sega01's blog

Icadyptes is evolving

It may take months, it may take years, but stay tuned for what's coming. It'll be worth the wait, but not that anyone is really waiting for Icadyptes to go anywhere.

I'll see you eventually with something big.

--Teran

BFS'ified!

Hey,

Looks like it's been ages since I last wrote. Sorry for the time it's been, but Icadyptes has had some good progress. I've been keeping track of BFS, and gave it a try. I was quite impressed with it, and #ck on irc.oftc.net has been quite helpful (and is quite the smart group of people). I pushed a BFS'ified and GRSecuritifed (but hacked to death, just for dmesg and /proc restrictions) 2.6.31.1 kernel out to core about 48 hours ago (2009-10-09). So, apparently, Icadyptes is the first traditional-ish Linux distribution to include BFS by default! Apparently someone got a Ubuntu Linux-BFS build going, but I don't think any other distros (except apparently an Android fork) use BFS yet, by default :-). The whole IRC channel is quite nice and helpful. It's nice to find a smart, but not obnoxious channel. AStorm was suggesting that my I/O lockup issues might be from the BKL in ReiserFS; I think he's right. If I `dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile, all I/O seems to stop. If I use Anticipatory (I actually spelled that right the first time; I'm surprised) or CFQ, it gets better, but real world experience in X is awful. Oh well, more on that later (I'm writing a I/O benchmarking script and will do a big benchmark sometime, keep on the look out :-) ).

X is also basically at a 7.5 level and is quite stable for me (except for a nasty memory leak I'm looking to plug), and e17 was updated. As is as usual, e17 is not *super* stable, but I'm using it right now, so it does certainly work :-) (it's really not too bad at all, but I would feel uncomfortable leaving it installed for any random user). It could mostly be that I got an unlucky svn revision though; I need to do some more e17 updates sometime. We've also got some Firefox 3.5.3 goodness, along with Gimp 2.6.7.

I've done a couple tweaks to the site, like with RSS/ATOM feeds and denying user registration (there is nothing useful in this part of the site, only the forums.

Thanks for reading!
--Teran (sega01)

Updates

Yes, development is still under way. I had about a month long lapse after meeting the most amazing person ever (no, not RMS or Linus), but I'm back to work.

Icadyptes 0.2 is released!

Icadyptes 0.2 is released, almost exactly 7 months after the 0.1 release. While this may sound like the second release, it is actually the fourth or fifth ISO. There are plenty of changes, countless bug fixes, many new packages, and it is much more refined. Of course it still needs work, but I think Icadyptes is ready to be publicised. We have Git on the repositories now, a forum, a much better website, and a fast mirror (all hosted on the same VPS running Icadyptes). The ISO has grown to 142MiB, with the core/ repository totaling 128MiB, and with extra/ at 298MiB.