[Self-interest] OurSelf.io April update - TerminalMorph!

[Russell Allen]

Hi all!

Work continues on OurSelf.io at a feverish pace (literally as I got a mild case of Covid - like everyone else!)

My immediate aim is to get to a place where the full cycle of Self development can happen without needing a local VM and without having to SSH into the server.

The first part of this is building access from within the Self image to the underlying FreeBSD jail so that the developer can use the existing unix tools - git, ssh etc - to sync .self files to GitHub or wherever.

If you start a trial now on OurSelf.io you will see a new menu item - New Unix Terminal - which will, as the name suggests, open a morph which is a unix terminal. It is a very basic terminal, just enough for running simple commands and not enough for TUI apps such as vi etc.

But with it, I can (if I’m logged in and not just doing a trial)

- use the Transporter to file out modules
- commit those modules to a git repository
- push the commits to GitHub
- pull changes
- read those changes in via the Transporter

I can also build new snapshots, and if I save them as ‘/self/snapshot’ and restart the OurSelf world then the new snapshot will replace the existing one.

(I’m thinking of this as temporary, the long term aim is to pull everything into Self so that no one needs know how and on what the image is running. But we’re a way off that)

Cheers Russell