The main resource at this stage is the pack­age source tree. To visit the tree, click here. The most interesting parts are the cfg files and patches.

The cfg files are our equivalent of Gentoo ebuilds [shout-out to Bonsai Kitten] or Slack­ware slackbuild files [Slackware was our first distro in the 1990s].

2. What is Laclin?

Laclin is an unusual Linux distro that's been under de­vel­op­ment since 1995. The key elements are as fol­lows.

Laclin is Wayland free and systemd free
systemd isn't for you and me
It's there to coopt
systemd we've drop­ped
Wayland is a fantasy

Laclin is large but super-light
Super-light is coder's delight
Code all day
Code all night
It's a beautiful sight
Dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight

Wikipedia off­line
WikiHow off­line
70GB of sources off­line
For sources you don't need to pine
Offline is mighty fine

Mirrors of online repos as well
Forced online builds are Hell
The solution is swell
Offline rings the bell

There is no pack­age tool
That is the rule
Everything is there
We did it on a dare

Better still
No need to climb the DLL Hell Hill
We hide pack­ages from each others
So conflicting pack­ages are brothers
You'd like both old and new?
The old we don't eschew

The distro is orig­inal. It uses patches from a dozen distros, but it's very dif­fer­ent from most distros and is descended from none.

There are a few Slack­ware boot scripts. We've also made liberal use of Debian and Gentoo patches. There is a filesystem trick simi­lar to the one in GoboLinux, but we de­vel­op­ed it independently about 20 years ago.

This web­site is running under Laclin. We've been eating our own dogfood since the start. Woof.

Presently, Laclin it­self is running in a chroot [a super-light container]. The chroot is hosted on a Devuan 4 dedi. Devuan 4 is need­ed because host boot loaders typically don't sup­port our kernel.

We like our dedi
Dedi is bet­ter than a Teddy
To run on a dedi Laclin is ready

Note: This web­site is writ­ten in Haggis, Laclin's own sim­ple but use­ful website markup language. Haggis produces sites that are mobile responsive but don't need JavaScript except for special pur­poses.

You'll notice responsive hyphenation on some pages. It's handled by word-breaks that Haggis inserts auto­mat­ic­al­ly.

3. What can I get?

You can get one thing right now and one thing hope­ful­ly before the de­vel­op­er passes away:

3.1. The pack­age sources are online at this link. For documentation, see the cfg files. The sources for the distro core, primarily Perl and shell scripts, will be add­ed in due course.

Many pieces will be use­ful to CLI de­vel­op­ers regardless of distro. In short, you don't need to down­load or run Laclin. You can learn from the developer's mistakes and crib scripts, patches, and data.

3.2. There will be a smaller iteration named Rescue­Coder. It'll include many of the tools, but the sources and larger pieces will be omitted. Distribution of Rescue­Coder should be sim­ple.

Depending on what goes into the final cut, the full-size distro image is probably going to be 1 TB in size. Distribution of a 1 TB file is more of a problem.

We're trying to fig­ure out the best way to offer bootable copies of the distro as a whole. Due to the RAM Apocalypse, SSDs and even Flash sticks [the ones that are fast enough] are ex­pen­sive now.

4. Who is Laclin for?

Nobody but Old­Coder will want to use Laclin as a daily driver. However, since 1995, it's work­ed towards the goal of being the best distro toy.

If you're a Linux CLI de­vel­op­er;
If you don't under­stand why heavy and sluggish desktops are common;
If you enjoy light-weight games;
If you re­mem­ber Sun workstations;
If you consider systemd to be the work of the Devil;
If you're startled by the modern disdain for reproducible builds;

and you like the idea of a port­a­ble toy stuffed with a terabyte of de­vel­op­ment tools, games, source code, and data;

Laclin might be for you. Carry around the distro in your pocket. Plug it in to any laptop at parties.

5. Who is re­spon­si­ble for this foolishness?

Laclin is a single-de­vel­op­er Linux distro that has existed for about 30 years. It's OldCoder's (Robert Kiraly's) most foolish endeavor in a lifetime.

Old­Coder hopes to finish the SSD version and some books to add to it, to send physical copies out, and to have the content outlive him in a Rudy Rucker Lifebox sense.

To contact Old­Coder, click here.

6. Features.

6.1. Laclin runs on a pocket-size USB3 SSD. Put it in a pocket and forget about it until you need it.

Then plug the SSD into a ran­dom PC or laptop, turn off Secure Boot, and boot from USB3. The existing hard disk and OS aren't affected.

6.2. Wikipedia (about 100 GB), the FreeDB CD music database (1 GB), and Flight Gear (plus 24GB of maps) are built in. We have the last public snapshot of WikiHow as well.

6.3. Laclin comes with copies of Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, Slack­ware, and other stand­ard distros. Including toolchains. Need to do a Linux port? The porting center is in your pocket.

6.4. The distro is light despite its size. The desktop is “jwm”. You can't get much lighter.

The desktop has Start button, boss button, task bar, workspaces, systray, launch buttons and Alt-Tab. Do most peo­ple need more than that? We do it in about 10 MB of binaries and scripts. Not 1 GB. 10 MB.

6.5. The X Server is XLibre. IRC is ZoiteChat, a very nice fork of HexChat. The primary web browsers are Ungoogled Chromium, LibreWolf, and Tor Browser. The web ser­ver is Angie, a spoon of Nginx that features automated certs. systemd and Wayland are deleted to the extent pos­si­ble.

6.6. The distro is about 90% converted to clang as opposed to gcc.

6.7. We've made fixes to old pro­grams. There are new features in some cases. You'll find maintained pack­ages here that are orphaned elsewhere.

6.8. There are dozens of unique tools. The unique tools will be released separ­ate­ly as individual FOSS projects.

6.9. User data can be stored in an encrypted filesystem. If you lose the SSD, you'll know, at least, that nobody else can get at the data.

6.10. The distro is packed with dozens of light­weight games. Including, for the chess inclined, 11 chess engines.

7. Software builds.

There are no add­ed pieces to down­load. Not even the source code. Everything es­sen­tial, including 70 GB of source code, comes on the one pocket-size SSD.

Disclaimers: We don't pro­vide source code for the bundled third-party distros. Additionally, there are a very few optional components that require online builds. Docker is one example.

In the same vein, Laclin has a strong focus on reproducible off­line builds. We reject the modern insistence on cloud-based builds. To work around this, we cache parts of Perl CPAN, Python PyPi, Ruby Gems, and the Go, Haskell, and Rust ecosytems. [Actually, we include all of CPAN except for old ver­sions.]

We've invested effort to make nearly pack­ages build­a­ble offline. There are only a few exceptions. One example is Docker, which can't be built off­line without the assis­tance of Lovecraft-ian entities.

8. In closing.

Laclin is a novel and use­ful toy. However, the distro isn't stand­ard or polished.

This distro is for experienced CLI de­vel­op­ers who happen to like the unusual features. Or for gamers who'd like to try dozens of light­weight games. [Of course, we include Wolfenstein and our own takes on Doom.]

We fig­ure that there are a few dozen such peo­ple in the world. But most such peo­ple won't happen across this page.

Most Linux users should use one of the major distros. We recommend Debian for VPSes, Debian or CentOS for corporations, and Linux Mint for former Windows users.

So, real­is­tic­al­ly, Laclin is performance art. Somebody spent 30 years on some­thing that might never be seen.

But there's more to it. If we share every­thing, peo­ple will find some parts use­ful.

Additionally, we can highlight our ver­sions of some of the more rare and unusual pro­grams involved and try to pro­vide portable build instructions for them.

Finally, as part of this, we can write about FOSS, individual pro­grams, and the pro­cess of assembling a distro.

This site will aim for these goals.