Invitation to celebrate Obarun's 4th birthday

Happy birthday Obarun !!

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"What? one more year?
Obarun is still alive?"

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Yes, one more year and still alive. This year comes with a great change regarding s6 implementation and the Obarun Team, but this is not all.

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Also, many thanks to all Obarun users. Thanks for complying with all the recent changes to this project, and to have not given up when things went wrong. Thanks for all your reports and input.

I was really alone at the beginning of this project, with wide spread and unanimous discouragement about the crime of hacking the holly Arch Linux system. At that time, more than 4 years ago, people thought it was impossible to do what I aimed, and I would not produce anything new or useful. To all those doubting Obarun, I have really bad news, Obarun is still alive after 4 years of existence with tons of improvements, I am no longer alone, and it is just the beginning.

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Many thanks to all of you guys sharing and bringing new things to the Linux communities.

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So, what is really new here?

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The single [obarun] repository was split to 3 different new repositories:

• - [obcore] : this repository matches the Arch core repository and contains the necessary and minimum requirements to properly build a base system. There is also an obcore-testing repository.
• - [obextra] : this repository contains useful programs when you want to build something beyond a bare metal system. Again, there is an obextra-testing repository as well.
• - [observice] : This is something that you will not find on any distro except Obarun. Service files/scripts are separate packages on Obarun and can be found on their own repository.

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S6 implementation... well... a lot of changes for sure. S6opts was deprecates and replaced by the 66 suite of tools. Those tools written completely in C come with many improvements of the s6 Obarun eco-system. They demonstrate new features like the concept of the tree (a tree of services), the front-end service file, and provide the opportunity to utilize s6 for any linux system. The most difficult part of s6/s6-rc is to implement it and create a complete ecosystem around it. 66 tools handle this part and combine simplicity and almost infinite flexibility. The emphasis is on speed and user-friendliness.

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At the moment, while I write this announcement, a new 66 release will be ready to share within a few days and comes (again) with even more new tools like 66-parser, 66-env, 66-boot, 66-scanctl, 66-shutdown, etc... They come along a revised design of the first scripts launched by the kernel (PID1), which are now binary, a clean, fast, and safe way to do this. Also the shutdown process can be programmed chronologically by the administrator as well as the user. But this is not the purpose of this post, to explain all of what 66 can do.

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Service now is easy to make by sysadmin/user passing through the frontend file. An easy syntax to understand is employed but in a powerful way. Multiple seats, multiple sessions, multi-supervision trees, can be done with clarity. Viewing the status and log of each service is done by only one tool and the output is easily readable. In two words: Try it!

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Obarun-install continues to evolve in the right way as well, and a good news are coming: UEFI installation is now easily handled by the same installer.

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The visibility of Obarun is accelerating and I really don't understand why (:p)... Obarun was added to the distrowatch database which brings many new users and testers. I hope that people can find something new and useful with Obarun.

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So, the adventure continues as long as I pay the Obarun server. Yes, all this work, energy, skill is shared, it is free, but it is not free for everybody. So, if you find this work important and useful to the linux community and people in general, and you have some money to spare for support, please think of Obarun.

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Many thanks to all again, and thank you for your attention.

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eric vidal