Sunday, September 10, 2017

Tribblix - illumos for everyone?

When I was doing a bit of a branding exercise for Tribblix, part of which generated the rather amateurish logo I now have - something I needed to make some business cards and stickers to take to FOSDEM this year - one of the things I wondered about was a good tagline.

In the end, I ended up with "the retro illumos distribution". Of course, it was pointed out that illumos was retro enough on its own, so the idea of a retro variant was a bit unnecessary.

The other tagline I came up with was "illumos for everyone". I rejected it in the end because it was a bit preposterous - I'm not really building something for everyone.

Yet the underlying idea here was simple - that I would actively seek to build a distribution that was inclusive, not exclusive. That's why:

  • I have a SPARC version as well as x86
  • On x86, I support 32-bit as well as 64-bit systems
  • Tribblix is suitable for both desktop and server use
  • Tribblix is a flexible system, not an appliance or hypervisor
  • I work on ensuring Tribblix will work successfully on systems with more minimal resources than other distributions
  • A variety of installation methods are supported - media, network, iPXE
  • I've worked on installation in the cloud, both KVM-based and AWS, in addition to bare metal or other hypervisors
  • I've tried to make key features such as zones easier to configure and use

Generally, the idea is to reduce the barriers and limitations for installing and using Tribblix.

This summer, I came across a much better way of putting it. Rather than "illumos for everyone", a variation of the UK Labour Party's slogan expresses the idea much more elegantly. Tribblix would be "illumos for the many, not the few". It's a shame that the slogan is already taken, as it expresses the philosophical aim rather neatly.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I Love that idea

"illumos for the many, not the few"

Just Great nothing more nothing less :)

Thanks Peter you are some of the few ;)

Ganapathy S Avathan said...

Could you pls write abt making @tribblix from an illumos distro other than itself, i.e. chicken from egg rather than chicken from chicken

Peter Tribble said...

The first version of Tribblix was created from another distro (OpenIndiana for x86), so it's possible.

But you wouldn't necessarily end up with the Tribblix I had now if you bootstrapped it again. The point is that the build pulls in all the non-illumos packages from the build system, so you're actually only strictly compatible with the system the distribution was built on. If any of the core libraries are incompatible, then you have a problem.

So bootstrapping on another illumos distro could be used to create a new distribution that looks like Tribblix, which may or may not be what you're looking for.

Ganapathy S Avathan said...

Thanx Peter for the reply ☺️ Ok, could you please write up about making Tribblix from itself?