Serpent OS timeline

Bhibb

Just curious if there's any information or blog posts on the progress of the work to rebase onto Serpent OS?

seanragout

From the Serpent OS website, latest blog
https://serpentos.com/blog/2024/02/29/end-of-february-update/
Hope this helps?

brent

seanragout holy crap via Ikey:
"...We're pleased to announce that over the course of this weekend, once testing has completed we'll deploy the latest version of boulder, our packaging build tool. This has been given the Rust treatment, directly sharing the codebase with moss....

..boulder makes use of the clone syscall to execute portions of itself under user namespaces, eliminating a longstanding deployment irritation of having the main build binary inside packaging...

...we finally integrated support for triggers in moss. These are actions that are executed at different stages of package management operations to finalize or "bake" some state based on the unified components of the installation."

also (to anyone) read 'Stateless' section and the testing on a Gnome GUI section. A lot of hard work is really coming to the surface now.

just wow.

Harvey

Rebasing can't be entertained yet because the new tooling is not ready and even if it was, Solus needs to get all its ducks in a row too.

On Solus side:

os-installer was replaced with calamares in Solus 4.5.
solus-sc will be replaced with gnome-software and discover (Currently in testing).
eopkg python2 -> python3 and make a static build (Currently in testing).
ypkg python2 -> python3 (Currently in testing).
solbuild has had various improvements.
iso-tooling has been rewritten and improved.
Move to a mono repo for package recipes.
Internal tooling and processes improved.
etc

May seem unrelated but its not. We need to move off EOL languages, shed technical debt, help bridge the gap and align processes to ease a future migration.

Serpent OS tooling is still under heavy development. Their blog and forums provide updates periodically.

That is all to say that people should not be expecting Solus to rebase on Serpent OS tooling any time soon, there is still lots to do on both sides of the equation.

brent

Harvey , shed technical debt,

I had to look that up (https://www.digitalocean.com/resources/article/what-is-technical-debt):
"Technical debt is the accumulation of sub-optimal or expedient solutions in software development that can slow future progress and increase costs. It represents the extra development work that arises when a team chooses a quick and easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.

Like financial debt, tech debt has a cost over time:

Software patches
Increased maintenance requirements
Restructuring
Bug fixes
Lengthy development processes"

@WetGeek personally never heard of a disk with that name

Bhibb

Thanks for pointing toward the Serpent OS forum and blog! I'm excited to jump in. Also, it looks like on the serpent OS website that sponsoring is happening only at the developer level, but I'll be curious to see if the project as a whole is also accepting support. I'm not rushing things, just curious of status. I can't even fathom how many ducks need to be put in a row for this effort. Thanks to all the Devs on our side for getting things ready!

alfisya

Bhibb sponsoring is happening only at the developer level,

That's because only one guy that started it all, Ikey. AFAIK, he uses that github sponsor fund to pay for all infra on Serpent. So, if you have spare income, better sponsor now to get Serpent production ready sooner rather than later.

WetGeek

Does anyone here know what to do with KVM disks? I've never run into those before.

Nevermind ... It was easy to find that it stands for Kernel Virtual Machine. That's a kind of virtualization that I'd never heard about, but it sounds intresting. I'm eager to learn more, starting in the morning.

WetGeek

brent personally never heard of a disk with that name

You would if you'd ever looked at the Downloads page for Serpent OS. I was curious to set up the most recent version in a VM to take at look at how it's progressed since the last time I looked, and that's how it's offered. I've been busy so far today with laundry and getting breakfast ready, but when I get some free time I'll look into it farther.

WetGeek

brent personally never heard of a disk with that name

Here's a fairly comprehensive introduction and tutorial on the subject, but basically it seems to boil down to virt-manager without the GUI, and with a rather steeper learning curve. I prefer to wait.

alfisya

I did try their KVM disks prototype.tar.zst a few months back. It was easy, just extract the archive, and click on some script or file there (Couldn't check, currently building something on PC) and voila you run SerpentOS. It was only tty, so you can only test moss cli. I remember you have to have libvirt installed before running the script. I think this instruction only ever available on matrix chat, might be wrong. Cheers, happy testing!

WetGeek

alfisya It was only tty

Yep, like the .ISOs. That's what I used. It was fun fooling around with moss, but I'm looking forward to trying the Solus/Serpent product, even if it's an alpha release.

Lucien_Lachance

https://serpentos.com/blog/2024/12/23/serpent-os-enters-alpha/

Lucien_Lachance

https://serpentos.com/blog/2024/12/29/alpha-refresh-available/

banger

What is the best VM to try Serpent on? Couldn't get it to boot on Hyper-V there are Notes about mangling the XML file in boxes and VirtualBox cant see in Discover? Created a Live USB from the Alpha download and that boots on hardware but don't want to install on bare metal.

alfisya

banger virt-manager would be fine. Just don't forget to set the firmware to UEFI in the settings.

banger

Couldn't get it to boot off the virtual HD there was a panic the live works fine enough to install and Gpart. Wanted to try the cosmic desktop. Maybe when it is in beta.

banger

Anyway to change the location of Virtual HDs as I have limited space on my Solus partition in virtual manager?
Think I have worked it out has to be done when creating the VM and add a storage pool.

Lucien_Lachance

https://serpentos.com/blog/2025/01/04/offline-rollbacks-enabled/