Time for another Sun Ray blog post! I’ve had a few people email me asking for help setting up a Sun Ray server over the last few months, and despite my attempts to help them get it going there’s been mixed results with running SRSS on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10.
my Sun Ray server is still on an earlier OI snapshot, so I figured it was about time to try to actually follow the new guides myself.
↫ The Iris System
Ever since my spiraling down the Sun rabbit hole late last year, I’ve tried for a few times now to get the x86 version of OpenIndiana and Oracle Solaris working on any of my machines, exactly for the purposes of setting up a modern Sun Ray server. Sadly, none of my machines are compatible with any illumos distribution or Oracle Solaris, so I’ve been shit out of luck trying to get this side project off the ground. My Ultra 45 is sadly also not supported by any SPARC version of illumos or Oracle Solaris, so unless I buy even more hardware, my dream of a modern Sun Ray setup will have to wait.
Of course, virtualisation is an option for many, and that’s exactly what this particular guide is about: setting up OpenIndiana on a Proxmox virtual machine. I actually have a Proxmox machine up and running and could do this too, but I’m a sucker for running stuff like this on real hardware. Yes, that makes my life more complicated and difficult, and no, it’s not more noble or real or hardcore – it’s just a preference. Still, for normal people who pick up a Sun Ray or two on eBay for basically nothing, running OpenIndiana in a virtual machine is the smart, reasonable, and effective option.
Unfortunately the industry went into quite the opposite direction.
Sunray was the peak “thin client”, or extension of the old UNIX Terminal. Plug in a smart card, and your desktop will be available immediately. You could even move between different locations and have your session move with you.
At one point Linux had similar. Not quote, but NoMachine / NX provided real fast X11 sessions with their proprietary compression and session management system. At least they offered a free version. (No, VNC does not count)
But today, Linux not only is on the way to completely abandon X11, most Wayland installations would not support this “multi-seat” setting out of the box, or even with heavy customization. Large corporation took over under the guise of modernizing, and they would rather sell you a cloud instance than have your local server + 20 thin clients setup.
(Ironically, you can do that with Windows with ease. But comes at a high cost)