After five months of “daily driving” OpenIndiana Hipster, I have been adjusting to using the descendant of Ma Bell’s operating system — Unix System V.
Without burying the lede: It’s no macOS (which is based on BSD — Berkley Software Distribution — Unix,) but should suffice for most basic use cases. However, most basic users would probably prefer another open-source *nix operating system — like Linux Mint or Ubuntu.
To preface my thoughts, it’s worth repeating that I’m not a programmer, network technician, or “super user” by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a journalist whose interest in the Bell System — and AT&T — piqued my interest into Unix, and therefore System V. OpenIndiana is the only open-source flavor of Unix System V in the modern world, despite System V being historically one of the two major kinds of Unix. (The other being BSD.)
With all that said, my opinion of OpenIndiana is largely unchanged since my initial post back in December. At the time of publishing that post, I had just ironed out two of my biggest challenges with getting OI to work on my ThinkPad W541: Installing multimedia applications and a lack of sound.
Most multimedia applications — like VLC Media Player and others — can only be downloaded from the “hipster-encumbered” package repository, instead of the normal “hipster” repo.
The lack of sound was fixed by redirecting the audio link (at /dev/audio) to the correct output device.
Since figuring those out, I’ve had minimal issues with OpenIndiana itself. It works as it should — both the graphical user interface and the command line. Because OI is based on System V, some command line commands are different from those found in BSD or Linux operating systems.
What I have had an issue with, however, is the applications I’ve installed sometimes don’t work. Audacity never worked in OpenIndiana, and following an update GIMP would no longer open some common file formats like JPEGs and PNGs. (I have found a workaround for the GIMP issue, though. Open the file using the “Eye of MATE,” copy the image, then paste into GIMP.) Some features in Inkscape don’t work, although I’ve had similar issues with the macOS version.
Unlike BSD and Linux, the list of applications available for OpenIndiana is limited. For instance, games — like SuperTux and SuperTuxKart — are not available for OI.
What about performance and speed? OpenIndiana 2024.10 runs a bit slow on the aging W541, which is nearing its 10th birthday. Some things, like Google Maps, are nearly unusable due to the slow speed. However, the W541 is still plenty useful running OpenIndiana for general web browsing and productivity.
The W541/OpenIndiana has sufficed for light use on a daily basis. I’m writing this post on the W541, and use it for checking/composing emails using Thunderbird. Of course, I still render MIDI files to WAV using TiMidity++. (I then access the WAV files using VLC Media Player.) For the “Horns Across Missouri” project, I use GIMP to process images and LibreOffice Writer for typing up descriptions.
Is OpenIndiana the best open-source Unix operating system? Probably not, especially if you’re an entry level user. However, it works fairly well. It’s also the only open-source Unix System V operating system — making it a good boon for those wanting to experience a descendant of AT&T’s Unix System V on modern hardware, or those programming for System V operating systems.
Also… I was able to get OpenIndiana to run on a VirtualBox virtual machine using the MintTin II/Inspiron 620.
