AOS has been discontinued due to lack of resources and increasing complexity of maintaining a distribution.
Intro
AOS is a source-based GNU+Linux distribution which aims to avoid the clutter of distro-specific frameworks, resulting in an environment where what you learn can be applied to almost any system.
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!
Installation
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.
Plans for the future
- More automation of maintenance for the buildwiki.
- Possibly an experimental distro that is essentially AOS pre-built, binary packages, graphical.
2018-07-12 - Updated buildaos.sh. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2018-07-12-06.50.changelog.
2017-04-28 - Updated wiki2shell.sh to better handle quotes and backticks in commands that need to be run as root.
2017-01-11 - Updated buildaos.sh to fix an issue with finding the toolchain's ncurses.
2017-01-09 - Updated buildaos.sh. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2017-01-09-13.44.changelog.
2016-12-20 - Updated wiki2shell.sh to better handle quotes and backticks in commands that need to be run as root.
2016-10-02 - Updated wiki2shell.sh to better handle comments instructing that commands need to be run as root, for cases where further comments are included.
2016-02-13 - Updated buildaos.sh with some fixes for cross-building. (
Changelog)
2016-01-02 - Updated wiki2shell.sh to better handle special characters in commands that need to be run as root, added the --sourcedir option.
2015-11-22 - Updated buildaos.sh with a fix to a minor mistake. (
Changelog)
2015-11-20 - Updated buildaos.sh with a workaround for an odd bug in ncurses. (
Changelog)
2015-10-19 - Updated buildaos.sh. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2015-10-19-17.04.changelog.
2015-05-19 - Updated buildaos.sh. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2015-05-19-15.10.changelog.
Show older news
2014-09-22 - Updated buildaos.sh. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2014-09-22-20.34.changelog.
2014-07-26 - Updated buildaos.sh. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2014-07-26-01.40.changelog.
2014-04-10 - Updated buildaos.sh, new package versions. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2014-04-10-14.21.changelog.
2014-02-14 - Updated buildaos.sh, mostly portability improvements. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2014-02-14-15.42.changelog.
2013-12-04 - Updated buildaos.sh with a fix to the problem mentioned below. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2013-12-04-23.05.changelog.
2013-12-03 - Updated buildaos.sh, mostly version updates (which will likely break some of the crossbuilds for now), but also some more readability improvements. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2013-12-03-20.32.changelog. NOTE: Problems were discovered with this version after the release, so you may want to skip this version and use the
previous version until next update.
2013-11-10 - Updated buildaos.sh, primarily making crossbuilds from Solaris (OpenIndiana in tests) work. Changelog at
files/buildaos-2013-11-10-20.23.changelog.
2013-10-09 - Updated buildaos.sh with several fixes, among others making crossbuilds from FreeBSD work and produce a functional system, changelog at
files/buildaos-2013-10-09-09.44.changelog.
2013-09-15 - Updated wiki2shell.sh to ignore whitespace at the beginning of lines when checking for commands that need to be run as root.
2013-09-09 - Updated buildaos.sh again with a fix for an overlooked issue in yesterday's version, changelog at
files/buildaos-2013-09-09-15.22.changelog.
2013-09-08 - Updated buildaos.sh, changelog at
files/buildaos-2013-09-08-01.54.changelog. Since this update of the buildscript updates many packages the ability to build from different platforms may be broken.
2013-08-01 - Updated wiki2shell.sh. Aside from handling a few more cases where commands need to be run as root the new version also accepts options such as --list to list dependencies and --nodepend to generate instructions without regard for currently installed dependencies.
2013-07-15 - Updated buildaos.sh (previously build.sh), changelog at
files/buildaos-2013-07-15-20.01.changelog.
2013-06-28 - Updated build.sh, changelog at
files/build-2013-06-28-14.46.changelog.
2013-06-22 - Updated build.sh, changelog at
files/build-2013-06-22-22.58.changelog.
2013-06-14 - Added a logo and changed the website layout, for comparison the old layout can be found at
oldlayout/.
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 '<'.
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
