New Project Indiana Details Emerge

Following this morning's mobility speak by Intel, Ian Murdock took the stage in one of the small rooms at the Moscone Center West to talk about the OpenSolaris Binary Distribution that is currently known as Project Indiana. We captured all of the slides Ian had shown, and while most of the information he shared was just reiterated from his past talks, there was some interesting details worth sharing. Among the advantages of Project Indiana is that it will use Sun's ZFS as the default file-system, and Project Indiana will be taking full advantage of its abilities to create snapshots and perform rollbacks if something with the system's software goes wrong. With Sun's past work with the GNOME project, GNOME will be the desktop environment in Project Indiana said Ian Murdock. He had gone on to reiterate several other basic points such as the single CD installation with network-based package management (likely powered by apt). Project Indiana will also be easier to acquire, as it will be available through mirrors that do not need registration and will be distributed via Bit Torrent. Another goal of Ian's is also to modernize the command line.

While Project Indiana will ship with many of the same applications that will be found in Ubuntu, Murdock believes that through Project Indiana there will be more interesting opportunities available than just bundling packages. These available packages will be setup in package repositories similar to the Fedora Project. While this is the case no more, in the past there was the Fedora Core and Fedora Extras repositories for official and unofficial packages, respectively, and Sun will be taking that same approach. For Project Indiana there will be an official Sun repository and then a community-managed OpenSolaris repository. Touched on briefly due to attendee questions was on the matter of Solaris drivers and whether Project Indiana would be on the "A List" or "B List" for hardware support. Ian had stated that the Solaris driver situation in the past year or two has improved dramatically and he believes the situation will continue to improve once the OpenSolaris user-base expands with Project Indiana. Once the user-base expands, he believes the OEM vendors will begin providing the drivers themselves. Why was Ian talking about Project Indiana at IDF? There will be optimizations for Project Indiana when running on Intel hardware.