Ubuntu Core

Welcome to the Utopic Unicorn edition of Ubuntu Core, an official Ubuntu project that provides users with a minimal rootfs (root filesystem), which can be used for building full featured operating systems based on Ubuntu.

Availability and supported platforms

Ubuntu Core is not a Linux distribution per se, as it is distributed only as tar archives that contain a minimal root file system of an Ubuntu Linux distribution.

At the moment, it supports the 64-bit (amd64), 32-bit (i386), ARM64 (ARM 64-bit), ARMHF, PowerPC, and PPC64 Little Endian hardware platforms.

Requirements and usage instructions

Before using the Ubuntu Core to create your own Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, you will need to download the respective tar archive for the target architecture, as well as to download the Linux kernel and bootloader for the target device.

First of all, you will need to format the disk drive of the target device and create at least one partition with the EXT2, EXT3 or EXT4 filesystems, extract the Ubuntu Core archive to the respective EXT2/3/4 partition, install the bootloader, install the Linux kernel, as well as to add a user.

A password must be created for the user, which needs to be added to the sudo and adm groups. Don't forget to add the necessary modules to the Linux kernel (in /lib/modules/$(uname -r) and boot the target device. Additional software packages can be easily installed using the apt-get command.

Bottom line

All in all, experienced Linux distribution developers can use the Ubuntu Core project to create desktop, server or embedded operating system that use the stable and reliable base of the world's most popular free OS, Ubuntu Linux.

Please be aware that this is an early development release of the Ubuntu Core 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) operating system, not suited for production environments!