NiceOS

NiceOS is a Linux meta distribution that does not provide a package manager. It rather uses other distro's package managers for extracting files. It achieves this by using extraction methods. Such methods include virtualization, rootfs or debootstrap. For more information on how this works see the extracting docs.

It is an operating system for advanced users who want to take full control of their system.

Try it and make NiceOS your last Linux distribution ever!

Presets

NiceOS creates your desired system by following a user defined set of instructions. We called these instructions presets. For more information see presets section.

NiceOS project contains few pre-packed presets to give you inspiration for rolling your own presets. In this Readme we will showcase the Minimal and Ghost presets.

Minimal Preset Example

You can watch me build the Minimal preset on YouTube ▶️.

mkdir -p /data/src/nice # recommend folder with few spare gigs
git clone 'https://github.com/solcloud/NiceOS' /data/src/nice
cd /data/src/nice
$EDITOR .config.sh # read and add overrides inside config.sh if necessary
export NICE_PRESET=minimal # presets by default lives inside presets/ folder
make download # download Linux and BusyBox compressed releases
make build # for multicore use MAKE_NUM_OF_THREADS for speedup
make cmd # or make gui , qemu cmd quit shortcut 'Ctrl-a x'

For more bundled presets look at presets folder.

Ghost Preset Example

Building my main desktop preset - Ghost 👻 with binaries extracted from Artix (Pᗣᗧ•••MᗣN)

You can watch me building Ghost preset on YouTube ▶️

export NICE_PRESET=ghost
DISTRO=artix DISTRO_ISO=/data/dwn/artix-base-openrc-20220123-x86_64.iso make extract
make build
make gui

For extracting binaries from different distribution, just read supported distributions. We virtually provide extract recipes for every Linux distro ever made 😉. You just need to pick one that suits your preset best. For example, if you prefer Devuan binaries over Artix just use something like DISTRO=devuan DISTRO_ISO=/path/to/devuan_chimaera_4.0.0_amd64_minimal-live.iso make extract instead.

After successful make build you have a raw disk image file in storage/sda.img that you can burn to real disk and boot from it or use make gui to run that image in QEMU virtual emulator. If you do not want to use QEMU, you can run make vbox which will convert raw image to virtual disk image file (.vdi), that can be used in VirtualBox for example. Windows video ▶

User's config

For overwriting default .config.sh variables you can use git ignored config.sh file at project root, eg:

$ cat config.sh
export QEMU_RAM=3G
export TARGET_GROUP=code
export MAKE_NUM_OF_THREADS=6

User's presets

If you have own presets in different folder than default presets folder, you can use NICE_PRESET_ROOT variable, eg:

export NICE_PRESET_ROOT=/home/me/nice/my_presets
# or use config.sh file
echo 'export NICE_PRESET_ROOT=/home/me/nice/my_presets' >> config.sh

export NICE_PRESET=my_custom_preset
make build

If you publish your presets to GitHub, do not forget to use niceos tag on your repository. Raspberry Pi video ▶

Build dependencies

When building on debian based system you will probably need these packages:

sudo apt install git make gcc rsync bison flex cpio bc libelf-dev gawk fdisk wget lbzip2 xz-utils dosfstools libssl-dev libncurses-dev # required
sudo apt install qemu-system-gui qemu-utils # optional (for running and extracting in QEMU emulator)

If you are on Arch Linux and BusyBox build failed with error cannot find -lcrypt than see #8 for solutions.

Cross compiling

NiceOS supports cross compiling using standard Linux cross compile options using ARCH and CROSS_COMPILE environment variables. For example for arm64:

export ARCH=arm64
export CROSS_COMPILE='aarch64-linux-gnu-'
make build

Here is example preset config for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.