alt.hn

6/14/2026 at 5:23:12 AM

Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution

http://tribblix.org/

by naturalmovement

6/14/2026 at 6:38:19 AM

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

by yjftsjthsd-h

6/14/2026 at 8:51:41 AM

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.

by ptribble

6/14/2026 at 9:02:28 AM

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.

by Altern4tiveAcc

6/14/2026 at 6:01:41 AM

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.

by Guestmodinfo

6/14/2026 at 9:23:56 AM

Should work fine if you can run Zoom through Firefox.

by Altern4tiveAcc

6/14/2026 at 6:31:09 AM

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.

by yjftsjthsd-h

6/14/2026 at 6:19:00 AM

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

by solarengineer

6/14/2026 at 7:53:17 AM

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

by 2b3a51

6/14/2026 at 6:07:47 AM

No

by unixhero

6/14/2026 at 5:55:38 AM

Very good work by Peter Tribble

by solarengineer

6/14/2026 at 9:01:58 AM

> desktop - an Xfce-based desktop with common tools

I would have expected OpenLook. Xfce is ugly.

by hulitu

6/14/2026 at 9:26:56 AM

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

by ptribble

6/14/2026 at 8:45:30 AM

Finally TempleOS has a companion - like a brother.

Retro will never die.

by shevy-java