Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution | Hacker News Reader

Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution

tribblix.org

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

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.

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...

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.

It installed perfectly on my V210 UltraSPARC machine and also on an Intel i5-8400T ( from memory) HP desktop. Very nice distribution!

Very good work by Peter Tribble

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.

https://tribblix.org/Use/3.install.html Yes

What does "retro" mean in this case. I failed to find what was really different compares to other illumos based OS.

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.

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.

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

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

Edit timeout reached so replying to my own post.

Installed on the Thinkpad T60 using the 'kitchen-sink' option to the install script following the instructions on the tribblix Web site. Left the USB stick in and rebooted and it did some first run stuff (you have to leave the usb stick plugged in at this stage).

Edit: To use a wired connection (e1000 driver on Tribblix) you need to have the network cable plugged in when you boot the usb stick. If you don't, then networking does not get configured.

The xfce desktop installation is quite nice, with emacs, vim and helix editors and Abiword/Gnumeric. Palemoon and Netsurf are available as graphical Web browsers.

Sometimes it is good to try something that works on a different basis to what you are used to - the contrast illuminates (lol) what you usually use.

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.

Should work fine if you can run Zoom through Firefox.

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.

> desktop - an Xfce-based desktop with common tools

I would have expected OpenLook. Xfce is ugly.

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

What's so ugly about it? The window decorations? The gtk-theme(which can be changed easily anyway), the file-manager, the panel(s)?

I would expect CDE (or NsCDE).

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.

I'm pretty sure CDE is available, it's just (sensibly IMO) not the default. Listed in https://www.tribblix.org/Use/5.desktop.html & https://www.tribblix.org/overlay-cde.html

Cannot find what are the min HW requirements ? What min RAM/HDD/CPU to get simple X11 environment ? Will it run on 486DX2-66 ?

It says 32-bit support completely removed, so I doubt it.

I'm tempted to try this on my Ultra 10! Looks like I need to upgrade the RAM first...

Finally TempleOS has a companion - like a brother.

Retro will never die.

This is a full Solaris UNIX distro. Pretty far from TempleOS.

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