Recently the launch of the new version of OpenIndiana 2020.04 was announced, which is a Unix-like operating system released as free and open source software. It is a fork of OpenSolaris conceived after Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems (the development of which was discontinued by Oracle) and is intended to continue the development and distribution of the OpenSolaris codebase.
The project operates under the patronage of the Illumos Foundation, since OpenIndiana offers the user a working environment based on a new portion of the code base of the Illumos project. Development of OpenSolaris technologies continues with the Illumos project, which develops the kernel, network stack, file systems, drivers, as well as the core set of user system libraries and utilities.
The stated goal of the project is to become the de facto OpenSolaris distribution installed on production servers where security and bug fixes are required for free.
It is important to mention that OpenIndiana is missing some features that can be considered important in OS / Net, such as the xVM Xen Hypervisor (dom0 support).
90% of OpenIndiana is open source and once it is fully based on the Illumos core it should be fully open. OpenIndiana has taken the approach of allowing binary drivers, unlike Debian. Lumsden says that the development of OpenIndiana will be comparable to the development model for CentOS, which is based on RHEL.
What's new in OpenIndiana 2020.04?
This new version of the system has as its main novelty the displacement of all your dependencies and packages from Python 2.7 version (This is due to the fact that this version is no longer supported) in addition to being removed from the installation images. Instead a migration was performed of all OpenIndiana specific applications, including the Caiman installer to Python 3.5.
Another of the changes made due to obsolescence is the support for 32-bit utilities for X.org and Xchat was removed.
Also fixed a vulnerability in the DDU utility (used to search for suitable drivers), allowing a local user to increase their privileges to root under certain conditions.
On the part of the updates se highlights the new included version of GCC 7 which is used as the main system compiler by default. The package manager PKG transferred from simplejson library to rapidjson to process data in JSON format, reducing memory consumption during operations with large package directories.
Regarding the packaging of the system we can find that The LibreOffice 6.4 office suite and the MiniDLNA package have been added to the new version.
From the system packages that were updated, The following are mentioned in the announcement:
- System applications: VirtualBox 6.1.6, VLC 3.0.10, ntfsprogs 2017.3.23AR.5, hplip 3.19.12, rhythmbox 3.4.4, Gstreamer 1.16.2, UPower, XScreensaver 5.44, GNOME Connection Manager 1.2.0.
- Updated system components: net-snmp 5.8, sudo1.8.31, mozilla-nspr 4.25, SQLite 3.31.1, OpenConnect8.05, vpnc-scripts 20190606, GNU Screen 4.8.0, tmux 3.0a, nano 4.8.
- Updated development tools: GCC 7.5 / 8.4 / 9.3, Clang 9, Guile 2.2.7, Golan 1.13.8 / 1.12.17, OpenJDK 1.8.232, icedtea-web 1.8.3, Ruby 2.6.6, PHP 7.3.17, Git 2.25.4 , Mercurial 5.3.2, Glade 3.22.2, GNU TLS 33.5.19, Automake 1.16, Glib 2.62, Binutils 2.34.
- Updated server software: PostgreSQL 12, Barman 2.9, MariaDB 10.3.22, 10.1.44, Redis 6.0.1, Apache 2.4.43, Nginx 1.18.0, Lighttpd 1.4.55, Tomcat 8.5.51, Samba 4.12.1, Node .js 12.16.3. 10.18.1, 8.17.0, 9.16, BIND 4.4.2, ISC DHCP 1.6.2, Memcached 8.1, OpenSSH 1p2.4.9, OpenVPN 20191007, kvm 20190827, qemu-kvm 0.4.1.9, tor XNUMX.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about this new release, you can check the details In the following link.
Download OpenIndiana 2020.04
From this new version of OpenIndiana 2020.04, three types of ISO images were formed, one of them is the server edition with console applications which has a weight of 725 Mb, the other is a minimum compilation for network installation with a weight of 377 Mb and the last one is a compilation with the graphical environment MATE (the desktop edition) with a weight of 1.5 GB.
For those who are interested in downloading and testing this system, they can obtain the images from the following link