Tribblix, the unique ilumos distribution – think Solaris – has a new SPARC milestone. It’s one of the few platforms still actively supporting SPARC, so even if the amount of users might be slim, I think it’s an important contribution to the ecosystem.

The application software here roughly corresponds to m34 on x86 systems, although the underlying illumos is still closer to m25/m26. Note that there are no functional illumos changes from the m28 sparc release – if that release didn’t work on your system, this one won’t either.

↫ Peter Tribble

I’m still looking for my mythical, unobtanium Sun Ultra 45, a goal farther away now than it’s ever been (Patreon maybe? One-time donation? Help me out after I took OSNews full-time?), and the SPARC version of Tribblix would be my first go-to.

We’ve talked about Tribblix before on OSNews – it’s a distribution of illumos, built by Peter Tribble. In his latest blog post, Tribble details some of the changes he’s made to the live ISO and other images for the most recent release.

All along, there’s been an overlay (think a group package) called base-iso that lists the packages that are present in the live image. On installation, this is augmented with a few extra packages that you would expect to be present in a running system but which don’t make much sense in a live image, to construct the base system.

You can add additional software, but the base is assumed to be present.

The snag with this is that base-iso is very much a single-purpose generic concept. By its very nature it has to be minimal enough to not be overly bloated, yet contain as many drivers as necessary to handle the majority of systems.

As such, the regular ISO image has fallen between 2 stools – it doesn’t have every single driver, so some systems won’t work, while it has a lot of unnecessary drivers for a lot of common use cases.

↫ Peter Tribble

Tribble then details how he addressed this issue, which is, unsurprisingly, rather clever. I’m not going to spoil it here, so go on over and read the details.