snacklinux

I've been thinking about this for a while. It's not really practical, but just for fun. Essentially rewriting the tools needed for a minimal Linux distro with just the kernel. I found this PyCon presentation(video on Youtube) about this very subject. Unfortunately there's no mention of it past 2006 but oh well. Another use for such a thing would like be similar to Docker but with the build process of SnackLinux. Being able to launch a customizable Python image with custom kernel is complete overkill but that's what makes programming fun I think.

It's with great success that I can announce SnackLinux has working arm64 build instructions, along with updated x86.

I haven't updated SnackLinux since 2018 or so, with the first commit on Feb 13 2013. Almost 10 years now, crazy! My longest-standing open source project that I've maintained. Honestly, it doesn't do much but at least it runs. I never put a whole lot of work into SnackLinux over the years with moving around the province, changing careers and changing my overall life.

It's nice having a constant hobby to always be able to chip away at when you have the time. Almost comforting in a way.

Anyway, i486 ISO builds work. I'm working on x86_64 ISOs. arm64/aarch64 kernel image and root filesystem builds work.

Download here | Code

Quick update to SnackLinux, rolled out Linux 4.15.2 with Busybox 1.28.0. Also switched over to x86_64 only (for now at least) since it simplifies a lot of things. I removed the need to staticly link everything and get rid of that niche, since a few other smaller distros cover that (Alpine Linux for example). Again, this simplifies building packages and running into less issues. Check it out on Github for build instructions, or the getting started page on getting SnackLinux running.

The Makefile for SnackLinux has been updated, I made it a bit easier to build SnackLinux from scratch. I'd like to update GCC to at least 5.x something, and add a few more packages to SnackLinux. Eventually, adding a PKGBUILD-like system to fbpkg would be preferable. Right now, it's just a bunch of instructions on the snacklinux.com.

SnackLinux now has a whopping 31 packages, which include a (somewhat) working gcc toolchain and other fun GNU utilities (vitetris included!). I was able to add Docker support as well, which is just tarballed userland. Getting a working gcc toolchain was a bit of a pain in the butt. Pain in the butt because musl doesn't play nice with every piece of software out there, since most (that I have encountered anyway) think we're using glibc. And since SnackLinux is focused on every packaging being staticly compiled, not every package plays nice with that either. For example, there is a Python 2.7.9 package in the repository that is missing quite a few modules, see below:

 SnackLinux finally has a domain, snacklinux.org! The source is still on Github and all the ISO images have moved as well.

 For the most part, SnackLinux works. I've been having problems with Busybox, so I've made packages for coreutils, binutils, sed, grep and gawk. When compiling anything, I get:

segfault at 0 ip    (null) sp bfdb1cbc error 4 in busybox[8048000+e8000]

or something along the lines of that. I used the newest Buildroot, 2013.11, to create a new toolchain and cross compile uClibc 0.9.33 for SnackLinux. I have yet to recompile Busybox yet, but I'm working on getting gcc natively working on SnackLinux. Once that is completed, I should be able to compile SnackLinux from within SnackLinux.

 Four months later and I finally updated SnackLinux. I changed  SnackLinux from a ramdisk to initramfs, updated the Linux 3.10.1 and cleaned up how things build. The full project is available on my Bitbucket and ISOs are available to download here.

 I've spent the last week or two working on SnackLinux, a small Linux distro. I managed to get uClibc in there, as well as tcc, which makes it somewhat useful. The source of it all is there, so you can compile the distro yourself (sans the packages). There are also ISOs which you can download here and fire them up in a virtual machine.