In the last few weeks I have been working on the base packages for Jedo Linux. Today I have completed a bootable system and in another week, I will have finished tweaking it, and fixing small issues.

I would say, I am only about 2 weeks behind the (rough!) schedule given in my last status report, which isn’t bad going really. :-)

Once I have the base packages working reliably and problem-free, I will be turning my attentions to the package manager.

Whilst Portage is quite a nice package manager, the emerge program doesn’t suit my needs in the following ways:

• strange options like –noreplace being needed for normal operation.
• quite different options to RPM.
• updating the ebuilds via HTTP is annoying.
• limitations of various settings and strange configuration methods.
• lots of features I have no plans of using, which effectivly adds feature bloat for me.
• lack of various features that I want.

I will be writing my own package manager, based partially on Portage. Essentially, it will use the ebuild.sh script from Portage (with a whole bunch of changes) which handles the ebuild files.

I will then write a program called JPM (Jedo Package Manager) to replace emerge. This program will:

• work out dependencies for installing/removing packages
• have similar style options as YUM and RPM.
• easy to configure
• either using Perl or C.
• easy to use binary or source packages.
• considering adding bittorrent support for downloading packages.

So that’s what I’ll be working on for the next month. And hopefully in March, I will be ready to start working on the installer, and in April might be able to release a test ISO of the base system. :-)