Typically, yes, but I'm using something a bit out of the norm. Want I initially wanted, and ended up creating, was a way to have the vast majority of the system be something known to be stable/reliable/unchanging (e.g.: Debian Stable), yet still have access to cutting-edge things (e.g.: Arch Linux) without overly much work involved to get them. The resulting system could have stability issues with respect to the Arch packages, but only them - I know that the init system from Debian will remain stable, but maybe compiz from Arch will crash on me when I feel like playing with it.
If you do not feel that meets what I described, it could be I failed to describe it properly, and if so, I apologize.
I'm just much, much better with text editors than I am with image editors. I wanted to focus more on the actual distro than the artwork. Other people have offered to spruce the website
So it is a CLI distro?!
Not really, no. While it is extremely minimal out of the box for technical reasons, the intent is you add quite a bit more to it, including whatever desktop environment you feel like.
Gives the wrong impression right at the start.
It is definitely not for everyone. I like it, but I know people I've explicitly recommend not try it. If a CLI scares you off, this is not for you - at least not at the first alpha release.
I gave an example here that arose with software that worked fine in Ubuntu but not in Debian. There is quite a bit of software out there that is very picky about what libraries are used. If you get everything from your repository's package manager or compile them yourself, it's not a huge issue, but if it is not in your repository and you don't want to or can't compile it (e.g.: proprietary software such as Valve's Steam), you have to fall back to other options. This happened to me sufficiently often that I ended up creating the discussed topic, and figured it was worth sharing.
Would you mind elaborating on what drove you to that conclusion? I feel all that fits the first alpha of just about any project, honestly, but it could very well be I'm simply not viewing it with the same mindset others are.
I am quite serious with this project, and in no way trolling - I just want to share something I created which I found useful. If you could explain what made you draw that conclusion, I'll try to remedy it if I can.
I don't think I quite follow what you are trying to say.
don't you think commenting "but we are better and you do not understand anything" under each post makes your distribution idea more interesting?
I really have no idea what prompted this. I think I came up with a nice out-of-the-box solution to a problem I found, but beyond that I don't really think anyone working on the project is necessarily "better" than anyone else. To be frank, you're all strangers I don't know well enough to compare myself too.
Your idea is okay, not very usable for the most people, but a nice project.
This much I think I follow.
But advocating it in the way you're doing at the moment, you will get many people who hate it, because you tried to force it on them
In no way do I intend to force this on anyone. Personally I felt it was a relatively niche project. I expected quite a few people to find it interesting, but that's really it - I didn't expect anywhere near the number of people offering to try it out that have. Would you mind elaborating on what gave you that idea? I'd really like to see if I can change whatever I did to cause this to avoid having other people draw similar conclusions.
That's what I used to do, but it was far, far to much work. No where near everything I wanted was available in backports, and to be frank I don't want to compile quite that much. Gentoo was interesting but not my cup of tea. This system provides me a way of grabbing arbitrary packages from arbitrary Linux distributions with relative ease, and meets my needs perfectly. I can certainly understand this not being for everyone - if you're happy with Debian and backports+compiling, you're more than welcome to stick with it. However it is not a sufficient solution for what I want, and based on the feedback I've been getting, I'm not the only one.
But testing? How many times did you have issues with it? What issues exactly?
Stable has two definitions in this context that I can think of: (1) reliability and (2) lack of changes. I want something which stays the same. I do not necessarily want to keep myself up to date on the changes going on if I don't have time for it. I want something that stays the same for extended periods of time. However, I don't always want that - occasionally I do have the free time to play with something cutting edge, and so I do.
This is what we call a backport. dget the.dsc file, dpkg-source -x that one, then build with dpkg-buidpackage. And that's if the backport doesn't exist yet in backports.debian.org
I used to do that, but I got tired of it. Bedrock's system is significantly less work to achieve the same goal with the number of things from other distros I want.
If you really don't want to do that (because there's too many new libs to depend on), then a simple chroot is enough.
I disagree. I want it all to feel like one, cohesive system. I don't want to think about what chroot something is in when I run a random command, I just want to run it and have it launch like it was a traditional Linux distribution.
Most of the time, all what you need is already there.
If you restrict it to need, then yes, that's probably true. However, I want quite a bit more than that, and this give it to me quite nicely.
To be clear, I don't think this is for everyone. If you're happy with what you've got, please do continue to use it. For me, absolutely no distro I could find provided all of the features I wanted, but I found if I could just pick pieces from a variety of them I would get want I want. So I did it, and figured it would be worth sharing in case other people feel similarly.
BTW, your example with dbus and firefox is a bit weird. Who and for what reason would you want to do this?
That's mostly a personal quirk I cannot find the words to fully justify. If you really want a good answer ask in #suckless on irc.oftc.net - there are others there who feel similarly about dbus but are much more apt at explaining why.
I know the ins and outs of creating a distro more than I understand people - I could be underestimating the demand for this. I'd sure love to see a large community grow around Bedrock Linux - I hope you're correct.
With two (admittedly major) things, this could be the Linux distro to take over the desktop.
While I would absolutely love for that to be true, I'm doubtful it's feasible to get this to be sufficiently simple and user friendly. While I could do things to make it much easier to install, there are fundamental aspects which I don't quite have sufficient imagination to foresee as ever being simplified sufficiently. I'd love to be wrong, though.
A decent setup program
That's definitely a goal I'm working towards.
and corporate backing
Should the opportunity for that arise, I don't see myself turning it down. This is all F/OSS - worst case scenario I quit and fork the corporate version.
That said, I wish you the best and I hope that I can get to contribute in some way in the future (too much of a n00b/scaredy-cat to venture into an open-source project now).
Thanks! If you ever get over your noobiness and fears, I'm certainly open to further help.
Most daemons from, say, sysv, aren't really dependent on the init system. They're just programs that init happens to run when it feels like it. You can run them manually whenever. For example, if you want to run Debian Squeeze's cups, you can run "/etc/init.d/cups restart" absolutely irrelevant of what the init is.
The daemons Ubuntu uses talk to init for some reason. If init doesn't talk back, they refuse to run. See here for my specifics on it, which links to a bug report on the matter that I'm doubtful will be resolved within the foreseeable future.
I really did not intend to be misleading in quite that way; if you truly feel that way, I apologize. I created something I feel is really neat and would like to share, and felt slashdot would be a great place to share it. You can check my UID - I'm not exactly new around these parts. I'm also not making any money on this - I'm not sure an advertisement is the best description of what this is.
Well, the issue then is that testing and unstable aren't quite stable enough for me. I want something which I can learn and set up, then leave running for years. Debian stable could do that, but neither testing nor unstable could.
However, at times I also want to play with the newest goodie from Debian Sid. I don't want to reboot, I don't want to use a VM, I just want to run a program from Sid. With Bedrock Linux, I can do that: I can have a system which is almost entirely Debian Stable, except for the packages I want from Sid when I want them. Any library compatibility issues one would normally have trying to get a.deb from Sid into Stable are non-issues with Bedrock Linux.
Add on to that that I can use Gentoo's portage to relatively easily keep a specific package customized to my specific tastes. Say I don't like dbus, but I want firefox - Debian's iceweasel is dependent on dbus. I could just get it from Gentoo with the flag set to exclude dbus. Yet everything else would be Debian.
At the same time, I am 100% library-compatible with Ubuntu, so for projects like sage mathematics, which I know provides packages for Ubuntu, I can use those with absolutely no worry that they won't work. Debian Testing cannot do that.
I really, really like Debian. If Debian could do what Bedrock Linux can, I would have never tried to make Bedrock Linux. The issue is, however, that you can't install an arbitrary program from testing/unstable into stable.. Many of those packages are dependent on specific libraries which aren't available in stable. With Bedrock Linux, you can install and use packages from both, at the same time. I can run Squeeze's newsbeuter in Sid's X11 and have it open a window in Wheezy's iceweasel. It's all transparent and feels like one cohesive OS.
If you truly feel that way, then I have failed to explain what it does properly.
The beauty of this is you can have the majority of the system be Gentoo if you want, except if you are in a rush and can't wait for something to compile, you can just grab it from the repository of another Linux distribution. Or the opposite - you can have the majority of the system be, say, Debian, except those two or three packages that you really don't like the Debian developer's compilation choices and just get them from Gentoo's portage.
Sadly, it really can't be considered user friendly at the moment. I don't expect to take any market share away from, say, Linux Mint. In fact, I should probably actively discourage it, at least for this release. However, this fit my use case, and I figure at least a few others had similar interests but were disappointed no one distro provided all of them at the same time.
Then you misunderstood the advantages outlined above. It might be my fault for explaining them.
I really, really like Debian. I like the fact that, once released, it really doesn't change for well over a year. Once I have it set up I can just let it run. However, it becomes out of date fast - if I want some new toy that just came out and isn't in Debian backports. With Bedrock Linux, I can have 95% of the system be Debian except for that one package I want from Arch, which I will get from Arch. Take a look here for what may be better examples.
If you still feel Wheezy covers this, reply again and I'll try to explain it differently. This is really nothing like Wheezy at all. Unless you want it to be, of course, then it is almost exactly like Wheezy.
That is the way it comes off in my description. That's really more a fault in my description than a fault in the design.
A more apt analogy would be thus: If you want a Prius 99% of the time for the gas mileage, but decide on the fly that you need to burn rubber, you don't need to get out of your car and into another - you just flip a switch and go. The beauty though really comes from the fact that you can get aspects of these things at the same time, without switching.
The best real-world example I can think of is the second item here. You really can't do that with any other distro nearly as cleanly - either I don't have working 3D acceleration, or I don't have a working compiz package. With Bedrock Linux, I had both at the same time without putting any effort into debugging.
While I'm sure you intended that as a way of de-valuing yet-another-distro, if you actually take a look at what it does, it is strengthened by the variety of other distros out there. Know two niche distros that both have features you want? Bedrock will (most likely) give you both of them at the same time. If there was One True Distro, Bedrock would have no value.
At the moment, I don't yet have a package manager manager (not a typo), but it is on the TODO and will get there eventually. For the time being, just run the package manager from the client Linux distribution of your choice and install the packages as you normally would. "apt-get install wine" or "pacman -S wine" or "yum install wine" or whatever else you'd like - take your pick.
I've yet to try installing the nvidia drivers through a package manager, as I expect that might make assumptions about the kernel which won't be true. Thus far I've just installed it manually from the drivers provided on nvidia's website. Installing it via a package manager may be possible eventually, just isn't there quite yet.
You've missed the way it integrates the various chroot'd clients together, which is really the whole point. See the second point here. That was literal barely anything more "apt-get install compiz && pacman -S xorg", throwing compiz in the.xinitrc and running "startx". As another example, it can have an RSS reader from one distro open a page in a browser from a completely different distro, transparently; it all feels like one single cohesive Linux distribution.
I do agree it is niche. It's not for everyone. However, I can't be the only one who has interest in the fact that I can have the vast majority of the system running Debian, nice and stable unchanging, yet still grab something from Arch with nothing more than a single pacman command if I feel like playing with something new.
Other than Ubuntu/Upstart's expectation to have its specific init running (which isn't technically a daemon, I don't think), I've yet to run into issues with conflicting distro-specific daemons. However, until very recently I'm the only one whose actually run it, and I'm sure people will find issues I've not yet thought up. That's why it's still in alpha.
Its as good as whatever Linux distribution you want it to be as good as. I used to use Debian's X11 with it until I got a new laptop which the latest version of Debian didn't fully support, so I switched to Arch's X11. I literally just ran "apt-get remove xorg && pacman -S xorg", installed the nvidia drivers (manually from the nvidia website), and I was good to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Typically, yes, but I'm using something a bit out of the norm. Want I initially wanted, and ended up creating, was a way to have the vast majority of the system be something known to be stable/reliable/unchanging (e.g.: Debian Stable), yet still have access to cutting-edge things (e.g.: Arch Linux) without overly much work involved to get them. The resulting system could have stability issues with respect to the Arch packages, but only them - I know that the init system from Debian will remain stable, but maybe compiz from Arch will crash on me when I feel like playing with it. If you do not feel that meets what I described, it could be I failed to describe it properly, and if so, I apologize.
An ASCII Art logo?
I'm just much, much better with text editors than I am with image editors. I wanted to focus more on the actual distro than the artwork. Other people have offered to spruce the website
So it is a CLI distro?!
Not really, no. While it is extremely minimal out of the box for technical reasons, the intent is you add quite a bit more to it, including whatever desktop environment you feel like.
Gives the wrong impression right at the start.
It is definitely not for everyone. I like it, but I know people I've explicitly recommend not try it. If a CLI scares you off, this is not for you - at least not at the first alpha release.
I gave an example here that arose with software that worked fine in Ubuntu but not in Debian. There is quite a bit of software out there that is very picky about what libraries are used. If you get everything from your repository's package manager or compile them yourself, it's not a huge issue, but if it is not in your repository and you don't want to or can't compile it (e.g.: proprietary software such as Valve's Steam), you have to fall back to other options. This happened to me sufficiently often that I ended up creating the discussed topic, and figured it was worth sharing.
Would you mind elaborating on what drove you to that conclusion? I feel all that fits the first alpha of just about any project, honestly, but it could very well be I'm simply not viewing it with the same mindset others are.
I am quite serious with this project, and in no way trolling - I just want to share something I created which I found useful. If you could explain what made you draw that conclusion, I'll try to remedy it if I can.
don't you think commenting "but we are better and you do not understand anything" under each post makes your distribution idea more interesting?
I really have no idea what prompted this. I think I came up with a nice out-of-the-box solution to a problem I found, but beyond that I don't really think anyone working on the project is necessarily "better" than anyone else. To be frank, you're all strangers I don't know well enough to compare myself too.
Your idea is okay, not very usable for the most people, but a nice project.
This much I think I follow.
But advocating it in the way you're doing at the moment, you will get many people who hate it, because you tried to force it on them
In no way do I intend to force this on anyone. Personally I felt it was a relatively niche project. I expected quite a few people to find it interesting, but that's really it - I didn't expect anywhere near the number of people offering to try it out that have. Would you mind elaborating on what gave you that idea? I'd really like to see if I can change whatever I did to cause this to avoid having other people draw similar conclusions.
That's what I used to do, but it was far, far to much work. No where near everything I wanted was available in backports, and to be frank I don't want to compile quite that much. Gentoo was interesting but not my cup of tea. This system provides me a way of grabbing arbitrary packages from arbitrary Linux distributions with relative ease, and meets my needs perfectly. I can certainly understand this not being for everyone - if you're happy with Debian and backports+compiling, you're more than welcome to stick with it. However it is not a sufficient solution for what I want, and based on the feedback I've been getting, I'm not the only one.
But testing? How many times did you have issues with it? What issues exactly?
Stable has two definitions in this context that I can think of: (1) reliability and (2) lack of changes. I want something which stays the same. I do not necessarily want to keep myself up to date on the changes going on if I don't have time for it. I want something that stays the same for extended periods of time. However, I don't always want that - occasionally I do have the free time to play with something cutting edge, and so I do.
This is what we call a backport. dget the .dsc file, dpkg-source -x that one, then build with dpkg-buidpackage. And that's if the backport doesn't exist yet in backports.debian.org
I used to do that, but I got tired of it. Bedrock's system is significantly less work to achieve the same goal with the number of things from other distros I want.
If you really don't want to do that (because there's too many new libs to depend on), then a simple chroot is enough.
I disagree. I want it all to feel like one, cohesive system. I don't want to think about what chroot something is in when I run a random command, I just want to run it and have it launch like it was a traditional Linux distribution.
Most of the time, all what you need is already there.
If you restrict it to need, then yes, that's probably true. However, I want quite a bit more than that, and this give it to me quite nicely.
To be clear, I don't think this is for everyone. If you're happy with what you've got, please do continue to use it. For me, absolutely no distro I could find provided all of the features I wanted, but I found if I could just pick pieces from a variety of them I would get want I want. So I did it, and figured it would be worth sharing in case other people feel similarly.
BTW, your example with dbus and firefox is a bit weird. Who and for what reason would you want to do this?
That's mostly a personal quirk I cannot find the words to fully justify. If you really want a good answer ask in #suckless on irc.oftc.net - there are others there who feel similarly about dbus but are much more apt at explaining why.
I disagree that it is niche.
I know the ins and outs of creating a distro more than I understand people - I could be underestimating the demand for this. I'd sure love to see a large community grow around Bedrock Linux - I hope you're correct.
With two (admittedly major) things, this could be the Linux distro to take over the desktop.
While I would absolutely love for that to be true, I'm doubtful it's feasible to get this to be sufficiently simple and user friendly. While I could do things to make it much easier to install, there are fundamental aspects which I don't quite have sufficient imagination to foresee as ever being simplified sufficiently. I'd love to be wrong, though.
A decent setup program
That's definitely a goal I'm working towards.
and corporate backing
Should the opportunity for that arise, I don't see myself turning it down. This is all F/OSS - worst case scenario I quit and fork the corporate version.
That said, I wish you the best and I hope that I can get to contribute in some way in the future (too much of a n00b/scaredy-cat to venture into an open-source project now).
Thanks! If you ever get over your noobiness and fears, I'm certainly open to further help.
Most daemons from, say, sysv, aren't really dependent on the init system. They're just programs that init happens to run when it feels like it. You can run them manually whenever. For example, if you want to run Debian Squeeze's cups, you can run "/etc/init.d/cups restart" absolutely irrelevant of what the init is.
The daemons Ubuntu uses talk to init for some reason. If init doesn't talk back, they refuse to run. See here for my specifics on it, which links to a bug report on the matter that I'm doubtful will be resolved within the foreseeable future.
I really did not intend to be misleading in quite that way; if you truly feel that way, I apologize. I created something I feel is really neat and would like to share, and felt slashdot would be a great place to share it. You can check my UID - I'm not exactly new around these parts. I'm also not making any money on this - I'm not sure an advertisement is the best description of what this is.
Sounds like a good enough reason to me. Happy to see I'm not the only fan of the show who frequents slashdot :D
That's a really neat idea - I'll look into it. It should be in the TODO before I go to bed tonight. Thanks!
Well, the issue then is that testing and unstable aren't quite stable enough for me. I want something which I can learn and set up, then leave running for years. Debian stable could do that, but neither testing nor unstable could.
.deb from Sid into Stable are non-issues with Bedrock Linux.
However, at times I also want to play with the newest goodie from Debian Sid. I don't want to reboot, I don't want to use a VM, I just want to run a program from Sid. With Bedrock Linux, I can do that: I can have a system which is almost entirely Debian Stable, except for the packages I want from Sid when I want them. Any library compatibility issues one would normally have trying to get a
Add on to that that I can use Gentoo's portage to relatively easily keep a specific package customized to my specific tastes. Say I don't like dbus, but I want firefox - Debian's iceweasel is dependent on dbus. I could just get it from Gentoo with the flag set to exclude dbus. Yet everything else would be Debian.
At the same time, I am 100% library-compatible with Ubuntu, so for projects like sage mathematics, which I know provides packages for Ubuntu, I can use those with absolutely no worry that they won't work. Debian Testing cannot do that.
I really, really like Debian. If Debian could do what Bedrock Linux can, I would have never tried to make Bedrock Linux. The issue is, however, that you can't install an arbitrary program from testing/unstable into stable.. Many of those packages are dependent on specific libraries which aren't available in stable. With Bedrock Linux, you can install and use packages from both, at the same time. I can run Squeeze's newsbeuter in Sid's X11 and have it open a window in Wheezy's iceweasel. It's all transparent and feels like one cohesive OS.
You're not the first one on slashdot to make that connection, but I would like to point out that it is in fact a strength of Bedrock Linux and not a weakness.
Gentoo lets you do all of this....
If you truly feel that way, then I have failed to explain what it does properly.
The beauty of this is you can have the majority of the system be Gentoo if you want, except if you are in a rush and can't wait for something to compile, you can just grab it from the repository of another Linux distribution. Or the opposite - you can have the majority of the system be, say, Debian, except those two or three packages that you really don't like the Debian developer's compilation choices and just get them from Gentoo's portage.
I'm glad you feel that way. I'll do my best to get it there!
Sadly, it really can't be considered user friendly at the moment. I don't expect to take any market share away from, say, Linux Mint. In fact, I should probably actively discourage it, at least for this release. However, this fit my use case, and I figure at least a few others had similar interests but were disappointed no one distro provided all of them at the same time.
I do have a hard time not feeding the trolls. I keep trying to rationalize something which isn't necessarily acting rationally.
:D
And thanks
Then you misunderstood the advantages outlined above. It might be my fault for explaining them.
I really, really like Debian. I like the fact that, once released, it really doesn't change for well over a year. Once I have it set up I can just let it run. However, it becomes out of date fast - if I want some new toy that just came out and isn't in Debian backports. With Bedrock Linux, I can have 95% of the system be Debian except for that one package I want from Arch, which I will get from Arch. Take a look here for what may be better examples.
If you still feel Wheezy covers this, reply again and I'll try to explain it differently. This is really nothing like Wheezy at all. Unless you want it to be, of course, then it is almost exactly like Wheezy.
That is the way it comes off in my description. That's really more a fault in my description than a fault in the design.
A more apt analogy would be thus: If you want a Prius 99% of the time for the gas mileage, but decide on the fly that you need to burn rubber, you don't need to get out of your car and into another - you just flip a switch and go. The beauty though really comes from the fact that you can get aspects of these things at the same time, without switching.
The best real-world example I can think of is the second item here. You really can't do that with any other distro nearly as cleanly - either I don't have working 3D acceleration, or I don't have a working compiz package. With Bedrock Linux, I had both at the same time without putting any effort into debugging.
While I'm sure you intended that as a way of de-valuing yet-another-distro, if you actually take a look at what it does, it is strengthened by the variety of other distros out there. Know two niche distros that both have features you want? Bedrock will (most likely) give you both of them at the same time. If there was One True Distro, Bedrock would have no value.
At the moment, I don't yet have a package manager manager (not a typo), but it is on the TODO and will get there eventually. For the time being, just run the package manager from the client Linux distribution of your choice and install the packages as you normally would. "apt-get install wine" or "pacman -S wine" or "yum install wine" or whatever else you'd like - take your pick.
I've yet to try installing the nvidia drivers through a package manager, as I expect that might make assumptions about the kernel which won't be true. Thus far I've just installed it manually from the drivers provided on nvidia's website. Installing it via a package manager may be possible eventually, just isn't there quite yet.
You've missed the way it integrates the various chroot'd clients together, which is really the whole point. See the second point here. That was literal barely anything more "apt-get install compiz && pacman -S xorg", throwing compiz in the .xinitrc and running "startx". As another example, it can have an RSS reader from one distro open a page in a browser from a completely different distro, transparently; it all feels like one single cohesive Linux distribution.
I do agree it is niche. It's not for everyone. However, I can't be the only one who has interest in the fact that I can have the vast majority of the system running Debian, nice and stable unchanging, yet still grab something from Arch with nothing more than a single pacman command if I feel like playing with something new.
Other than Ubuntu/Upstart's expectation to have its specific init running (which isn't technically a daemon, I don't think), I've yet to run into issues with conflicting distro-specific daemons. However, until very recently I'm the only one whose actually run it, and I'm sure people will find issues I've not yet thought up. That's why it's still in alpha.
Its as good as whatever Linux distribution you want it to be as good as. I used to use Debian's X11 with it until I got a new laptop which the latest version of Debian didn't fully support, so I switched to Arch's X11. I literally just ran "apt-get remove xorg && pacman -S xorg", installed the nvidia drivers (manually from the nvidia website), and I was good to go.