Why Macaroni OS? #

While the project is originated born to create a binary distro following the idea of Sabayon years ago, the precious experience with the Funtoo team and later with the Funtoo shutdown itself give me a new idea of the targets of distro.

In this years where the AI technology from one side permits to find details that was been hidden before from the other side risk to automatize things and loose of some details to users; we need to evolve but have an eye about past and how things are started in order to continue to have a full control of everythings. Inside this, trying to reboot from scratch a system we can see details that before are been developed in a way that was fine in the time where are been created but that could be reviewed with new technologies continuing to have a full control of the system.

In order to respect this idea, Macaroni OS want to be not just a distro but a set di tecnologies to create an Operating System and to permit studying of the layers needed for this creation and give the power to users to easily change things using existing technologies or creating new technologies but without strictly dependencies that could be blocking for the system itself.

So, to respond at the question about what is the base of the Macaroni OS the response is: just based on other layers of the Macaroni OS.

Every layer could be see as a specific Operating System with specific features that is the base for another layer, etc.

The concept is already present from different years over the cross-compilation, in different source-based distro, with the creation of the stage1, stage2 and stage3:

• Stage1 – Bootstrapping the Toolchain

  Starts from a very minimal environment: only a bootstrap script and a few essential tools. The goal is to build the compiler (GCC), binutils, and the C standard library (libc or musl). Once you have a working compiler, you can rebuild everything else with it. To build of the stage1 help users to integration new architecture or rebuild literally everything from scratch.

• Stage2 – Rebuilding the Toolchain + Base System

  The freshly built toolchain from stage1 is used to rebuild itself, ensuring consistency (a full bootstrap cycle). Core system utilities (coreutils, bash, sed, grep, etc.) are then compiled. By the end of stage2, you have a coherent and working toolchain with a minimal userland.

• Stage3 – Minimal Usable System (Starting Point for Users)

  This is what you can download as tarball and creating it through anise tool. It already includes a working toolchain and a minimal base system. From here, you can use to build the kernel, desktop environment, and any other software.

In a similar way, the Macaroni OS wants build the stage3 through his layers:

• MFS (Macaroni/Mark From Scratch): this layer is not yet available for the users but is in the plan. It follow the FFS (Funtoo From Scratch) idea but it uses anise-build to build the stage1 and stage2 toolchains. anise-build uses Docker technologies to build and create packages. Packages that are soon available as a repository that could be used with anise to install a chroot or a minimal system.

• M.A.R.K. ( Macaroni Automated Repositories Kit ): It follows the Funtoo concepts and it uses a Funtoo patched Portage engine and kits with ebuild generated automatically from the mark-devkit tool. It’s the layer used as base for the Sambuca Anise stack. It wants to be a source-based OS where easily apply patches to the upstream sources. At the moment, it follow the Gentoo/Funtoo concepts but with changes oriented to be more aligned to the Macaroni binary stack in order to be used together with Macaroni’s binary when needed. The name remember the Iron Man’s Armor MARK.

• Sambuca Anise Stack: the original Macaroni OS layer that was before based on Funtoo and now based on MARK. It supplies binary packages created with anise-build and managed by the anise tool. It uses different MARK branches to supply the releases Macaroni OS Phoenix, Terragon and Eagle.

The concept of the layers want to be also a way to divide the level of complexity on using a Linux system. Starting with Sambuca Anise Stack give to new users a fast way to create a working system without using a compiler. But keep an open door to integrate with the lower layer MARK. This gate is one of the pros of the Macaroni OS. The MARK layer instead like Funtoo before requires additional skill to prepare the system but give the control to users to easily apply custom patches to upstream sources and/or customize compilation flags to have a better performance of the system. This is also one of the main difference of MARK with Funtoo before, MARK is been created to join this two worlds and slowely create a better integration between the two.

In the figure below is visible the relationship between the layers and the Phoenix release for the desktop that use the mark-iii branch to build packages. The MARK Stage3 is created through the anise packages of the Phoenix release but could be created also using a previous stage3 tarball of MARK itself or through the MFS packages generates as stage1 and stage2 (at the moment not available) as source in alternative of the packages available in Phoenix.

A similar approach is used for the Terragon and Eagle releases that instead using the mark-xl release.

The build process is like a circle that permits to create the full system from scratch and the final node of the chain became the source of the first node.

So, in summary, these are the core targets of the Macaroni OS Linux:

Macaroni Releases #

Following the core targets just described in Macaroni there are different releases:

Are you ready to find your favorite layer and enjoy? #