Mastodon Linux

Download

BETA0066, released 2-May-2002

Description

My Linux distribution, which features a primarily BSD Unix userland, a completely a.out set of systems programs (to avoid the wonderland of gl*bc backwards incompatability), and a lot of experimental things I’m playing with.

Future plans

Roadmap

For the next release I’m trying to decide whether to roll to one of the super-bloated newer Linux kernels or write my own USB stack plus SATA and UDMA drivers for 2.0.28. The advantage of rolling to one of the newer Linux kernels is that the work is all done, but the disadvantage is that modern Linux is in a symbiotic relationship with a large mass of GNU code and replacing the kernel means replacing a huge variety of other code just to get the damned thing to build. Plus the new kernel source tarballs are over 300mb unpacked, which would tend to completely fill / on many of the flash root filesystems I’ve got on my servers.

Todo list

Things that need to be done for the next release are

• improve the filesystem hierarchy.
• find a libc (not glibc; I need to ship glibc so that third-party tools can work, but even with having to completely rebuild glibc [so that I don’t have to deal with the nasty nss plugin libraries that it uses] it’s still too much of a moving target) that I can link systems programs with.
• redo the installer. The days of the single-floppy install are probably long gone, and I’m going to have to ship a mini-ISO image that holds the installer.
• After working with commercial Linuxes for a few years now, I’ve begun to believe that there is some merit to using some sort of package management scheme. But which one? One that writes to a package database (with a backup to text files in case the package database goes south), or one that simply writes, slowly, to a collection of textfiles?

Releases

Version	Release Notes?	Comments
INST0063	yes	A fairly old (even in the context where “new” is 13 years old) release.
INST0064	yes	libc 5 is depreciated here, due to y2k issues.
INST0065
BETA0066	yes	The last version of INST0066 before I went to a network distribution model.