Month: March 2008

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It lives

Well it is 11:30pm on a Saturday and I have just booted into Blue Square Linux 2008.03. There are a few little things left that I’d like to do such as compile the latest kernel but as it stands 2.6.24.1 is still very new (2.6.24.4 being the latest). I’d also like to get some of the files that I’ve made by hand during the build to be integrated into the core-file package and do a little more work on the first shell prompt. Apart from that the whole system is made with the RPM Package Manager from the start making it easier to update, install and keep track of your packages and their files.

For a list of all the RPMs currently installed click here.

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Not long now

The OS is coming along and should be finished pretty soon. It’s based on LFS SVN-20080327 with some customisation such as having ZSH as the default shell and the RPM package manager. The Sparc64 build has been abandoned for now to allow the x86 build to be finished. The spec files used to create the RPMs can be used on any architecture. This means that one all the spec files are made for the x86 build they can be used again for the Sparc64 build, so once the temperately OS is built and in place the computer can be left on running a script to build all the RPMS.

Once all the used packages have been built I will look into a way of creating all the miscellaneous files used in the system. After that I purpose that an installer system would be the next logical step but seeing as how this OS is made for my purposes I might not make one.

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The shop is now closed

After not having any orders for the last 3 months I was thinking about closing the stop, but then an order came in. Several dead DVDs later and a brief lesson in fight and gravity for my printer the order was finally complete and it was posted moments ago. Now I’m closing the shop. I am closing the shop is because OS that this website was originally created for is going well and overall I am making a lose on the DVDs that I sell. Failed DVDs and a temperamental printer combined with low sales mean that it is not really worth it. However I will still sell DVDs if you drop me an email at shop [at] bluesquarelinux.co.uk.

I’m going to notify Debian and the Fedora Project to have my website removed from the vendor lists.

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Specs

I have been working hard on my systems and now both the x86 and Sparc64 hosts have RPM5 installed and I am working on the spec files. The spec files are used by RPM5 to build the packages and I am still learning about them. Some of the packages have simple spec files that work on both architectures but some (like Glibc) are much more complicated. The spec file uses different commands for the different architectures and created more than one RPM once finished.

However once all the core spec files are made, tested and working for both sparc64 and x86 I can then build the whole system in RPM format. This makes it much easier to upgrade and distribute.

Another thing that I should mention is a change in the version naming. Instead of having Version 0.3 like I was planning I thought that it would be better to have something similar to Gentoo’s version naming. The next version would be called “2008.03” and come out by the end of the month.