The Tarball Linux Distribution

Introduction to Tarball

Tarball is a new pristine-source-plus-patches, boot-strapping, self-hosting Linux distribution designed for purpose-built Linux machines.¹ The build stages are:

Stage 1 (boot-strapping, part 1): Build from a host system (e.g., Fedora Core).
Stage 2 (boot-strapping, part 2): Build from a chroot environment composed only of Stage 1 packages. This completes boot-strapping.
Stage 3 (self-hosting): Build from a chroot environment composed only of Stage 2 packages. Stage 3 packages are used to boot the actual target hardware. All stage 3 and stage 3+n builds are self-hosting -- everything is built from binaries that were compiled using the Tarball distribution.

Tarball Goals

The goals of the distribution are:

Be small. The installed system should not depend on interpretive languages, such as perl, php, or python. (Of necessity, any build system may require these languages, but they should not be required on the target system, unless in support of some specific and optional software.)
Boot from a CF disk. (I originally though about booting from a USB stick, but my BIOS is so fiddly, I decided it wasn't worth it. Fortunately, I found CF to IDE converter).
Support on-disk encryption.

Example Hardware

Some hardware examples are provided, using prices from newegg.com, mostly from March 2007. It is possible to build a 2TB server for under $2k, 4TB for under $3k, and 6TB for under $4k. These are all bare-bones servers.

Alternatives to Tarball

If Tarball sounds interesting, there are other distributions that might be interesting and/or more suitable for your project:

ROCK Linux
The T2 System Development Environment
Open Embedded
rPath ("the only platform that transforms applications into software appliances")
Several general purpose distributions have smaller, embedded versions, such as gentoo and debian.
Many other "small Linux" distributions, designed for a variety of purposes and needs. YMMV.

If your goal is to build a RAID system or a NAS box, there are other distributions that might be interesting and/or more suitable for your project. I recommend FreeNAS (I started working on tarball before FreeNAS supported encryption, or I'd likely be using FreeNAS).

FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server (built on FreeBSD, based on m0n0wall; USB stick support; latest release supports encryption!)
CryptoBox (Debian-based, no USB stick support at present)
NASLite (some proprietary elements?)
Openfiler (rPath-based)

¹The Bogus Linux Release, available in 1994, was the very first pristine-source-plus-patches, boot-strapping, self-hosting Linux distribution. In 1995, pristine-source-plus-patches technology was introduced to Red Hat's RPM package manager. Most distributions today (2007) are based on a pristine-source-plus-patches model, and some are both bootstrapping and self-hosting. Small, purpose-built, Linux distributions are numerous, bumbering in the hundreds, but most appear to lack the boot-strapping or self-hosting qualities and are, instead, built by using pieces of larger distributions.