Dyson

OpenAxiom is an open source platform for symbolic, algebraic, and numerical computations. It offers an interactive environment, an expressive programming language, a compiler, a large set of mathematical libraries of interest to researchers and practitioners of computational sciences.

I've set up Debian Patch Tracker: http://patches.osdyson.org/
It is incomplete and buggy, but no more than in Debian itself
Not so buggy already, see https://bugs.debian.org/745480

Patch tracker is useful to overview Dyson patches, usually
prefixed with "dyson-".

See for example http://patches.osdyson.org/package/fakeroot/

Maxima used to be built with GCL on Debian, but SBCL is much, much simpler to build on Dyson ;-)

SBCL lacks support for thread on Dyson. Maxima built with SBCL can't load gzipped info pages.

But it works!

I'm in progress of updating illumos components.

Recently Dyson was based on illumos gate dated October 2012.
Now it is moving onto March 2014 snapshot.

As always, it happens in unstable distribution "bok", and
updates are pulled into new testing distribution "lacaille".

The lastest CD (http://ftp.osdyson.org/iso/2014-02-07/) installs
"messier", but it is "stable" now, e. i. not updated ;-) It's a kind of snapshot.

Upgrade should work as usual: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
But I recommend reboot right after it completes.

There is a new install CD built from the lastest packages - http://ftp.osdyson.org/iso/2014-02-07/

Minor changes:

• added pciutils
• added a new mirror http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/illumos/dyson/apt/
• removed http://archive.alkaloid.net/dyson/
• installer brings more XFCE packages
• adduser does not hang any more

Bootstrapping GHC is quite untrivial even if not cross-compiling:
stage 0 and stage 1 compilers must be built with the same toolchain.

Thanks to pkgsrc and SmartOS teams for stage 0 compiler which I used as stage 1 compiler.

This post is written from Midori running on Dyson, screenshot is done on Dyson too :-)

1. Network cards are not supported, neither wired nor wireless (don't ask) :-)
2. Vesa video driver ("Switchable graphics" must be disabled in BIOS, otherwise vesa can't find video card)