We are a systemd free linux community

Edited again: 2021-07-29

Antix is to Debian what Obarun is to Arch, and Devuan is to debian what Artix is to arch.  Such projects/distributions seem to be very promising in concept and execution.  Equally promising, if not more, is Void, Sabotage, and Kiss linux taking an independent path.  Unfortunately we can not cover the progress of too many distros and at times we may have to drop a few from the list and concentrate on the few we believe there is future and hope.  We have dropped Devuan over a year ago due to serious doubts with the project’s management, its  credibility.  and now we have decided Artix has to go too.

Spyware: KDE Plasma, like Gnome, the anti-FOSS eye-candy blackmail

Non-Linux OS with extensive telemetry:
MS Windows
Apple macOS – based on Unix
Apple iOS & derivites – based on Unix
Google Chromebook ChromeOS – based on Linux
Google Android – based on Linux

Linux OS with extensive telemetry:

Pretty much any Linux with KDE-plasma or Gnome, and there are some like ElementaryOS, EndeavourOS, Fedora that may use telemetry even with LXDE or i3wm.

What ever happened to Obarun, long time no noise from it.

4 years of blogging, 4 years of Obarunning, (more than 6 for Obarun starting from Openbox and Runit) and we are all still here.  So what is there new for Obarun to talk about?

66 development, OUR instead of AUR (Obarun Community/Users Repository) is reality, new images published, and a new XMPP chatting board with room for more rooms, on Obarun’s own server.

udevd is dead, long live mdevd – libudev-zero shines bright

Getting close to our 4year birthday here and what more reason to celebrate than cutting one more tie to the IBM’s monolithic bloatware that is shoved down our throats by agents of dependence and control.

Thanks to the revamping of Kiss and its new commitment to independence, to offer a way to such independence, we noticed a tragic neglect of reality.  We started talking about independence from systemd, and all we thought it was necessary was to substitute pid1 for an alternative.  100 distros later, and many forks, seem to be systemd-free.  Some solutions pre-existed and worked, some fresher were hardly tried. Then came the substitution to systemd’s logind by consolekit2.

Then came the realization that not using systemd init, but using dbus and elogind, was the next worst thing to be doing, and while more and more non-systemd distros (on our long list) didn’t use systemd, they used – or later adopted elogind (void, slackware, and our beloved adelie, even antiX is using it here and there).  So beyond pid1 those systems were business as usual.  We then focused on the next best alternative, consolekit2 (which is recently receiving fresh attention) or not using it and dbus at all, which is fine for most of us wm, teminal, consoles users.

Now, as Kiss points out, udev is another piece that behaves as an IBM monolith in linux and it is our task to evade its dependence.  Maybe then we can set ourselves free, not so fast slick you will trip on your own myth here!  Most X-server subsystems depend indirectly to what udev provides, and IN THE WAY UDEV provides it.

Kiss K1ss linux off, https://kisslinux.org is here

https://kisslinux.org/

Kiss Linux nearly run aground by the founder’s good willing nature, and open and free spirit that was naively expected to be engulfed with respect by the community.  Kiss since day 1 was a bet, to build a hard core base proposal, lay some values and principles down, and allow the interested community to build a quilt of packages around those principles.  He (Dylan Araps) shared his project with those that became initially involved.  So what happened?  Not all those actors paid much attention to those values and principles, did things on their own violating the principles, and still wanted to call this a Kiss Linux community.  Before anyone knew it, Kiss community violating the principles was more Kiss than Kiss itself, and the community’s looser principles (or lack there of) were characterizing Kiss more than it could maintain character itself.

So after a much needed break and settling of the situation forming, the restructuring came in July 2021 as yet a new shot with stricter values and principles. 

2021 hardcore list of linux distributions without elogind and other systemd parts

        Edited: August  15th 2021 (replacing older strict list)

This list is going to be short and there may be a sublist of distros with a medium strict standard.  We shall explain what the object is, below the short list (which we hope the community will assist in making longer as we have not been able to currently review the work of every distro and fork.

2021 list of “healthy” hardcore distros in alphabetical order

1.    Obarun Linux –> obarun.org (the most extensive distribution that meets the criteria)
2.    Kiss Linux –> kisslinux.org (New and even more promising – independent from community influence)
3.    Kwort Linux –> kwort.org
4.    Sabotage Linux  –> sabotage-linux  (most inspiring commitments and goals)
5.    Oasis linux –> oasislinux/oasis
6.    Zandra linux –> zandra.org
7.    Mutiny linux –> mutiny.red
8.    Glaucus linux –> glaucuslinux.org
9.    Mere Linux —> merelinux.org  (alpha project – active again Musl + pacman )
10.    Iglunix Linux —> https://github.com/iglunix/iglunix/releases, https://iglunix.xyz. (musl busybox no-gnu + alt kernels + wayland NoX)
11.   Chimera Linux —> chimera-linux.org  (hard to tell apart from Iglunix)
12.   CarbsLinux —> carbslinux.org (Kiss fork with CPT pkg manager sinit/runit/busybox )
13.   Gobo Linux —> gobolinux.org (Alternative filesystem structure source based glibc)
14.   Venom Linux —> venomlinux.org (forked from LFS glibc now with runit )

 

Please keep the recommendations going, for inclusion and exclusion from the list.  We can not keep and maintain installations for all of them, we count on you.

Hardcore because they seem honest and dedicated to the war against totalitarianism by IBM and other mega corporations to dominate the Open and Free software world.

In the pandemic of global neo-liberal capitalist dictatorship we are still here

… and so are all the projects we support and exhibit.

WordPress continues to make our life miserable, with all their new guis a web-client-google-apis.  As if they are no longer capable of developing their own code for a web-client interface they must add google functionality, which in turn is not supported by all safety and privacy minded browsers, only those produced by google and mozilla corporations, making it hard to protect yourselves against the corporate bandits and have adequate functionality to publish.

Fuchs your freenode irc server – resignation

Reproduced here while it lasts, as his own links at the end of the text and the mainpage of his site are “gone”:    (also read sysdfree.wordpress.com/314 )

Reproduced as free speech to free people about freenode as found on this link 5/20/2021 posted on the Obarun Forum

freenode-resign-letter.txt

Dear freenode users and projects,

I joined freenode staff a bit more than 10 years ago, after having used
the network for already roughly 5 years by that time.
During this time, I enjoyed supporting our communities in various roles;
I met some of you through first level support,
through my work for the groups team or due infra work.

startpage.com waterfox browser and w3m text browsing – gstatic.com

Brief reporting here of a slogan sold cheap “your privacy is important to us” or “we put your privacy 1st“, used by many commercialized old software and services, that became too popular for “industry” to leave alone.  Sometimes marketing hype and sloganism becomes more than actual meaning and content.   It is the myth that sells.  So how is open/free software and a free search engine, committed to user privacy, used by large marketing businesses, and data miners, is used as a lure to do exactly what Microsoft explorer, msn, google, yahoo, mozilla, do, but with an “activist’s” dress?  I am talking about waterfox and startpage, both sold during the past couple of years to a data mining business.  And if it wasn’t a data miner it is now.

Myth busted: Can you run sway/wayland’s i3 without systemd or elogind?

For those who want to skip the discussion and get right to it follow the steps at this README

For a while, we have heard this justification, among distributions that have refused systemd as init, that elogind was adopted as a necessity for running wayland which is the future of graphical desktops.  Some future this is, but anyway.  For Artix it was a day one decision, for Void and Adelie it has been a year or more, for Slackware a few months.  But it is only a handful of distros at this point that have totally refused the use of elogind and stick to consolekit2 (which was recently upgraded upstream unlike common myth that has it abandoned).  Consolekit2 can handle logind functionality but can’t provide seat management.  So there is seatd, a daemon that just does this.  So count the different functions, unrelated to each other, that systemd provides all in one huge blob.

Arch-linux building from source – and Obarun to the rescue

What if, there was a benefit in building from source, a system that is commonly used by pre-fabricated binary packages, like Arch or any of its forks and desktop flavors?  What Arch considers a “clean-chroot” is primarily of need to developers ensuring their package can be both satisfied for all dependencies AND are reproducible, as long as this can be achieved within a constantly rolling distribution.  That is open and nearly free condition for you.

Why

Building in a clean chroot prevents missing dependencies in packages, whether due to unwanted linking or packages missing in the depends array in the PKGBUILD. It also allows users to build a package for the stable repositories (core, extra, community) while having packages from [testing] installed.

Scratch most of this for several reasons.  We are not developers, we are building our own system like Gentoo-ers, k1ss-ers, Crux-ers, and others do.  We want to make sure that each of our packages fits well within the parameters of our specific machine, and it wasn’t built on another machine that may not be 100% compatible to ours.

Glaucus Linux α = musl-c-library toybox-utilities init=finit

https://glaucuslinux.org

This is a very alpha project with very promising prospects.  Not much software other than the core basics, a tiny kernel that boots in QEMU and other virtual realities, it can possibly boot on some plain-jane hardware, we didn’t try.  It is tiny in size and tiny in resource use.  In our tries we were booted and loged-in as root with about 14MB of Ram use.

If you don’t like Qemu you can use its utility to convert the image to a vdi (VirtualBox)

qemu-img convert -O vdi glaucus-bennettae-finit-x86_64-30092020.img glaucus-bennettae-finit-x86_64-30092020.vdi

 

FSF Richard M. Stallman and the gangsters of the globe

There is much talk these days about RMS, the founder of FSF returning to the board of FSF and IBM refusing to have him, popular demand, vote, or otherwise.

I could list countless articles here as a detailed research on the matter, but the plethora of them TOTALLY MISS THE ISSUE.

Who decides and how is a decision made?  Is it influence by rational arguments or is it a choke-hold maneuver that even his (RMS’s) dearest of friends can’t escape?

The rational argument by IBM, and their fellow mutually interested global giant corporations, is “YOU DO AS WE SAY, OR NO MONEY COMING TO YOU“.