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Upgrading from OpenSolaris 2009.06 to OpenIndiana 1 comment

I’ve written up instructions for this on the OpenIndiana Wiki, but am still seeing a number of questions on how to do this, so thought I’d stick a quick post up here as well, covering how to upgrade from OpenSolaris 2009.06 to OpenIndiana.

The first thing to remember is that, unlike lesser operating systems, Boot Evironments (BEs) mean that you an upgrade with impunity – if it all goes wrong, you just reboot, select the previous working BE, and carry on.

The majority of people will have OpenSolaris 2009.06, the last OpenSolaris distribution. This release snv_111, which wasn’t the last OpenSolaris project release. Confused? We all are.

The direct upgrade from snv_111 to OpenIndiana is problematic – a lot of things have changed, not least the updates to the packaging system. So this needs to be done in two stages – first, update to snv_134 (which would have become the OpenSolaris 2010.03/05/whatever distribution) and then jump to OpenIndiana (oi_147).

So, the first step is to tell OpenSolaris to look at the snv_134 repository hosted by OpenIndiana:


pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.openindiana.org/legacy opensolaris.org

This is a snapshot of Sun’s snv_134 repository – as I’m not sure how long that will hang around, it’s best to go through the OpenIndiana repos instead.

Next, we need to tell OpenSolaris to do an image update – basically, dig through the list of local packages, the list of packages in the new repo, find the updates, and then install them:


pfexec pkg image-update

This will take some time, so head off with a coffee and catch up with the OpenIndiana mailing lists and the IRC channel.

Once image-update has finished, you can reboot your machine. The new BE will have been selected as the default, so your machine should boot straight into snv_134.

Start up another terminal session, and we pretty much do the same thing.


pfexec pkg set-publisher --non-sticky opensolaris.org
pfexec pkg set-publisher -g http://pkg.openindiana.org/dev openindiana.org

Once we’ve setup which repos to use, we then need to tell pkg that we’d prefer to use the OpenIndiana ones:


pfexec pkg set-publisher -P openindiana.org

Then we purge anything old, and do a full image-update:


pfexec pkg uninstall entire
pfexec pkg image-update

Once again image-update will do it’s thing, and at the end you’ll be asked to reboot. You’ll find OpenIndiana now on the boot menu – enjoy!

Note that at every stage, you can reboot, select your old or previous BE from the boot menu, and boot back into a known, working environment. This makes testing updates and new releases much less hazardous, and means it’s very easy to get stuck in and try out OpenIndiana for yourself.

OpenSolaris lives! OpenIndiana announced Comments Off on OpenSolaris lives! OpenIndiana announced

Now that Alasdair has started to spread the news ahead of next week, I can share the details of OpenIndiana.

OpenIndiana is a continuation of the OpenSolaris operating system. It was conceived during the period of uncertainty following the Oracle takeover of Sun Microsystems, after several months passed with no binary updates made available to the public.

The project will be formally unveiled with an announcement next Tuesday.

OpenIndiana is part of the Illumos Foundation, and provides a true open source community alternative to Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express, with an open development model and full community participation.

Come along on Tuesday – either in person if you’re in London, or online – and see what OpenIndiana is about, then get involved. If you’ve got OpenSolaris 2009.06 machines you’ll really want to know about this.

Solaris 09/10 is out Comments Off on Solaris 09/10 is out

Oracle have announced that Solaris 09/10 is out. Along with a number of new features, two things really stick out:

1) Oracle have begun putting a lot of effort into tuning and integrating Solaris and Oracle. If you’re an Oracle database shop and you’re not running Solaris, you need to be paying close attention to this, because it’s the future for Mad Larry’s database cash-cow.

2) Perpetual licensing. Gone is the stupid 90 day eval – if you’re doing anything that’s not production, you get Solaris for keeps.

Except for any included software package or file that is licensed to you by Oracle under different license terms, we grant you a perpetual (unless terminated as provided in this agreement), nonexclusive, nontransferable, limited License to use the Programs only for the purpose of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications, and not for any other purpose.

Clearly the short sighted and ill considered “90 day evaluation” clause generated enough of a negative backlash from customers for Oracle to change tack. Hopefully with some of the confusion out of the way more people will be picking this up and playing with it.

OGB resigns, OpenSolaris canned – or is it? Comments Off on OGB resigns, OpenSolaris canned – or is it?

As expected the OpenSolaris OGB have officially thrown in the towel. Plans have been leaked internally from Oracle showing that they are going to stop open development of OpenSolaris.

All pretty much expected, and hopefully this will be the ‘jumpstart’ that the OpenSolaris community needs to start pushing community distros and community code.

What a lot of the peanut gallery commentators have missed is that this doesn’t spell the end of any OpenSolaris development. Oracle will still release code, just after a long-ish delay. This is a clearly a tactic to address people like Nexenta, who are directly competing with Oracle in the open storage space – where there’s an awful lot of money up for grabs.

There are pluses and minuses for all of this – to get an idea read these posts from Ben Rockwood and Joerg Mollenkamp to see the view from both sides of the fence.

The big plus for existing Solaris shops – and yes, it is a plus – is the return of Solaris Express. Specifically Solaris 11 Express, which should be appearing sometime after OpenWorld.

The death of SX:CE was a massive mistake from Sun – OpenSolaris was too far ahead of current shipping Solaris versions, and it made any sort of planning or roadmap to implement new features impossible, especially in a large environment. You know, those big corporate Solaris/SPARC shops who paid Sun’s bills?

The return of Solaris Express gives these guys – the ones who pay big money to Oracle – a chance to evaluate new features, plan out a deployment/upgrade strategy. Which means it’s much more likely they’ll stick with Solaris, take advantage of the new features – and continue to pay money to Oracle.

Sadly for Oracle they seem to have handled Solaris with all the deftness and tact of IBM with OS/2. Getting all bullish with licensing and support costs without giving your customers solid roadmaps and upgrade plans is pretty amateurish.

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