I hope it's the right place to post this kind of message.

As I mentioned in my presentation, I'm using NuTyX since almost 10 years now. But may be you wonder what's about so special this distribution. I will try to briefly give some features here Feel free to have a look at the doc.

- It's a turnkey LFS, means download a 200 Mb ISO and install it on a partition (no network needed)

- It's has it's own packagemanager, fork of the CRUX package manager pkgutils, prt-get and ports tools "all in one + some extra features". This package manager fit perfectly because it made of one statically link app and one (more complete) dynamically link app

- It's can build from scratch (just like LFS) by following the documentation
- It can build an ISO from your fresh install

- Build your own package is very easy

- They are so many way to install and build up your NuTyX that I introduced the scenario concept

- XFCE4, KF5, Mate, lxde, enlightenment and gnome are availables

Feel free to ask more

What is the use case? Is there a target function or philosophy driving this project? How is it specifically different from other distributions?

I will probably install it in a virtual guest and have a look, as it appears a very interesting project, but even after visiting the links it is not clear to me why this distribution exists. I am used to that information being front and center.

I use it as:
desktop (xfce4)
nfs server
http server
ssh server
rsync server

The server is not having any gui.and this since 2007. I'm really not interested to change to anything else.

Probably for me what is important is to manage my system from A to Z, spending as less as possible time when I have troubles, as I know it wery well, it's the case. Avoid systemd (yes I mentionned it now...). As a linux user, I do want to have a full control of what going on in my Linux

They are for me three or four main differences with any other distro.

- We all knows as experiment Linux user's the dependencies can sometime turn to real nightmare. Because of this Slackware do not even want to take care of them. Even it's not clear if NuTyX is a binary or a source distribution, cards is probably the only PM able to track the binaries dependencies and check if they are installed / uptodate. Me as packager I almost never have to mention what has to be installed as dependencies to make a binaries working, cards does (quite well for me). Last but not least, it's writen by my self in C++ means no unnecessary deps (python, gawk, perl, glib or whatever) and VERY fast in handling installation of packages

- Installing a distribution is really sometime a nightmare. Some Installers do not ask you anything and install the distro but not the way you want. Some Installers do ask so many questions, when it's time to answer the 20th question, you already forgot what was the answer of the first question... NuTyX installer is straight forward, will never format a partition if you not do it your self. It extremely fast to install, You get a solid base. From this base you can choose so many options ( I call them scenarios)

- Since the origin of NuTyX (back in 2007) I'm a fan of using a script to install NuTyX. I think it's the most efficient way to test, to build, to install this distribution. Because cards is actually made of two main applications one static and one dynamic linked, The install-nutyx (version 8.1) is really a nice tools to use as it does more than just install. It can be launch from any other distribution as well means you don't have to be on NuTyX to install another NuTyX.

- The boot manager is another sources of problems. With NuTyX its simple. It's a SEPARATE topics. You want your own, you want it installed, Before, after, never It's really not an issue. Just you decide. Because of this, it's for example more easy to installed NuTyX on a USB stick.

- The receipes of the packages. Again I want to have a maximum flexibility and take advance of the power of bash. No need anything else to build packages. As a good example, we can see how easy it is to update all the kf5-XXX package... Just update the version of the plasma package and bash will do the rest.

- Even it's a LFS/BLFS based distribution, NuTyX is (when only using binaries) much more light then a pure LFS / BLFS. All the binaries packages are splitted in base-packages and sub-package. So for example the gcc package is 103 files and 15 Mb gcc.devel package is 1339 files and 114 Mb... As long you don't need to compile you can live with the gcc package only. As sub package we also have: documentation, man page and locales


I guess I could talk about NuTyX for hours but I guess now it's up to you to try or not.

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OK, so both desktop and server, with a different kind of control driving it. That sounds interesting. I think I will have to give this a spin. Thank you.

NuTyX is great. I have used it when CRUX became 64bit only and before I found out about the unofficial i686 port of CRUX.
At that time it was possible to migrate (no documentation though, I did it on my own) from CRUX to NuTyX.
The possibilities are amazing and having binaries available is great. The developers are experienced and helpful guys.
Good to see you here.

One question, can an old saravane/sekong be upgraded to the new release? Something I never tried.

Thanks a lot for your compliment. I think you right


Not possible with sekong version, very difficult with saravane version as the collections names have been changed.

This is for me a recurrent question, so to solve definitely this issue I split the disk in at least three partitions in a very special way:

/dev/sda1 is mount on /home/myuser
/dev/sda2 is a swap
/dev/sda3 is my main NuTyX
...
/dev/sdan is my alternate NuTyX

What's really special with my configuration is that sda1 is not only my home but's it's also the grub partition. This make my life so easy. I can do what I want with the NuTyX /dev/sda3 (and nexts ) partition(s) I can easily edit the grub.cfg (as it's in my home/grub folder. Even if I have to reinstall completely NuTyX:

1. I don't touch my personal stuffs
2. I don't have to care about boot process

I installed this on a Samsung laptop a week ago using the bare installation script out of Dragora. Today I got a gui up and running; it needed the openchrome driver, which I had to build myself.

So far I like it. You get a minimalist system with no unwanted cruft and then add what you want. I did have one or two problems after the installation. In particular, the installer does not write the root device into the fstab file. The file on disk can be edited by hand of course, but the same error occurs in the initrd's fstab file, preventing the switch to the real root. I had to copy over the Dragora kernel (which doesn't use an initrd) to get it to boot.

It should be possible for the script to find out what partition it's being installed to. Something like:
Then it could write it into both fstab files.

I was also surprised at how long the NuTyX-LTS kernel took to boot. Is there some reason for this?

Hello Hazel

Thanks for trying installing NuTyX.

Please provide your hardware configuration.The boot time is very much fluctuating from hardware to hardware. I never understud why my wife's PC is booting much faster then mine:
My hardware:

Intel i7 3.50Gb
gpt partition
1Gb Harddisk

Her hardware:

Intel i5 3.10Gb
dos partition
500 Gb Harddisk

Why should it since the initrd knows about it ?

Well, that's the point. The initrd has its own /etc/fstab file, which is supposed to contain the real root device, and it isn't there. The init script halted and dropped me to a shell, saying that it couldn't find the root. When I investigated, sure enough we were still in the initrd's own root directory. There was an /etc/fstab file there and when I looked in it, there really was no such line. I suppose I could have unpacked the initrd image, edited the fstab file and repacked it, but I was nervous about trying that. I don't know a lot about how initrds work, since I try to avoid using them if I can.

I also checked the installer script itself and I couldn't find any code there for setting the root device. Presumably this has to be passed to mkinitrd at some point so that the initrd will "know about" it but how does this happen?

The laptop is a second-hand Samsung NC20 with a 1.3GHz VIA Nano processor and 1GB of memory. I have installed NuTyX onto sda3, working out of a Dragora system on sda2. When I say the kernel load took "forever", I don't just mean that it was very slow in time. It was also spewing out lines and lines of dots, whole pages of them, as if it was loading a simply huge file. In my experience, loading a stock kernel usually produces only 3-1/2 lines of dots; my handmade kernels load with 1-1/2. So what was going on here?

I'm not complaining, just curious to know.

Thanks again for your feedback
Not at all I really appreciate your interest.

It look like something wrong in your config
May I see your grub.cfg MenuEntry of NuTyX

I'm at work, I'm not suppose to spend too much time on forums. I will come back to discuss this evening ( Paris Time) I'm interested to have more details about your try

1 members found this post helpful.

Ah! well, I'm not using grub for a start. Dragora gives you a choice of bootloader (very civilised imho) and I chose lilo because I'm used to it and I like it. I don't like grub; I find it unnecessarily complex. So after installing NuTyX, I just added a new stanza to lilo.conf and ran /sbin/lilo.

Lilo doesn't usually have any problems with distros that use initrds. For example, Debian is one of the systems on my desktop machine but the bootloader is lilo and not grub, because the first distro I installed on that machine was Crux. But I may indeed have misconfigured the new stanza, in which case I've been unfair to your kernel. Can we let that rest for the time being? I'll play around with it a bit and report back later.

Now, I have one more question which may help clear the other matter up. Is the install-nutyx script that I downloaded the same one that runs on your installation disks? Because if so, it would normally be launched by that ncurses-based menu program that I've seen so many screenshots of. And presumably it would be the job of that program to set the partition name (as an environmental variable, I guess).

If you just type "install-nutyx", you get a helpful error message suggesting that you set the installation folder as the temporary environmental variable LFS (which I then did of course). Maybe it should also advise setting the partition device in the same way. But if not, the code I suggested would also do the trick.

Show me your lilo.conf

OK, here is the lilo.conf file. The second stanza is for Nutyx with a dragora kernel; the third is for native Nutyx. All three stanzas successfully boot their kernel, but the 3rd stanza prints out 16 lines of dots before doing so.

I've named the attachment liloconf.txt to get round the site's requirements.

Attached Files

liloconf.txt (958 Bytes, 44 views)

I think I know what's the prob. With your config the kernel do not receive the right argument which is suppose to be: root=/dev/sda3 and that's by the way how the initrd knows which partition to mount (and that's why it's not need to specify it in /etc/fstab)

So: just replace in your lilo.conf file:
with
Some more info about setting up boot process