Sunday, February 14, 2016
Cinux is Not Dead
I have received questions lately as to whether Cinux is dead or not and I want to say that it's not. There have been no updates lately because of my lack of free time and because of the greater lack of interest in the project.
In December of 2015 I decided that Cinux needed to be rebooted and a rebranded, in order to fix mistakes that I made while developing Cinux. Although I am not sure if I will go through with this, these are my thoughts:
| # | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Build a server oriented distribution |
| 2 | Focus on long term support distribution cycles |
| 3 | Focus on deployability and adopt a minimalistic approach |
| 4 | Focus on seamless VM support |
| 5 | Write a small package manager that will install, update and remove select software |
| 6 | Distribute as an ISO and VM image |
You may have noticed I mention nothing about a desktop environment and that is for a reason: Building a desktop oriented distribution is not worth it due to their complexity and the sheer amout of such distros (and competition) out in the wild and, hence I am done with those. If a community arises and wishes to support GUIs and complex desktop applications, so be it.
As of now I will develop the package manager and build bot for Cinux, that will build packages off of the development branch of Linux From Scratch, and can be found here. The target architecture will be x86_64, dropping any x86 or ARM versions I had developed in the past (ARM might come back, especially after reading this article).
Cinux for desktop is dead, Cinux for servers is well alive and will be renamed. More information will be provided in the near future.
As of now I will develop the package manager and build bot for Cinux, that will build packages off of the development branch of Linux From Scratch, and can be found here. The target architecture will be x86_64, dropping any x86 or ARM versions I had developed in the past (ARM might come back, especially after reading this article).
TL;DR
Cinux for desktop is dead, Cinux for servers is well alive and will be renamed. More information will be provided in the near future.
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Changes you will see in Cinux 2.4
2 comments:
Categories:
cinux,
cinux 2.4,
Linux,
linux 3.15
Cinux 2.4, as you will notice, is much smaller and a lot faster than its predecessors. It also runs on a lot less memory. If, at any given time, you run
top you will notice that memory consumption will remain around 100MB. |
| Only 78.8 MB of RAM are used. |
Package management is, again, non-existent in the latest release (build 2.4.1001), but it is scheduled to appear at some point whenever scratchey is ready.
As noted, the newer build is ready for download (Just click on download, and it will download the latest release). Only minor changes were made, such as the look and feel of the Bash terminal environment. More changes to come.
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Update: Cinux to jump to version 2.4
No comments:
Categories:
cinux,
cinux 2,
cinux linux,
Linux,
linux 3.15
One of the great things about Cinux is that it's based on Linux From Scratch and not on any distro. It is not condemned to carry on any changes it's parent - faultily - made, instead there is ultimate freedom. The last update was Cinux 2.2 which was an experimental version running on systemd; it was surprisingly fast, fast enough to beat my previous records: It booted in just under 5 seconds. However, Cinux 2.2 was never released as an image or ISO. Instead, I released the Cinux Toolchain Builder (CTB) which I used to build it.
A couple of weeks ago I remembered about CTB and saw that it was incredibly outdated, so I decided to update it. Half way through the process I realized that it was all manual work and decided to build CTB from the ground up, but now with the name Scratchey. Scratchey, still work in progress, crawls the development version of the Linux From Scratch website, parsing all the packages, commands and instructions and later on downloads the packages, unpacks them and runs the build script of each one; one by one. Future Cinux builds will come from that, if I want to release more often.
I'm releasing today the newer, updated and better working and configured version: 2.4. I consider it an alpha release, since a lot are going to change until the stable version rolls out. Support for 2.4 is, currently, scheduled for the next year (until July 15, 2015) until further notice.
A couple of weeks ago I remembered about CTB and saw that it was incredibly outdated, so I decided to update it. Half way through the process I realized that it was all manual work and decided to build CTB from the ground up, but now with the name Scratchey. Scratchey, still work in progress, crawls the development version of the Linux From Scratch website, parsing all the packages, commands and instructions and later on downloads the packages, unpacks them and runs the build script of each one; one by one. Future Cinux builds will come from that, if I want to release more often.
I'm releasing today the newer, updated and better working and configured version: 2.4. I consider it an alpha release, since a lot are going to change until the stable version rolls out. Support for 2.4 is, currently, scheduled for the next year (until July 15, 2015) until further notice.
Download Cinux 2.4
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Video: Cinux 2.2 Running on systemd
14 comments:
Categories:
cinux,
cinux 2,
Linux,
systemd,
virtual box,
virtualbox
So, these past few days I've been playing around with several options and software. The latest experiment is this: Cinux 2.2 running on systemd. It's surprisingly and amazingly fast: It boots up in just 5 seconds and you can boot it up and turn it back off in just 14 seconds. I made a video of it running through Virtual Box 4.3.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Release: Toolchain Builder
1 comment:
Categories:
builder,
cinux,
cinux toolchain builder,
toolchain
Hey guys, almost two days ago I completed the Toolchain Builder for Cinux. It's a set of scripts that automate the process of building the toolchain necessary to build the actual operating system (Cinux).
The project is hosted, as all other, on Github, where you can fork, contribute and submit issues.
The project is hosted, as all other, on Github, where you can fork, contribute and submit issues.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Release: Cinux 2.2 Build 998
3 comments:
Categories:
cinux,
cinux 2.2,
Linux,
linux 3,
linux 3.11.4
Build 998 of Cinux 2.2 was just released and is available to download. Minor changes were made, including the addition of ALSA and a Linux kernel upgrade to version 3.11.4.
Also, the website is undergoing some changes, as you might have noticed. I switched to Disqus for handling the comments and I'm working on a new look.
Download Cinux 2.2
Also, the website is undergoing some changes, as you might have noticed. I switched to Disqus for handling the comments and I'm working on a new look.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Announcing Cinux 2.2 Beta 2
No comments:
Categories:
cinux,
cinux 2.2,
Linux,
linux 3.10
Hey guys,
I, finally, decided to release a new Beta version of Cinux 2.2 after I made a tone of changes, which I will list one by one.
First of all, the biggest change you will notice is that the live system will boot and load substantially faster. This happens because I "got rid" of KDE, even though I really-really liked it, until I figure out a solution to the immense memory consumption problem it has. KDE has now been replaced by Xfce.
Beta 1, with KDE 4, needed a system with 2350MB or more of RAM, which I found to be greatly unreasonable. Other than that KDE ran perfectly well, which is the reason I want to keep on tinkering with it till I find a way around.
There are also less useless start-up processes triggered and a brand new kernel configured by me specially for the needs of Cinux: Linux 3.10. The changes mr Torvalds authorized made the kernel, from my viewpoint, a lot faster and reliable.
Another change I made was, well, mostly a fix. You can now mount, read/write and modify NTFS partitions, while in previous releases the user had to compile his own kernel to support FUSE (Filesystem in User SpacE) and ntfs-3g, which are all included and supported out of the box.
This sums up all the changes I've "pushed" so far. For the next releases I will try to commence an automated installer and/or the package manager: cinux-get. (Hopefully.)
I, finally, decided to release a new Beta version of Cinux 2.2 after I made a tone of changes, which I will list one by one.
First of all, the biggest change you will notice is that the live system will boot and load substantially faster. This happens because I "got rid" of KDE, even though I really-really liked it, until I figure out a solution to the immense memory consumption problem it has. KDE has now been replaced by Xfce.
Beta 1, with KDE 4, needed a system with 2350MB or more of RAM, which I found to be greatly unreasonable. Other than that KDE ran perfectly well, which is the reason I want to keep on tinkering with it till I find a way around.
| NTFS Read/Write on real hardware. |
Another change I made was, well, mostly a fix. You can now mount, read/write and modify NTFS partitions, while in previous releases the user had to compile his own kernel to support FUSE (Filesystem in User SpacE) and ntfs-3g, which are all included and supported out of the box.
This sums up all the changes I've "pushed" so far. For the next releases I will try to commence an automated installer and/or the package manager: cinux-get. (Hopefully.)
Download Cinux 2.2 Beta 2
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