Talk:Caldera Smallfoot

20070804 fixup

Hi. I just fixed a few names, and (it's Allan) added a link for me (vanity is a monkey).

Writing is a bit scattered; not sure I would do much better. Some of the positions were not translated across the Atlantic, but I din't think I cared much for positions then.

The US team was Allan, Alex Sack, and Walt Croom; Sergey was also assigned to the group. Not sure if it's logical to name the team of a project that was implicitly canceled on the announcement of the lawsuit.

66.65.106.195 20:33 Allan Clark

20070913 (UK)

Jack Richards

Since this document seems to outline who did what and who was responsible for the technology, I think it is important to document that transitionary phase between where I began and you took over. Alex, Sergy et al were part of the UNIX architecture breifing and there input to the project should be noted.

Should we detail what the differences between linux and unix versions were ? Should we outline the abilities of the toolsets ? and should we give any other actual 'real' information here ???? Also, do you have a copy of the Doom on a disk ? I don't, but I do still have all the Incredible Technology releases and the installer environment. The old CandP machine did have some old stuff of mine from the SCO days. Still know where that is ?

Take care - see you in the UK some time !

/Jack Richards

I believe this project is notable.

Just read the Linux, SCO-Linux controversies, and finally, the Timeline of SCO-Linux controversies. This project is notable because it shows that even the SCO projects were affected by the lawsuit. Now what about the rival projects of other vendors that Caldera SCO was trying to squeeze? Clearly, they would have been affected had Caldera SCO prevailed, as was possible in 2003. There would have been a multi-billion dollar impact on rival companies had SCO Caldera prevailed. --Ancheta Wis 00:29, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Noteable

Yes, I think this is notable.

SCaldera had a perfect place in the market to take on Linux and go far further than RedHat or SuSE with OpenLinux. Smallfoot should have had a really strong influence in the market place - had it not gotten killed off.

Of course, its also the ONLY SCO PRODUCT to have both UNIX and LINUX versions.

JPNZ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.188.179.212 (talk) 18:49, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Heh....

Looks like some of this has been ripped from my Linked In page by enthusiastic wikiphiles !

86.3.241.206 (talk) 23:29, 13 January 2008 (UTC)Jack

What "linked in page"? If it's a copyright violation, you are welcome to remove the content as long as you include proper evidence in your edit summary. -- intgr [talk] 23:25, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Corrections

UNIX and Linux versions? Not that Jack designed with me... Jack, you been promiscuous? The Smallfoot Toolkit was written for Linux; after cancellation, there was a script-hack built, but I don't believe it reached beta stage. SFL was how I "cut my teeth" on Trolltech software, since it leveraged a licensed Qt2 or Qt3 baseline for string-handling, XML, and generators for the various unpacks and builds.

It's notable, too, that the product was built to work with 2.4 and 2.6 -series kernels, but did not ship that code; rather, it knew where to download it from, and knows how to configure it and start a build -- this is similar to BuildRoot, and (I think) OpenEmbedded. No Linux Kernel code was included in the release. Linux testing was considered on LKP, but we were able to do a kernel-build on UNIX with the EDG toolchain so long as we softlinked the kernel pathname to something very short (I think we used /k) because UnixWare had very short commandline limits (1024 characters or such).

The KernelBuilder classes for the SFL were notable as well because they didn't necessarily know how to configure a kernel, but they relied on "kernel needs XXX" markers; these were based on exhaustive runs of building the linux kernel, then sampling its available symbols and other black-box probing of the built result to see what effect +/- a given parameter made. There was a half-dozen parameters we had to "teach" the KernelBuilder, which KernelBuilder_2_6 inherited from KernelBuilder_2_4, but then I had 3 or 4 servers on a bone-simple ONC/RPC daemon to clean/unpack/build/scan/report iterative builds. Each new point-release of the kernel took just over a week to build, and there was roughly 2080 parameters. Remember too that LKP at the time ran 3x as fast as Linux, until Linux truly exploited the fine-grained locking and the Syquest CopyOnWrite edit that IBM put in. After that, it was nearly faster to netboot a clean Linux image on a netbooted builder to ensure that the environment was clean and trivial. The manager for the builders could parse a Kconfig, except for some typos -- that used Kernel code, so if I released it publically, I'd need to honour GPLv2. I didn't release it.

We also looked at 2.2 for its compact build size -- a functional kernel, but really small.

Allan Clark (allanc@chickenandporn.com | allanc@trolltech.com | allanc@sco.com) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.143.120.219 (talk) 15:31, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Linux Source versus GPL?

I'd also point out that the Smallfoot Toolkit (SFT) did not distribute GPL code -- it downloaded it and verified checksums like anyone else (well known practices by Busybox, uCLibc, etc). This was done to reduce the distribution image, not to evade any license. Source: I'm Allan Clark, who designed the C++/QT build engines in SCO NJ.

Allan Clark (allanc@chickenandporn.com | allanc@trolltech.com | allanc@sco.com) —Preceding unsigned — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.172.103.206 (talk) 19:08, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Alan has a point

There was a lot of change after I left SCO and Allan really drove the technology forward.

I ( Jack ) was more interested in building an OS for production and developed most of the technologies for that. Such as stateless operation, static operation, reliable file system handling for unclean shutdown, elevator latency tuning, caching and performance optimisation as well as object stripping and library profilers.

I wrote a small init handler and built some clever scripts as well as a really fast touchscreen driver ( used on TouchIT )

Smallfoot went out in production to Krispy Kreme, Budgens, Barcrest, Linetex and TouchIt in various incarnations and itterations. By the time TouchIt was released, the OS technology was pretty much there, but each following release was basically a hand cranked iteration.

Allan whilst also concerned with these things was a far better application developer and programmer than I was and so was better placed to build the true toolsets. I set out the Product Marketing Definition - that is what the customers wanted and what the target platforms should be and a very high level outline of how the technology should work.

In all fairness to Allan, he took these requirements and added to them, optimised them, threw away the technological cul-de-sacs and designed a better solution. He had a team.

As I stated, I did not work on the actual UNIX versions at all other than this initial input. I was too involved in the Commercials at this point and I was not happy with SCOs' increasingly aggresive stance towards Linux. This was a particularly hard time for me as I was the Only dedicated Linux Consultant in the company. Eventually I resigned, but by that time there were only 7 or 8 people left in the UK. Gazelle was a total revisit of what I felt was needed for RetailPOS, it was much larger and had a two tier architecture. A service layer (ISL) that was a micro linux distribution and a run time environment (RTE) that was more fully fledged. The idea was closer to a virtual environment or chroot system and allowed a greater level of flexibility and maintainence, but back then XEN was just a small startup technology.

Gazelle was a complete self hosting environment. I built it from scratch in about 6 months and the build environment totalled about 4GB. It was entirely script driven as I am a crap programmer and used dialog:: as a front end. It did however spit-out a complete installer, network installer, PXE environment, RPM based disto and ISL at the touch of a button. All compiled from source and built within two self hosted chroots for code purity ( it did this twice so that the output code was double distilled to make sure that there were no cross linking problems ) I also wrote a network management tool and web based manager that sat on the ISL. One nice feature was that the build process md5 checksummed the binaries and libraries as they were compiled and then placed these signatures into the kernel in a hashed format such that the kernel would refuse to boot if any of the checksums did not match. This made it pretty much tamper proof - a goal that was reached in order to make it a Chip and Pin attractive offering.

One day I shall resurect Gazelle. Any takers ?

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Should this be moved to Smallfoot (operating system)? Or something similar?

I'm not sure that this should be considered the "primary topic" by this name, now that a successful animated feature film called Smallfoot has been released. I'd propose moving this article to Smallfoot (operating system) or something similar. I'm not familiar with the topic, so I don't know exactly what the best name for the article would be. Feel free to add suggestions, if anyone has any. --Jpcase (talk) 18:12, 29 October 2018 (UTC)