ptribble

It's a bit of an in-joke, as if illumos itself isn't retro enough. But it relates to the use of older (smaller, faster, lighter weight, more reliable and well tested) technologies in certain places, the most obvious being the use of traditional SVR4 packaging as opposed to IPS.

Oh, Open Look is there too. Although I always found Open Look, like SunView before it, to be pretty unpleasant to use.

One of the reasons for creating Tribblix in the first place was that there really wasn't any documentation on how OpenSolaris (as was) was built. I wanted to understand that, so had to work it out essentially from scratch. I soon worked out that there were ways to do it better, and Tribblix is still here something like 15 years later.

Why pick on the over-70s though? Most drivers in the UK either can't see or don't bother looking, so we should be demanding higher standards of all drivers.

Not dead, still going strong under new ownership (MNX).

SmartOS can, of course, boot from a local zfs pool, but it treats it logically as just another source for the bootable image. See the piadm(8) command.

That's like asking if Linux has a desktop environment. Strictly, no, but Linux distributions do.

So OpenIndiana has MATE and a couple of other options; Tribblix has about 30 desktop options; OmniOS you can install a desktop stack from pkgsrc.

There was nothing about screwing anyone involved in the choice of the license. The license had to be something all the copyright and license holders were prepared to accept (and getting them to accept CDDL was hard enough, not everyone did hence the few closed components).

Our belief was that Linux would be unlikely (and unwise as the overall system architecture is sufficiently different that it would be hard to port) to take the code. We expected - and encouraged - the concepts to be taken (as with the slab memory allocator).

That shouldn't be a fundamental problem with current Tribblix - due to this sort of problem the installer got modified so that once the bootloader has pulled the ramdisk off the usb stick it doesn't need it again (although if it can't see it it won't be able to install any packages from it, falling back to dragging them across the network).

There are over 30 desktop options (including quite a few of the older window managers, which is a bit of a blast from the past).

I do include CDE and Open Look (the window manager and toolkit, at least). In both cases the add-on tools that were present in Solaris (like the whole of the DeskSet suite) aren't available, because they were never released in source form.

Sheesh. Just use a separate schema per tenant.

Pretty much it, yeah. If there's anything useful upstream then it will get pulled in, and there's a still a lot of worthwhile cleanup of SPARC, but the kernel will be essentially frozen.

Tribblix SPARC will continue. While you lose any new features that go into illumos upstream, at least you don't keep getting broken by changes going into illumos upstream.

(This isn't a commitment for all time, naturally. At some point the SPARC hardware I have will stop working. But it turns out to be solidly built and impressively reliable.)