Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution

http://tribblix.org/

by naturalmovement • 1 month ago

86 29 1 month ago

tribblix.org

solarengineer2• 1 month ago

Very good work by Peter Tribble

Guestmodinfo• 1 month 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.

unixhero• 1 month ago

solarengineer2• 1 month ago

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

2b3a512• 1 month 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

yjftsjthsd-h4• 1 month 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.

Altern4tiveAcc2• 1 month ago

Should work fine if you can run Zoom through Firefox.

LeFantome3• 1 month 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-h4• 1 month 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

ptribble3• 1 month 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-h4• 1 month 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...

shevy-java• 1 month ago

Finally TempleOS has a companion - like a brother.

Retro will never die.

LeFantome3• 1 month ago

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

hulitu• 1 month ago

desktop - an Xfce-based desktop with common tools

I would have expected OpenLook. Xfce is ugly.

ptribble3• 1 month ago

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

LargoLasskhyfv• 1 month 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)?

ruslan2• 1 month ago

I would expect CDE (or NsCDE).

LeFantome3• 1 month 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.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 1 month ago

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

Altern4tiveAcc2• 1 month 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.

prmoustache• 1 month ago

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

ptribble3• 1 month 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.

ruslan2• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

shrubble• 1 month ago

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

boricj• 1 month 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.

iluvcommunism• 1 month ago

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

icedchai• 1 month ago

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

Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution

Related Stories