News (June 2017)

New chat in Telegram

In 12 days we’ve got 92 participants in Russian speaking group and 15 in English speaking group Calculate Linux in Telegram. Except of those public groups we’ve opened several private groups specialised in topics of localisation, documentation, development and design.

Comparing to IRC chats in Telegram keep history, support file transfer and have voice chat capabilities. Telegram has a convenient client for all popular platforms. In our chats you can be consulted about work with Calculate Linux. If you’re willing to join the project and actively participate, just write us about it.

Binary packages repository

An amount of binary packages in our repository has exceeded 7000. It takes more than 4 minutes to calculate dependencies now. To handle the growth we’ll need to split compiling systems by categories, and that will also additionally allow to use different USE-flags for packages.

In Calculate Linux the index file of the repository (Packages) is compressed and it’s updated during the run of cl-update. It helps to get rid of repetitive connections to the network at each run of a package manager. Every binary package has been tested and includes detected automagical dependencies.

Implementation of new distribution Calculate Linux Container

Last week we successfully migrated main company servers to Calculate Scratch Server + Calculate Linux Container, using LXC. The system in a container has several advantages including: in a compressed state it takes only 180 Mb of a disk space, it does not require a kernel, it starts almost instantly, it has very low system requirements, it works with the same speed as a host machine, and it can be easily moved to another host.

Another bonus which is not so much recognised is a possibility to install it to an encrypted partition. Benefit of this approach is that Calculate Scratch Server has a working network right after the boot, and then using the network it can get a key to decrypt, mount and run containers with data.

Development of Calculate Linux 17.6

Previous version of Calculate Linux 17 was released 6 months ago. It’s a long time to collect many updates to be considered. The new release will have a number 17.6 with a special meaning. Exactly 10 years ago the first version of Calculate Linux 7.6 was publicly released marking a beginning of an ambitious project Calculate Linux. The choice of Gentoo paid off. We’ve got a very flexible tool to create different modifications of a system. Also Gentoo developers appeared to be conservative enough to keep a possibility of using OpenRC.

Calculate Linux 17.6 release is planned for the end of June.