Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Tribblix - minimal plus pkgsrc

The latest update (0m20.5) of Tribblix is now available for download.

This one comes relatively quickly after its predecessor, but includes the eager fpu and ldt fixes.

The visible change this time is that there's a minimal ISO available. At just over 200M, it's about a fifth of the size of the regular ISO.

The only difference between the regular and minimal ISO is in what extra packages are dropped on the ISO. If you aren't going to add overlays at install, then the minimal ISO is much better.

The use cases for the minimal ISO are the obvious minimal server installs (including cloud-based), but also if you decide to use pkgsrc for your software rather than Tribblix native packages.

Tribblix is all about choice and flexibility, so if you want to use pkgsrc, go right ahead. You'll get a broader choice of software, certainly. In some areas you'll get newer versions than I provide, in some areas Tribblix will update more aggressively.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that if you want to use pkgsrc, do so exclusively. Mixing and matching native packages and pkgsrc really doesn't work.

With that in mind, the minimal ISO makes a great base for pkgsrc. To make it even easier, the pkgsrc bootstrap is available on the ISO itself. So if you want to install Tribblix with pkgsrc, just invoke the installer like so:

./live_install.sh -B c1t0d0 pkgsrc

Then, as root

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH

and you're all set to install packages from pkgsrc.

To get the X server and basics:

pkgin install modular-xorg

To install a graphical desktop, such as Xfce - there are many others, of course:

pkgin install xfce4

And then, as a regular user

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH
startxfce4

And, lo and behold, you should have a functional basic Xfce desktop running.