Hacker News: ptribble

New comment by ptribble in "Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution"

ptribble — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 10:39:06 +0000

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.

New comment by ptribble in "Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution"

ptribble — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:26:56 +0000

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

New comment by ptribble in "Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution"

ptribble — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:51:41 +0000

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.

New comment by ptribble in "British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years"

ptribble — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:12:19 +0000

Why pick on the over-70s though? Most drivers in the UK either can't see or don't bother looking, so we should be demanding higher standards of all drivers.

New comment by ptribble in "SmartOS"

ptribble — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 20:47:01 +0000

Not dead, still going strong under new ownership (MNX).

New comment by ptribble in "SmartOS"

ptribble — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 20:41:58 +0000

SmartOS can, of course, boot from a local zfs pool, but it treats it logically as just another source for the bootable image. See the piadm(8) command.

New comment by ptribble in "OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution"

ptribble — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 08:13:12 +0000

That's like asking if Linux has a desktop environment. Strictly, no, but Linux distributions do.

So OpenIndiana has MATE and a couple of other options; Tribblix has about 30 desktop options; OmniOS you can install a desktop stack from pkgsrc.

New comment by ptribble in "OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution"

ptribble — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 20:33:55 +0000

It has 30 desktop options, including i3

The repo has a list of packages

http://pkgs.tribblix.org/

New comment by ptribble in "OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution"

ptribble — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 20:02:56 +0000

There was nothing about screwing anyone involved in the choice of the license. The license had to be something all the copyright and license holders were prepared to accept (and getting them to accept CDDL was hard enough, not everyone did hence the few closed components).

Our belief was that Linux would be unlikely (and unwise as the overall system architecture is sufficiently different that it would be hard to port) to take the code. We expected - and encouraged - the concepts to be taken (as with the slab memory allocator).

New comment by ptribble in "Tribblix – The Retro Illumos Distribution"

ptribble — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 13:57:10 +0000

That shouldn't be a fundamental problem with current Tribblix - due to this sort of problem the installer got modified so that once the bootloader has pulled the ramdisk off the usb stick it doesn't need it again (although if it can't see it it won't be able to install any packages from it, falling back to dragging them across the network).

New comment by ptribble in "Tribblix – The Retro Illumos Distribution"

ptribble — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 12:12:05 +0000

There are over 30 desktop options (including quite a few of the older window managers, which is a bit of a blast from the past).

I do include CDE and Open Look (the window manager and toolkit, at least). In both cases the add-on tools that were present in Solaris (like the whole of the DeskSet suite) aren't available, because they were never released in source form.

New comment by ptribble in "Tribblix – The Retro Illumos Distribution"

ptribble — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 12:09:27 +0000

It's never going to be maintained...

But there is a 64-bit port (which I ought to bring in to Tribblix)

https://github.com/ggodd/xview-64bit

New comment by ptribble in "Nile: PostgreSQL reengineered for multi-tenant apps"

ptribble — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 13:48:07 +0000

Sheesh. Just use a separate schema per tenant.

New comment by ptribble in "Illumos to drop SPARC Support"

ptribble — Sat, 08 May 2021 09:23:24 +0000

Pretty much it, yeah. If there's anything useful upstream then it will get pulled in, and there's a still a lot of worthwhile cleanup of SPARC, but the kernel will be essentially frozen.

New comment by ptribble in "Illumos to drop SPARC Support"

ptribble — Fri, 07 May 2021 20:55:16 +0000

Tribblix SPARC will continue. While you lose any new features that go into illumos upstream, at least you don't keep getting broken by changes going into illumos upstream.

(This isn't a commitment for all time, naturally. At some point the SPARC hardware I have will stop working. But it turns out to be solidly built and impressively reliable.)

New comment by ptribble in "Illumos to drop SPARC Support"

ptribble — Fri, 07 May 2021 17:28:04 +0000

Because it's not a stock gcc. It's specially modified to do things quite differently on SPARC. If it was a case of "just" upgrading we would have done it long ago.

As one of approximately 2 people who actually build illumos on SPARC, I can testify that the whole thing is enough of a maintenance burden that it's causing major problems.

(And I'll just fork a copy and use that; it's not as though the SPARC ecosystem is a moving target.)

New comment by ptribble in "Illumos to drop SPARC Support"

ptribble — Fri, 07 May 2021 17:22:06 +0000

For illumos, the sweet spot is the 10-15 year old Sun gear you can pick up on eBay. Works well, supported, not overly expensive.

Newer SPARC systems are really quite good. And pretty cost-effective too. The problem is that the starting price is out of reach, and almost nobody is offering a cloud service based on SPARC, so you can't hire it either.

I'm running illumos on SPARC. I have some old hardware (desktop and server) that I like to make use of. Time, yes, but I'm not putting money into it.

And while OpenJDK upstream has dropped support for SPARC and Solaris, that was really all about problems with the Studio compiler. I' maintaining an illumos OpenJDK port with the gcc toolchain on x86 - it's not excessively hard, and realistically if you're using a common toolchain and common CPU most standards-compliant code is portable at the OS layer.

New comment by ptribble in "Open Source Enterprise Server OS"

ptribble — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 19:20:11 +0000

Other way round. Like LX, into SmartOS first, then brought across into OmniOSce. But yes, OmniOSce picks up a lot of SmartOS features, whereas some of the other distros are vanilla illumos.

https://omniosce.org/info/bhyve

New comment by ptribble in "The Cloud is Just Another Sun [video]"

ptribble — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 09:42:53 +0000

I was at the talk, and thought at the time that Rankin missed the main point.

Linux didn't beat Sun because it was better, cheaper, or had more ideologically pure licensing.

Linux dominated because it was accessible. Anybody could download it, try it, it ran on most things. Barrier to entry was essentially zero. Licensing helps, but it's being trivial to access that is the killer outcome.

And the reason behind the rise of cloud isn't because it's cheaper or better, it's that it's more accessible. Anybody can get out their credit card and try it, use it. Barrier to entry is essentially zero, and that's how to suck people in.