Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution

naturalmovement 81 points 28 comments June 14, 2026
tribblix.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (10 comments)

solarengineer

Very good work by Peter Tribble

Guestmodinfo

It is comparable to slackware as I says on the website and for many yas i have wanted to use slackware. So i want to install it on my pentium laptop that I got in 2020. I want to run zoom on it with screen sharing. Can I do that? I can use antix linux on that laptop frthe same purpose.

yjftsjthsd-h

Notable for still maintaining some level of SPARC support. On a personal level I'm impressed and fascinated by the fact that apparently one man created and has maintained an illumos distro for many years; * making an OS distro at all is hard * making an illumos distro is harder (less precedent to work from, and IMHO Sun didn't do a great job documenting things if you weren't inside Sun) * making a different distro is harder; this isn't an OpenIndiana rehash, AFAIK it's mostly novel * and of course maintaining it for so long is a huge undertaking

shevy-java

Finally TempleOS has a companion - like a brother. Retro will never die.

hulitu

> desktop - an Xfce-based desktop with common tools I would have expected OpenLook. Xfce is ugly.

Altern4tiveAcc

Has anyone managed to boot it on bare metal using an AM5 motherboard? I tried booting various Illumos distros through USB sticks on two different AM5 computers, and it got stuck very early on. I assume due to some incompatibility with USB 3.0. Meanwhile, a friend of mine booted on a Thinkpad just fine from a DVD.

prmoustache

What does "retro" mean in this case. I failed to find what was really different compares to other illumos based OS.

ruslan

Cannot find what are the min HW requirements ? What min RAM/HDD/CPU to get simple X11 environment ? Will it run on 486DX2-66 ?

shrubble

It installed perfectly on my V210 UltraSPARC machine and also on an Intel i5-8400T ( from memory) HP desktop. Very nice distribution!

boricj

I can't seem to find a list of supported hardware (or at least hardware which is supposed to work). Will it run on a UltraSPARC T2 server? I've got one collecting dust in the basement.

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