Over the past week I have been working very hard on the OS and I believe that is it close to being ready to release. There are only a few things left to do that they are all related to the LiveDVD or the install scripts. It is only a matter of time now….
I’ve had the Sponsor section on my links for a while but I have only added images this week. Now they stand out much more from the other links. They are on my website as a thank you.
He has given me space on his web server to host any large files that I wish to share as my internet is not up to the job. Once Felix is done the livecd will be put up here.
He has given me three PowerMac computers over the past year because they are surplus to his requirements but they make great build boxes for me. It is much easier for me to spend a small amount fixing these computers than it would for me to have to buy them from an unknown dealer on the internet.
I have been working on and off on the next release of my OS. I have also been doing some testing for CLFS for PowerPC and I will be doing SPARC64 throughout the week. I had hoped to get most of the packages done by the end of this month and able to release the OS at least for x86. I’m currently stuck on Linux-PAM which is pretty important to the system.
Felix is probably end up being released in August but on the plus side there should be live CDs / DVDs and support for x86, PowerPC and SPARC64. I also plan to install trac and implement virtualisation software of some kind.
As it is the last day in June it seems very unlikely that I will be able to finish a fully working OS by the end of the day. Thus a sneaky rename is in order. The current software list for Felix-Dev can be found here and is being updated as each bit of software gets compiled and installed. Unlike my previous attempt where I was basically upgrading all of the software for the current running OS I have gone back to the LFS way. This is a completely fresh build made on a blank hard drive partition to avoid any contamination from the host.
Using the latest software does bring some problems but thankfully the only two I have ran into so far have been fixed. Thanks to “ChrisS67″ from Linux From Scratch, GNU C Library 2.8 is now compiled and at this moment is running through it’s test suite.
I have been working very hard over the past week to get all of the packages updated to the very latest version. Some of the software that I use hasn’t been updated in a few years where as some others were updated late week. There OS should be released within 2 weeks.
Features:
Today I was told about by ‘Killerboy’ so I went over and had a look. It’s a GUI based on GNUstep. Seven months ago I made XFCE on Xfree88 but I never really followed it up. That was my first LFS that I’d made and therefore a bit buggy.
Étolié is a nice and simple GUI and is highly flexible but it requires X11 and GNUstep in order to run. I used Xfree86 last time because it’s one big package that you compile. Xorg R7.3 on the other hand is made out of modules and thus easy to customise. Over the next week I will begin building Xorg for Blue Square Linux with the aim to have a working X11 server and Étolié. By the end of R806 I’d like to have these in RPMs making it easier to distribute them and also easier to make / remake them.
After a few attempts at my SPARC64 build I’ve finally done it. It’s set up in pretty much the same way as the x86 and PPC builds but with one or two little differences because of the architecture. I’ve come across a problem with ping that I’ve fixed with a patch my friend made. I’ve also learnt how to boot using silo in command line mode after a mistake mean that non of the menus booted my systems.
I still have the IDPROM problem that means the machine needs to be booted via serial but I can live with that for now. I think the new move would be to make RPM packages for PPC, x86 and SPARC64 for R806. This would be interesting because I know some of the packages like Silo do not work with the latest kernel so I’d either have to use an older kernel for the SPARC build or build silo on an old kernel and use the new kernel anyway.
Well the PowerPC build went much better than the SPARC64 build. As a result the PowerPC build is having the packages updated and built where as the SPARC64 built hasn’t been touched in a while. Every time I do a new LFS built I learn more and more. I’ve made a small patch for the kernel that adds the Blue Square Linux logo to the boot and I’m working on updating the software too.
I’ll explain the naming scheme a little. Mostly it’s something I make up on the spot but I have two main ones that I’m trying to keep to. The Main finished release is called 2008.03 Nicholas (YYYY.MM Name) and the work in progress is called R805 (’R’ YMM) where Y is Year and M is Month. I do have a name for the next release but I am not telling anyone what it is.
I’ve not been able to use my computer for a few weeks but now it’s working and I can continue to work on my OS. As you know 2008.03 is done and my server has been upgraded to run on it, however some of the software has not been upgraded because the RPMS are not finished or because it would mean a lot of reconfiguring to do.
Sparc 64
Something I have noticed from my time on a support channel is that Ubuntu uses Mawk by default instead of Gawk. This is the reason that Glibc kept on failing to compile on my sparc machine because of the ubuntu host. Now this has been fixed I am working my way thought CLFS and have made good progress. The RPM spec files will probably have to be rewritten to support this multilib OS and some sparc specific configurations.
Live CD
I am working on a live CD made from the 2006.03 build so that it is easier to install. Currently it is a lot like Gentoo’s installation where you have to download and unpack a tarball and then create / edit specific files in order to get it to boot.
Now that I am happy with all the spec files used to create the RPMs for my system I am now starting the Sparc64 build again. This time I am using CLFS svn instead of my previous method of slowly replacing the Ubuntu install with my RPMs. This proved to be a disaster due to Ubuntu’s Sparc64 OS lack of 64bit. I ended up with 32bit programs linking to 64bit libraries and killing the system. I hope to have this build finished by the end of the week so I will let you know how it goes.