Sunday, January 20, 2008

Aloofix - Good Enough for a Tarball

Hey, it's time for my Sunday weekly progress report on Aloofix, and it's even Sunday.

Aloofix 0.4 (The Barking Pup release) is now available for download on SourceForge.

It should be usable on VirtualBox, VMWare Player, and Qemu.

This is still an alpha release, but going from private alpha to public alpha definitely constitutes forward movement.

I'll spare you the list of changes made since it was originally imported into svn - you have other blog articles to read. There are also several important items to finish before I'm going to consider it ready for beta release.

Here are some vital statistics for the current release:

  • Source tarball size: 68KB
  • Time to build from scratch: 45-60 minutes (on Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8Ghz) w/ 128MB RAM and cheapo 40GB 7200rpm disk)
  • ISO image size: 10.8MB
  • Time to install: <10>
  • Time to boot from grub: approx 10 seconds (in Virtualbox on 3.4Ghz P4)
  • Time to reboot: 15 seconds (no apps other than dropbear)
  • Disk space used: 45.6MB
  • RAM used: 9MB
  • Qty of regular files installed: 127
  • Qty of symlinks installed: 285 (primarily busybox)
  • Qty of directories installed: 34
  • Amount of fun I'm having: oh, you have no idea...
Cheers!

2 comments:

Matt Snoby said...

Hi Aloof,
This is exactly what I was looking for! I'm replacing a PLC and display interface with a SBC that I want to run Linux. I've done quite a bit of Linux development and I feel very comfortable doing this project in Linux.

I attempted to use buildroot, with some success, however I believe your build scripts will give me a great jump start. If I can offer any help let me know!
Matt

Aloof Schipperke said...

The best help at this point is to kick the tires on the package. The build portion is still evolving, so expect notable changes prior to 1.0. The end result is very close to the minimalism I'm trying to keep for the distro.

I haven't spent much time thinking about SBCs, since I'm primarily interested in virtualized environments. Having said this, I intentionally designed it based on embedded concepts (minus a robust cross-build).

Also, your blogger profile comes up as unknown..