Wills' Projects: Operating Systems

Origin of the Species

Having been introduced to two flavours of Unix (Sun's, and Silicon Graphics') in my University degree, and finding two abandoned 386 machines in the office at my first job, I took an interest in getting Linux to run on them.

Starting by investigating a number of microdistributions (minimal and floppy-based Linux systems), I quickly found a variety of small programs that could be mixed and matched, and wrote an handful of scripts that collated the most functional parts into a single system. It was a quick-and-dirty hack, but it worked! But then the world moved on. Radical changes in the core libraries suddenly meant that mixing and matching like this was no longer easy, and -thanks to a SuSE 6.2 evalutation CD found at WYLUG- my desktop machine had become an officially-approved dual-boot installation anyway.

And the Beat Goes On...

That was late December, 1999; Franki Linux, for the most part, was a hybrid of the Linux Router Project version 2.9.4, and muLinux distributions with a Slackware 3.9 kernel. Today, the scripts that cobbled the parts together have evolved into STUBS, the Toolchain and Utility Build Suite, which has the capability of not only assembling a linux bootdisk from prebuilt binaries, but building the toolchain to create them as well! Find out more about STUBS here.