Illumarine Development

I have bad news, and good news relating to the IllumarineOS project. Bad news: I lost over $10,000 in hardware, lost a few accounts due to my password manager being locally hosted (Mastodon and BlueSky), and my main development PC all are just gone. This means I won't be able to develop anything for a while .  The GOOD news: We are in talks with a possible angel donor who might help us get back up on our feet, and maybe even stronger with a computer that can actually handle the development of Illumarine. I won't announce who or how much until a) it has happened, and b) they give me permission to do so. I will not know until tomorrow afternoon Denver time zone if the donation goes through. Even then if it hits the bank account I am using, I don't know how long it'll take for a new development PC to come in. If this angel donor comes through and we actually get the money, we will be launching back up the project AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. This time, with thought behind it. We a...

I designed six wallpapers for the inaugural release of Illumarine. Three of them are slightly modified pictures of lighthouses in different areas from Pexels, with minimal modifications just to make them look nicer on desktops. The other three are using tools available in GIMP to make basic designs. Credits will be available in the forms of links to the original images I used of lighthouses. The Pexels Wallpapers You can find the  license to these images at pexels.com/license . Credit: Photo by Dylan Chan from Pexels Credit:  Photo by Oziel Gómez from Pexels Credit:  Photo by Julio  Agreda from Pexels And the basic GIMP ones These were created by me for the project using one tool from GIMP for each one. That last one, named "stylish.jpeg" will be the default Illumarine wallpaper. Thanks to the Pexels creators, and Pexels for the open license to use/modify for Illumarine. We hope more people contribute wallpapers because this was a lot of fun with minimal skill. Thank...

While I love this project to death, and maybe one day it will start to rebase off of OpenIndiana once again, right now with where my life, my mental state, and everything else, I have chosen to leave the realms of forking illumos by hand, and instead plan to work on Illumarine as an OpenIndiana fork. While I have loved working on my own mini-illumos distro, I do feel as if it is a requirement to think about development differently. Over the last few hours I have just broken down in feeling like a failure for not getting Illumarine to work as I wanted to. There isn't a lot of documentation on how to build an illumos distro, unlike how many different tools alone exist for Linux users to just spin a complete operating system in just a few hours. On the technical front, I realized that ultimately beyond some changes, Illumarine's goal was to be a more user-friendly OpenIndiana anyways, and lots of what we will be doing in the future is just reinventing wheels that OpenIndiana alrea...

Some background: ZFS is on the backburner for now, in favor of working on the installation of a bare minimum Illumarine system that we can then expand and start actually having people install systems. This was one of three options. ZFS was not a community favorite option to continue work on, and XLibre was a close second. But focusing on the installer was ultimate winner in the short 2 hour poll on Twitter. So let's talk installers!  I know a lot of the Linux/BSD side from people I know who have made their own distros, and from basic research. This was my jumping off point to figure out how to setup an installer. My ultimate goal with the installer is to provide four methods of installation. Via command: One command to start setting up your Illumarine install CLI tool: A simple, screen-reader friendly CLI tool Menu tool: A simple curses menu Graphical tool: One that many new users will expect This seems difficult, right? Wrong. I already have a concept in the works on my personal G...

I wanted to share more about the history of the "Illumarine joke" and the things I envisioned and currently envision for the project. The reason I wanted to do this was because I want to provide context on why I am working on this project, and why I give a shit.

The TL;DR of today's article is this: I believe XLibre, not Wayland, is the future of illumos desktops. While there may be some political issues some projects have with XLibre, I ultimately am choosing the best technology for the Illumarine project.