generatrix linux

a small, independent linux distribution with no gnu and no systemd. built from source, from scratch, on musl and busybox. rolling, no version numbers, no codenames. the whole live-and-installable system fits in a ~14 mb iso and idles at around 11-24 mb of ram.

frequently asked questions

these are some supposedly frequently asked questions.

what is generatrix?

a linux distribution built by removing things instead of adding them. no gnu userland, no systemd, no dbus, no base system to fight against. musl libc, busybox, s6 for init, clang instead of gcc, limine to boot. that's basically the whole thing.

is generatrix stable?

mostly. it installs and boots on real bios and uefi hardware, wifi works, the package manager works. but it's getting developed by 3 person(me, I and myself)

should i install generatrix?

Yeah you need to install generatrix because its lighter than tinycore its better than BigRatOS reliable and small distro

is modern browsers, games and other shit available on generatrix?

probably. world installs standard alpine .apk packages from the alpine edge repos, so most of the alpine catalogue works. if it's gnu software though, no. see below.

is generatrix gnu/linux?

no. that's the entire point.

why do you hate gnu?

they ruined forth by gforth also aint no way im writing on (((((((((lisp)))))))))

what's world?

world is our package manager. it's one ~1000-line c program, a single static binary, no runtime dependencies. it reads alpine's edge repos directly, resolves dependencies, and unpacks the .apk archives itself with its own gzip and tar code instead of shelling out to tar. it also unpacks safely, it won't let a package write outside the target or overwrite files through a symlink.

it has a growth-themed cli because why not:

world tide            refresh the repo indexes
world seed <pkg>      install
world bloom           upgrade everything
world weed            remove orphaned dependencies
world map <pattern>   search
world probe <pkg>     info
world grove           list installed
world vaporize <pkg>  remove

so how does it block gnu?

if you ask world to install gnu software it just refuses:

error: bash is gnu software. gnu does not run on generatrix.

it also swaps a few bloated non-gnu tools for leaner ones on its own, like meson for muon, ninja for samurai, sudo for doas, man-db for mandoc. and it turns away lisps for having too many parentheses. that last one is a joke, but it's also real, it will actually refuse to install sbcl.

but doesn't banning gnu break half the software you'd want to install?

it would, if we stopped at the ban. a lot of programs need a gnu library somewhere down the chain, so banning the library would drag the whole program down with it.

so we don't just ban them, we replace them. when a program needs a banned gnu library, we write our own non-gnu version that answers to the same name and the same abi, ships zero gnu code, and gets tested against the real library so it behaves the same. the program links against ours and never knows the difference.

so far we've done:

libtasn1        our own clean-room asn.1 engine, checked against real
                libtasn1 on actual x.509 certificates
libunistring    backed by utf8proc, matched across every unicode codepoint
readline        libedit
gettext/iconv   musl already does these, we just answer to the old names
fribidi         sheenbidi
ncurses         netbsd-curses
the gnu tls stack that printing and networking drag in gets rebuilt on
openssl instead

the gnu ban stays total and your software still installs. no gnu code ships.

how big is it really?

the minimal iso is about 14 mb. a fresh install idles at roughly 11 to 15 mb of ram. there's also a 32-bit build and a 64-bit gui edition, which is a plan-9-style floating wayland compositor called hevel driven by mouse chords. hevel's sourcehut page for supporting the whole gui iso is about 21 to 25 mb.

does it do uefi?

yes, and bios, from the same image. the installer detects your firmware and sets up the right boot partition either way. it's a plain openbsd-style question and answer installer, no tui art, no mouse.

what license is generatrix under?

the whole repository is bsd 2-clause. take it, fork it, ship it, sell it, doesn't matter. it is also, unlike some distributions, not available for 7.5 thousand dollars per sku. (get the ref pls)

built and maintained by garodaemon. thanks for FeriBSD and caqq for supporting.