My third Lenovo ThinkPad has a new lease on life.
Before retiring the machine in November 2021 with the purchase of my current daily driver, a M1-powered Mac mini, the W541 was my daily driver for most personal tasks – from watching videos, writing posts and playing Minecraft. It ran Windows 10 at that time.
After a hiatus of a couple years, I awoke the dormant machine in October to grab some files off it. I wasn’t able to get Windows 10 to boot (odd considering it worked fine when I last used the machine), but a Linux Mint installation on a live USB flash drive allowed me to get the files I needed.
Wishing to revive the ThinkPad W541, I pondered operating systems to install on it. The most obvious choice was Linux Mint, but I wanted to experience a different type of *nix. (I already had two installs of Linux Mint, including a more current install of Mint 20.2 Cinnamon on a Dell Inspiron 620, the “MintTin II,” I got from my aunt back in 2018.)
My prime choice was OpenIndiana Hipster, an operating system based on Illumos, which is in turn an open-source derivative of AT&T and Sun Microsystems’ Unix System V Revision 4 (SVR4). The history is a bit messy, but OpenIndiana was the successor to OpenSolaris after Oracle (following its purchase of Sun) pulled the plug on an open-source SVR4 operating system.
The W541, however, wasn’t my first choice of computer to run OpenIndiana on. I first wanted to get it working in a virtual machine, but it wouldn’t boot in the VMs I have installed on my Mac mini (UTM, VirtualBox).
I then tried to install it on the aforementioned Inspiron 620, but couldn’t get it to run. From what I’ve read online, OpenIndiana can be a bit picky with hardware compatibility.
As a last resort, I tried the OpenIndiana live USB on the W541 and it worked!

While the install worked, there were instantly problems: No wireless connectivity, and no audio.
The former issue was caused by the W541’s stock Intel Wireless 7260 radio no longer being supported, therefore no current drivers are written for it. To counteract this, I simply purchased a TP-Link travel router that allows me to use it as a wired access point, essentially allowing me to use the Ethernet connection for “wireless” connectivity.

The audio issue was trickier, but I too figured it out eventually. The audio link (at /dev/audio) wasn’t pointing to the right output device.
OpenIndiana uses the MATE desktop environment for its graphical user interface. It has all the basic traits of any GUI: a desktop, windows and menus. Like the menu bar in macOS or the task bar in Windows, MATE uses “panels” that can be repositioned and layered. Panels can be used to display open applications (akin to the task bar in Windows), to launch applications, or show widgets such as clock, volume. Panels, as well as MATE overall, is pretty customizable and flexible. It isn’t as refined as macOS or Windows, but it’s pretty good for open-source.

As someone with minimal *nix command line experience, it has been a slight learning curve. While most typical tasks can be completed entirely from the GUI using MATE’s included applications (such as Caja, MATE’s file browser, or Pluma for editing text), I opted to spend much of my time learning Unix SVR4 commands in the MATE Terminal.

My first project — creating static HTML pages about the AT&T Long Lines network during my brief hiatus from WordPress — was almost completely (about 90%) done using vim in MATE Terminal.

So far, I haven’t rm -rf’d my root directory or anything. But there have been frustrations and issues.
At first, I relied only on the software in the “default” OpenIndiana Hipster package repository. This publisher includes basic software titles that don’t present any licensing issues in certain jurisdictions, such as LibreOffice (a free, and pretty decent, Microsoft Office alternative), GIMP and Inkscape.

I eventually learned the “hipster-encumbered” repository has a far greater software selection, including audio/video codecs, VLC Media Player and even Audacity. (While the Audacity package installed fine, I haven’t been able to get it to open.)
After installing the additional applications, and audio/video codecs, OpenIndiana functions much like a standard (Windows/macOS) operating system. I was able to view YouTube videos, listen to MP3 and WAV files, and more.
A nice feature with OpenIndiana is the ability to create boot environments, which can be used to create a “backup” in case things go awry. It can also help in deploying OpenIndiana installations with pre-loaded software onto multiple computers.
Outside of the frustrations with hardware compatibility, how does OpenIndiana run on the ThinkPad W541? It works well, but can be laggy — especially when playing video. A 480p video I watched on the ThinkPad W541 played at less than 15 frames per second, as it was dropping a lot of frames playing in VLC. It was even worse with YouTube.
Final first impressions
In summary, is OpenIndiana an operating system I can recommend?
To a complete *nix newbie looking to transition away from Windows (or macOS): No, I wouldn’t recommend it. There are many Linux distributions — such as Linux Mint — which are more beginner/user-friendly right out of the box.
However, don’t count OpenIndiana out. If you’re experimenting with different *nix operating systems, or have an affinity for System V Unix, it’s worth checking out.
OpenIndiana is very useful if you’re developing software for Unix System V, or in general. Unlike macOS, the GNU C compiler (and C++ compiler) are readily available to build your own software — or compile software downloaded from the internet.
If I was living on an island and OpenIndiana was the only operating system available, I would be OK with it. It works for most basic tasks (even for me, a *nix newbie). It might not be as good as proprietary operating systems like macOS and Windows, but it’s better than many other open-source operating systems — including one I’ll be writing about in the near future.