The Basic System for building Software Appliances.

This is the official homepage of the General-Purpose APPLIANCE System (GPAS).

What is it? The General-Purpose Appliance System was made as a basic Linux Live Operating System ready to build software appliances on it. It comes on a bootable Linux Live CD based on SLAX Frodo Edition (http://www.slax.org) along with a couple of additional software components often needed by such appliances.

What does it do? It does almost nothing than booting the system and calling a (dummy) script "start-appliance.sh". There is an (empty) directory "/ADDON" on the CD image where the special content of an appliance should be located.
To make your special appliance up and running all you have to do is to copy all required stuff to this directory and adapt the start script "start-appliance.sh" to install and/or run your appliance and then remastering this CD image using the scripts distributed with GPAS.

What if I don't want my appliance to run from CD? You can use the original SLAX script "make_disk.sh" coming with the APPLIANCE sources. This copies all CD content to the harddrive and makes it bootable using Lilo. After applying the script your appliance runs from HD and the CD is not required any more.

What is inside? The system is based on the "SLAX Frodo Edition", a minimalistic Linux Live System containing only a full working Linux command prompt and drivers. While SLAX is a modular system it can easily be enhanced with modules required by a special appliance. The current version 1.02 of GPAS comes with the following components preinstalled (in addition to SLAX Frodo):
NOTE: Some of the packages are _not_ completely included, but only parts of them needed to get a subset of their functionality (e.g. from net-snmp are only included the files required for the SNMP agent).

• Postfix 2.3.2: Wietse Venema's mailer, performant, easy to use and Sendmail compatible. (Homepage)
• Lprng 3.8.28: The enhanced, extended, and portable implementation of the Berkeley LPR print spooler functionality. (Homepage)
• openldap-client-2.3.32: Open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (client tools only). (Homepage)
• JRE 1.6.0: The Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) from Sun Microsystems. (Homepage)
• Apache Tomcat 5.5.17: Apache Tomcat, the servlet container for Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages. (Homepage)
• Multipart Request 1.30.rc1: A file upload parser library, written in Java. (Homepage)
• DB44 4.4.20: The Berkeley Database (Berkeley DB) library. (Homepage)
• Glibc-i18n 2.3.5: The C Library to provide internationalization support. (Homepage)
• Nail 11.24: A mail user agent derived from Berkeley Mail 8.1 whith the functionality of the POSIX.2 mailx command with additional support for MIME messages, SSL/TLS, POP3 and SMTP. (Homepage)
• Net-snmp 5.4: The Simple Network Management Protocol. (Homepage)
• Samba 3.0.23c: File and print services for SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems. (Homepage)
• Pstotext 1.9: A tool for extracting plain text from PostScript. (Homepage)
• GPL ghostscript 8.15: The interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF. (Homepage)
• YAFPC 2.0: A Java application for composing PDF documents. (Homepage)

What license applies? The General-Purpose Appliance System contains only componets that are distributed under the GNU Genreal Public License (GPL) or compatible licenses. GPAS is distributed under GPL too.

Are there any projects using GPAS? The General-Purpose Appliance System is a new project. There is only one known project using it. It's my own project YAFPC-Appliance (A Network PDF Server Appliance). If you have a project based on GPAS, please drop me a line to and I can make a link to it here.

Where can I get it? Right here (Current version is 1.03, 2008-01-29):

Description	Download Link	Md5sum	Size	Bit Torrent	Remark
Master ISO image	Download	Md5sum	123 MB	No Torrent	Bootable ISO image without sources
APPLIANCE Source Tree	Download	Md5sum	305 MB	No Torrent	Complete source tree incl. scripts for remastering

Enjoy the General-Purpose APPLIANCE System (GPAS)!

    last modified: 01/29/2008

Copyright © 2006-2007 Wolfgang Ullrich. All Rights reserved.