lesslinux.org Development Blog

So now you are ready building the chroot environment – then it is time to assemble the final ISO. To do this you need an overlay containing some configuration files for the bootloader. I packaged such an overlay for the current LessLinux Search and Rescue: lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20110202-155012-overlays-en.tar.bz2. You’ll find more recent overlays here: http://download.lesslinux.org/overlays/, but when building care that overlay and buildscripts match. Unpack the overlay in the folder /mnt/archiv/LessLinux. (more…)

Besides the switch to SQLite there are other big changes regarding the build of stage02, which is the population of the chroot environment:

• LessLinux now supports tracking of dependencies after building packages. This allows to define the order of packages to build.

• As a consequence of the dependency tracking it is now also possible to parallelize the build. On a three core Athlon this brought down build times from around three days to less than 20 hours. With a faster machine you should even get better results.

(more…)

Many changes were added since my first description of how to build LessLinux. There are two major changes that are worth noting most:

• We switched from MySQL to SQLite3 as database during build

• LessLinux is self containing now, this means you can use LessLinux to build LessLinux to build LessLinux…

The stage01 build of LessLinux very closely resembles the chapter Chapter 5 – Constructing a Temporary System from Linux from Scratch. You’ll even notice similar environment variables. There will always be slight differences in package versions – this is intended. So you might be able to build LessLinux on any machine equipped with the right programs to build Linux from Scratch. But in my opinion do one of the two following things: (more…)

Build lesslinux-20090626-1010.iso lesslinux-20090626-1435.iso fixes firmware loading issues with lots of WLAN cards and adds some new applications (Evince Document Viewer, Gnumeric Spreadsheet, AbiWord, File-Roller):

Another build, another new tool: mmmm is a simple yet efficient mount manager that clearly shows to which physical drive a volume belongs:

mmmm is built around the XML output of lshw and uses just Ruby and Ruby/Gtk. No DBUS, HAL or Policy Kit required which makes it attractive for builds that try to be as light as possible.

The interface of mmmm is clearly inspired by GtkMount of the Pmagic live distribution, but using the XML output of lshw is a bit more precise than just parsing “fdisk -l”.

TODO: mmmm is very usable right now, but for the future a button to reread devices would be nice.

Please test: Please test the latest build (lesslinux-20090604-1326) and tell me if mmmm correctly finds all your volumes. You might also send me your hardware information, so I can debug possible problems more easily.

Update: A small bug in mmmm prevents extended partitions from being correctly detected. A fixed build lesslinux-20090608-1708 is available.

When I started LessLinux I was considering uClibc as base C library, it is small and provides nearly everything that is needed for a small niche distribution like LessLinux. Unfortunately, several applications needed to be patched to compile flawlessly against uClibc. So I went with Glibc, just the BusyBox used in the first stages of the boot procedure is statically linked against uClibc.

Still there are some drawbacks when using Glibc, especially the dependence on Bash as shell and the relative big size. Now there seems to be a solution for this problem. Eglibc is a fork of Glibc that aims to be source and binary compatible with Glibc but removes the dependency to Bash as sole shell and will allow for lighter configuration. In the medium term this seems like a perfect solution: LessLinux does not need NIS and for some applications even localization might be skipped.

In the next weeks I will not have the time to play around with Eglibc, but as soon as the release of Glibc 2.10 is near, I will give Eglibc a try.

• Aurélienn Jarno zum Import der EGLIBC in das Debian-Paket-Repository
• OS News “Debian Switching to EGLIBC”
• Golem: “Debian wechselt zur Eglibc”