Where to start
So you're new here? Check out the Introduction.
Mailing List
This is WAY too important for the news section: I now have a mailing list! Click here for the mailing list page. Please join!
News (click here for all the news):
Well, thank deity, school is over for the year, the programming season has begun, and I just ordered Orange Box!
So I promised I would start working on the "major poly-p-ux redux" over summer - well, I've actually been working on it for a while. In fact, I have a well-working init system already in place. All that I must do now is reduce memory usage (I've dumped bash, zsh is huge and awkward, I'll use busybox's dash. Oh, and make it so every respawn process doesn't need a shell guiding it :D) My goal - 2mb of usage on startup. However, once I get it down to 3 (and it works on my 386 laptop), I'll release.
What should you expect? Greatness:
- A shell that doesn't segfault running scripts
- A brand new init system that is smaller and works better.
- Very low memory usage!
- A developer that will actually work on the project.
Hope to release soon!
I'm not dead yet!
School has been pretty time-consuming lately, what with summer nearing. I really have not had much time to work on poly-p-ux.
This three-day weekend is a good place to start, and after school is over, be prepared for lots of work on this.
What are my plans? Well, first off, I want to totally redo most of the system. In order to avoid the random segfaults that are plaguing me, I'll just rewrite the whole init system, probably in bash. Sure, it'll take a while, and it only might come out as well as "real" init implementations, but I'll have full control.
Also, I'm planning on phasing out other parts of busybox in favor of bash scripts that do the same thing. In other words, I'm planning to make poly-p-ux the lean, mean, bash-script machine it should be. And, I (and you) will have full control over all the system's bash scripts. This means customizability and ease of debugging.
For now, use the versions in existance (sorry about the lack of the 386 version - the copy I tried to make crashed my build machine when I chrooted into it), and join the mailing list if you want to get involved.
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!
