Annvix Development Blog

The following testimonial was sent on the users@ mailing list on Feb 14th by David:

Well, I’ve had fun getting Annvix set up. Using a PIII-750MHz, and base install was barely over 300 MB. After installing apache + php, and my folding program, I am now using annvix as experimental web server at admiral.ath.cx and also for folding client - see http://fortressdataprotection.com/folding

I formerly used Trustix Secure Linux, but development was stopped this year, so I was looking for a seceure server distro that would run on older hardware. Annvix is it! Thanks for a great distro! And for great support. I love it, and plan to experiment with its capabilities for use as web server and for running other select apps. THANKS FOR ANNVIX.

Thanks for the kind words, David!

I’ve just branched 3.1-CURRENT and updated the mirrors, so the apt metadata for ‘current’ now points to 3.1-CURRENT. 2.0-RELEASE is still on the mirrors for the time being but for all intents and purposes it is dead and no longer supported. In other words, please upgrade if you haven’t already.

I’m hoping to accelerate things a bit and have a year between releases, even if they are smaller releases. I.e. 2.1-CURRENT really should have been 2.1-RELEASE, but due to the high number of changes, it was a much more significant release (thus being called 3.0). 3.1 should be a much more minor “point” release. The things I’d like to concentrate on here are newer versions of stuff, provided they are relatively compatible with what’s currently in 3.0-RELEASE, and improving documentation.

As always, if you would like to help out (even with documentation, there’s plenty to do there!) please stop by in IRC (#annvix on freenode) or drop a note in the developer’s mailing list. The more the merrier!

Since I switched my personal blog (on linsec.ca) to wordpress a few months ago, I’ve wanted to do the same here once I had a better feel for whether I liked it better than s9y. If not, then I would have converted the other one back. Anyways, I do like wordpress better so instead of tracking two different blogging packages, I opted to move the Annvix blog to wordpress. Conversion is done, I think it looks a bit sharper now, and all the old content/authors are back. Enjoy!

There was an independent review done of Annvix on Linux.com today (for once, this is a review done by someone other than myself). It was actually a pretty good review. Check it out here: www.linux.com/feature/124243.

Annvix 3.0-RELEASE (Freya) is now available!

Today marks the fifth public release of the Annvix Linux distribution. February 4th, 2007 marked the release of 2.0-RELEASE; this version is the fruit of almost a year’s worth of hard work. We believe that 3.0-RELEASE is the best version of Annvix available. It is recommended that everyone using 2.0-RELEASE upgrade, as it is no longer supported.

Some of the new features you can find in 3.0-RELEASE include:

- 2.6.22.15 kernel with AppArmor support (RSBAC is no longer supported)
- updated services including PHP 5.2.5, MySQL 5.0.51, PostgreSQL 8.2.5, Apache 2.2.6, and Samba 3.0.28
- many other upgraded system packages, including Glibc 2.6.1

Version 3.0-RELEASE can be downloaded from the mirror sites listed at:

http://annvix.org/Download

Read the full release notes for 3.0-RELEASE as well, especially if you are upgrading from 2.0-RELEASE:

http://annvix.org/Release_Notes/3.0

If you use and like Annvix, please consider making a donation to the project.

There’s some really good news in ports-land tonight (this morning?). I’ve just got a preliminary dependency resolver implemented in the builder script along with a few other fixes and tweaks. It actually works quite nicely although I need to make it less prone to breaking and to handle deeper nested dependencies. This isn’t urgent as there’s only a few packages that have ports-based dependencies.

With annvix-ports 1.8, I built autogen (builder -p autogen), which required guile, which in turn required umb-scheme. builder did the right thing… it built and installed umb-scheme first, then guile, installed it, then built autogen. And was successful. =) Of course, if umb-scheme required something else, or if guile and autogen both required something else, I’m not sure how well it would hold up. Like I said, it’s preliminary, but it handles the scenario we currently have in ports (AFAIC, there are no other inter-ports-dependencies right now).

This is probably the biggest “issue” I had with ports, and it’s just been solved, which is nice. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s working and gives me the basis to tweak and refine it further although as things sit right now, until I have a more complicated “test scenario” I really can only theorize how it will work.

Of course, only 2.1-CURRENT is getting the new builder. 2.0-RELEASE is pretty much done; at the rate I’m going, if all goes well, 3.0-RELEASE will be available for Christmas. =)