tools so they can create IPS-compatible packages for OpenSolaris, and in fact, Sun is counting on the vast developer community to eventually make a much broader array of applications available on OpenSolaris and therefore Solaris. This approach, says Murdock, is how Debian Linux grew to support over 25,000 applications in around 14 years. "Of course," Murdock concedes, "those numbers are a little different from the usual ISV package counts, since it might contain 40 different versions of Tetris."

For now, Sun has a limited number of packages available in the IPS repository it is building, including the usual suspects like Apache, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and so forth. It makes sense that Sun and Blastwave, which packages up open source stacks for Sparc and X64 variants of Solaris, will work together to create IPS versions of the Blastwave stack so OpenSolaris users can quickly and seamlessly add software. "Open source works best when it is done iteratively," explains Murdock.

Officially, the final Project Indiana variant of OpenSolaris is expected in the first half of 2008, but Murdock said that Sun's goal is to get it into the field in March 2008. The software will have a similar naming convention to Solaris commercial versions, and if Sun hits that date, then it will be called OpenSolaris 3/08.

OpenSolaris Developer Preview will be available as a LiveCD ISO image and as a USB stick image, which allows the installation on a machine in LiveCD format (meaning running off the CD, not the disk drive) or as a fully installed operating system on a machine.

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