Software directions in Tribblix

Tribblix has been developing in a number of different directions. I've been working on trimming the live image, and strengthening the foundations.

Beyond this, there is a continual stream of updated packages. Generally, if I package it, I'll try and keep it up to date. (If it's downrev, it's usually for a reason.)

In the meantime I've found time for experiments in booting Tribblix in very little memory, and creating a pure illumos bootable system.

But I thought it worthwhile to highlight some of the individual packages that have gone into Tribblix recently.

The big one was adding LibreOffice, of course. Needless to say, this was a modest amount of work. (Not necessarily all that hard, but it's a big build, and the edit-compile-debug cycle is fairly long, so it took a while.) I need to go back and update LibreOffice to a more current version, but the version I now have meets all of my needs so I can invest time and energy elsewhere.

On the desktop, I added MATE, and incorporated SLiM as a login manager. Tribblix has a lot of desktop environments and window managers available, although Xfce is still the primary and best supported option. I finally added the base GTK engines and icon themes, which got rid of a lot of errors.

In terms of tools, there's now Dia, Scribus, and Inkscape.

Tribblix has always had a retro streak. I've added gopher, gophervr, and the old Mosaic browser. There are other old X11 tools that some of you may remember - xcoral, xsnow, xsol, xshisen. If only I could get xfishtank working again.

I've been keeping up with Node.js releases, of course. But the new kid on the block is Go, and that's included in Tribblix. Current versions work very well, and now we've got past the cgo problems, there's a whole raft of modern software written in Go that's now available to us. The next one up is probably Rust.