Tribblix for SPARC m25.1

Following hot on the heels of the Tribblix Milestone 22 ISO for SPARC, it's possible to upgrade that to a newer version. The new version that's available is m25.1.

(If the available versions look a bit random, that's because they are. Not every release on x86 was built for SPARC, and not all of the ones that were actually worked properly. So we have what we have.)

The major jump, aside from the underlying OS, in m25.1 for SPARC is that it brings in gcc7 (for applications, illumos itself is still built with gcc4), and generally there's a bunch of more modern applications available.

To upgrade m22 to m25.1 is a manual process. This is because there are steps that are necessary, and if you don't follow them exactly the system won't boot.

The underlying cause here of the various problems in this process is that it's a big jump from m22 to m25.1 and you will hit bugs in the upgrade process that have been fixed in intermediate releases.

First, take a note of the current BE, eg tribblix. You might need it later if things go bad and you need to reboot into the current (hopefully working) release.

You can manually add available versions for upgrade with the following trick (this is just one line, despite how it might be formatted):

echo "m25.1|http://pkgs.tribblix.org/release-m25.1.sparc/TRIBzap.0.0.25.1.zap|Tribblix m25.1" >> /etc/zap/version.list

and check that's visible with

zap upgrade list

and then start the upgrade with

zap upgrade m25.1

Do not activate or reboot yet!

You MUST do the following:

beadm mount m25.1 /a
zap install -C /a TRIBshell-ksh93
pkgadm sync -q -R /a
beadm umount m25.1

and then you should be safe to reboot:

beadm activate m25.1
init 6

If it doesn't come back, you can boot into the previous release (that you took the name of earlier, remember) from the ok prompt

boot -Z rpool/ROOT/tribblix

Once you're up and running m25.1 it's time to clean up.

zap refresh

and then remove some of the old opensxce packages

zap uninstall \
SUNWfont-xorg-core \
SUNWfont-xorg-iso8859-1 \
SUNWttf-dejavu \
SUNWxorg-clientlibs \
SUNWxorg-xkb \
SUNWxvnc \
SUNWxwcft \
SUNWxwfsw \
SUNWxwice \
SUNWxwinc \
SUNWxwopt \
SUNWxwxft \
SUNWxwrtl \
SUNWxwplr \
SUNWxwplt

and then bring packages up to current

zap update-overlay -a

and this should give you a system that's in a workable state, and roughly matching my active SPARC environment.