Sunday, June 19, 2005

SchilliX is real now

SchilliX is an OpenSolaris-based live CD and distribution that
is intended to help people discover OpenSolaris. When installed
on a hard drive, it also allows developers to develop and compile
code in a pure OpenSolaris environment.

After 4 months of hard work, the first OpenSolaris based
UNIX distribution is ready for download at schillix.berlios.de.

Well, I should mention that the project started in December 2003
with the first discussions with Sun about a Solaris Live CD.
Then in September 2004, there was a OpenSolaris summit in
Santa Clara and the OpenSolaris Piolot started with a growing
number of people (at last ~150) talking about the background.
We needed to find a License and Sun did make a great job
with cheking more than 9 million lines of code for encumberences.

Let me describe what OpenSolaris is and what the differences
to Schillix are. OpenSoplaris is currently the Sun O/N Source
tree for Solaris. This source tree is much more than a kernel
but a few things are missing in order to allow a boot to the
multi user mode. The following pieces of code are missing:

Libm
The source is part of the Sun Compiler suite but Sun
did OpenSource a 1993 version for BSD-4.4Lite.
The effort to port a recent FreeBSD version was 5 days.

bzip2/gzip
These programs are free software and needed for Solaris, so
they need to be added

The Netscape LDAP libs
They are needed for PAM and must be compiled from sources...

LibXml2
This lib is a major prerequisite for SMF and needs to be
compiled from sources.

Some of the SMF tools
are part of the Suninstall sources and needed to be replaced.

Some small programs
needed to be devloped to make a CD boot with few RAM possible.

libz
is of couse also needed

The NIC drivers from Masayuki Murayama
are nice to have and have been added

Unzip
is nice to have and has been added

Wget
is nice to have and has been added

/opt/schily/bin/*
is nice to have and even needed for some of the
Sun Replacements. As /usr/ccs/bin/make is part
of the Sun Compiler Sources, it had to be replaced
by my 'smake' that is _the_ OpenSource "make"
implementation that is closest to Sun Make.

The main goal was to implement as much source/binary
compatibility to Sun Solaris as possible. Something
that was not simple, giving the fact of the missing
libm.

Load SchilliX from Berlios and enjoy
SchilliX. If you like it and if you like to help
bus as a volunteer, please send me a mail...

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

OpenSolaris is out, SchlliX will be out soon

SchilliX now boots from a split CD (root is mounted
from a ramdisk and /usr from CD). The boot from CD
takes one minute and needs 256 MB of RAM.

The first SchilliX distribution will be published in
a few days.