GoboLinux 016 Released With Its Own Filesystem Virtualization Tool (gobolinux.org)

Long-time Slashdot reader paranoidd writes: GoboLinux announced Thursday the availability of a new major release. What's special about it is that it comes together with a container-free filesystem virtualization that's kind of unique thanks to the way that installed programs are arranged by the distro. Rather than having to create full-fledged containers simply to get around conflicting libraries, a lightweight solution simply plays with overlays to create dynamic filesystem views for each process that wants them. Even more interesting, the whole concept also enables 32-bit and 64-bit programs to coexist with no need for a lib64 directory (as implemented by mostly all bi-arch distributions out there).
"Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin, other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that's installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way."

Comments

Wrong /etc/hosts

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see the discussions in 5 years:

1> I put it in /etc/hosts but it doesn't resolve
2> Ok, you also need to add an SE Linux permission
1> Did that, but it still doesn't respond
2> Wait that /etc/hosts is the one used by chrome, you need to modify the ones for firefox and ssh too
3> CAN YOUR ADBLOCK DO 16 THINGS? HOSTS ENGINE MODIFIES ALL /ETC/HOSTSEES WITH SIMPLE SCRIPT

Amiga did this back in the 80's!

[gabrieltss]

The Commodore Amiga did this back in the 80's. Any installed programs installed all their files in a single directory. It allowed you to copy that directory ANYWHERE on the filesystem and you could still run it.

Nothing new about this idea.....

Re: Those who do not know Unix...

[HishamMuhammad]

This link is a bit outdated (for instance, we don't tweak the root user for years now), but I've already responded to some criticism of this kind back in 2004: http://gobolinux.org/doc/artic...