1 Can a good thing get better, and by how much? Wasn’t 66-info good enough, transparent enough, detailed enough? It was. It is no more. Gone!

2 Wasn’t the Obarun-Install software one of the attractions in Obarun, I thought, was the precision and ease of the installer. Gone (will be in a few days)!

1 66-intree & 66-inservice

One of the most used tools in the 66 suite of software was 66-info. 66-info -T gave information about service trees, and 66-info -S gave information about a particular service, its status, its configuration, its environment, etc. Really useful tools that we lacked in most other init and service managers. Well, it is gone, deprecated, dead and forgotten. BUT WHY?

Because simply it was one tool trying to do two very different jobs and even though, comparatively across systems it was great to have, it didn’t do either one adequately and reliably by Obarun’s standards. So its creator replaced it with two new tools, 66-intree and 66-inservice. Here is a simple output of what it looks like:

% sudo 66-intree -v3 -c -d4 -g root

-c color output -v3 maximum verbosity -d4 tree depth to display of service dependencies -g displays contents as graph

Simply running:

% sudo 66-intree root

Name : root

Initialized : yes

Enabled : yes

Current : yes

Contents : ntpd-log ntpd dhcpcd-log tty@tty1 dhcpcd

% 66-inservice -d4 -v0 -g -c -p10 ntpd

and provides the last 10 lines of its log file (not shown on the picture) by the option -p10 (you can use any number of lines).

While without any options simply:

% sudo 66-inservice ntpd

Name : ntpd

In tree : root

Status : enabled, up (pid 2088) 26911 seconds

Type : classic

Description : ntpd daemon

Source : /usr/lib/66/service/ntpd

Live : /run/66/scandir/0/ntpd

Depends on : ntpd-log

Start script : execl-cmdline -s { ntpd ${cmd_args} -c ${conf_dir}/${conf_file} }

Stop script : nothing to display

Environment source : /etc/66/conf/ntpd

Environment file : cmd_args=!-n -u ntp:ntp

conf_dir=!/etc/ntp

conf_file=!ntp.conf

Log name : ntpd-log

Log destination : /var/log/66/ntpd

Log file : ….. clipped off …….

To see what 66-info -T and 66-info-S looked like.

If you know of any other system that provides critical information of what is running, where, how, how well, on any other init/service manager and provides direct control like this, please let us, or the Obarun developers, know. We would all love to see what is better. Resources used by 66 while you are working on the system ZERO! Except for that millisecond you execute a command reconfiguring something on 66, 66 vanishes. It is all s6-service-supervision.

2 The obarun-install

Structurally is the same, more but no less, and it has received a total face lift to make it more pleasing, simplifying menus, option for auto-partitioning or partitioning manually from inside the installer, easier options for language/keyboard from the start, and even a mouse clickable install/resume button when using it on terminal. Easy automatic or manual selection for bios or EFI boot options, selection of desktop flavor (JWM, openbox, xfce4, KDE-plasma, or base), and the ability to pick and choose software before installation.

This new installer is not currently on the isos or if you update the current installer, it will be in a few days. There is a way, if you want to try it in beta form, to edit the file /etc/obarun/install.conf and in the line that begins BRANCH = “” enter dev-eric between the quotes and where it says: UPDATE_INS=”no” and UPDATE_TPL=”no” you fill no if it says yes, or simply say no to updates when the installer starts.

% sudo obarun-install You can do this from the live image or from a current installation after you have installed obarun-install (% sudo pacman -S obarun-install ).

If you are on any arch based system you can download the obarun-installer from obextra repository:

cd /tmp

wget https://repo.obarun.org/obextra/obarun-install-1.0.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

and its signature https://repo.obarun.org/obextra/obarun-install-1.0.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz.sig and manually install it with:

% sudo pacman -U /tmp/obarun-install-1.0.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

(if the package no longer exists by the time you try this look manually at https://repo.obarun.org/obextra/ for obarun-install and make adjustments.

For any questions or problems comment here or at the forum or ask one of the devs at freenode #obarun through irc.

Important Note: Obarun at the moment, its main developers that is, can barely afford the cost of the servers of the repositories, website, wiki, and building machines. There isn’t even enough money available for a proper Distrowatch announcement or advertisement, so if you tried it and appreciate all this great system innovation, please consider hitting the donate button of the website