(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Over the years, developing Puppy and derivatives, I have had a need to compile some utilities statically.

It has been ad-hoc, using different uClibc and Musl filesystems. Now, I am making it more formal, and reproducable and useable by anyone.

Rob Landley's Aboriginal Linux is an archived project. I am bring it back, specifically the uClibc based version.

Introduction is here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/projec ... readme.htm

Download (228MB):

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/projec ... 0.2.tar.gz

And what to do after downloading:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/projec ... /start.htm

if anyone is interested, you are welcome to play!

Barry, I can't help any technically, but I just have to say that
you are another Elon Musk, and starting this "making it more formal,
and reproducable and useable by anyone." project
is like Elon sending his "pet" Roadster to the Asteroid Belt.

Now, well, very Soon!, not only will there be Puppy derivatives for
almost any Linux distribution, but also for almost Any Hardware!

I have a Compulab Utilite (ARMv7) that I wish Puppy was available for.
Others likely have various machines laying around, too,
even some tablets and whatnot. There is hope for resurrecting them all!

Thanks for all you are doing, Barry.

Eddie Maddox, USA

What I am doing is not new, there are other Puppy developers who love minimalism, and indeed older smaller code, who have played with Aboriginal.

I received a PM from 'goingnuts', the guy who has resurrected 'xwoaf':

Thanks Barry - I did play with aboriginal a while ago - found that static linked c++ was hard to get going (?) . My notes says that I could not build cdrkit-1.1.10, module-init-tools-3.3-pre11, dvd+rw-tools-7.0 and iptables-1.4.0 as static linked bins...At that time I was trying to do an "AboPup" from source.
Still I have most succes using the old buildroot-0.9.27 source - but guess thats because I focuse on old abandoned sources and techs...

That old version of Buildroot is another option. It supports creating a target rootfs that can be used as a chrootable development environment -- later Buildroots abandoned that capability.

Forum member 'scsijon' has also done something:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=86704

...see also posts from goingnuts in that thread.

Here is another link, to 'PupnGo' created by goingnuts:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=51478

Another guy that you will find very active in these minimalist projects is 'technosaurus', and there are many of his posts in the above forum thread.

EDIT:
goingnuts worked on a bigger PupnGo here:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=78941

Personally, I am not that interested in building a complete distro statically, just core utilities, but I do appreciate the aesthetic charm of it!

There was a completely static distro announced awhile back, named 'Stali', but it's site has disappeared. It was using musl.

Stali did get forked though, as 'Oasis', and my God, it is using Wayland:

https://lists.suckless.org/dev/1702/31114.html

Oasis project:

https://github.com/michaelforney/oasis

...an active project

Are you really talking about aborigonal, which was ended in 2016 due to toolchain+ issues?

After some design changes it has been evolved into mkroot https://github.com/landley/mkroot and that is what is supposed to be used. Mail groups, etc., have been moved across.

Also, I understand there is some problems with using the word aborigonal, something about a protected name, so that may also have had some bearing on the name change.

The word "aboriginal" means the original inhabitants of any country. So technically, Anglo-Saxon people in England are aboriginals.

That's not how the word is commonly used though.

Dictionary definition:

inhabiting or existing in a land from the earliest times or from before the arrival of colonists; indigenous

...but, in the case of England, it depends how far back you go. Who were the first arrivals, after the last ice age?

I knew the aborigonal bit but 'somewhere' told him to change it!

Then it went to mkroot, but apparently that has upset others so he's in the process of changing it again, poor guy, just as he's got, git, the mailing lists, and groups, etc all sorted.

Looks like it will become, and I quote Rob

I think I do want to call the project "hermetic", because hermetic system builds
are the point of the exercise. Dunno if that makes it "hermetic linux" or not...