Blogs

The good news:
The StormOS repository now has over 2,500 packages in it! 2,583 to be exact. Notable new packages include the latest version of Xorg, Qt4, GTK+, Glib (which appears to be working with our FAM port), APT, Dpkg, Python 3 and HAL, plus many more which I've since forgotten about.

With all of this talk about Nexenta possibly becoming an official Debian port now seems like to ideal time to announce some changes I've been working on in StormOS.

Mainly, I've been working on breaking up some of the monolithic sunw* packages and replacing others with upstream versions of the software they provide (such as sunwhal with hal).

This makes porting software that sit on top of these packages a lot easier and I also have a feeling that if Nexenta were to become an official Debian port they would make these changes too.

Late last night I pushed a new batch of StormOS packages and we passed the 2000 mark (2030 to be exact). This includes gcc-4.4, perl-5.10.1 and a load of Perl/Java libraries needed to port the rest of Debian Sid over. I've also made some progress on fixing that long standing bug in binutils that can make linking to sun libraries a real pain in the ass.

"Debian turns 17 today. Yes it has really come a long way from being Ian Murdock's pet project back in 1993 to being the distribution on which the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is based on now." Let's go through some interesting history of Debian.

Via: OSnews

StormOS will be taking a new direction. I've decided to stop backporting Jaunty and Lucid packages to our Hardy base and instead start pulling packages from Debian Sid. Yes, that's right - StormOS is rebasing on Debian Sid! This will make package porting much easier and it's also why the repo is now named 'hail' and not 'hardy' anymore. Which brings me to another big change in the way StormOS is developed.

The repos are now on the new server and the DNS has been sorted. To use the repos you need to add the following entry to your /etc/apt/sources.d/stormos.list file (/etc/apt/sources.list for Nexenta users):

deb http://stormos.org/apt/ hail main

You can also browse and search the repo and install/download packages from within your browser by visiting at http://stormos.org/apt or by clicking the Packages link above.

Source packages are currently offline.

UPDATE: The server migration has started. The drupal install has been migrated (although it is a bit broken now) and we new have our own git repositories and rsync. APT repository is still being uploaded.

RootBSD (rootbsd.net) have kindly offered to host StormOS for us. This means we can finally set up rsync for the repo and ISO mirrors and introduce some kind of infrastructure to manage the repository. I'll keep this space updated as I start to make use of this new server of ours :)

I had been talking with TuxFamily about moving StormOS over to their servers but they have proven themselves to be... unreliable to say the least.

So if anyone knows where I can get 10Gb of hosting with git and rsync please say so.

I'm also looking for site moderators to help beat the Spam which has been greatly reduced but, is still a PITA.

As part of our new license agreement with The Bordeaux Technology group Bordeaux has been ported to StormOS. The full version will be included with the next StormOS release for no charge and packages will be added to the StormOS APT repository.

_FINALLY_

The StormOS repo is finally 100% up to date, and the way updates are done has been overhauled so future updates should be fast and painless.

Mono goodness, etc, is all live.