I seem to have just missed the anniversary, but it turns out that Tribblix has existed for slightly over a decade.
The initial blog post on Building Tribblix was published on October 24th, 2012. But the ISO image (milestone 0) was October 21st, and it looks like the packages were built on October 4th. So there's a bit of uncertainty about the actual date, and I had been playing around with some of the bits and pieces for a while before that.
There have been a lot of releases. We're now on Milestone 28, but there have been several update releases along the way, so I make it 42 distinct releases in total. That doesn't include the LX-enabled OmniTribblix variant (there have been 20 of those by the way).
The focus (given hardware availability) has been x86, naturally. But the SPARC version has seen occasional bursts of life. Now I have a decent build system, it's catching up. Will there be an ARM version? Who knows...
Over the years there have been some notable highlights. It took a few releases to become fully self-hosting; package management had to be rebuilt; LibreOffice was ported; Xfce and MATE added as fully functional desktop offerings (with a host of others); a whole family of zones, including reimplementing the traditional sparse root; made available on clouds like AWS and Digital Ocean; network install via iPXE; huge numbers of packages (it's never-ending churn); and maintaining Java by default.
And it's been (mostly) fun. Here's to the next 10 years!
6 comments:
Very impressive work Peter, here's to another 10 years!
Well done!
I believe it is important this Tribblix exists.
Just wish you had more help and a way to fund it easier. Hopefully illumos makes Segway into servers
Hopefully illumos grows on servers and desktops in the future
Belated congratulations.
It is so nice to see there is life in Solaris distributions also today.
I still remember SchilliX somewhat, occasionally used it. May need to
refresh my memories with another Solaris dist, I'm afraid. Might as well
consider yours. Anyway, thank you very much for your endurance providing
your user base with a good os over such a long time. Thank God there is
more people can consider than the usual suspects, when it comes to
system softwares.
If you really wanted to target the ARM platform - that little rascal,
the Raspberry Pi 400 'home computer' vulgo 'breadbox 2.0', would fit
your dist? One of the few things I could consider 'pretty in pink',
honestly. 'Solaris at your fingertips' would become reality.
This year be one for you to cherish, with many events to enjoy, I hope.
Best wishes, keep calm and carry on, or rock the house - up to you!
Quite agree on the Raspberry Pi 400, it's a nifty little package, many of us remember systems in a form factor like that from the early days. I don't have enough free time to work on it myself, but the illumos aarch64 port appears to be making progress.
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