Custom OS?

ok, this has been tried before i know, but that project is dead now i believe,
im wondering if anyone would be interested in a totally built from scratch linux os for the AAO - i mean totally from scratch as in not based on any current distro, as i am considering building such a system and im curous as to weather people would find a progress/updates page useful since i would no doubt be asking a lot of questions to get this working

 

Cool.

Are you doing this as a personal challenge, or to get a more optimized system?

In case of the former, more power to you. I've heard good things about http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

If you're just looking for an optimized system, I'd advise you to start from one of the mainstream distro's and fine-tune / recompile from there. I remember (back in the day) getting a debian potato system smoothly running, with graphics layer, office apps (abiword, gnumeric) and browser (opera), on a decrepit 486 laptop with 20 megs of ram and a 425 MB disk. Having a launching point made things much easier. Being able to fall back on the repository for updates was a big help as well.

 

im using linux from scratch - im doing it partly as a challenge and as a way to make a more supported (aka less full of custom edits like linpus) OS that can be more easily updated and supported (which fedora 8 wont be shortly

 

Cool. I've been thinking about the fedora conundrum, and I think the easiest way out is probably to figure out how to build compatibility libraries so all the acer apps and hacks keep running while the underlying distro is upgraded to mainline fedora. Once there's an upgrade path to fedora that preserves all the functionality, the linpus AAO's can be kept up to date with comparatively little effort pretty much indefinitely.

 

agreed, but also a full custom OS would be good as we (well i think i can) can back engineer the current acer libs to work independant of related software versions (manual compile etc)

 

Yeah, the only reason I'm wary of a custom OS is because I'd end up having to do maintenance on it. I don't mind investing some time to get the system going right, but I hate it when I have to keep investing maintenance effort. The current linpus os is pretty easy to maintain.

 

I think it's a great idea. One known limitation - the Jmicron drivers used to enable reading of xD card in the right card slot do not work with newer kernels (but did work for me with a Fedora 2.6.23 kernel).

Even though I've got a 120GB HDD, my personal preference would be for a lightweight (both in memory usage when running and disk space) desktop environment built around a standard toolkit (GTK, Qt, or whatever). I've got LXDE on Ubuntu down to about 1.8GB excluding my home directory, but it's probably not what most would consider feature-complete (no vlc, no skype, Abiword/Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice.org), but that does include sun-java6 and the Gimp.

 

cronjobs are greatg for maintenance , and yea lfs is capable of building insanely small systems (ive built one previous and its about 300mb uncompressed, no gui on that tho, im making progress doing this once i have the os booting ill work on sorting out the card readers etc