Mastodawn

I've been re-reconverting a lot of my "stuff" to the BSDs (Free, Open, Net). It's refreshing. The Linux every-tool-has-to-be-a-swiss-army-knife ethos is exhausting after a while. The relative simplicity and clean organization of *BSD (especially OpenBSD) re-affirms my fondness for UNIX-y things.

You might think there's not that much difference but, in many cases, I'd rather admin a BSD box. Try it, you'll see.

Also, NetBSD is soo lean, it has made my old Pentium III almost useful again. Even with 333Mhz and 128 MB of RAM 🙃

#bsd #openbsd #freebsd #vintagecomputing

jhx Dec 17, 2023

@rory
The BSD's are quite sane and smooth to work with.

@rory Yeah, I get what you mean, with THICC Distros like @ubuntu having dropped #i686 support half a decade ago...

I do however think that #thinn and #minimalist #Linux isn't just possible (see #TinyCore) but also could be made to work from a single 1440kB 3,5" FDD...

And I do work on that - see @OS1337 ...

And yes, I do want it to be a #KISS-principled #embedded & #desktop (#CLI) #distro that works on anything from an #i486-SX and up with 16MB RAM...

Rory Dec 23, 2023

@kkarhan @ubuntu @OS1337 Cool. I'm always interested in floppy-sized OSs.

@rory Well, for #OS1337 I took inspiration from @w84death 's #Floppinux and took his #documentation and went full "chimp banging rocks together" on it, but swapping #BusyBox for @landley 's #toybox since I prefer #bash over #ash and wanted something really basic that would do more than cat text files but provide i.e. a portable #SSH #client on a FDD.
Something that could serve as a foundation or rather plain "slate for my other projects in lieu of a THICC distro that is not practically auditable

@rory Since then @SweetAIBelle and I have worked on OS/1337 and whilst we have some booting prereleases, I want to iron it out into something that works and that is easily extensible and "build from source yourself"...

https://github.com/OS-1337/OS1337
https://github.com/orgs/OS-1337/projects/1/views/1

Tho #OS1337 is not to be confused with @landley 's reference implementation of a #toybox + #musl / #Linux distro that is #mkroot, which is close to but not identical to the foundation of #Android, but exceeds my space requirements.

GitHub - OS-1337/OS1337: OS/1337 Project

OS/1337 Project . Contribute to OS-1337/OS1337 development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

@rory That being said, Contributions and Feedback is welcome and as per it's #0BSD license you could even go so far as to fork it and put a #NetBSDor any other #unix-esque #Kernel under it if you so please.

In fact, I'd not be surprised if #toybox + #musl / #FreeBSD is the foundation of the OSes used on the #NintendoSwitch and #Playstation5...

it's just that neither #Nintendo nor #Sony have admitted so and I'm not going to stalk through the mailinglist of toybox when @landley hinted enough.

@rory So yeah, OS/1337 is my attempt at #minimalism on #Linux for the sake of powering #embedded projects and seeing how minimalist I could actually go and still do my job as #Linux #Sysadmin...

And long-term I do expect this to gain features in different editions [thx @SweetAIBelle for the nickname ``chonky`` on that] that will exceed the ``CORE`` version targeting 1440kB!

@rory So think of #OS1337 like a new attempt at #tomsrtbt in terms of simplicity...
https://infosec.exchange/@rory/111630432435153899

Rory (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @OS1337 Cool. I'm always interested in floppy-sized OSs.

Infosec Exchange

@kkarhan @rory
Yeah, I needed at least one other edition to test that my scripts were set up right for multiple editions and also to play with things that weren't in the official version, so I tried to name it in such a way that it didn't seem like the main, official version.

Of course, given I only set it to 2.88 for the size, I am left feeling there ought to be another edition that should be the size of a cd or dvd. Everything's early days anyways, though...

@SweetAIBelle @rory
Yeah, I did kinda made some notes on that, but the names ain't set in stone nor are the sizes I noted down:
https://github.com/OS-1337/OS1337/blob/main/docu/ideas/editions.tsv

OFC I am open to suggestions do appreciate feedback and contributions like that...

After all, OS/1337 is a young project so it's not like we got hardened and fixed castings and boxes that must he adhered to.

And ideally at a 1.0 version something like a custom distro/image builder with size approximations would exist...

OS1337/docu/ideas/editions.tsv at main · OS-1337/OS1337

OS/1337 Project . Contribute to OS-1337/OS1337 development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

@SweetAIBelle @rory
OFC the current 0.1 goal is to have basically something that just runs #Dropbear as #SSH-Client (#dbclient) and is maybe able to write another system image to a drive.
https://github.com/OS-1337/OS1337

GitHub - OS-1337/OS1337: OS/1337 Project

OS/1337 Project . Contribute to OS-1337/OS1337 development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

@SweetAIBelle @rory But OFC the goal for @OS1337 remains to be a #minimalist yet versatile foundation and slate based off #toybox + #musl / #Linux because #GNUtils and #Glibc suck beyond #GPLv3...

https://github.com/OS-1337

OS/1337

OS/1337 is a CLI-oriented minimal toybox/Linux + musl distribtion - OS/1337

GitHub

@SweetAIBelle @rory OFC #OpenBSD puts #security first which I"ve explicity not covered on OS/1337 since that's out-of-scope for the current development goal but that doesn't mean I'd stick with single-user directly being thrown in as root, because that's kinda bad.

And at 1440kB with 200kB being wasted to #syslinux one can't expect that...

@SweetAIBelle @rory The reason @OS1337 uses #Linux and not a #BSD #Kernel is solely based upon #drivers and #vendor #support as well as the applications I intend to run on it...

OFC I'd hope to even yeet the #GCC and other stuff sooner than later but in the meantime I've to settle with what works.

But you're happily invited to make it work with BSDs...
After all, @landley 's #Toybox should in theory allow that...

I just got neither tge time nor resources to support more than 1 Kernel…

Rob Landley Dec 23, 2023

@kkarhan @SweetAIBelle @rory @OS1337 Maybe 2/3 of toybox runs on MacOS and FreeBSD already.

https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/kconfig/freebsd_miniconfig

The real holdouts are stuff like "ps" where the API to get data from the kernel isn't just fundamentally different, but not really documented. (It's like 5 apis wrapped in an external magic library. Toybox has no mandatory library dependencies except libc...)

@emaste has done some work on this area, but he's pretty busy.

toybox/kconfig/freebsd_miniconfig at master · landley/toybox

toybox. Contribute to landley/toybox development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

@landley @SweetAIBelle @rory @OS1337 @emaste

Makes sense that support outside of #Linux is "nice to have" but not core priority...

Also yeah we all have quite finite time at our hands, otherwise we could just brute-force everything...

Ed Maste Dec 28, 2023

@landley indeed - ps/top/iotop/pgrep/pkill are the ones in "posix" section that will be awkward, and I imagine the same issues will apply to some of the networking ones

Rob Landley Dec 23, 2023

@kkarhan @rory @SweetAIBelle It's always good when more people pursue simplicity. Alas "simple" is one of those xeno's paradiddle things you approach but never definitively achieve. The author of "The Little Prince" said it best:

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry