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News (click here for all the news):
alright, so I lied...
I kind of ran out of time back during winter break, seeing as a bunch of strange compilation problems kicked up when I least expected them. Alright, so you might say, why wouldn't I work on it some more then and get it finished by February?
#1: I have, and I hate to admit this in public, not too much use for this project right now - I mean, it's not like I use my 486 all too often... then again, I did just acquire a pair of 586's, one of which I'm putting in a shoebox, no moving parts - that'll be getting netbsd for now, until I can get polypux to the point that I like it (and it has bind, dhcpd, cups, and a few other knickknacks I need...).
Okay, so I have a bit of motive... unfortunately, thanks to school (it feels like teachers have been trying to make the last few months hard), the oppurtunity has been unavailable. I try to put in a little effort whenever I can, but honestly, that's not very often.
So, it looks like, at least until I get some outside help to whom I know what work I can give, this is my summer project that I'll try to keep up for as long as possible - sorry to dissappoint my (one or two) fans.
If you want to help me, write a package manager in C that is as minimal as possible and does what I need it to do, or build me a bootable floppy for each of the three processors that meets my requirements - in both cases, if you're remotely interested, pop in to the mailing list...
...although it's not as if anyone is reading this...
Well, I thought you might all like some good news for Christmas (since it's tomorrow... this can also be good news for Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, or whatever your preference is)...
The new builds are going to use buildroot only for building the toolchains - I'll be making the roots myself. This actually is a good idea, because of how much of a hassle buildroot actually is.
So, what's the good news? The toolchains are all built! Now I can simply build all the applications to include in the root filesystems for my 3 architectures (686 is being dropped because of build issues... I'll pick it up again later, maybe.).
I'm still aiming for a 2008 copyright date :P
State of poly-p-ux
Currently, poly-p-ux (0.20) is usable, in fact, it's on my 486
right now. It is only compiled for 486's, but expect 386 and 586
(Pentium) builds pretty soon (It's pretty easy to set up the
builds, but I'm lazy and I'm dealing with other stuff right now.)
The initial system tarballs unpack to about 7.9mb (486, others vary), but that is a
powerful 7.9mb. It contains
busybox, uclibc, kernel modules for just about every piece of (old)
hardware imaginable, a basic package-management system (with
install and uninstall in-package, and unified check-dependencies),
grub, and much, much more. Yeah, there's some stuff missing, but just look in packages/ !
Overall, it's a decent system right now, and once some more cool stuff
is released as packages, it'll be amazing. Expect difficult
installs, and a few things to work out, but otherwise, it's already
respectable. And, now that I have games released for it, it's already fun!
