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SmartOS is a Joy to Use

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Photo by  Marc PEZIN  on  Unsplash I had a renewed interest in the Solaris operating systems. It was a sad time when Oracle closed the Opensolaris project and killed Solaris. But it's direct descendant Illumos project is still alive and well. There are three well know distribution based Illumos -- Omnios CE , Openindiana and SmartOS . Omnios CE is community driven server oriented distribution Openindiana aims to be the direct descendant to Opensolaris SmartOS is a live OS that provides virtualization What Illumos Offers ZFS - The de facto file system for production systems in my opinion. DTrace - Dynamic tracing for identifying software issues. Zone - a container technology based on Jail (from BSD). Crossbow - Network virtualization technology. What SmartOS offer SmartOS is a live OS. This means you burn the OS onto a USB key and boot from it. It's diskless. The update process involved burning another USB key and boot from that. Many components are immutable (e.g. /etc an