A highly optimized and extremely lightweight Linux distribution built from scratch

Hey there, how's everyone doing?

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I'm currently working on a project called

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It was previously known as snail, and has been under development for 2 years now. The development started in parallel with another project of mine called DOTSLASHLINUX (a website that featured extremely lightweight and in depth kernel configuration guides. Unfortunately, it's currently unmaintained. You can find the archived website and all of its articles here

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The project was initially intended for educational purposes, but soon grew into something really interesting, so I decided to publish it on github (for now, will also be published to gitlab and framagit soon).

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What's so special about glaucus? Here's a list of some of its features (a really ambitious project I know but bare with me):

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1. Extremely lightweight, as the core installation only needs 25MB of disk space and requires 33MB of RAM to boot in QEMU and idles at just under 6MB of RAM
2. Razor sharp bleeding edge as it fetches the latest sources available from upstream repositories for all cerata (cerata means packages, refer to the due to several errors relating to the graphics stack not correctly separating from the host).
3. 
   musl libc (I know right :P)
4. skarnet's s6 small supervision suite
5. skarnet's s6-linux-init tools for a Linux init system (version 1.0.3)
6. skarnet's s6-rc service manager for s6 (with morpheus/stali scripts ported to s6-rc) (currently
7. No coreutils (so you'll be left with no tools in your user base, jk xD), as it was replaced with:
   
   
   1. suckless base (sbase)
   2. unportable base (ubase)
   3. OpenBSD ls, pax, stty, diff, fmt, patch and sort from OpenBSD's userland port to Linux (lobase)
   
   
8. OpenBSD's ksh ported to Linux (loksh) as the main user shell (much lighter and faster (around 2.5x) than bash, and still manages to support auto-completion and command history).
9. 
   dash for running scripts (all system's scripts are in dash, which is only 1.8x faster than loksh) (you can even replace run dash alone if you're an adventurer, but glaucus tries to stay convenient while being extremely lightweight)
10. NetBSD's curses, with less, mandoc and vim (yes vim, I know right xD) all built against it
11. LibreSSL
12. Any many more lightweight and suckless software (dash, mawk, byacc, re2c, nnn...)
13. Adheres to the latest FHS standards, with a minimal and clean root filesystem
14. The kernel uses the bare minimum configuration needed to get a bootable system (from DOTSLASHLINUX's extremely lightweight kernel configuration guides)

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But wait, there's more! The core image builds (along with 130+ cerata) (again cerata are packages because ). You can also remove all of these flags, and stick to the basic -Os -s -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe and further reduce the image size down to 14mb (really the choice is up to you, as all included cerata work with all included flags).

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Kindly refer to the for screenshots of glaucus in action.

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This project is highly experimental (and currently only available for x86_64-pc-linux-musl architectures, and only runs in QEMU for now) so please tread with care!

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It also lacks a package manager (or at least a dependency sorting method), and a fully functioning graphics stack (which is what I'm currently working on atm).

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The project further needs a logo and some artwork, perhaps a glaucus bennettae swimming in the sea with Tux the penguin (the official linux mascot) and Puffy the pufferfish (the official OpenBSD mascot).

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glaucus is licensed under the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) license.

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This project is dedicated to my lovely parents.

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If you like glaucus and want to support its development, then kindly donate to:

• PayPal: [
  
  
  Vollständiger Original-Bericht

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