Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution

(tribblix.org)

36 points | by naturalmovement 4 hours ago ago

13 comments

  • yjftsjthsd-h 3 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 44 minutes 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.

  • Altern4tiveAcc 33 minutes 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.

  • Guestmodinfo 4 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.

    • Altern4tiveAcc 11 minutes ago

      Should work fine if you can run Zoom through Firefox.

    • yjftsjthsd-h 3 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.

    • solarengineer 3 hours ago

      You can try via a usb bootable and see if the hardware is recognised

      • 2b3a51 2 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=1M
    • unixhero 3 hours ago

      No

  • solarengineer 4 hours ago

    Very good work by Peter Tribble

  • hulitu 33 minutes ago

    > desktop - an Xfce-based desktop with common tools

    I would have expected OpenLook. Xfce is ugly.

    • ptribble 8 minutes ago

      Oh, Open Look is there too. Although I always found Open Look, like SunView before it, to be pretty unpleasant to use.

  • shevy-java an hour ago

    Finally TempleOS has a companion - like a brother.

    Retro will never die.