Ninit: Minit on steroids

Ah, maybe I have found "the one"!

As I lamented in the previous blog post, I found the service managers derived from daemontools to be very restricted:

http://bkhome.org/news/201802/thinking-about-service-managers.html

Minit is one of them:

https://www.fefe.de/minit/

Ninit was forked from Minit, by Nikola Vladov, and considerable thought has gone into extending the usefulness. Dependency options are now looking very good.

Minit and Ninit are both intended to be compiled statically with dietlibc, and I have done that. Host is Quirky Xerus64 8.4, which has dietlibc in the "devx" PET.

A quick note on how to compile Ninit. I edited the 'Makefile', set "DIET=/usr/bin/diet", and had to create a symlink:

# ln -s lib /usr/lib/diet/lib-x86_64
# make
# make install

Back in the mists of time (2012 actually), I created a PET for Minit:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pet_packages-common/minit-0.10-i486.pet

http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pet_packages-common/minit_DOC-0.10-i486.pet

It has etc/minit, which which is a quick hack to make Minit work in an unchanged Puppy. It sets up a replacement for /etc/inittab and runs the usual /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit.

I copied etc/minit/* to /etc/ninit/. Then inserted "init=/sbin/ninit" into the kernel boot parameters, then rebooted. Hey, it's working, back at the usual desktop!

This sets up the infrastructure for service management. One thing that I am keen to do is implement services that are dependent on a network connection.

Now, about Ninit. It is a dead project, however has been preserved here:

https://gitlab.com/notklaatu/ninit

If you download this, it is version 0.14.

More info is here:

http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Ninit_instructions 

Tags: easy, quirky