Wills' Projects: STUBS and Franki/Earlgrey Linux

• Introduction to STUBS.
• Release Announcements.
• STUBS downloads.
• Freshmeat page for STUBS here.

STUBS: Read All About It

Franki and Earlgrey Linux are small but usable (busybox+uClibc, execute-only-environment) linux distributions designed to demonstrate the full extent of STUBS, the Toolchain and Utility Build Suite.

What It Is

The STUBS Toolchain and Utility Build Suite is a set of scripts which can be configured to build one or more software packages in sequence. STUBS is designed to work in very minimal environments -including those which need the installation of 'make' as a step in the build- and URLs are included so source and patches can be downloaded as necessary. Configuration files and scripts are provided which create boot media for Franki/Earlgrey Linux (one of several example busybox- and uClibc-based Linux environments) and the intention is that STUBS should be able to rebuild such an environment from within itself.

Normally, STUBS' build script is pointed directly at an index file which lists multiple packages, though it is possible to build packages independently of this mechanism by specifying their build scripts directly. Any relevant source files are extracted, and the associated build commands (configure/make/make install, or equivalent) are executed. Where an index file is used, each program built by STUBS can make use of the ones built before it. Because STUBS makes no assumptions about how packages are built and installed, it is ultimately possible -with minimal configuration and little subsequent interaction- to meet the aim of building a fairly bare but self-installing OS.

What It Isn't

STUBS is not a replacement for 'make'; it assumes the dependencies any packages have will have been satisfied in advance, i.e. rather than automatically prompting the necessary builds, the absense of software not yet built will abort the build. STUBS may be extended to reference Makefiles as well as scripts in the future, which will alleviate some instances where this is a problem.

STUBS: Announcements

• (2008-08-12) STUBS Configurations 0.8.0-2pre1/0.9.5-2pre1: This prerelease sanitises and updates a number of build scripts; curl, hdparm, mailx, patchutils, pciutils, vitetris, and wget scripts now build newer releases. The Black Dragon toolchain and distribution extensions now include bsd-games and its dependencies.
• (2008-05-31) STUBS Configurations 0.8.0/0.9.5: This release officially kicks off the 0.8.0 stable series. New and updated packages since 0.6.x include autossh, bzip2, findutils, file, httping, udhcp, and wget.
• (2008-04-19) STUBS Scripts 0.9.4-2: This Scripts release fixes a typo in 'mogul' when making prerelease and release candidate floppy/ISO images. It obsoletes version 0.9.4.
• (2007-03-16) STUBS Scripts 0.9.4: This Scripts release fixes a bug in 'mogul' where "release candidate" version numbers cause unsuitable initrd image filenames to be generated. A disk image built with this new version is now available.
• (2007-03-16) Earlgrey 0.9.5rc1 disk image. This is another preview release built to test the latest scripts.

...Get downloads here