AOS is a source-based GNU+Linux distribution aimed at giving power to the user at every level, including to see the specific source that her/his/their system was built from and to make changes freely.
It's mostly just a distro to fit my own personal preferences of how a system should work, but if you like it too you're welcome to use it! It might be useful for educational purposes.
Unlike most distros AOS doesn't come with an installer system, instead the buildscript is used to build it from an existing system, either a previously installed system or a liveCD system.
Once you have the base system installed any further packages you wish to install need to be installed manually, but for that the buildwiki can help you on your way.
Or you could use a script to automatically fetch build instructions which you can pipe to a shell.
Some ways in which AOS differs from other sourcebased distributions:
- There is no need to chroot into the installed system to finish setting it up, therefor making it possible to install from a different architecture or even a completely different software platform.
- The entire base system is built from source, no binary stage tarballs.
- Doing things yourself is at the core, no distro-specific magic behind the scenes (what you learn from using AOS will be usable on almost all operating systems, regardless of existing "magic").
- All source is available to you. Unless you choose to remove it yourself, all sourcecode is stored on disk, including the source of the base system in /usr/parent-src.
2013-05-31 - updated build.sh, changelog at files/build-2013-05-31-09.58.changelog.
2013-05-22 - updated wiki2shell.sh, the new version prints out the command that su is invoked to run.
2013-05-02 - updated build.sh, changelog at files/build-2013-05-02-10.39.changelog.
2013-04-02 - updated wiki2shell.sh with more cases of commands that need to be run as root, and added source mirroring.
2013-02-26 - build.sh updated, primarily new versions of core packages, changelog at files/build-2013-02-26-10.27.changelog.
2013-01-27 - fixed wiki2shell.sh to convert HTML-escaped '<' back into '<'.
Show older news
2013-01-26 - made some fixes to build.sh regarding locale-generation.
2013-01-25 - build.sh updated, changelog at files/build-2013-01-25-20.01.changelog, also updated wiki2shell.sh to handle more situations where commands need to be run as root.
2013-01-12 - some improvements/fixes for building AOS for x86_64
2013-01-09 - added back the checks for already installed packages in wiki2shell.sh, in case the output is saved as a script and run later or multiple times. there are also several changes to build.sh, check the .changelog file in files/ for more details.
2012-12-06 - improved the wiki2shell.sh tool to skip dependencies already accounted for earlier
2012-11-24 - improved the wiki2shell.sh tool to automatically use su -c for commands like 'make install' (unless you run it as root)
2012-11-21 - fixed a bug that caused the include paths for C++ headers for gcc/g++ to be faulty, among other small tweaks
2012-11-16 - fixed a bug caused by some of the hacks to support cygwin (but not limited to cygwin)
2012-11-13 - the latest version of the build script should now be able to build from cygwin (along with several other minor changes since a month ago)
2012-10-14 - it has taken a while, but the buildscript is finally up now
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