AdoOS

An Alpine derivative where every change is a profile, an overlay file, or a package — never a patched recipe.

---

What this is

An Alpine 3.24.1 base with its own ISO: branding, a live overlay, a rootless build path, and a rebranded apk that lives on a separate branch. Nothing in aports/ is patched, so an Alpine package that runs on Alpine runs here.

What AdoOS deliberately does not do — a glibc compatibility layer beyond gcompat, proprietary NVIDIA, a binary repository — is argued line by line in docs/SCOPE.md. Read that before assuming a feature exists.

Design

One rule drives the build: AdoOS adds layers, it does not fork the base.

Surface	Mechanism
Base system	Upstream Alpine; no recipe modified
Branding	Files in overlay/, shipped as an apkovl tarball that wins over the packages owning the same paths
ISO profile	iso/mkimg.adoos.sh, loaded through $HOME/.mkimage/ (mkimage.sh:204) — aports/ stays untouched
Live overlay	iso/genapkovl-adoos.sh packs overlay/ plus hostname and apk/world
Volume ID	gen_volid() in the profile — one source, since GRUB's search --label depends on it
Reproducibility	SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH pinned to git log -1 of this repo
Rootless build	unshare -Ur gives fake root; the Alpine minirootfs is the builder, its checksum verified against the mirror before extraction
Console	console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200, with a serial getty in overlay/etc/inittab so qemu -nographic reaches a shell

What it does not provide

• No glibc runtime. gcompat covers the C library sonames only; libstdc++, NSS and gconv stay out (see SCOPE). Flatpak and distrobox are the supported answers for glibc binaries, and neither is wired into the ISO yet.
• No package repository. AdoOS builds no packages of its own.
• No installer. The ISO is a live system.

Build

scripts/build-iso.sh     # -> iso/adoos-3.24.1-x86_64.iso (+ .sha256/.sha512)

No root. scripts/alpine-chroot.sh fetches the Alpine minirootfs into .builder/, verifies it against the SHA-256 the mirror publishes, re-execs the build inside it via unshare -Ur, then runs Alpine's own mkimage.sh with --checksum. Overrides: ALPINE_VER, ARCH, ADOOS_MIRROR, SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, and ADOOS_LITE=1 to drop firmware from the modloop.

To inspect the builder: scripts/alpine-chroot.sh opens a shell with the repo bind-mounted at /adoos.

Layout

AdoOS/
  alpine-standard-3.24.1-x86_64.iso   reference ISO (upstream Alpine, git-ignored)
  docs/                               scope, decisions, architecture notes
  iso/                                ISO profile, apkovl generator, build output
  overlay/                            files baked into the live system
  scripts/                            rootless builder and build entry point
  aports/                             upstream checkout, unmodified (git-ignored)
  apk-tools/                          apk source with the rebrand branch (git-ignored)

Both upstream checkouts carry their own git history and are ignored here; no script in scripts/ writes to either.

apk rebrand (abo)

apk-tools on branch adoos differs from upstream 844009a in 133 files (+623/−611). The executable is named abo, which is why the paths below say abo and not apk.

cd apk-tools
meson setup -Dprefix=/usr build && ninja -C build
./build/src/abo --version        # AdoOS abo 3.0.6, compiled for x86_64.

Requires meson, ninja and the usual dev libs; on a non-Alpine host uv tool install meson ninja is enough. meson test -C build runs the upstream suite — it reads $APK, which the build points at the abo binary (test/meson.build:10).

The branch is not part of this repository. SCOPE rule 2 keeps the option of shipping the rebrand as a patch series at package build time instead.

Status

The ISO has not been built and booted from this tree. Every claim above describes the scripts, not a working image.

Area	State
ISO profile, overlay, branding	Builds through scripts/build-iso.sh; no root required
Rootless builder	Works on this host (unshare -Ur); minirootfs checksum-verified
Serial console	getty on ttyS0 shipped in the overlay
apk-tools rebrand	Local branch; builds and passes the upstream suite
Package repository	Not started
Flatpak / distrobox path	Present in Alpine community; not wired into the ISO
glibc prefix package	Not started
Localization	musl-locales in the package list; no fonts or input methods
NVIDIA	Open stack (nouveau/NVK) only; proprietary and CUDA unsupported, no plan
Boot test	Not run on a built AdoOS ISO

Known gaps

• ADOOS_LITE=1 does not skip the firmware download. The profile overrides section_kernels, but update-kernel pulls linux-firmware itself (757 MB, 113 subpackages), so the flag changes modloop contents, not build time. Closing it needs an empty higher-version stub package.
• The volume ID truncates at 32 characters. A long RELEASE value loses the architecture suffix.

Roadmap

• Build and boot an ISO; record its SHA-256 here
• Wire Flatpak or distrobox into the live image and document the path
• Empty linux-firmware stub so ADOOS_LITE=1 is fast, not just smaller
• Decide whether the abo rebrand ships as a patch series (SCOPE rule 2)

License

MIT for everything in this repository — the same license Alpine uses for its own tooling (alpine-conf). Copied-in upstream components keep theirs: apk-tools is GPL-2.0, musl is MIT. See LICENSE.