Here is the longer note with some details about NORD. First, where to
get it ...
http://www.casita.net/pub/nord/
There is some crude 'make' logic to get it running under Hercules.
Also, at lease one VMer has reported that he took that and figured out
how to run it on VM.
The most important single feature of NORD is that the op sys core is a
component which can be replaced as one unit. Having just bitten again
recently by that in-place Linux upgrade that I mentioned, I think this
might appeal to some people. On z/VM, we replace CP and CMS without
disturbing either the users or the added software packages. But the
usual methods in Linux prevent such a clean switch ... until now.
First the bad news: Some parts are still missing. Biggest missing
piece is UDEV. Everything is done with UDEV now, so it's important.
Gone are the days when we just create a device file under /dev. We
now depend on UDEV to connect certain sub-directories under /dev with
the magic of hotplug.
When I tried building UDEV, I got into dependency hell. I need help
untangling it. NORD is supposed to be a minimal system, so I DO NOT
want to build a dozen additional utilities and libraries (to ship)
that nothing else needs (at run time). I am happy to build things as
"optional", but in the case of UDEV, I need help identifying them
all.
Also, 'rpm' and 'dpkg' are not built. If someone requires those, let
me know so that I can prioritize it. I intend to NORD to ship them
both (with empty inventory), but they're both low priority right now.
Somewhere between 2.6.22 and 2.6.34 the kernel developers moved the
header files so I don't know where to snap them. I can figure this
out in a couple weeks, but if someone knows right away, would you clue
me in? Thanks. All other packages are very current.
Finally, I have been pushing the idea of "read only root", and wired
NORD to do that. But some people will probably not want that. (Even
though ROR lets a drop-in op sys work a lot more smoothly.) If you
download NORD today, you'll get an ISO 9660 file for the root FS and
will have to convert that to EXT2 on your own if you need a RW root.
You can use the ISO 9660 and use another partition for /etc. Works
fine. You can also copy the content over to your own EXT2 root.
Something Mother said: Thou shalt not comingle local or third party
apps with the op sys. But in a world of RPM, what else can you do?
Maybe the VM world can help solve that problem.
-- R; <><
