From Icadyptes

Revision as of 13:25, 18 May 2008

Icadyptes

Icadyptes is a new Linux distribution in development; this is it's wiki. It is based on Arch Linux and is aimed at satisfing the greatest geek while being easily usable by an average user.

This is yet another project of mine (Teran McKinney/sega01). I want the development process to be as open as possible and open to change. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions to the way I am developing this, or for the distribution itself. Sorry for the lack of content, more should come soon.

bioe007 gave me some excellent advice to write a "vision" of sorts. I have finished a document that outlines what I am hoping for, though without any specifics. See: http://go-beyond.org/newdistro/vision.txt <- Unfortunately, a while ago I had a rm -r /var/www instance on my server. Last backup was far too far, and thus I don't have this file anymore. If anyone has a copy somewhere, I would greatly appreciate getting the file back. Thanks!

Status

Repository and PKGBUILD's are available here (extremely low bandwidth, URL modified so it is not indexed): f-_t-p:_/-/go-beyond.org/

2008-05-18: Yes, we are still alive. 2.6.25.4 is in the repository, along with Firefox 3 (though broken as it points to an old libpng symlink, and needs to be updated to RC1), Claws Mail, Nexuiz, Nouveau, E17, ndisc6, Xine, lighttpd, Wine 1.0RC1, bmon, and others. Icadyptes still needs a new name and help with development. After contemplating this and changing my original stance of several months back, I decided that Icadyptes will be purely open source and not include even any proprietary firmware in its repositories. If I give you a 7/8 apple and 1/8 cherry pie, is it still an apple pie? I think that the same applies to open source. While firmware is less of a security hazard than binary blobs, it is still distributing that which we are trying to make free. There are plenty of devices with pure open source drivers requiring no firmware, and while it does inconvience the user to not include closed-source in the repositories, I think that it would be worth while in the long run. Drivers requiring firmware are still in the kernel package, as they are open source themselves and more easily enable the user to support their hardware with closed source if they choose to do so.

There have been countless minor changes and improvements. IPv6 is supported by default in almost every place I have thought of, so things are going really well on that end. Deprecated non-libata and non-mac80211 drivers have been removed. X.org 7.4 is coming soon, so we should see a lot of X updates soon. Arch is starting to catch up to us. They moved their ABS to rsync too, so I hacked in Arch's prettier script (although it had a major issue that had to be fixed). I'm confident enough to say that, in theory, we may, possibly, just have a major release on 2008-06-13, but we will see. That date is the 1 year anniversary of Zenserver 0.5, but also my ACT (end-of-grade) testing day :-(.

Zeqadious has been a huge help in the department of X and finding all sorts of little bugs, along with much needed feedback. Thank you :-).

2008-sometime in Febuary: ks1 needed a more modern Icadyptes update, and has been a great help. Thus, we have the Kenneth-edition Icadyptes ISO release. http://rtfi.org/sega01/icadyptes-kenneth.iso - MD5SUM: 4d4389b97b5eed05c7b2ff9535e8af8a . Icadyptes is still only recommended for usage by those who are fearless and don't mind a half-broken experimental system ;-).

2008-01-17: Lots, and lots of progress :-). I'm working on a new project with Icadyptes, and hence it has been getting a good checking and assortment of packages for vpn-related and some ipv6 stuff. This should be revealed soon. 2.6.24rc8 is now in the repository too :-). Oh, did I mention that we have a working X setup :-)? `pacman -S xorg` should get you a working twm setup, and Wine is in the repo too. I've been playing Garry's Mod in Icadyptes and it seems to be working great :-). Zeqadious did almost all of the work on Xorg, with grouping the packages nicely and building them all back when Icadyptes was i686/generic (he had them in his own repository too). I just rebuilt his packages and tweaked things slightly. Thanks again Zeqadious!

Not sure if it is a bug with Pacman or not, but I changed around the packages and updating will now break your ping and traceroute unless you reinstall iputils. Originally ping and traceroute were in corebins, and there was no iputils. They were somewhat lacking though, and traceroute did not support ipv6. I decided to remove them from corebins while updating Busybox at the same time (1.9.0 beta now), and make iputils a dependency to install automatically since the functionality is removed from corebins. When you update, it installs iputils first since it is the new dependency. However, the old files from corebins exist and are not overwritten. Normally Pacman refuses to install a package if there are conflicting files. There are no warning messages, but it simply doesn't copy the files onto the old corebin's packages (thus you have a few symlinks to busybox applets that it now does not have). To get around having a broken ping and traceroute, you can either force updating just corebins first and then install iputils, or update normally and reinstall iputils afterwards. Sorry about this, but Pacman should at least give a warning message when it does not overwrite the other package's files.

Alright, the i486 ISO is here! Sorry for the long wait, but it seems to be working quite well. If you wish to do encrypted rootfs, you must untar the kernel package into / of the installer. One module seems to be missing, and I ran out of patience and CD's to do another :-P. Also, Zeqadious has been doing a great job of X packaging, which *should* be added to the main repository soon. This is still developer preview, but is now closer to "slightly more refined" developer preview. Many, many changes are yet to come.

So, the changes:

1MB bigger at 110MB.

Bug fixes.

Updates.

2.6.24-rc5 :-).

A few more packages, with many more to come.

And best of all, you can install it to <i686 hardware. Currently running quite nicely on a K6-2 (suprisingly not a pure 686, as I learned the hard way).

The ISO is now at: http://rtfi.org/sega01/icadyptesi486.iso (MD5 is c721503e30e7164b1006e724b9b43efd )

Thanks for even looking at the site, let alone reading this far :-). And many thanks for the support and help I have recieved. Cheers! --Teran McKinney (sega01)

After finding out that AMD K6's are not fully i686 compliant (along with most Via C3's that are still sold today) some investigation was done on whether it would be worth compiling for i486 instead. After a few days worth of benchmarking and discussing, we have decided to move to -march=i486 -mtune=generic on all packages. The performance difference is so negligible, and even faster in some cases. So fire up those 486's! :-)

The torrent was just posted. For the curious or those interested in developing, who are not afraid to loose all data on their box: http://www.openbay.org/torrent/10/icadyptesdevel.iso . This is a console-only ISO with development packages. Note: this is a new tracker. I was having problems with the other one though I am still keeping it going. Please use this one instead.

I don't have much time to write about what it has exactly, but here are some things:

2.6.22.12 kernel with CFS patches and some other goodies.

coreutils and Busybox mixed into corebins (I think I have worked out all of the breaks).

`abs` uses rsync to my home server. `abs-arch` is the classic ABS and syncs from Arch to /var/abs/arch/ .

Lua :-)

No GPM or Perl *ducks from the flaming Perl arrows*

Hard to pronounce name (key feature too, but it will likely change :-) )

openntpd

netcfg2

And... well, you'll just have to see for yourself :-).

I will be handing out a few root-access and user-level accounts on boxes here with it installed.

IRC Channel and Forums

The semi-official IRC channel for this is #icadyptes on irc.freenode.net.

The forums: http://icadyptes.smfforfree3.com

Main things that need to be written and discussed

A new name for the distribution.

What is included in a default desktop and default server installation.

Goals of the project.

Contact

See: http://go-beyond.org/contact.html