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An Appeal To The Github Community
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miklevin committed Nov 3, 2015
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Expand Up @@ -13,9 +13,31 @@ Levinux combines with another Github project of mine called Pipulate, so that
you can see a live Python/Flask app running from http://localhost:8888. There
will be a minimal (busybox) webserver on http://localhost:8080 after first run.
But what's going on under the hood to make this all possible? Easy, Levinux is
the remix of QEMU and Tiny Core Linux that has just been waiting to happen.
the remix of QEMU and Tiny Core Linux into something perfect for nix newbs.

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# An Appeal To The Github Community
The main limiting factor in this project is my inability to make the perfect
QEMU binary for use with Tiny Core Linux for each platform (Windows, Mac and
GNOME/Unity). I'm currently using the smallest and most highly compatible and
widely distributed versions pointed to by qemu.org, but they are becoming
forever more brittle as OSes evolve. The QEMU binaries need a fresh compile
from a talented and trusted source each platform by someone who knows how to
bake-in dependencies like the curses library (but not SDL). There's also a
pruning job down to just what's necessary to get the non-graphics version of
core.gz, so I suspect it will take a lot of qemu config file optimizations.
I've seen the binaries as small as 1MB on older versions of QEMU, but modern
compiles seem to come in arount 60MB. Times 3 platforms, and the "keep it
small" tennant of Levinux goes away. So, anyone up to the challenge?

- Selecting the right QEMU version and patches code-base on each platform to
start with.
- Trim the qemu configuration file down to the bare minimum to support the
also-minimal vimlinuz Linux kernel distributed with Tiny Core Linux.
- Rounding up all the dependencies to support text-only mode (curses, ncurses,
pdcurses, etc.) and static compile them into the qemu binary.
- Help with testing on the current and last few versions of each OS.

# Installation Instructions

Download the zip, unarchive it and...
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