Tribblix Milestone 25
Poking his nose where he’s not supposed to, Mayank Sharma finds himself inside a Solaris variant that he just can’t seem to shake off.
Poking his nose where he’s not supposed to, Mayank Sharma finds himself inside a Solaris variant that he just can’t shake off.
Tribblix pitches itself as a flexible, fast, and familiar OS to anyone who’s used Solaris in the past. The distro brings the retro Solaris up to date and ships with modern software on top of the illumos-derived foundation.
For anyone unfamiliar with Solaris, Sun Microsystems’ SunOS evolved into the rechristened Solaris and began as a proprietary UNIX variant designed to support Sun’s SPARC processors. Its list of supported hardware widened over time, and in 2005 Sun released the source code in the form of OpenSolaris. Then Oracle purchased Sun, renamed the OS once more to Oracle Solaris, and decided to cease source releases, effectively closing the source once again.
That’s when the community took it upon themselves to maintain OpenSolaris. They decided to ditch its development tools and processes and created the OpenIndiana Hipster branch to modernise the OS. Hipster is compiled with GCC instead of Sun Studio and is based on the work of the illumos project, which produces the kernel and other core utilities.
Tribblix, however, isn’t just another illumos distro. Although it does borrow illumos technologies such as the kernel, ZFS, zones, DTrace, and SMF, and a few components from OpenIndiana, the distro insists that it’s essentially been built from scratch, with its own build and packaging system.
Tribblix bills itself as a traditional Solaris system with software distributed as SVR4 (System V Release 4) packages. The distro is also particular for its use of lightweight window managers. It defaults to Xfce, though several other lightweights ones like Mate, Openbox and Enlightenment, and dozens of window managers can be installed from its repositories.
All Suns blazing
The distro is available in two variants: a standard edition designed for workstations and another built on OmniOS, primarily for the LX zones, which helps run most Linux programs inside a virtualised environment that it claims is lighter than a typical virtual machine. Both editions are released in a standard and a minimal image.
First-time users should stick with the standard workstation image. This also drops you to a shell environment and that’s by design, since the developer intends to provide just enough OS to help users build their desktop from scratch.
Any distro that takes this DIY approach to building a usable desktop must have a solid package management system, and we’re happy to report that Tribblix doesn’t disappoint. Its custom Zap (Zip Archive Packaging) package manager essentially provides compressed versions of traditional Solaris SVR4 packages.
Moreover, instead of individual packages the distro thinks about managing software suites or applications. These are known as overlays and help install complex pieces of software such as desktop environments, office suites and more. Using overlays enables you to get to a desktop with working wireless in no time.
For installation, the distro uses an installation script. All you need to do is point the script to a partition you want to install Tribblix on and let it rip. You can also pass the name of any overlays and the installer will install these as well. Many of the commonly used overlays such as Xfce are bundled in the standard installation media, which further speeds up installation.
Partitioning is handled by the well-documented Solaris format CLI utility. However, we’d suggest anyone not familiar with Solaris partitioning to first experiment with the script inside a virtual environment.
Just like the installation, the installed Tribblix system boots quickly and feels responsive, even inside VMs, which would be a good environment for anyone to acquaint themselves with the ways of Solaris.