A few months ago StormOS joined the Debian Derivatives Exchange. This means that StormOS is now on the Debian Census and the repository is being diffed against Debian proper to create a full set of patches which are useful for indentifying changes, upgrading packages, and hopefully in the future getting changes accepted upstream too.

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I mentioned in my last post that due to the APT repositories growing faster than I had expected that I was running out of space and would likely not be able to host the StormOS Pre-Alpha ISO myself. Since then RootBSD has kindly given me an extra 40GB which gives me plenty of room to breath. Many thanks to everyone that offered to help with hosting but for now everything is back on track.

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I have been able to generate working StormOS Flash ISO that appears to be fully functional (if you don't mind getting your hands dirty - that is) so I think it's getting close. If all goes to plan StormOS Flash Pre-Alpha will be ready in ~2 weeks. I'm not sure I have enough space/bandwidth to host the ISO though so if somebody else could do that for me that would be very much appreciated. In the meantime I'll speak to RootBSD about increasing my storage.

For now I'll leave you with some screenshots taken from some of my development ISOs.

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StormOS now has multiarch support!

Support for multiarch in StormOS has been achieved by porting dpkg and gcc-4.6 from Debian Wheezy and backporting multiarch support from binutils 2.21.X in Wheezy to binutils 2.20.X in Squeeze in order to work-around a regression in Solaris support that is in Debian's 2.21.X based packages. Packages will be online shortly.

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Debian has announced that they are going to introduce multiarch support for Wheezy (7.0) in 2013 which I think is great news. The original plan to solve the need for both 32/64bit on StormOS Flash (which is Wheezy based, already) was to implement support for FatELF but I will be now abandoning this because with proper multiarch support there is no need for fat binaries.

EDIT: Heres a link for anybody interested in the kind of problems this will solve.

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I will be releasing a pre-alpha version of StormOS Flash in next few weeks. For those that don't follow the dev blog, StormOS Flash is a distribution based on NCP4 (NCP4 combines Debian Squeeze with Illumos kernel and userland). In order to meet this goal I'm going to set the bar pretty low and aim to have only the bare minimum of features/applications included but aim to have everything working.

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After a lot of hacking I finally got Xorg running on NCP4. Xfce hasn't been ported yet so I didn't have a lot to test but qtdemo seems to work flawlessly ;)

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For the last few months I've been working for Nexenta Systems on the next release of their free OS Nexenta Core Platform 4 (NCP4). NCP4 is pretty much a port of the base Debian Squeeze (not quite Debian Sid but certainly a step up from Ubuntu hardy!) packages onto Illumos with a few tweaks here and there to keep some compatibility with Solaris and NCP3. A lot of work has been done on fixing issues that were in NCP3 so I know this is going to be a great release and a stable foundation for the next StormOS.

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Due to the massive amount of spam being posted to this site I have no choice but to disable both the forums and comments. Sorry.

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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.

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