Awesome, thanks Kev!

I’ll work on creating an all-in-one binary (using PyInstaller or Nuitka) and ping you as soon as it’s ready to test on #mkroot.

Really appreciate your willingness to give it a spin!

@bazkie well, you can to an extent.

• Just like #SysVinit and #Xorg got yeeted because they enshittified due to neglect...
  • See #toybox + #musl / #linux as in #mkroot, which is @OS1337's upstream…

@Ruyynn thx.

Feel free to ping me once there's like a all-in-one binary to plop down, I'll give it a spin.

• If it works on #mkroot (which is basically the upstream of #OS1337) I'm confident it'll work on _OS/1337...

@arh consider @OS1337 (or rather #mkroot / #toybox)…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk9TatW9ino video feat. @landley

https://landley.net/toybox/

@decryption I guess you gonna provision said VMs with passthrough to the drive(s) paid for and just let it boot into a "ROM" with like a minimalist linux that barely runs like dropbear and only gets customized with the SSH-Pubkey of said client to allow only them to login.

• After all, people should use this as mere "data storage" and not much more.

Consider #mkroot (#toybox) and maybe add vsftpd or Pure-FTPd to it if you don't want a full phat debian on it?

• Certainly you don't want people to abuse your box for shitcoin mining...

• @OS1337 sadly isn't ready yet for such a setup...

@landley granted I do share that goal for @OS1337 abeit with way less priority (as I'm content with a #VxWorks-like approach for now!)

• But also because I am kinda lazy and don't want to "reinvent the wheel" and instead 'just wait & pull from upstream' [#toybox] because I suck at coding [outside of bash and some other small stuff]…

All I want to do re: _OS/1337 is merely do the bare minimum necessary to quickly build custom, verifyable & reproduceable system images to boot as well as include whatever tools that one wants in it.

• And ideally I want to just pull vanilla codebases and just have configurations for *each supported architecture [currently i486 only but others are planned too] to target:
  • Basically just having to specify the target and roll that way.

Since the build scripts are all #bash, 'self-hosting' (building itself under itself) should be totally in the cards and as soon as #mkroot can do it, I intent to follow suit in this functionality...

#OS1337

@landley @ActionRetro Yeah, I know that one and OFC unless one needs to save every kB of space it doesn't make sense to cut a lot of functionality out of a system.

• #mkroot aims to be a showcase of a #toybox + #musl / #linux system.

• #OS1337 on the other hand trades functionality for size in the CORE "Edition" in order to fit.

OFC that means a lot of tools I want to add won't fit into that envelope either...

• But #dropbear and some basic network drivers to #SSH should be in the cards for a sort-of "SSH-Terminal"...

Also mkroot is IMHO a way better option than what some vendors cobble together with old Debian versions and also way easier than #LinuxFromScratch!

@landley @ActionRetro the only disadvantage I see with #mkroot is that it takes up more than 1440kB, but that's more of a "me problem"…

• The smallest CD-Rs can take 20MB of data and sub - 1 GiB flash is so cheap that only for UEFI and other firmware is there any production at all.

• Even "garbage-tier" USB(C) flashrives and (micro)SD cards should do the job just fine...

Plus mkroot supports more than 80x25 MDA and PC beeper, and has actual networking drivers included.

• Something I've to work on tho for #OS1337...

@ActionRetro there's a testing image for @OS1337 here:

https://github.com/OS-1337/OS1337/blob/main/OS1337-core-prerelease.img

• And if that's too spartan, @landley made #mkroot as part of #toybox which is ~ 5MB and has a full toybox + #musl / #linux OS on it!

@adisonverlice it's @OS1337 and also the problem is not to "make an OS" on it's own.

@landley, who maintains #toybox, has an exellent talk going over how #mkroot, which is basically the minimal toybox + #musl / #linux system, can be build relatively quickly, but that's how you make some #embedded system.

• He did not just do #LinuxFromScratch and half of Beyond Linux from Scratch to evidence it can be expanded to arbitrary complexity, but that doesn't make it a #distro, much less a desktop one.

Cuz there are thousands of microcorrections, configurations and optimizations even in a super-lightweight distro like #TinyCore (which is based on #BusyBox) and "getting things to boot" is the easy part.

• Cuz I just took @w84death 's #Floppinux documentation and merely substituted BusyBox for toybox.

So most of the hard work had already been done by the @linuxfoundation / Linux developers, toxbox contributors and others.

• But merely getting a shell with blinky cursor to boot isn't considered sufficient for most people these days when we have people who are raised on touchscreen-based GUIs…

And there is the major workload!