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.
Sounds like a nice solution. It really is too bad that Solaris based systems are drifting into the dustbin of history. There was a time when I would have paid good money for Solaris just to have a “real” UNIX. Now I cannot even be bothered the inconvenience of using Tribblix or OpenIndiana for free. Perhaps I should dust off a system and give Tribblix a try.
Oxide is using illumos for their cloud computer system: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios
I really hope Illumos will still be around in 10 or 20 years. After all it’s the only “real” Unix that’s completely FOSS.