The state of Tribblix, 2020

It's been a funny year, has 2020.

But amongst all this, work on Tribblix continues.

I released milestone 22 back in March. That was a fairly long time in the making, as the previous relase was 9 months earlier. Part of the reason for the lengthy delay was that there wasn't all that much reason for a new release - there are a lot of updated packages, but no big items. I guess the biggest thing is that the default gcc compiler and runtime went from gcc4 to gcc7. (In places, the gcc4 name continues.)

Milestone 23 was the next full release, in July. Things start to move again here - Tribblix fully transitioned from gcc4 to gcc7, as illumos is now a gcc7 build. I updated the MATE desktop, which was the start of moving from gtk2 to gtk3. There's a prettier boot banner, which allows a bit of custom branding.

There's a long-running effort to migrate from Python 2.x to 3.x. This is slow going - there are actually quite a lot of python modules and tools (and things that use python) that still show no sign of engaging with the Python 3 shift. But I'm gradually making sure that everything that can be version 3 is, and removing the python 2 pieces where possible. This is getting a bit more complicated - as of Python 3.8 I've switched from 32-bit to 64-bit. And now they're doing time-based releases there will be a version bump to navigate every year, just to add to the work.

Most of the Tribblix releases have been full upgrades from one version to the next. With the milestone 20 series, I had update releases, which allowed a shared stream of userland packages, while allowing illumos updates to take place. The same model is true of milestone 23 - update 1 came along in September.

With Milestone 23 update 1 we fixed the bhyve CVE. Other than normal updates, I added XView, which suits the retro theme and I've had quite a few people ask for.

Immediately after that (it was supposed to be in 23.1 but wasn't quite ready) came another major update: refreshing the X server stack.

When Tribblix was created, I didn't have the resources to build everything from scratch straight away, so "borrowed" a few components from OpenIndiana (initially 151a8, then 151a9) just to make sure I had enough bits to provide a complete OS. Many of the isolated components were replaced fairly quickly over time, but the X11 stack was the big holdout. It was finally time to build Xorg and the drivers myself. It wasn't too difficult, but to be honest I have no real way to test most of it. So that will all be present in 23.2.

One reason for doing this - and my hand was forced a little here - is that I've also updated Xfce from 4.12 to 4.14. That's also a gtk2 to gtk3 switch, but Xfce 4.14 simply didn't work on the old Xorg I had before.

Something else I've put together - and these are all gtk3 based - is a lightweight desktop, using abiword, geany, gnumeric, grisbi, imagination, and netsurf. You still need a file manager to round out the set, and I really haven't found anything that's lightweight and builds successfully, so at the moment this is really an adjunct to MATE or Xfce.

Alongside all this I've been working on keeping Java OpenJDK working on illumos. They ripped out Solaris support early in the year, but I've been able to put that back. The real killer here was Studio support, and we don't want that anyway (it's not open source, and the binaries no longer run). There are other unix-like variants supported by Java, running on the x86 architecture with a gcc toolchain, just like us, so it shouldn't be that much of a mountain to climb.

Support for SPARC is currently slightly on the back burner, partly because the big changes mentioned above aren't really relevant for SPARC, partly due to less time, partly due to the weather - running SPARC boxes in the home office tends to be more of a winter than a summer pursuit, due to the heat.