Illumarine Development

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.

Honestly, while I would like to keep general politics like "Democrats vs Republicans" out of our development channels, no project is truly without some form of political belief. That's why I should clarify what the politics of Illumarine are. We are an accepting community of anything that doesn't hurt other living beings for no good reason. LGBTQIA+, furries, people who are right leaning, people who lean left, Libertarians, old and young, black, white, hindi, or anything that isn't listed below are fully welcome. We only disallow the following people: Animal abusers People who consider themselves "minor attracted persons" Bigots A short and sweet list, and even then, as long as you're not actively harming our community, I'll make an exception if your past includes one of those things. People change, and people can improve themselves if they care enough to. I see a lot of hate on platforms I am on, and I really dislike that. Call me a "grille...

Hello, my name is Samantha (also known as Barry B. Benson dev), and I am the creator of Illumarine. An Illumos-based operating system inspired by (but not affiliated with) the Ultramarine Linux distribution. I have never built an operating system before, but my ex created some popular Linux and FreeBSD distributions that I helped lightly with. My minimal experience makes this project difficult. I usually try to keep anonymous online, but I felt comfortable enough to write this blog post with my real name in it.  My initial goal with Illumarine was to make a Linux-esque Illumos distribution. I'll admit, while I still want to work on Illumarine, that initial goal was created while high. I ultimately decided to build an operating system that makes me happy, and hopefully get some people into the Illumos community. I might know hyper-paranoia, C/C++, shell scripting, and Python, I have never built an OS before by myself. Give it time, and be patient with me.