Node OS

http://node-os.com/

by steveklabnik • 13 years ago

31 14 13 years ago

node-os.com

rch• 13 years ago

Seriously - what?

Isn't this taking things a bit too far??

tomhschmidt• 13 years ago

Could you elaborate on the some of the benefits of having a dedicated OS for Node projects? I'm confused by the website

Linux Kernel NodeOS is a full OS built on top of the Linux kernel

As are many other operating systems...

NodeJS Runtime Node is the primary runtime — no bash here

NPM Packages NodeOS uses NPM as its primary package manager

You can change both of these on other OSes, no? Also, are these really large pain points?

Hosted on Github Open and easy to contribute to — pull request friendly

Not really a feature

jevinskie• 13 years ago

All of these are features if you're looking for a fun hacking project. Think of the opinionated Haiku OS.

jlawer3• 13 years ago

Haiku actually seems to be trying to be something very different.

The BeFS filesystem's use of metadata / extended attributes for one, very multi-threaded core libraries and GUI for others. The kernel is also different giving the OS a very different feel.

The goals for Haiku have always seemed around desktop performance unlike most *nix derivatives which either balance other workloads or focus on servers.

NodeOS could offer something different, but what they have mentioned so far doesn't seem that interesting (then again I am not a Node or javascript developer).

jlawer3• 13 years ago

You can't really change package managers (or at least the package format) on a linux distro effectively without installing a new OS.

Yum and apt-get could be replaced as these are front ends, but trying an in place conversion of rpm to dpkg would be extremely difficult.

cwisecarver• 13 years ago

You're drunk JavaScript, go home.

tethis• 13 years ago

My thoughts exactly!

axman6• 13 years ago

My first thought was "Whis is a joke, right?"

fineline• 13 years ago

It does beg the question - why? Would this be a good base image for deployment of Node apps onto a Docker host, for example?

nickstinemates• 13 years ago

That sounds like a blast. I'd love to provide guidance (but unfortunately busy with other work) to make that happen.

otterley• 13 years ago

What problem does this project seek to solve? What pain points does it address?

ratbeard• 13 years ago

I think this would be cloud ready as it seems supremely easy to scale a node webapp within the OS. I prefer express-apps currently, thought I'm looking for something a bit more minimal, e.g. follows the UNIX philosophy - do one thing, and do it well. Would love to use Go for this.

jlawer3• 13 years ago

So a quick look through the github repo, it appears that Node OS is : 1.) New Init Process 2.) New Shell 3.) NPM as a package manager

Not really an "OS" in the traditional terms, but not just a distro. It uses glibc like most other distros. I would consider it half way between a traditional debian derivative and android in the sense that the environment could be completely different from traditional linux.

That said, there is a reason Debian and Fedora (and most other linux distros) look like they do, and thats to be comparable with software.

If this was to stay under active development it could be interesting, however I would seriously be questioning if they are able to package, patch and support the literally hundreds of packages needed to make an effective Linux OS.

Looking back on the great cambrian explosion of linux distributions of the early 2000s, its really not surprising today to find most distros are based on either debian/ubuntu, SLES, Fedora/RedHat, Gentoo or Slackware. The effort to maintain such a number of packages saps such resources that its almost worth delaying using a different package manager until you have dealt with everything else.

Even now I would think the sanest way to do this project would be to build a abstraction layer and use .rpm or .deb packages until you could completely replace it.

fit2rule• 13 years ago

I'm digging the trend of pushing things out of the way and using packaging to solve the big OS hairball .. Just today I booted a small Linux image straight to lua-jit. A delightful platform!

Node OS

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