This is an overdue update about NORD Linux. Belated Merry Christmas
to you all!
I introduced NORD Linux almost a year ago on the VM discussion list.
Its purpose is to assemble a minimalist system for use in service
virtual machines. It is inspired by the SVMs which have been used on
VM for decades.
I was going to "introduce" it here too, but it seems a little late.
(And I've kind of mentioned it several times anyway.) Also, I've been
busy and not had time to do much with it. (Wait ... I was busy
*before* the new job. What's wrong with this picture?) So I could
use some help.
http://groho.casita.net/pub/nord/about.html
A couple of friends have contacted me off-list using NORD for one
thing or another. That means they are exercising the logic.
Grrr-eat! Need more o dat.
There is no installer. You simply boot it and run it. Things like
Hercules are "hosted", making a download+boot+run easy to do. For
installation to 3390s, some clever Pipelining might work (I am open
for contributions), or you can leverage SuSE, RH, or Debian.
Normally, the only service started at boot time is SSH. (Well ...
that and the network and a "profiler" which can read from a CMS disk.)
Presently, it also has NAMED ("BIND").
The best thing about NORD is that it gets the shared op sys right.
There are at least three ways to do so, and as presently configured it
uses something akin to basevol/guestvol. So while the op sys is 350M
to 500M (depending on packages used), the writeable root is maybe 30M.
(Can grow to any size, and can probably squeeze smaller if you like.)
Actually, it's 64M now because NAMED resides in the root and that
alone is a whopping 45M. I should fix that. Really, I've had some
tiny writeable root disks.
Complete core op sys in a DCSS should work nicely.
NORD is self-hosting on s390 and i386 (can rebuild itself). The web
site only has the s390 build. If I have time (and space) I'll drop
the i386 build there too.
The mascot is a black-and-white animal with an affinity for colder
climates ... and ready to work!
-- R; <><
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