Notices by Peter Tribble (ptribble@mastodon.social), page 2

@quad @lanodan There's a reason we used to call it HP-SUX!

One of the original visions of Unix was that users wouldn't ever need to interact with the OS directly. Systems like HP-UX took that as an invitation to make sure you would never want to.

It's not often you see Solaris offered as a service, or SPARC come to that

https://www.siteox.com/store/solaris-vms

#solaris #sparc #cloud

There are almost 10,000 tier1 tests in jdk24. All but about 25 now pass on illumos.

Working at fixing the test suite for the openjdk Solaris/illumos port. It's getting pretty clean.

Fixed a number of broken tests simply by letting them know that Solaris exists; now on to fixing the port. Sometimes it's just getting the errors/warnings to match the regex in the test.

#openjdk #illumos #java #solaris

Every few months I have a look at usage of the Tribblix package repository. It basically mirrors what you would expect - usage is predominantly the last couple of releases, and older versions drop off over time.

Except the old m20 release from 2017. Yes, the last working 32-bit version that hasn't had any meaningful updates for about 5 years. It's not a huge amount of traffic, but it's still out there, and still being used by the looks of it, refusing to go away.

#tribblix #illumos

Think that running Solaris means you're stuck with an ancient version of Java? Think again:

https://pkgs.tribblix.org/openjdk/

#illumos #solaris #openjdk

Virgin Media continue on their path of failing to offer any help whatsoever

** server can't find help.virginmedia.com: NXDOMAIN

Switching the home broadband from Virgin also came with a nice speed boost. Full fibre is just that, and gets away from the asymmetric speeds I used to have. The big difference I notice is when I'm uploading stuff - and getting a full gigabit when pushing data to S3 earlier was quite impressive.

A dozen years ago, it was rightly said that "Everything's broken and nobody's upset".

I don't see any evidence that things have improved since, to be honest.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/everythings-broken-and-nobodys-upset

@lanodan

Well yes. I'm responsible for selecting, packaging, and shipping it. So if there's a problem with third-party software and it gets into Tribblix, then it becomes my responsibility.

If there's a bug anywhere in Tribblix, there's only one person to blame. Myself.

Provides great clarity.

Is 2024 the year of Tribblix on the desktop?

For me it is, anyway. (Small sample, I know!)

To be honest, it's not just a year, it's been a decade of Tribblix on the desktop for me. And servers, development machines, the whole shebang.

Having tried (lots of) other operating systems, I can't honestly see much prospect of anything else displacing it.

@joel Dell Optiplexes for desktop use; they're very solid. Being aimed more at business they're also very predictable (boring is good).

I don't have any laptops available - used them only for work, so always the company-defined setup - but unless they've improved dramatically since 10 years ago they tend to have "interesting" hardware configurations.

@joel If you want commercially provided drivers for external cards, nvidia is the only game in town. But that's relying on the nvidia build for Solaris (it's some cross-compilation thing as I understand it) still working on illumos.

I'm more that happy with my old Intel HD integrated graphics with the default Xorg driver, full transparency and tear-free at 2560x1440. And the Intel integrated graphics is actually the only graphics that's really natively supported by illumos (via gfx-drm).

Comments developers leave behind.

/*
* Every programmer and his dog wrote functions called getline() and dprintf()
* before POSIX.1-2008 came along and decided to usurp the names, ...
*/

A company that says "we can't change the email address associated with your account for security reasons" needs to be re-educated with a very large cluebat.

With the UK a bit warm, not much of the Tribblix home lab is running right now.

The T4, at 400W, is out of the question. SPARC development tends to be a bit seasonal (they're great in winter). Even the Intel servers at 100W or 200W aren't going to be running. So just my desktop (where, actually, most of the power consumption is from the display rather than the box itself). Even there I just leave a build running and go sit somewhere cooler.

Legacy technology: the stuff that makes sure your staff get paid.

Cutting edge technology: the stuff that pads your suppliers' profits.

I've been bothered a while by an annoying bug in Tribblix - Python applications couldn't open https connections in non-blocking mode. Which hindered access to S3 and Backblaze, for example.

Finally worked it out yesterday. Openssl needed to be built with -D_REENTRANT in order to enable per-thread errno so it catches failures and handles them correctly. That ought to have been the case anyway, but something was dropping it, so I needed to be explicit.

#tribblix

@josephholsten @apicultor @q66 @wyatt8740 @Okanogen @dashdsrdash @jnpn @ariadne @bremner

One thing about SMF was that if you wanted to manage a service the old SysV way, then it still worked essentially as before. The one breaking change in SMF, really, was replacing inetd, and that part had a few rough edges early on.

(An area of unhappiness with SMF was using XML as a user interface.)