UBOS strives to make the development and operations of Peer Computing apps simpler and less laborious.
Core to UBOS is UBOS Gears, which automates many of the otherwise complex and laborious tasks of systems administrators administering peer computing applications. For example, to fully install and configure an application such as Mastodon, only a single command needs to be performed. UBOS Gears will downloaded the needed software, provision a database, configure a webserver, configure and start background daemons such as Redis, obtain Letsencrypt certificates etc. Similarly, UBOS Gears provides high-level commands for backup and restore, automated whole-stack systems upgrades, network management and more. For a list of available commands, see Command reference.
UBOS Gears today performs this feat on a curated derivative of Arch Linux called UBOS Linux. UBOS Linux takes most of its packages from Arch, but customizes some of them in order to make administration with UBOS Gears simpler. Like Arch, UBOS Linux follows the rolling release model, but with multiple release channels of different software quality.
UBOS can be hosted on:
- physical hardware, such as industry-standard x86 servers or smaller ARM devices such as the Raspberry Pi 5;
- virtual servers, with virtualization software such as VirtualBox and UTM;
- cloud servers from Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud.
More details on installation and operations are here.
Finally, we are developing UBOS Mesh, which is middleware that promises to make the creation of new, interoperable peer computing applications significantly simpler. UBOS Mesh is based on a novel semantic graph data representation and will provide rich semantic models, access control and support for peer computing protocols out of the box.
As UBOS Mesh is still in heavy development, little documentation about it is available on this site; this will change as UBOS Mesh matures.