I’ve been playing around with Thinstation Linux for work for the last year. I like it a lot. It’s lightweight, fast, modular, flexible, and simple yet powerful. There are smaller Linux distros (e.g. BlueFlops or Tomsrtbt), but for us Thinstation hits a sweet spot in power vs complexity.

Interesting fact about Thinstation: it comes from New Zealand. Its author is Miles Roper from the West Coast District Health Board. I think I need to go down the West Coast for some Monteiths training.

Thinstation is designed as a thin client operating system, so it has to be lightweight (thin clients don’t have grunty CPUs and normally no hard drive). Its purpose is just to get the computer started and connected to a big application server fast, with the applications then running up on the server. It’s Linux though, so it can be made to do a lot more than that.

Thinstation is not so much a distro, but a distro construction kit which you can use to create your own distro. (Though there are some prebuilt versions already available.) It is made up of a variety of packages which just need to be chosen and then built into a boot image. Once built Thinstation can boot off the network (PXE or Etherboot), CD/DVD (ISO), off a USB stick (SysLinux), or it can be installed onto a hard drive (SysLinux or LiLo).

The whole distro except for the kernel is built into a squashfs initrd, and then linuxrc (thinstation.init) mounts that read-only filesystem together with a tmpfs filesystem using unionfs as the writable (but not persistent) root filesystem. For a “normal” distro running linuxrc is only the first of many steps to booting, but for Thinstation once this completes it is 99% ready. This makes it fast. We have it booting in under 15 secs from a live CD.

Some examples of the packages included are: Samba server, X windows, IceWM, Dillo, and Vim, as well as the vital Base package. A package is just a directory with the files stored in their relative locations and a couple of special files like the package’s dependencies. Because it is so simple it is very easy to see how Thinstation packages work and easy to create new custom packages.

Thinstation: lightweight, fast, modular, flexible, and simple yet powerful = sweet

The air conditioning system at work started belching out smoke resulting in a full fire alert.

Andi was up in Auckland for the weekend in search of some good Malaysian food. Caught up with him, and Tim, Kelvin, Ciprian & Emma, and Simon at Galbraith’s and then Tim, Andi and I had dinner at Selera where we met up with Carl & Grace. Tried Teh Tarik which was strong and sweet, nice!

The end of Unix time came up over beers as it does in such social gatherings. I couldn’t remember the date, but described it as my retirement plan. I’ve just followed the definition of time_t from <time.h> back to <bits/types.h> and calculated it will run out on 32 bit systems in Sunday, 18 January 2038, hopefully I will already be retired by then.

time_t on my computer is a __time_t which is defined to be __TIME_T_TYPE which is a __SLONGWORD_TYPE which finally works out to be a long int. That’s signed so it can only hold 2147483648 (2³¹) seconds before it wraps. It counts from the Unix Epoch of 1970, so that gives us 30 years to upgrade all Unix based systems to 64 bits. With 64 bits Unix time will last until the year 292471210647 (+/- a few for leap seconds).