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Everest Linux

A highly flexible, general purpose meta-distribution, built off of the monolithic Linux kernel and Glacier package manager.

Advantages of Everest

Simple:

Everest strives to be simple by design, coming with no pre-installed bloatware or spyware. Everest follows the UNIX philosophy whenever possible, and tries to avoid including large programs in its base system.

Stable:

Everest is designed to be as stable as possible. All base system programs are statically linked, and can be updated with git-controlled root filesystems.

Fast:

Glacier downloads program source code and compiles it locally on your system. The end result is an extremely fast and optimized package. Simply define CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, and MAKEFLAGS, and you're ready to go.

Lightweight:

Everest uses Busybox for its userland tools and init system, and musl for its standard C library. All of these tools are designed to be as lightweight as possible.

Flexible:

Everest supports highly customized installations. Want to replace Busybox init with systemd, openrc, runit, dinit, or s6? Or replace musl with uClibc or Glibc? All of these are possible, and encouraged.

Try Everest

News

10/3/24 - libglacier v4.0.0rc out now

After 8 months of development, libglacier has been released as v4.0.0rc.

While this is technically an unstable development release, it has been tested vigorously and is only labeled as unstable due to the absence of configuration file parsing, which will be added in the next release.

This release means that progress on Glacier's frontend programs can finally progress.


7/12/24 - Registration closed for git.everestlinux.org

Due to an influx of spam on our Git server, new account registration has been closed.

If, for any reason, you require an account, please email me at [email protected] so I can set one up for you.


4/4/24 - All new releases on hold indefinitely

While work has been done on releasing Everest and Glacier, these releases are on hold indefinitely.

I have decided to rewrite Glacier in C, which has added a significant amount of time needed for the release. This will ultimately be a good decision, since the rewritten Glacier will be much more portable than the Bash version.

Additionally, I have recently committed to Assumption University to study cybersecurity. Hopefully I will be able to integrate this project into my studies if possible.

Ultimately, this is a hobby project. I do not anticipate it to ever become big (or at least as big as some other distros), however if you are interested in helping out, shoot me a message at [email protected].


12/20/23 - Everest v1.0.0 and Glacier v4.0.0 put on hold

Unfortunately, the releases scheduled for January 1st are being put on hold.

The past few months have been very busy in terms of college stuff. Thankfully, I have been accepted into multiple schools and have a good idea of where I'm going.

Since this stuff is clearing up, I now have more time to work on releasing Everest and Glacier. Most importantly, I now have a testbed to run everything on.

The new target release date is March 1st, 2024.

Once again, thank you for your continued support of this project.


9/29/23 - Big news at Everest

Many things have been happening at Everest in the past few months.

Glacier v4 is almost complete, and is due for a release sometime before 2024.

Everest v1.0 is nearing its completion as well, and should be released before 2024.

We do not expect these dates to change, but if we need to polish things up more, we'll take that opportunity.

Finally, all Everest websites have transitioned to the nord colorscheme. We may bring back the k2 colorscheme at a later date.

Thank you for your continued support everyone!

-The Everest Team


6/8/23 - New Everest logo

The Everest logo has been slightly redesigned. This includes a darker color palette.


4/25/23 - Announcing Glacier v4

Glacier v4 is another complete overhaul of Glacier. This new release includes dependency resolution, multiple downloads, and a new, concise package format.

Since Glacier v4 uses a completely different package format, it is thus incompatible with all previous releases.

No time estimate has been given for this release.

WARNING:

Glacier v4 is highly unstable and experimental. Use at your own risk.


2/1/23 - Manual intervention required for /etc/glacier.conf

With the new Glacier update, changes were made to the download backend. Please ensure your current configuration is overwritten while updating.


1/26/23 - Website overhaul

The Everest website has been completely overhauled with a cleaner, sleeker look.


1/26/23 - System image builds nearly complete

A system image is coming together. This includes the toolchain We are still ironing out issues with Busybox's wget implementation, which fails to support https.


11/1/22 - System image builds have begun

Today, the team has begun compiling system images. All programs have compiled correctly, with the exception of the system toolchain. This is a very important component, and the system cannot function without it.


10/25/22 - Glacier v3 is released

After nearly 2 months of hard work, Glacier v3 is finally out. This release includes many stability improvements, changes to the codebase to improve readability, and a new build system.


10/7/22 - Glacier v3 enters testing

Glacier v3 is now available for testing. Please note that this release is not stable and therefore should not be run on a production machine.


8/31/22 - Announcing Glacier v3

Glacier v2, which was release back in June, functions great, however does not function like a typical package manager would.

Additionally, adding functionality is very difficult as the codebase is very complex and messy. Glacier v3 aims to fix these issues.


6/21/22 - Registering everestlinux.org

Everest now owns a domain. This allows us to host our own website, rather than using GitHub (which is owned by Microsoft). This gives us more control over our work.


5/31/22 - Glacier v2 is released

Glacier v2 has been released. This version provides several improvements to the codebase, such as condensing everything to a single executable.


4/20/22 - Glacier v1 is released

Glacier has released a stable point in its development.

In addition, color and unicode support has been added.


4/5/22 - Glacier v0.6rc

The package format has been updated to include timestamping capabilities.

These timestamps will be queried along with a package.


3/28/22 - Glacier v0.5rc

Added a proper cleanup operation after a transaction finishes.

Additionally, caching support has been added.


3/10/22 - Glacier v0.2rc

Added proper error handling.