14 DAY TRIAL // OpenIndiana is a free and open-source Unix operating system, based on Illumos and derived from OpenSolaris. The latest version, 2016.10, was announced by Alexander Pyhalov on October 31, 2016.
The OpenIndiana 2016.10 "Hipster" release comes with a large number of updated components, new features and under-the-hood improvements, but the most exciting ones are the migration to FreeBSD Loader, porting of Intel KMS (Kernel Mode Setting), the implementation of Python 2.7 by default, the removal of Sun SSH, and the MATE 1.14 desktop, which is now integrated and installed by default.
"The most notable change for users is migration to FreeBSD Loader. After installing new bits, upon the next beadm activate the new loader will be installed instead of GRUB," reads the release announcement. "This improvement allowed us to modify the text installer so that it can newly install the operating system on RAIDZ/mirror ZFS pools."
New and updated software applications
Among the updated software applications that ship with the OpenIndiana 2016.10 release, we can mention the Mozilla Firefox 49.0.2 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 45.4.0 email and news client, Mesa 12.0.3 3D Graphics Library, CUPS 1.7.5 printing system, InkScape 0.91 vector graphics editor, and Mutt 1.7.1 email client.
The list of updated components continues with Irssi 0.8.20, ImageMagick 6.9.4.5, Midnight Commander 4.8.18, Graphviz 2.38.0, Yelp 3.20.1, Nmap 7.31, GD2 2.1, libpng 1.6, libtasn1 4.8, tmux 2.3, Dash 0.5.9, and Nvidia proprietary driver 340.96. The graphics stack has been updated as well, and LightDM 1.19.3 display manager is now integrated.
Last but not least, various FUSE modules were added for NTFS-3G, the top command now displays ZFS ARC usage stats, and the Areca package was removed. OpenIndiana 2016.10 is available for download right now from our website, and it's distributed as server and minimal install images, as well as a GUI image with the MATE desktop.