ReynbOS was first born out of a live video call where we joked about Rey having her own Operating System, and as stupid as i normally am, Thought this was a fun little idea and took it to heart.
My first idea was to find an old micro-kernel I build a couple of years ago, but then it dawned on me. If Rey is doing all these *nix “hacking”/dorking videos for her audience, a custom micro-kernel with no toolchain has no life within this community, so i switched to linux.
I soon realized that just doing as linux kali or Ubuntu did. To base the distro upon Debian, which brings us multiple benefits with little to no down-sides. First we get access to all the debian packages in the world, which in this case is A LOT. Secondly we get a highly stable distro to base this on, as many have asked me. Why i didnt base it on Arc, its because Arc doesnt exactly have a LTS deployment and are to be taken as served. Plus i am more familiar with debian, which is most likely more core argument.
The Distro was to be tailored to be friendly for people wanting to enter the *nix world and to be lightweight and fast as a primary factor. Since its a live distro (might look into a installable option later)
The choice of i3, why? well, im glad you asked. i3 is extremely lightweight and fast, and the tiling window manager is exactly what most (or me at least) find extremely useful.
After tinkering for a while, i created multiple bootstraping script but settled on the current .\reynbos script which allows you to fetch, rebase, download, build, bootstrap and test.
i’ll be working on this script a lot in the coming weeks, but with work and other projects in the way, time will be dedicated as we go along. things i would like to add to the script is custom kernel injection, and allow for more architectures as of now its targeting x64.
We ofc need documentation, so people that are not too familiar with *nix get a better introduction to how things work and how to get started. This also includes to recipe feature which is a core feature of ReynbOS which has not been implemented yet, since the distro is of a live nature, we have to take in to account the fact that people might flash the distro to a USB thumb drive and not use it for several weeks before returning to it, so much of the software and packages on there might be outdated. As such we can or rather should only bootstrap packages and software that can take being out of date, such as firefox or visual studio code, which does no harm if they are 3 months out of date.
but some packages, such as sherlock which rey has promoted before, this package could change daily if not hourly, which requires it to be pulled in when needed. which is where the recipe function comes in hand, if we can say “fetch sherlock” and it will git clone, install all required dependencies such as python and initialize the pip installation as well, to fetch the required python packages, so they can literally go, “fetch sherlock”, and then start using “sherlock … something” (cant recall the arguments used atm) ..
these recipes will be handy for a lot of frequently updated git repositories. especially for a live repo.