Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution
tribblix.org43 points by naturalmovement 6 hours ago
43 points by naturalmovement 6 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.
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.
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.
Very good work by Peter Tribble
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 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.
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=1MEdit 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).
Alas, it turns out that neither the ethernet nor the wifi are supported (dladm show-phys returns nothing and ifconfig shows loopback devices only).
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.
xfce4 extras are not installed so automounting of storage does not work. An Oracle Solaris page mentioned rmmount so I was able to workout how to mount a usb stick at least.
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.
> 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.
Finally TempleOS has a companion - like a brother.
Retro will never die.