Development Build 2

A lot has happened since this released. One of the biggest things is readapting the musl C library. My motivation for that is the lightweightness of the core system (15MB vs 60MB), along with security and safety. The LiveCD Filesystem and Xiongnu init were also heavily modified. Instead of switch_rooting into the filesystem found on the image, it instead just remounts the initramfs in RAM and read-write, meaning changes can be made, but nothing will be retained when rebooted.

A SquashFS can solve this (if created using a USB drive), but that's for another time. StelaLinux at the moment is very minimal, with only core libraries and executables being installed. Libraries include the musl C library and ncurses, and binaries include the BusyBox userland, util-linux, and vim. The next release will focus on binaries and libraries for allowing StelaLinux to be installed to a real drive (e2fsprogs, zlib, etc).

StelaLinux, for the moment, will follow the most stable kernel, which included with this build is 5.5, instead of the latest LTS. This ensures StelaLinux gets the latest and greatest features. When a package manager eventually comes to StelaLinux, this will likely change, as ABI stability will become of great importance. RISCV and ARM (Raspberry Pi 4) support is also on the radar.

The StelaLinux Script, stela.sh, was also modified to treat toolchain packages the same as normal packages. It was also greatly rewritten to be a lot more functional. Eventually, the image function will be updated to create an EFI compatible bootable disk image.

New Features

• Read-Write LiveCD Filesystem which is loaded into RAM
• ncurses library, util-linux (cfdisk, etc), and vim text editor (overwrites vi)
• i686 support (i586 unofficially supported)

Specifications

• Linux Kernel 5.5.4 (Stable)
• musl C library (1.1.24)
• BusyBox 1.31.1 (Stable)
• Xiongnu Init (nova - heavily modified)

Side Note:

You should try Ataraxia Linux or other musl distributions like Void or Apline Linux. With numbers come power.