Side Projects

Redox is a complete Rust operating system, in addition to the kernel, we are developing several side projects, including:

  • RedoxFS - Redox file system inspired by ZFS.
  • Ion - The Redox shell.
  • Orbital - The desktop environment/display server of Redox.
  • pkgutils - Redox package manager, with a command-line frontend and library.
  • relibc - Redox C library.
  • audiod - Redox audio server.
  • bootloader - Redox boot loader.
  • init - Redox init system.
  • installer - Redox buildsystem builder.
  • netstack - Redox network stack.
  • redoxer - A tool to run/test Rust programs inside of a Redox VM.
  • sodium - A Vi-like editor.
  • games - A collection of mini-games for Redox (alike BSD-games).
  • OrbTK - Cross-platform Rust-written GUI toolkit (in maintenance mode).
  • and a few other exciting projects you can explore on the redox-os group.

We also have some in-house tools, which are collections of small, useful command-line programs:

  • extrautils - Extra utilities such as reminders, calendars, spellcheck, and so on.
  • binutils - Utilities for working with binary files.

We also actively contribute to third-party projects that are heavily used in Redox.

What tools are fitting for the Redox distribution?

The necessary tools for a usable system, we offer variants with less programs.

The listed tools fall into three categories:

  1. Critical, which are needed for a full functioning and usable system.
  2. Ecosystem-friendly, which are there for establishing consistency within the ecosystem.
  3. Fun, which are "nice" to have and are inherently simple.

The first category should be obvious: an OS without certain core tools is a useless OS. The second category contains the tools which are likely to be non-default in the future, but nonetheless are in the official distribution right now, for the charm. The third category is there for convenience: namely for making sure that the Redox infrastructure is consistent and integrated.