A Weekend Drive With OpenIndiana 151a

Last month to mark the one year anniversary of the OpenIndiana project there was the release of OpenIndiana 151a, the latest build of this Illumos-based Solaris operating system. I have finally had time to try out this latest OpenIndiana release and, of course, to run a few benchmarks.

Earlier this month I mentioned Intel Sandy Bridge was troublesome on OpenIndiana 151a, so this testing was done on an Intel Core i7 990X Extreme Edition system.

OpenIndiana quickly and easily installed.

OpenIndiana 151a is distributed as a DVD ISO or USB disk image. The images offer both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 support, and it's supposed to automatically boot to the correct kernel based upon the installed hardware, but for this Core i7 990X system it was still booting to the 32-bit x86 kernel.

The desktop to OpenIndiana 151a is GNOME 2.30.2. They are not using the latest GNOME2 release (v2.32) or GNOME 3.0/3.2. Not much has changed on the desktop side since the earlier OpenIndiana development releases over the past year. There is still the standard set of packages common to OpenIndiana/OpenSolaris.

X.Org Server 1.7.7 is being used from the middle of 2010. There is still no proper Radeon, Nouveau, or Intel driver support that is up-to-date. At least the NVIDIA binary driver remains available for use. One Phoronix reader mentioned in the forums that he ported the xf86-video-intel 2.16.0 driver to Solaris for testing purposes, but it is not part of the shipping OpenIndiana stack. There is also an unmerged Nouveau stack. Oracle also has an official Intel KMS driver stack for Oracle Solaris 11.