Annvix Development Blog

It is with great regret that I announce that development of Annvix will be on hold indefinitely. At this point, I do not forsee continuing development in the future at all, at least not as an entire operating system.

In November of 2003, I started Annvix to build a Linux distro that was meant to be secure and fast. I feel that this goal has been met and exceeded… Annvix is secure, and it is fast. It’s light-weight, with a low memory and hard disk footprint making it ideal for any number of applications. I know there are many who currently use it, and who have used it in the past, who feel the same.

Annvix, in it’s 4.5 years, became perhaps one of the most unique Linux distributions out there. It broke out of the old mold… it did things differently — some things better, some things probably worse. I feel that overall it was better and despite a learning curve, Annvix was a great server distribution.

To that end, technologically, Annvix is a great success and I am proud to have worked on it for 4.5 years. It was also meant as a learning experience, and by that it truly was — you cannot possibly appreciate the amount of work that goes into an operating system until you deal with the nuts and bolts of it. Annvix was a fantastic experience that I do not regret. It taught me new development skills, problem solving and QA skills, taught me how the management of a distribution could work and does work.

I do not, and never will, regret giving 4.5 years to this project.

Annvix was never about making money. I never set out to create a Mandriva-killer, or Ubuntu-killer, or any other distro. I didn’t expect to make a million dollars doing it. Having said that, Annvix was never about losing money either, and if I calculate the out-of-pocket costs for this project, it was an expensive hobby. When I calculate the cost of my time involved, that figure rises — to over $250,000 in time. That is time I can never get back, and while the cost to me so far has been acceptable (out-of-pocket and time), it’s no longer feasible especially when the rewards are so limiting. With expenses of over $10,000 in 4.5 years, contrasted to donations of $500 in the same time frame, I suspect that I’ve pushed this project longer than most people would have — especially considering the amount of help that was received (not just financial, but in terms of user participation, testing, documentation, development, and general responsiveness).

The sad thing is, I know there are well over 200 Annvix installs out there. I also know that one individual donated 40% of that money, and also donated time to test and develop. The other 60%…. well, suffice it to say that most of that was for referral links on the website. I think it would be generous to say that 20% of that $500, beyond what Ying donated, was for actual appreciation of the distribution. So for that, I’d like to thank Ying-Hung Chen, not only for his time and effort invested in Annvix, but for the donations he made to the project. He has been with Annvix almost since the beginning and has remained a steadfast friend and source of encouragement, and has expressed his appreciation many times, and in many ways.

Annvix, as an operating system, will most certainly no longer continue. It may come back in some form, as secure package add-ons to different operating systems perhaps, but likely not for some time. It’s time that I gave my time to myself and to my family.

The website and subversion repository will still remain available for some time (thank you, Ying, for offering to host the subversion repository). The repository should be back in a few days or so. Bugzilla will most likely be shut down. The mailing lists will be shut down sometime this week. Development and package updates will not be forthcoming.

This has been a difficult decision for me, but I feel I’ve made the right one given the lack of response to the questions posted recently on the mailing list about the future of Annvix, and given the calculated personal cost. Even now as I migrate some of my systems away from Annvix, I’m struck by how much more difficult it is to manage them, how much slower they are and how much more overhead they have. At this point, given the alternative, these are compromises I am willing to make.

So for those of you who use Annvix, thank you for giving it a try and I hope you enjoyed it. And, again, I’d like to express my sincerest gratitude to Ying-Hung Chen for his help on many fronts, and I’d also like to thank other individuals who have given me help when it was needed: Thomas Backlund, Chmouel Boudjnah, Sean P. Thomas… there are likely more who have helped in little ways and I apologize if I neglect to mention you. Thank you so much for the help you’ve given me with this project.

I’m looking at possibly upgrading the build system for Annvix. It’s currently using a 3-year-old dual opteron system that’s starting to show it’s age (dual 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM).

The system I’m looking at replacing it with is a Sunfire X2200 M2 which would be a quad-core 2.6GHz opteron (dual CPU, dual core) with 4GB RAM. Suffice it to say, that’s a pretty good upgrade that will make compiling things much faster, not to mention save some energy by dropping from a big 3U system to a 1U system.

Problem is, even with Sun’s 25% off try-and-buy, it will still cost about $2750CAD (once you throw taxes and such in there). I don’t really have $2700 to throw at Annvix right now, but I think a new build machine is important (especially as I’d like to get more people involved and they would have access to the machine to compile stuff as well).

If I could raise even half of this in donations (let’s say $1500CAD), then it would be viable for me to invest the rest (including new/larger HDDs).

Donation “drives” for Annvix have rarely been successful in the past… I’m not sure if this time will be any different, but if you like and find Annvix useful, please consider making a donation. If you’ve thought of donating before but didn’t want it to just end up “somewhere”, at least now you’ll know it’s going into hardware (unless someone wants to donate an equivalent system?). Now would be a good time to donate if you’ve thought about it and haven’t done so in the past. This development machine would get quite a bit of mileage and would be a real boon to the project.

Info on donating can be found on the donations page. Thank you for the consideration!

New ISOs are now up that fix the boot issues with non-PAE-supporting CPUs. The new ISOs are currently on ibiblio and will be on the other mirrors soon. If you still have trouble with these kernels, please use Bugzilla to report the issues.

The main problem was that during 2.1-CURRENT we stopped building i586 kernels with support for 4GB of RAM and instead started building i686 kernels with support for 64GB RAM, the latter requiring PAE support to properly implement. This is now fixed by reverting back to the i586+4GB kernels.

I’ve put up a few boot charts on the website and compared Annvix boot time to Mandriva’s Corporate Server 4. I don’t mean to pick on CS4, but I think CS4 is pretty decent and pretty quick… and I had it on hand. I may add CentOS 5.1 to the page as well… I do have it installed in vmware.

While the charts themselves are kinda cool to look at, the thing that I think is really cool is the boot times: 12s on a default install and 12s with a half dozen services added and starting. In comparison, CS4 took 26s. These are in vmware, of course, with modest amounts of RAM allocated (although the host system is a mac pro running 2 2.66Ghz dual-core xeons).

Anyways, it’s interesting stuff… if you’re interested in that kind of thing (although, I think for a server OS the boot speed is a pretty minor consideration since it’s not supposed to be booting that often (and if it is, you have other problems)).