Inside Jidometa: A look at our Open Source Software

[Read part 2 of Inside Jidometa]

In this post, we’ll highlight some of the open source tools we’ve created and deploy in every Jidoteki appliance, including Jidometa itself.

The OS

We’ll start from the buttom up. Jidometa is built on top of TinyCore Linux - a small footprint in-memory operating system built on GNU/Linux. We use the unmodified OS with a few minor changes.

• The sources for the OS toolchain
• The sources for the OS busybox
• The TinyCore OS initramfs and kernel
• The TinyCore OS scripts modifications

The kernel

TinyCore Linux ships with a slightly modified Linux kernel. In our tests, we were able to deploy our appliances with a completely unmodified (vanilla) Linux kernel, so we provide the full unmodified kernel sources.

• The kernel build scripts
• The sources for the Linux kernel

The extensions

Extensions are similar to Debian .deb packages and RedHat .rpm packages. In Jidometa, they are squashfs .tcz files which contain pre-compiled and stripped binaries. They’re typically much smaller because we don’t include man pages, headers, and other files not needed in an immutable OS.

• The sources for the extensions

We have yet to publish all the build scripts for our extensions, but they all use basic commands:

./configure;make;make install

Anyone can easily rebuild them with the original sources.

The admin scripts

We always include our own Open Source scripts to help manage the appliance. The scripts vary in importance and are either written in POSIX shell, or PicoLisp. We’re slowly working on replacing all our POSIX shell scripts with PicoLisp shell scripts.

• The Jidoteki Admin scripts, which manage the appliance from the console
• The Jidoteki Admin API scripts, which manage the appliance from a REST API
• The helper scripts, which provide additional functionality to the appliance scripts

We have quite a few more administration scripts, but we haven’t open sourced them yet.

The libraries

The Admin scripts are built on top of a set of open source PicoLisp libraries which provide the foundation for stable, tested, and functional tools. The libraries include:

• A unit testing library, to help write simple unit tests for every PicoLisp script and library, and ensure correct functionality (as well as reduce bugs/regressions)
• A JSON library, to natively parse and generate JSON documents directly in PicoLisp
• A SemVer library, to help manage, compare, and validate appliance and update package versions
• An API library, to help build simple REST APIs as quickly and easily as possible

The licenses

It’s almost impossible to gather every single license for every single software used in the appliance. We provided the software source packages intact, which include all the unmodified license files as well.

Additional licenses can be found directly in the appliance in:

/usr/share/doc/License/

The ISOs

Since downloading all individual source packages can be quite troublesome at times, we also provide direct links to download ISOs which bundle all the sources together.

Fauxpen source

We’re not running a fauxpen source operation here. Admittedly not all our code is Open Source, but we do our best to comply with the GNU and OSD licenses by making it easy for everyone to access the sources files for the appliances and binaries we distribute.

We’re constantly releasing new open source tools and libraries, so make sure you sign-up for our mailing list to stay up-to-date on our work, tools, and solutions.

If you’re looking to provide your customers with an on-premises virtual appliance, without being locked-in by your vendor, then contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss your requirements.