MaidSafe (Farming) on Lunar Linux

Development
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I’m something of a fan of ‘Lunar Linux’, which is a source-based distro that’s extremely fast due to all its packages being built from source. I used it years ago when I had an old dual 700MHz Slot1 server when 1GB RAM was alot. It was the only distro in which anything ran at a suitable speed.

I’ve begun revisiting it & am amidst installing it to a VM with relatively beefy compute & memory specs. However I don’t have much storage to give it since the entire VM host is installed to a small SSD. I expect it to do better at MaidSafe Farming than any of the Ubuntu distros which are so popular for building new & exciting apps such as MaidSafe on.

I’m curious as to whether or not I’d be able to build MaidSafe from source on Lunar, since it’s not an officially supported platform. My first thought is that as long as I’m able to install commonly available packages as dependencies, that MaidSafe would probably build just as if it were on Ubuntu. Then I wonder what details might be different than Ubuntu & if I’d run into problems.

So I’m here to discuss, hoping to hear good news that MaidSafe will build on Lunar. If it’s not expected to work without reworking a bunch of stuff to ensure compatibility, what exactly would need to change?

Lunar’s Wiki has a section detailing how to make packages (called modules) for their distro, & I’m wondering if someone here might be willing to provide the expertise needed to get MaidSafe into their repositories. Especially since the whole system is so darn fast. It could be a boon to Farmers. To me, it seems the perfect system for Farming. And if I can get someone here with packaging skills to agree with me, I’d love to get it working. Even if no one wants to package MaidSafe for Lunar, potential Farmers could benefit from install instructions for the Lunar distro.

As I mentioned, I’m currently amidst the long installation process, & expect to be able to tinker with getting MaidSafe installed in a couple of days. In the meantime, can someone here advise as to whether it’s sure to be a miserable failure or not?

Many thanks,
-F

3 Likes
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Great new idea!

Wish I knew more about it

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No reason it can’t be built, you just need to ensure you can get all the tools needed, and libraries need, either from their repo our built from source.

I don’t know lunar, so I’m only taking generally.

I’m not sure if speed will be that much of an issue for farming, but it certainly won’t hurt. The testnet will tell, so having this running alongside another distro in the same machine would be a useful test. Good luck!

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That is practically irrelevant for any program, and especially MaidSafe farming. Even for programs that matter (CPU-bound) differences are probably negligible.

Post issues you run into here.

But you said you haven’t even compiled it yet.
Do you have any I/O-related benchmarks of Lunar vs. Ubuntu on the same hardware?

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I don’t have benchmarks, but back in 2006, it’s desktop apps loaded & ran much quicker than whatever Ubuntu version it was back then. I had it installed to an old dual Slot1 700MHz box w/ 1G RAM. I’m basing this statement on that experience on the old hardware. On a modern box, it’s sure to be even quicker.

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Okay, so basically no proof.

Here (Gentoo needs focus to stay relevant – Striving for greatness) we can see that a while ago building from source would translate to a paltry (for a single system) 5% performance gain.
And in terms of the MaidSafe workload, I’m bet $10 the difference wouldn’t be more than 0.5%. Hard to justify, IMO.