April 16, 2008

Adventures in Packaging....

RPM hasn't changed much externally to the user since 1996 when it was first released. Nor has it changed much for people wanting to package up software with it. Internally however, it has changed a great deal, especially with how it discovers dependencies.

As time has gone on, RPM has become more and more aggressive in discovering what dependencies a package has, including it's calls to GNU only features in the C library. This wouldn't be a problem if your C library was from before 2.5 if you had packages that had been build by both RPM 4.4.6 and 4.4.8, however this is not the case on AltimatOS; we use glibc 2.5.

Because of this, I get to wait on glibc to build again. This does not make me a happy panda....

April 9, 2008

Same old task...

For a few months I've ignored the state of our packages for AltimatOS. Well, today that changes. We're not far from a public beta and we've yet to get KDE built, let alone fixing any broken dependencies in the repository, which would make it near impossible to release, let alone install.

As I'm currently the only person on the project, I've turned my attention from the installer to work on our packages. So, at this moment, I'm building KDE 3.5.9 with a wealth of patches to make the experience a little better for our users.

This will take a while to sort out the last of the packages before I can get back to working on AI unfortunately. Due to the state of the repository and AI, etc. I now implore the free software community: if you want to help; have ever wanted to work on a Linux distribution, please get in touch with me at greeneg aT altimatos DoT com to volunteer.

April 2, 2008

Looking good....

I've almost all of the code done for the user interface of AI, and at this point can focus on one of the more important features for release of the installer: kickstart mode.

The back end of the installer is intended to write the kickstart file as it goes so we can just read in the actions requested and act on them in the later portions of the installer. This also allows users to clone systems easily and effectively by installing once on a canary and then copying the kickstart file to a pen drive and running the installer on the new box with the pen drive attached.

Stay tuned for updates on this, since this shouldn't take too long to add in. ;)