It’s been 4 months since the last release of Blue Square Linux (BSL for short) but I have been working on a livecd for Cross Linux From Scratch (CLFS) in between then. I’ve also been adding software packages here and there to the server as and when I need them.
A bit of information about BSL 2008.08; It’s based on a hybrid build of CLFS and LFS, this works but it does seem to have problems with the ncurses library since these books handle that differently. I uses the RPM pacakage manager but does not have an update tool such as yum, You instead have to manage the packages yourself.
2008.08 took a while because for each package I had to make an RPM and also I lost motivation midway, The SPEC files used to create the RPM binary packages can be reused for the 2009.x release saving time and hassle. I have also been learning how to create an initramfs which should allow BSL to work on a much larger range of hardware. At the moment the kernel will probably need to be recompiled to work on your your machine. I have access to a x86_64 machine but I do not have root access, this means that I can not create 64bit RPM packages but I should be able to create a 64bit kernel and initramfs.
I have about a month left of the inter-semester break so I hope to start a new build for BSL. The release will be based on Cross Linux From Scratch with customisation.
Goals for 2009.x
- Wider hardware support
- 64bit kernel option
- Range of server packages include web
- Unicode Support