This is the (work in progress) SunOS jdk builder.
The aim is to attempt to download, patch, and build any relevant jdk tag, and do so for SPARC and x86, and for illumos and Solaris 11.4. It has currently been spot-tested on current illumos/x86 (specifically Tribblix m32).
It is dependent on the jdk-sunos-patches repository, which holds all the patches for each tag.
Peter Tribble
Built by Peter Tribble, the same person behind Tribblix, and he’s published a blog post with more details about this project. I’ve definitely been seeing an uptick recently in interest in Solaris, which is great to see. It’s gotten me interested in installing Tribblix on my dual-Xeon workstation to see just how much I’ve been missing since last using Solaris like 15-20 years ago.
I really hope the QEMU project will be able to get the sun4u emulation up to par to run 64-bit Solaris versions, including Tribblix. It would be pretty awesome (even if slow!)
The Niagra emulation supposedly can boot solaris…
Last I checked Sun4U in Qemu is mostly complete?
Yet another project that seems to reinforce my growing opinion modern desktops are over the top, yes we need the modern performance and functionality, that’s the what they can do argument, but it’s often wrong to associate what they can do with how they look, those retro-desktops are fine perhaps even better!
I concede when the grunt is available that I do love the excesses of a modern GUI, a modern GUI glitter bomb circa Compiz might be my nirvana, but without reservation I concede that while the excess bling probably keeps me working longer, it might not actually help me work better, smarter or faster. I’ll never tell you that the console or command line is the only way to go, that’s just digital flagellation, but these late 1990s and early 2000s desktops have an aura. Sorry I digress about Tribblix in commentary about a JDK.
cpcf,
It would be interesting to compare what modern day developers could do on hardware of the 90s and what developers from the 90s could do with modern hardware. A hollywood script could explore this… People in stasis wake up decades later and come across modern hardware but no surviving engineers. Meanwhile another crew ends up marooned with only old legacy hardware…. a disaster movie for geeks
@Alfman
Dead on the first include!
The desktop is not just about the looks, but the frameworks as well.
It was extremely painful to develop for Motif (or SunView), for example. So a lot of what people label as bloat tends to be what also makes the desktop easier to develop for as more and more functionality is added to the underlying frameworks and base systems.
Also things like resolution and pixel depth increase requirements exponentially in terms of storage, processing power, bandwidth etc.
There will always be the aspect of nostalgia, where we tend to idolize our entry points to tech. As that was likely the time we were “fresh” and energetic and didn’t have any sort of baggage and expectations. So that became our experience against we compare newer ones.
For example, if I show my kids a Win98 desktop they recoil in horror. Because for them a “computer” is a tablet/phone that you interact with your fingers and can ask it questions. Its fascinating that what I thought was cool and futuristic as a kid, for them it feels archaic and ugly looking.
Java is so broken as an environment. Java the language and many of the technologies are fine and really neat, but I understand the need for having every Java tag available. Some apps only work with a specific tag… JAVA, why ….
Java has evolved into such a strong application specific language I’m not sure it can be judged from a general purpose computing perspective, along side C, C++ for me Java is now ubiquitous.
Kudos to Peter Tribble for the (work in progress) SunOS JDK builder! The effort to download, patch, and build relevant JDK tags for SPARC and x86, covering illumos and Solaris 11.4, is truly commendable. I’ll be sure to check out the blog post for more details. The resurgence of interest in Solaris is exciting – it’s a testament to the enduring appeal of this technology: https://snake-game.io