@kkarhan @kojack @Njord

You know, that's one of many games that I played a bit of and got distracted, but did like. I should go back to it sometime...

@kkarhan @OS1337
One of these days.

Tried running a minimal bash script I found online that was supposed to create a minimal linux distro.

It failed to compile busybox. Impression I got looking into it is just that busybox hasn't had a release in a year, and a kernel release broke compiling it since then. More of these minimal linux versions should use toybox...

@SweetAIBelle that's why I started @OS1337 : I looked at #Floppynux by @w84death and while it works with #BusyBox it doesn't do much beyond cat and vi and doesn't even have like drivers to store anything.

OFC #OS1337 isn't much better as of now but I do share the motivation that made @landley start #toybox:

A simple, clean, lean and adaptible, #smol #Linux distro that can be the solid foundation for anything.
https://youtu.be/MkJkyMuBm3g&t=1408
Whilst #mkroot is nice, I think there is some room for improvement and building an actual #distro.

• Also he has made excellent documentation including a live demonstration on how to basically DIY a minimalist linux from scratch with #musl & toybox: https://youtu.be/Sk9TatW9ino

I feel that "Just chug in a #RaspberryPi with the lite Version of #RaspberryPiOS seems quite overkill (it's a 350MiB (!!!) image) for most projects and espechally when it comes to #security-related stuff like #Cryptofon, #PocketCrypto and #LambdaCrypt.

• I think that besides "Don't DIY encryption! There are excellent implementations ready to grab and go!" the #KISS-Principle is key, cuz I'm a shit coder and I want to avoid having to fiddle around and instead make it easy to fix stuff just by updating versions from upstream.

@SweetAIBelle I just hope that @landley can do #alias support in toysh so I can supplement most stuff easily with a .bash_aliases file to make it easy to use...

Like I know I eon't be abke to ship most tools that I want to have at hand with like a 1440kB image but I can just yoink them with #wget or #curl or #tinycurl or whatever even before any package manager is up and running or available.

• Tho compared to most #Linux distros and tools like apt and yum, spm isn't very advanced and at most will likely only offer to download/remove a binary or replace it...

@SweetAIBelle But yeah, I really need to get back at @OS1337 and dedicate time to it.

• It's just that nuisances in meatspace kept me occupied against my wish but sadly those things don't ask for consent...

@kkarhan @OS1337

I know that feeling...

In my case, I kinda want to go through the steps from scratch a bit without doing things to save on space and so on to get the basics down a bit more without trying to do different things (and also without just following LFS, which is kinda bloated).

I'd also, ultimately, like to try building a livecd with a gui and a graphical environment, and most things I can find to do that are debian, ubuntu, or arch based. I'd like it to be my own weirdness.

And there's part of me that wants to see if I can successfully set up systemd from scratch. :P

@SweetAIBelle @OS1337 nodds in agreement #LinuxFromScratch basically builds a whole #GNU / #Linux distro with #rpm and all the #LSB-compliant stuff...

• I too think it's really #bloated because most of that isn't needed.

Similarly I think that #SystemD is a net positive on anything beyond space-constrained minimalism. It just didn't make the cut being too big to fit as of now.

@SweetAIBelle @OS1337
As for #GUI I do think being able to at least have like a #wayland session is a 2.x version goal as a post-install, but a #TUI should be feasible early on.

• In fact, I do want to see something like a "virtual desktop" with like #tmux in 80x25 where the 25th line is like a status bar / task bar similar to DEC Terminals...

I've already done some mockups with the navigation bar at the bottom (which could also be put at the top instead)...

@SweetAIBelle I also want @OS1337 to be not only a simple to use and customize and port distro but one that takes the notion of "only 1337hax0rz use the terminal/command line!" and throws that out of the window, because something as powerful and intimidating as tmux can be made easier to use if it's supplied with like a good preconfiguration...

Just like the welcome screen on #OS1337 and how everything from like early #Windows & #MSDOS to #UbuntuServer to this day can ease users into a system and help them setup stuff...

@kkarhan @OS1337

Can definitely understand those goals!

Since I'm not worried about fitting on a floppy, but rather usb/cd/dvd, I'd be kinda going for minimal, but not that minimal.

For a minimal desktop, I use XFCE a lot, Lxde/Lxqt would work, and there would be a certain fun retroness in using something like IceWM. Any of those directions would probably be X11, because most smaller desktop environments don't support Wayland.

Obviously, we'd have a terminal program. I'd also want gparted, and support for a lot of file systems. I'd want a browser, gui and non gui text editors. I'd probably also throw in compilers, an ide, and a few games, honestly.

It'd pretty much end up becoming a system rescue cd / gentoo/arch/lfs/other install disk / minimal web/dev environment disk.

(And yes, I *can* see where I could probably do this with debian or arch, but sometimes the journey is the thing...)

@SweetAIBelle @OS1337 nodds in agreement

Whilst I do want to focus on #CLI & #TUI tools first, since those offer the most "bang per storage" I can totally see why you want to go beyond that with something close to #TinyCore which packs a full #Xorg desktop onto 16MB, I'd guess this will be something to aim for post 1.0 if not 2.x.

• A lot of tools like #gparted can be substituted with others that are functionally cose enough, like #cfdisk, to do partitioning.

That being said I do think that a lightweight #GUI #Desktop like #OpenBox or #i3-gaps or #Sway is something nice and would propably fit well as an "extra" or "fancy desktop" package.

• Personally I do want to be able to target like low and lowest-end systems and at least have something instead of #MSDOS and old #Windows versions to run on #i486.

Not to mention that there are few and far in between options outside of #ix86 for most systems:

• "Don't like #NetBSD or the native OS to some obscure system? Tough shit..."

@SweetAIBelle @OS1337
So instead of relying on some non-#reproduceable system images for cheap SBCs, why not make something like #OS1337 that is compact enough that one can easily build everything one wants for it to get at least started with something.

• After all, rarely does a project call for a fancy, hardware-accelerated GUI desktop with a Cube-Style animated Virtual Desktop switcher.

Sometimes one just needs to bood a system, check it's hardware and #ddrescue something off the internal harddrive because one doesn't have any other system that can run it...

• Or have something to #netboot into as a #RescueSystem because #DisklessWorkstations and #DisklessServers are a thing espechally in big hosting envoirments where everything is done in seperately scalable layers and abstracted to APIs and Oroticols like #iSCSI...https://github.com/OS-1337/netboot