Trident OS Developers about migrating a project to Linux. The Trident project develops a ready-to-use graphical user distribution reminiscent of older releases of PC-BSD and TrueOS. Initially, Trident was built on FreeBSD and TrueOS technologies, using the ZFS file system and the OpenRC init system. The project was founded by developers involved in TrueOS, and was positioned as a related project (TrueOS is a platform for creating distributions, and Trident is a distribution kit based on this platform for end users).
Next year, it was decided to transfer the releases of Trident to the developments of the distribution . The reason for migrating from BSD to Linux was the inability to otherwise get rid of some of the problems that limit users of the distribution. Areas of concern include hardware compatibility, support for modern communications standards, and package availability. The presence of problems in these areas hinders the achievement of the main goal of the project - the preparation of a user-friendly graphical environment.
When choosing a new framework, the following requirements were identified:
- Ability to use unmodified (without rebuilding) and regularly updated packages from the parent distribution;
- Predictable product development model (the environment should be conservative and keep the usual way for many years);
- Ease of organization of the system (a set of small, easily updated and fast components in the style of BSD systems, instead of monolithic and complicated solutions);
- Accepting changes from third-party contributors and having a continuous integration system for testing and building;
- The presence of a working graphics subsystem, but without dependence on already established communities that develop desktops (Trident plans to cooperate with the developers of the base distribution and work together on the development of the desktop and the creation of specific utilities to improve the usability);
- High-quality support for up-to-date hardware and regular updates of hardware-related components of the distribution kit (drivers, kernel);
The distribution kit turned out to be closest to the declared requirements. , adhering to the model of a continuous cycle of updating software versions (rolling updates, without separate distribution releases). Void Linux uses a simple system manager to initialize and manage services. , use your own package manager and package build system . Glibc is used as a standard library instead of , and LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL. Void Linux does not support installation on a ZFS partition, but the Trident developers do not see a problem with independently implementing such an opportunity using the module . Interoperability with Void Linux also makes it easy to under the BSD license.
After switching to Void Linux, Trident is expected to expand its support for graphics cards and provide users with more modern graphics drivers, as well as improve support for sound cards, audio streaming, add audio over HDMI, improve support for wireless network adapters and devices with an interface bluetooth. In addition, users will be offered more recent versions of programs, the boot process will be accelerated, and support for hybrid installations on UEFI systems will be added.
Among the disadvantages of migration is the loss of the familiar environment and utilities developed by the TrueOS project for system configuration, such as sysadm. To solve this problem, it is planned to write universal replacements for such utilities that do not depend on the type of OS. The first release of the new edition of Trident is scheduled for January 2020. Before the release, the formation of test alpha and beta builds is not excluded. Migrating to a new system will require manually migrating the contents of the /home partition.
Support for BSD builds will be immediately after the release of the new edition, and the stable package repository based on FreeBSD 12 will be removed in April 2020 (the experimental repository based on FreeBSD 13-Current will be removed in January).
Of the current distributions based on TrueOS, the project remains
offering the MATE desktop. Like Trident, GhostBSD uses the OpenRC init system and the ZFS file system by default, but it also supports Live mode. After migrating Trident to Linux, the GhostBSD developers that remain committed to BSD systems and continue to use the stable branch as the basis for your distribution.
Source: opennet.ru