Announcing: nuOS 0.0.9.1b1 - a whole NEW FreeBSD distro, NOT a fork

[Alfred Perlstein]

On 7/7/13 2:58 PM, Chad J. Milios wrote:
> PLEASE reply to this only in freebsd-chat. I have posted this 
> announcement to five freebsd mailing lists, I hope I am not overstepping.
>
> Hello everybody. My name's Chad J. Milios. Long-time lurker, sparse 
> rare sporadic poster.
>
> TL;DR? -- Skip below to our summary of features in an outline format 
> then grab it at http://nuos.org .
>
> I would like to enthusiastically announce the release of an 
> open-source project of much pride and passion of my good friend Scott 
> C. Ziegler and myself which we have brought forth thanks to the 
> support and contributions of about 15 others. I believe it is solidly 
> ready to be shared with the world in the hopes that others may help 
> build out the software and community in a way that promotes quality, 
> innovation and collaboration much like FreeBSD has led the open-source 
> community at doing.
>
> The nuOS project ( http://nuos.org ) is about bringing back the power 
> to the people! Currently, technical software, hardware and networking 
> power. Ultimately, the power of personal communication and community 
> self-organization. Currently made by geeks/nerds/hackers for 
> geeks/nerds/hackers, our intent is to create an entirely new software 
> ecosystem that promotes quality, easy to use software that is for 
> any-and-every man woman and child yet without lassoing us all into one 
> herd of sheeple. ;) Simple, common things should always be EASY. 
> Complex, amazing or never-before imagined things should always be 
> POSSIBLE.
>
> We have a live image for download from our site. (Fully functional at 
> 189 MB, just cat or dd to your 4 GB or larger usb drive or select it 
> as a flat-file virtual disk in your hypervisor of choice. It is not an 
> ISO and nuOS does not work well from optical media.) Or grab our 
> source (currently hosted by GitHub at 
> https://github.com/CropCircleSys/nuOS ) and build the entire system 
> from any FreeBSD 9.1 system with one simple yet deeply customizable 
> command. (We only build/test on amd64 and would like that to change in 
> the future.)
>
> It is my belief that our software is PRODUCTION READY with our new 
> beta release. It might just be the answer to the management headaches 
> you may be having. Take the plunge tonight and find yourself breezing 
> through your day-job with "nu"-found ease tomorrow morning. If you're 
> the comfortable yet cautious type, watch the discussion for a week or 
> two first instead. Either way, we intend to cause a positive large and 
> lasting motion in the FreeBSD community.
>
> I hope you will give nuOS a look and offer your assessments and ask 
> any questions you have. Please tear it and us apart in discussion with 
> the goal of a better FreeBSD for us all! Documentation is one area 
> that is sorely lacking though it is mostly because Scott and I 
> consider most of our code clear enough to have been pretty 
> self-documenting [for our purposes we've had until now]. It is our 
> hope that with the community's help we will bring more and more of 
> this platform to the high standard of quality that FreeBSD is known 
> for. We aren't trying to create our own new garden. We offer this code 
> with hopes that it, in part or in whole, might be some day included in 
> canonical FreeBSD releases.
>
> We have NO intention on forking FreeBSD and are instead developing a 
> very lightweight suite of tools which hopefully capture and collect 
> modern best practices while providing a testing and proving ground for 
> advanced FreeBSD features. We want to bring computing to more people, 
> bring more computer users to open source, bring more high-value and 
> responsible open-source users to FreeBSD and bring more current 
> FreeBSD users guidance and enlightenment regarding advanced features 
> in the face of FreeBSD's typical adherence to maximal backward 
> compatibility, legacy support and solid ground yet sometimes daunting 
> array of intimately detailed configuration choices.
>
> We do not seek to limit those choices or to shift the ground beneath 
> current FreeBSD users' feet. We seek to offer an alternative flavor of 
> default system for those interested in taking a step back from their 
> current perspective in order to take a giant flying leap forward. This 
> doesn't mean giving up anything in terms of compatibility or 
> configurabilty, quite the contrary. Throughout our evolution, we seek 
> to always maintain the environment that FreeBSD users have come to 
> know and love while reducing the issues that sometimes irk them. We 
> simply seek to provide a better way to structure, provision and 
> maintain production systems and development processes.
>
> Outline of features:
>
> Extends plain old FreeBSD 9.1 (RELEASE or STABLE) and maintains total 
> compatibility
> We seek to remain nimble
>     Expect a production-ready seal of approval to lag behind releases 
> by no more than a week or two
>         and prebuilt images and packages
>         e.g. releases like 9.2 and 10.0, et al
>             Someone should be able to build it and use all applicable 
> features on 8.4 with ease
>                 we simply haven't the time or inclination to even try
> Default full ZFS filesystem layout, completely legacy-free
>     Boot from ZFS, boot to ZFS
>         If you'd like use all 100.0% of all your drives for one large 
> zpool
>         Use one large zpool for all of your
>             filesystems
>             block volumes
>             alternate boot environments, including one called "rescue" 
> which is included
>     NO partitions, not some tiny /, not even a /boot
>         Just ZFS datasets in their infinite flexibility
>             /etc is now a ZFS dataset of its own
>                 How did we do it?
>                     Decades of conventional wisdom says /etc must be 
> on /.
>                     Check it out, discuss the whys and the trade-offs.
> nu_jail - provision all sorts of jails
>     No guesswork
>     Yet no cookie-cutter limitations
>     Clean-room jails provisioned almost instantly
>     ZFS clone of /etc and /var give you almost no storage overhead
>     nullfs and/or unionfs mounts of /, /usr, /usr/local give you 
> almost no memory overhead
>         Run 1,000 jails and 10,000 Apache instances
>             they safely access the same executable memory pages
>             they securely know not of one-another's existence
>     Advanced intra-host networking with VIMAGE kernel by default, 
> simplified
>     Made for developers who want robustness, power and flexibility 
> streamlined for
>         Unlimited development, testing, staging and production 
> environments
>     Uses all of the new jail and vnet features of FreeBSD 9.1
>         We cleaned out all of the cruft left over from earlier versions
>
> That is just a taste of the features that we consider complete enough 
> for use in your PRODUCTION systems. There are many more features 
> production ready, our approach to package management for instance is 
> in the early stages and provides simple functionality but does so in a 
> way that is predictable, reliable and SOLID. It is also our strong 
> commitment that we will never cram any of these features down your 
> throat. You may take some a la carte without penalty and you may bring 
> your own tools like pkg-ng, portupgrade or portmaster.
>
> We never store data in strange places or formats, we use the standard 
> editable text configuration files and other sanctioned FreeBSD 
> ways-of-doing-things as a single source of truth. ALL of the nuOS 
> system is manageable from the command line and those utilities have no 
> external dependencies, just sh, sed, awk and make from the base 
> FreeBSD system. APIs still being built atop our core utilities and 
> being packaged for open-source release expose interfaces such as HTTP 
> REST, SNMPv3 and Mailman and may do so using advanced software 
> packages from the ports collection. Functionality will NOT be 
> introduced in APIs, web-apps or GUIs that is not equally usable, 
> first-class, from the command line. Not even curses GUIs. Curse curses!
>
> All that being said, the project is in it's infancy. Just breaching 
> the birth-canal, quite literally, with this announcement. It's not 
> going to do your work for you or cook you dinner just yet. What it 
> offers is clean and complete. Incomplete areas will be clearly marked 
> with orange cones and yellow tape. They will not impede your path 
> should you decide to avoid them.
>
> It should be noted that the nuOS project is a loose not-for-profit 
> association currently sponsored by a for-profit corporation, Crop 
> Circle Systems, Inc. ( http://ccsys.com ) of which I am a founder. (A 
> corporation with a market cap of about that of a used Yugo, but a 
> for-profit corporation nonetheless.) All code released from the 
> project is and shall be covered by either the Simplified BSD license 
> or Mozilla Public License v2.0 if it is not simply placed into the 
> public domain.
>
> WARNING: It should be noted that the live boot image includes three 
> user accounts with default names and passwords. "joe": He's your 
> normal barely-privileged user, employee of business or all-around 
> troublemaker; this would be your boss. "ninja": That's you, technical 
> sword for honor and/or for hire. "sumyungai": That's me, your 
> distributor. (Or you, when you disseminate nuOS to other ninjas along 
> with your value-added contribution/support.) All of this is easily 
> customizable with a few command line options when you stage a real 
> deployment.
>
> On the live boot image the root account has no password and the local 
> ttys are assumed physically secured, as per FreeBSD default, so you 
> can just log in as root from the local console and change the account 
> passwords and/or add one for root if you like. sshd is the one service 
> already enabled but the network is not configured by default. 
> Uncommenting a line in /etc/rc.conf.local is all it takes to enable 
> auto-dhcp on every interface though most admins will want to add an 
> appropriate line for their preferred interface.
>
> Thank you from Scott and myself for reading. Hopefully I'll be 
> thanking you for trying, discussing and contributing!
>
> --Chad J. Milios
Chad, this is great stuff!  Thanks for choosing FreeBSD as your base OS.

Look forward to checking things out.  I'm hoping we can get some cross 
pollination with FreeBSD, PCBSD and TrueOS.

-- 
Alfred Perlstein
VP Software Engineering, iXsystems