Coyote switching to Suse Studio for base OS
After much tinkering around with OpenEmebedded as well as RPath Linux and OpenSuse/Suse Studio, I have switched my development platform to Suse Studio. For those unaware of this marvel of technology, it is a web site that allows the creation of a customized "JeOS" (Just Enough Operating System) installation of Linux based on the Suse distribution. RPath would have been my first choice as they have multiple base distros and allow for a switch from 32 to 64 bit when building an individual appliance - but I found their web interface and service to be way too buggy.
In addition to the more stable appliance creation interface, Novell owns and operates Suse Studio and both the Suse distribution and Mono - the .net platform is very well integrated.
The use of Suse Studio / openSuse for development will save me an estimated 6 months of work over the course of the Coyote 4 development cycle (This is about the amount of time that was spent between each major release of Wolverine on the underlying custom Linux distro).
The drawback to using Suse as the core OS is the size of the installation. The base OS for Coyote 4 will be approximately 50 time larger than that of Coyote 3 and 500 time larger than Coyote 1 and 2 (which fit on a floppy). However, Coyote 4 will eventually include a full graphical console for administration, a remote web service for 3rd party applications and services to interact with, and will be capable of running many additional services. The use of a full distribution as the base for Coyote will also allow me to focus directly on the security features of the product and leave general system setup and configuration to the underlying Linux install - this will allow for a much greater array of hardware support than previously available. Approximate installation size at this time is around 500MB - however, with the cost of a 4GB flash drive being less than $20, the cost of storage capacity (even for small appliances) was not a deciding factor in my choice of base installations.
~Josh
Coyote Linux development update
It has been several months since I posted anything about Coyote Linux and the state of its development. When I originally started using Open Embedded to create the initial install images for Coyote, everything went smoothly right up to the point of integrating Mono. The versions of Mono available in OE at the time lacked the necessary features to run Coyote and after several weeks of fighting to get a current build to work properly with OE, I set the project down for a while. I now notice that the latest release of Mono is part of the default OE build so I will take another crack and building Coyote using OE. If it works properly, I will continue using OE for future development - otherwise I have also been tinkering around with rPath Linux. My ultimate goal is to provide a simple, easy to install, and easily updated version of Coyote where the bulk of my development time can be spent on the product features and not the core Linux system itself.
Very sorry for the delay in updates and releases. During the time I have not been working on Coyote Linux itself, I have been working on the software distribution, licensing, and community web sites that will be deployed along with Coyote Linux 4. As Coyote 4 will take a dual license approach to distribution (community and commercial releases), I have also spent a great deal of time and effort making sure that the sales and distribution channels for future releases are much more user friendly and accessible than they were with previous releases of Wolverine for both the end user and resellers. The hardware product line available for Coyote 4 will be much more in-line with other competing products in the small to mid-sized security market.
OpenEmbedded chosen for Coyote builds
I have chosen to use BitBake / OpenEmbedded as the base buildroot for Coyote Linux v4.0. Previous versions of Coyote Linux used either a custom chroot environment or required a particular distribution to be used as the development platform. With the use of BitBake/OE, it should be possible to build Coyote Linux to target multiple different architectures and machine configurations using nearly any Linux distribution as the development machine OS.
I will release a custom OE build tree shortly so that others can start working with or developing for Coyote Linux. If you happen to already be familiar with either OE or BitBake and would like to be involved in the development of Coyote 4, please send me an email at jjackson [at] vortech [dot] net. I am specifically looking for someone that would like to help with the BitBake tasks and packages for Mono and/or PHP.
