Starch Linux: OpenBSD Atop Arch's Linux Kernel

[staalmannen]

thx but nah, out of userspace i use only a few programs
il check if they are simple, i like simple code

speaking of simple code check plan9 from userspace
its a port of.. well plan9 userspace

http://swtch.com/plan9port/

simple programs as they should be, easy to read too


edit: BSD tools look readable and simple too, probably the reason they chose 'em
plan9 is simpler still

Plan9 is indeed cool and is in fact my favourite hobby OS. It utilities are unix-like but often not-quite-unix and I have had to build a few utilities from sbase and Heirloom for APE to be able to run configure scripts etc. Starch contains 9base (plan9port without X11 progs). If it is simple utilities that you want, you should look at the sbase ones.

https://github.com/StarchLinux/sbase

[Ibidem]

gens has it right, I think.

Regarding the claim that glibc is lightweight:
1: see http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html
2: if that doesn't convince you, get back to me when you have booted a Linux/busybox system in 4 MB (mem=4096) and have 2 MB used after boot.

For those who are saying BSD should die:
Could you please check what you can build if you remove all glibc headers containing the BSD license notice?
Also, please remove sudo, ssh, mandoc, the groff mandoc, me, ms, and other BSD-derived macros, mdoc, tcl & tk, ldap, libtirpc, and any other permissively-licensed packages containing code copyright by "the Regents of the University of California"

[gens]

EDIT: By the way. If you are interested specifically in OpenBSD "core utilities" port to Linux, you might want to check out obase:

https://github.com/chneukirchen/obase

thx but nah, out of userspace i use only a few programs
il check if they are simple, i like simple code

speaking of simple code check plan9 from userspace
its a port of.. well plan9 userspace

http://swtch.com/plan9port/

simple programs as they should be, easy to read too


edit: BSD tools look readable and simple too, probably the reason they chose 'em
plan9 is simpler still

[tvall]

Wrong, RHEL and other Linux distros contribute fixes that often also effect the current development version of KDE as they do not lag very much behind.

BSD ports tree lacks so far behind that the bug fixes made to them were already done in Linux. And even more, they do not contribute back to KDE, they keep the fixes to themselves.

Thus they are holding KDE (and for that matter, all open-source projects) back. But luckily, GNOME has taken the smart decision to ignore BSD and focus on linux instead. This gave them the choice of implementing linux-specific features which give superior performance and characteristics like udev and systemd.

it's interesting cos the majority of BSD desktop users are gnome users so they be forced to switch to linux which is good.

I also strongly think that all other open-source projects should forget about BSD and should implement feature which require the linux kernel so that would make it hard or impossible to port them to BSD. So BSD with have no apps and thus can die quicker. If they don't like it, I'll give them a noose.

It should serve them right for holding back linux and at the same time spreading anti-Linux FUD.

Well, I think all open source developers should forget about GNOME and implement some feature that breaks GNOME compatibility, because I don't like GNOME. Once everyone realizes I am right, actually... I have never thought this far ahead? what will gnome disappearing add to my life? well... IT NEEDS TO DIE ANYWAY!

/sarcasm-like rant thingy

[staalmannen]

i see everybody including Michael missed the point so il' put it bold


ITS A PROJECT FOR A STATIC VERSION OF ARCH LINUX !!


its not about BSD or linux or what libc it uses, its just a project for making a statically linked userspace

musl is chosen cuz glibc dosent fully support static linking
bsd tools are chosen cuz GNU are made with glibc in mind
etc etc


y'all should at least check their web site before ranting nonsense

For fairness sake, it says already at the front page that it is a Suckless/OpenBSD/Linux-based distro.

But indeed, it is its 100% static nature that makes me very interested in it. I am considering installing some of its packages on my "standard" dynamic Arch system - especially a shell and Pacman. I have been hit by a broken glibc before, and having the core static would make that much less risky.

EDIT: By the way. If you are interested specifically in OpenBSD "core utilities" port to Linux, you might want to check out obase:

https://github.com/chneukirchen/obase

[BSD SUCKS DICKS]

Various *BSD port trees usually lag behind KDE upstream, so any bugs that the *BSD maintainers fix likely are no longer relevant. :/

The same can be said for RHEL and other Linux distributions that tend to lag behind upstream.

Wrong, RHEL and other Linux distros contribute fixes that often also effect the current development version of KDE as they do not lag very much behind.

BSD ports tree lacks so far behind that the bug fixes made to them were already done in Linux. And even more, they do not contribute back to KDE, they keep the fixes to themselves.

Thus they are holding KDE (and for that matter, all open-source projects) back. But luckily, GNOME has taken the smart decision to ignore BSD and focus on linux instead. This gave them the choice of implementing linux-specific features which give superior performance and characteristics like udev and systemd.

it's interesting cos the majority of BSD desktop users are gnome users so they be forced to switch to linux which is good.

I also strongly think that all other open-source projects should forget about BSD and should implement feature which require the linux kernel so that would make it hard or impossible to port them to BSD. So BSD with have no apps and thus can die quicker. If they don't like it, I'll give them a noose.

It should serve them right for holding back linux and at the same time spreading anti-Linux FUD.

[ryao]

Starch Linux piqued my interest, so I took the time to actually install it in a chroot. It is minimally functional and it needs a great deal of work. However, what Starch Linux's developer(s) have accomplished so far is a fairly good start for a distribution that is doing something genuinely different. This is especially true when you consider how limited the man power behind Starch Linux is.

It's exactly opposite. Even Linux chroot is more secure than bsd jails. Not to mention containers. There's also many more options on Linux that are more secure.

chroot is insecure by design. You can get a perl script that demonstrates this:

http://pentestmonkey.net/blog/chroot-breakout-perl

Don't make us laugh mentioning thing that are something common. It's Linux that made bsd userland far more secure, because 99.9% of bugs in applications are fixed thanks to Linux. Ask KDE why bsd is worthless to them when comes to fixing bugs.

Various *BSD port trees usually lag behind KDE upstream, so any bugs that the *BSD maintainers fix likely are no longer relevant. :/

The same can be said for RHEL and other Linux distributions that tend to lag behind upstream.

[kraftman]

This is directly false.

They were pretty early with propolice and stack smashing protection. They implemented W^X and they are pretty good with privilege separation. (read about why they wrote their own ntpd and invented BSD auth instead of PAM and the privilege separation ideas they implemented there).

Basically, they assume that the software that runs is buggy and tries to make it hard to exploit those bugs. Thanks to this they have discovered many bugs in 3rd party apps and thus contributed that Linux userland has become safer.

Don't make us laugh mentioning thing that are something common. It's Linux that made bsd userland far more secure, because 99.9% of bugs in applications are fixed thanks to Linux. Ask KDE why bsd is worthless to them when comes to fixing bugs.

[kraftman]

Linux chroots were never intended as a security feature and should never ever be used as such. bsd jails is more like linux containers and linux containers are like chroot, not intended for security isolation so use those with care.

It's exactly opposite. Even Linux chroot is more secure than bsd jails. Not to mention containers. There's also many more options on Linux that are more secure.

[kraftman]

They do. But actually they review it before doing so. I maintain some ports myself, I know that.

And you think Red Hat, Suse, Oracle don't do this? Go home.

So why did KDE recently have a 10 years old bug fixed? More people looking at it, eh?
FAILed QA.

Much more than on BSD. In contrary there were 25+ year old bug in bsd.

It just does not need them like your Linsux does.

Oh, it does need the same protection genius, but it's meaningless OS, so nobody cares to make it secure.

Because Americans are too stupid to handle Unix?

Because they're too smart to use Unix or Unix like OS while there's Linux. However, they're not smart enough, because many of them is using Windows.

How?

Described in another thread already.