Well, it's April, and the work on uDSL continues.
I blame my discovery of UnionFS. It makes my dream of a unified ramless extension system real.
Well, that, and the advances in things like udev and a minor patch to the loop kernel module (nothing big, just that my kernel now supports a full whopping 1M loop devices.)
That, UnionFS and SquashFS put together let me make a 10M DSL core with the ability to add any software you want at no extra charge.
Well, some extra charge. from my calculations, you'll need an aditional 64k of ram per extension you add on.
Additionally, everything's being cross-compiled from scratch for two target platforms: i386 PC and G3 Mac.
The MyDSL Maker will be a base system for a YouDSL Builder. YouDSL will be written in C/C++ using gtk1.2. It'll be able to import libraries for "custom" extensions (cip: the theme maker and the e-mail setup), and will build both DSL and uDSL ISOs from the web. Mirrors for DSL extensions are taken from the Damn Small Linux page, while there's only going to be one source (until I can find mirrors, not an issue until I get more stuff ported) for uDSL extensions.
So far, I've got a .dsl, a .tar.gz, and a .uci extension ported for testing purposes. The scripts work right, but everything needs polish. I also have to work on my uninstaller; it's not as clean as I'd like. Meanwhile, it's stable as rock on both my PC and my Mac Mini (we'll see how the new old 233MHz iMac fares with it), and aside from some graphical glitches, it's about ready to be betaed out to a few of my friends (live ones, guys, don't get excited).
With luck, I'll be able to work around the quirks in uClibc and get this puppy out by June.
By then, I'll have probably have gotten a case of the give-a-damns on my website and finally get the DNS fixed and moved over to fordi.org.