Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution (tribblix.org)
73 points by naturalmovement 12 hours ago
yjftsjthsd-h 11 hours ago
Notable for still maintaining some level of SPARC support.
On a personal level I'm impressed and fascinated by the fact that apparently one man created and has maintained an illumos distro for many years;
* making an OS distro at all is hard
* making an illumos distro is harder (less precedent to work from, and IMHO Sun didn't do a great job documenting things if you weren't inside Sun)
* making a different distro is harder; this isn't an OpenIndiana rehash, AFAIK it's mostly novel
* and of course maintaining it for so long is a huge undertaking
ptribble 9 hours ago
One of the reasons for creating Tribblix in the first place was that there really wasn't any documentation on how OpenSolaris (as was) was built. I wanted to understand that, so had to work it out essentially from scratch. I soon worked out that there were ways to do it better, and Tribblix is still here something like 15 years later.
yjftsjthsd-h 13 minutes ago
That tracks:) On which note... Any chance you wrote it down? Because I'm also quite interested in knowing how to do that, and as you note the documentation is...
boricj an hour ago
I can't seem to find a list of supported hardware (or at least hardware which is supposed to work). Will it run on a UltraSPARC T2 server? I've got one collecting dust in the basement.
Altern4tiveAcc 9 hours ago
Has anyone managed to boot it on bare metal using an AM5 motherboard?
I tried booting various Illumos distros through USB sticks on two different AM5 computers, and it got stuck very early on. I assume due to some incompatibility with USB 3.0. Meanwhile, a friend of mine booted on a Thinkpad just fine from a DVD.
shrubble 2 hours ago
It installed perfectly on my V210 UltraSPARC machine and also on an Intel i5-8400T ( from memory) HP desktop. Very nice distribution!
solarengineer 12 hours ago
Very good work by Peter Tribble
ruslan 5 hours ago
Cannot find what are the min HW requirements ? What min RAM/HDD/CPU to get simple X11 environment ? Will it run on 486DX2-66 ?
Narishma 5 hours ago
It says 32-bit support completely removed, so I doubt it.
Guestmodinfo 12 hours ago
It is comparable to slackware as I says on the website and for many yas i have wanted to use slackware. So i want to install it on my pentium laptop that I got in 2020. I want to run zoom on it with screen sharing. Can I do that? I can use antix linux on that laptop frthe same purpose.
LeFantome an hour ago
Debian no longer supports Pentium, so neither does Antix.
There are still Linux distros that will work on it. Adelie should. I think Arch32 as well. And Tinycore.
I am not as sure about Slackware but I believe the single-core (non-SMP) kernel runs on Pentium.
yjftsjthsd-h 11 hours ago
You can try running it via LX zone (Linux compatibility) but I would consider it a very far stretch. You might be able to make it work via browser but I don't know the situation there.
Altern4tiveAcc 8 hours ago
Should work fine if you can run Zoom through Firefox.
solarengineer 11 hours ago
You can try via a usb bootable and see if the hardware is recognised
2b3a51 10 hours ago
Would that be a question of using dd to write the iso to a USB stick, or are we talking about burning the iso to a DVD, booting and installing to a USB drive?
PS: Thanks to Peter Tribble for providing this system.
Edit: I've just downloaded the basic (Tribblix 0m40) iso, dd'ed [see below] it to a smallish USB stick and booted an old Thinkpad. Boot succeeded and I was able to log in to the minimal live session. Haven't done more than that yet.
# dd if=tribblix-0m40.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M2b3a51 7 hours ago
unixhero 12 hours ago
No
prmoustache 7 hours ago
What does "retro" mean in this case. I failed to find what was really different compares to other illumos based OS.
ptribble 7 hours ago
It's a bit of an in-joke, as if illumos itself isn't retro enough. But it relates to the use of older (smaller, faster, lighter weight, more reliable and well tested) technologies in certain places, the most obvious being the use of traditional SVR4 packaging as opposed to IPS.
hulitu 9 hours ago
> desktop - an Xfce-based desktop with common tools
I would have expected OpenLook. Xfce is ugly.
ptribble 8 hours ago
Oh, Open Look is there too. Although I always found Open Look, like SunView before it, to be pretty unpleasant to use.
ruslan 5 hours ago
I would expect CDE (or NsCDE).
LeFantome an hour ago
It is not designed to be “retro”, like a toy. While it prefers many older, simpler technologies, it is designed to be used.
XFCE is much more functional than CDE.
LargoLasskhyfv 6 hours ago
What's so ugly about it? The window decorations? The gtk-theme(which can be changed easily anyway), the file-manager, the panel(s)?
shevy-java 9 hours ago
Finally TempleOS has a companion - like a brother.
Retro will never die.
LeFantome an hour ago
This is a full Solaris UNIX distro. Pretty far from TempleOS.