[cfarm-users] Future of cfarm186/cfarm187/cfarm188 at OSUOSL

[Denis Ovsienko]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:36:08 +0100
Baptiste Jonglez via cfarm-users <cfarm-users at lists.tetaneutral.net>
wrote:

> - Haiku, Minix, Hurd and Sortix (especially Hurd)
> - Trisquel
> - Illumos distributions (OpenIndiana, OmniOS, Tribblix)
> - Fedora or Gentoo

Haiku would not survive long in CFarm:

~> id
uid=0(user) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),101(party)

(Multi-user support is not complete, e.g. the OS implements a concept
of multiple Unix-ish users, but there is only one home directory, *the*
home directory of *the* Haiku user (root), so until a more complete
implementation is in place, it is mostly a means to provide
pseudo-users for system processes that need them.)

That said, Haiku happily installs and runs in a virtual machine (must
have a video card for the GUI), then one can use SSH and sshfs and do
software porting work almost as usual.  Both the userland and the kernel
crash debuggers will use the GUI.

Re illumos distributions, my experience with OmniOS has been
consistently better than with OpenIndiana.  Both install and run in
a local AMD64 VM trivially too.  GNU/Hurd used to be difficult, but in
recent few years Debian started to publish ready-to-run disk images (the
most recent snapshot is from 2025-08-20), which just work for i386;
AMD64 is available, but still rough.

Perhaps it would be easier to plan/decide if someone described the
problem that needs to be solved.

-- 
    Denis Ovsienko