cubic blog

During this weekend I started work on the boLDwiki. It is not yet complete, as I am still writing one some documents. Basic information about boLD and using the wiki will be present this evening. Please note that the wiki has been restricted to only allow logged-in users to edit articles. This has been done to reduce the amount of wiki spam. Sorry for this inconvenience.

As an installer for boLD is not yet available, a bzipped archive with the basic system will be posted this evening, too. To use it, you will need a spare partition - preferably ext2 or ext3 - with around 2G space available. If you plan to take part in development of boLD I would suggest to have around 10G available, as we will add more components like Xorg.

As usual feel free to comment. And visit the boLD wiki to learn more about boLD, of course.

Just a quick note: today I built new RPMS and SRPMS for RHEL3 and Midgard from current CVS. We already use Midgard CVS with MySQL 4.0 branch from MySQL for a while now and it works fine.

In order to get things running smooth, please help with testing and give the packages a change. You can get them from my Midgard snapshot directory

Requirements are low: RHEL3 with at least Update 2 installed plus MySQL 4.0.x RPMS.

Bug reports welcome. Post a comment here or send email to the Midgard development list.

Since my boLD system now works as expected, I have invested some time into tuning the kernel and considered several additions which might be of value.

The rough plan is to divide the kernel into two branches, one for server usage and one for desktop usage. The primary reason for this is that I want to enable the Linux VServer patches for server usage, while some other patches might be of interest for the desktop like INotify support which makes the Beagle happily provide end-users with a great search experience. Also, adding the patches for SELinux could be interesting.

Since adding SELinux will involve changes and patches in the whole system for most of the basic components, this will be added later. In the meantime I will play with SELinux on my RHEL4 test systems. It seems that authoring policies is the major point in SELinux. E.g. without any policy updates, the PHP module for Apache can not access MySQL, Postgres, etc. Other things to figure out include the difference between targeted and strict policies. In case anyone has good resources for why one would choose strict or targeted, I’m listening.

Meanwhile… numerous kernel builds running in the office, a first AMD64 build should be through this night.

Initial development of the boLD base system is done by now. Just did a first boot into the new system some minutes ago. Right now the system is based on a plain kernel (version 2.6.9), glibc-20041122 and gcc 3.4.3 plus the usual tools like util-linux, bzip2, tar, etc. installed. The whole system now needs around 180Mb of space with debugging options installed.

Next task will be the integration of RPM and YUM into this base system, which should be done by the weekend. When done, I’ll have to audit the system for LSB and FHS compliance. As I built everything with LSB and FHS specs opened on my monitors, there hopefully will be only minor errors.

Building an installation ISO and testing on several other systems will be on the plate for next weekend. Since the system installation should be done by using YUM, I am not sure how this could be done. In case anyone knows a system installer which can employ YUM, feel free to contact me.

boLD is my personal pet project to develop a brand new Linux distribution that is based on common standards developed from within the Linux community. This includes the Linux Standard Base 2.0 specification, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 2.3, plus the whole set of software developed under the umbrella of the freedesktop.org

The aim for boLD is to provide an up to date Linux distribution that will provide the full range of functionality needed for the daily usage of your computer. Primary deployment targets for boLD are the business desktop and server (as this is the main interest of the main developer).

As of now, the boLD project will be drafted and developed by Daniel S. Reichenbach, the owner of the blog from where you may have read this announcement. If you want to join this project, feel free to contact him via mail to dsr@best-off.org.

Mailing lists and a development wiki will be made available soon.

boLD will be developed in a Subversion repository and should be available soon for the X86 and AMD64 platform. Additional developers interested in other platforms are welcome, especially PPC and IA64 would be great.

The main targets for boLD are:

• provide only free software, every included application is free software,
• be free of charge and remain so for all times,
• only provide security patches and send any other patches and package customizations upstream,
• support X86, AMD64 and PPC processors,
• be buildable using an automated system,
• closely follow the latest system and desktop developments to provide the best experience for the user.

More information on boLD will be made available soon in this blog.

Additional resources will be posted soon under the category os projects → boLD