OpenSolaris-Derived OpenIndiana For A Media PC? You Can Now Run Kodi

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenSolaris-Derived OpenIndiana For A Media PC? You Can Now Run Kodi

While the OpenSolaris-derived OpenIndiana operating system doesn't come to mind as a HTPC/multimedia operating system, the Kodi software was just ported to it...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Kodi-Can-Do-OpenIndiana

[caligula]

Hmm, Solaris is still alive huh?

[rabcor]

Solaris is still alive, but this is Illumos we're talking about, an opensolaris fork. Solaris is just proprietary (again) now i think.

This is pretty interesting, I've always wanted to try out Illumos, this might be a good excuse.

[SystemCrasher]

Hmm, Solaris is still alive huh?

"Its not dead, just resting". Actually, Solaris is controlled by Oracle and is a proprietary. Not sure why they had to do it. But serves as lesson to those who failing to get idea what "vendor lock" stands for and why it happens to be so bad.

[jacob]

Maybe I'm missing something, but why on Earth would you use OpenSolaris for a media box?

[BSDude]

"Its not dead, just resting". Actually, Solaris is controlled by Oracle and is a proprietary. Not sure why they had to do it. But serves as lesson to those who failing to get idea what "vendor lock" stands for and why it happens to be so bad.

That is usually the case with Oracle. The same can be said about BTRFS. Don't quote me but since they acquired Sun they stopped committing to btrfs. They've encumbered OpenSolaris as well and keep it on life support. So virtually the filesystems of the 21st century have been locked out. Good thing ZFS was able to legally escape all that crap and had enough momentum to establish its own foundation.

[jollyd]

I actually use OpenIndiana as a media box holding a 4TB RAIDZ for my data since 2011, with an Nvidia card since this is the only driver providing performance on par with other systems. If you know your way around portability issues (missing POSIX compatiblity + Linux specific code mostly) it is manageable.

Our small community of volunteers is not completely resting: https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-us...its/oi/hipster

Struggling now with Intel KMS driver testing and finishing migration of consolidations.

Thanks for the info Michael ! I will try to bring Kodi to the repo when time permits.

[SystemCrasher]

That is usually the case with Oracle. The same can be said about BTRFS. Don't quote me but since they acquired Sun they stopped committing to btrfs.

BS & incompetence.

First, Oracle lost a bit of traction when they lost Chris Mason, who gone working for FusionIO instead and then moved to Facebook. He has architected core of btrfs design, coded it and has been a project lead all the time. One who takes care of this part, aggregates changes and coordinates development. That was a key person behind design and he is still team lead. Doing same thing as usually. Corps do not make features, humans do.

Then, if we take a look, Oracle actually still cares about btrfs. Is it so fucking hard to go Linux kernel git and take a look into changelogs before making silly statements? Difficulty bonus: learn use git and grep and search for something like "oracle.com" before making dumbass statements. Don't you mind just released kernel 4.4 got some commits/reviews/etc from devs using @oracle.com mails? Sure, Oracle lost some pace, because facebook has gained it instead, commits from Chris Mason now come from @fb.com instead and since he aggregates patches, he accounts for quite a decent share of commits, any day

They've encumbered OpenSolaris as well and keep it on life support. So virtually the filesystems of the 21st century have been locked out. Good thing ZFS was able to legally escape all that crap and had enough momentum to establish its own foundation.

Not sure what has been "locked out" but I'm using btrfs here and now. Right on my laptop I'm using to type this message. Because I like snapshot features, and cp --reflink also kicking the ass. Its nice to isnta-CoW large hierarchy for some experiment, changing only small part of it and sharing most blocks against previous instance. And as for ZFS, now there're two incompatible versions: Oracle version and community version. Also, unlike ZFS, btrfs isn't an overgrown enterprise monster and works fine even on my modest laptop. It does not needs gigz of RAM to work properly. I would have hard time distinguishing it from EXT4 in most typical scenarios, except some few specific workloads. So good luck with "foundations", but ZFS code is CDDL-licensed. Just not going to take off in Linux. Uhm, sure, ubuntu mumbled something, but they mumbled about heck a lot of crap, be it Mir, upstart, UbuntuOne or something. Yet its normal for Ubuntu to close half of projects. And RH takes aim on btrfs. E.g. systemd devs got fancy ideas how to leverage its features when it comes to system management, etc. This thing can be quite useful.

But still, I do not get what Oracle has achieved by fucking up Solaris and ZFS. Looks like really pointless hostile move without any sane reasons. Though they are good at it. E.g. LibreOffice has appeared this way, as well as MariaDB..

[jollyd]

Also, unlike ZFS, btrfs isn't an overgrown enterprise monster and works fine even on my modest laptop. It does not needs gigz of RAM to work properly.

Well I do not know about that, but I used to run OpenSolaris on a Thinkpad X41 with 1.5GB RAM...

When it comes to system management, if you look at ZFS+Zones+SMF+DTrace(+IPS+Crossbow later), Sun had done a very nice integration back in 2005 (more than 10 years ago :S) I was surprised that no Linux distribution attempted to do anything similar.
So it is good to see that RedHat, including Lennart Poettering with "his" vision for integrating package management, btrfs and system management are catching up on the concepts.

Otherwise, if you look at what SmartOS is doing with LX brand+Docker and FreeBSD with ZFS and Bhyve, there are nice ongoing out there.

[profoundWHALE]

The problem with Solaris is Oracle. But anyways, regarding Linux compatibility, check this out:

http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx