[illumos-Developer] Illumos Live is Live!

[John Sonnenschein]

What is it?
-----------
    Illumos-live is a diskless live-foo distribution of Illumos plus minimal
extras that eschews packages in favour of simple files. It's intended as a
starting point for builders of embedded appliances, distributions and so forth.

    We're hoping that creative folks can do things we hadn't anticipated with
it so we've tried to limit the assumptions made on the final product it turns
in to. For that reason there is no package manager, no installer, no on-disk
assumptions, and software included is either required for booting and running,
or a bug.

    Adding and removing software from the final live image is as easy as
building it in to the proto/ directory and adding it to the (hopefully easy to
understand) manifest file

What isn't it?
--------------
    Illumos-live is not currently the absolute minimum set of software required
to boot. In the interest of engineering time scarcity it's been cut down to a 
reasonably minimum set of software (currently weighing in at about 200M.) 
Illumos-live is also currently not self-hosting, as it was minimized to the
point of missing some critical build software. To build it you'll need a recent
version of OpenIndiana (other distributions of Illumos may work as well, but it
was only tested on OI.)
    Illumos-live also currently only generates AMD64 images. It is not 32-bit
compatible.

What's the license?
-------------------
    CDDL unless otherwise specified in the source.
    
Where is it?
------------
    https://github.com/joyent/illumos-live
    
So, I downloaded it. Now what?
------------------------------
    If you don't currently have Sun Studio installed correctly for Illumos
builds, edit configure.illumos to point SUNW_SPRO12_URL and SUNW_SPRO12u1_URL
to a proper wget-able dlc.sun.com link.

    `./configure; make world; make live` and Bob's your uncle

Ok, it's built. What now?
-------------------------

    In the 'output' subdirectory you'll find a platform-xxxxxxxxx folder. Inside
is a generated root password, a kernel, and a boot_archive. You will need some
form of multiboot bootloader ( which reasonably speaking but not necessarily
is GRUB ) to load it. Note that you do /not/ need Solaris' GRUB as it does not
require UFS or ZFS support. Your old Linux install's GRUB will do.

Point the "kernel" line in menu.lst to the kernel, and the "module" line to 
boot_archive. Then boot. Welcome to illumos-live

Enjoy and Happy Hacking from your friends at Joyent