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+title = "Development Restarted"
+date = 2022-09-04
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["Site News"]
+categories = ["Site News"]
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+Development on HitchHiker Linux had slowed quite a bit over the past year and a half.
+It had not entirely stopped, as the base was staying in sync with new versions of the
+base packages such as gcc, glibc and the kernel, but no real new development had taken
+place. At the point that it was left, hhl was at a state of being *almost* bootable on
+x86_64 and Raspberry Pi. It is now officially booting and running on x86_64.
+<!-- more -->
+Some of the reasons for the hiatus were personal, having been spending too much time on
+this project and not enough with family. Others were due to being stalled on a few
+(mostly) simple problems. The most daunting seemed at first to be figuring out s6-rc.
+This turned out to be not all that complicated in the end, but was complicated by the
+documentation leaving out a number of key pieces of information. This often happens in
+open source, of course.
+
+While there is no automatic mechanism in place for handling changes to the boot process
+and which processes are to be started and shut down, it is happily running on a dual
+boot with Arch on one of my laptops and I am happy with s6. It is fast and light. You
+don't really notice that it's there, actually.
+
+## Some other changes
+I've given up on using The One True Awk and have gone with Gawk instead, due to changes
+in Pkgsrc not recognizing that we have a valid Awk installed. This get's frustrating,
+but as Gawk is already required to build some of the base packages it also created a
+bootstrapping problem and had to be built as part of the temporary toolchain when
+building the base system from source. If I can track down the Pkgsrc issue I reserve the
+right to go back. We'll see.
+
+The kernel config that will ship with binary sets on x86 is based off of Slackware's
+Huge_S kernel. This will allow HitcHiker to boot on most hardware without an initrd,
+greatly simplifying development. Users are encouraged to build a kernel suited to their
+own hardware.
+
+## Packages, or what is the system like?
+On my machine I've currently got both Xfce4 and Mate desktops installed. There are a
+large number of WindowManagers also compiled as packages. My only persistent issue at
+the moment is that my touchpad is not recognized as such, and is instead treated as a
+ps2 mouse. This isn't high on my list of priorities as I'm not a big mouse user to
+begin with, but I'd like to track it down and provide a fix.
+
+Other than that issue the system is pretty nice. There are areas where pkgsrc lags
+behind Arch and you don't get as up to date libraries, so a few of my other projects
+aren't able to compile on HitchHiker yet. But out of curiosity I tried to manually
+compile and install Flatpak and was surprised to get it working quite easily. As I'm
+in the process of migrating some of my graphical applications to target Gnome
+specifically, a couple of them are already almost ready to upload to FlatHub at this
+point. Now, I have mixed feelings about Flatpak and containerized anything, but it
+does provide a path forward to use HitchHiker as a daily driver and still be able
+to do the other development work that I have been engaged in.
+
+I have two machines running periodically compiling packages from Pkgsrc. Currently,
+the number of packages that are ready to go is up to 2261. Pkgin seems to be quite
+a nice package manager, and the command line is easy to understand compared with,
+say, Pacman.