This was the old description of the MudOS project included in its old README file:

MudOS is an LPmud server (driver) which was originally distributed as an
enhanced version of the LPmud 3.x driver.

The official support site for MudOS is http://www.mudos.org/

For more information about LPmuds and MUDs in general try reading
the USENET groups rec.games.mud.{admin,announce,misc,lp,tiny,diku}.

On this repository, you could find different branches for the following versions of MudOS (from older to newer):

• v21.7b21_fr
• v21.7
• v21.7-maldorne (Maldorne fork, based on v21.7 + v21.7b21_fr patches)
• v22.2b13
• v22.2b14
• v22.2-maldorne (Maldorne fork, based on v22.2b14 with fixes)

The master branch is empty, try any other branch to see its contents.

If you want to test the images in your local machine, you can use them directly from the Github Container Registry.

Every branch now compiles on Debian 12 Bookworm with gcc 12, replacing the old Debian Sarge (2005) + gcc 3.3.5 pipeline. The driver itself is still built as a 32-bit i386 ELF binary — int and void * need to be the same width for the K&R C code in MudOS to behave correctly — but the surrounding container userland is now fully modern: current glibc, current git/openssh, security updates, and any host architecture that can run Docker.

All version branches share the exact same Dockerfile recipe, differing only in the version string printed in the header comment. Porting any future patch or fix across branches is a simple copy-paste.

To make gcc 12 accept the legacy source without patching it, the Dockerfile injects a set of compatibility flags into build.MudOS via sed: -m32 (i386), -fgnu89-inline (pre-C99 inline semantics), -fcommon (pre-gcc 10 tentative definitions), and several -Wno-* / -Wno-error=* flags to tolerate K&R-style prototypes, implicit int and mismatched conversions.

A second patch is applied to the generated system_libs file (produced by ./edit_source -configure) to strip -ly (the legacy yacc runtime library, not needed — MudOS provides its own yyerror/main) and -lnsl (the legacy network-services library, whose functions are now part of glibc proper). Both of these libraries used to exist on Sarge but are no longer shipped for i386 on modern Debian, so the final link step fails without this patch.

The full story — including the 64-bit pointer-truncation segfault that drove the decision to go back to i386 — is in the blog post Compiling MudOS on Modern Linux: From Debian Sarge to Bookworm.

• Versions of MudOS advanced up to 0.8 updating its minor version (using something like semantic versioning).
• 0.9 started naming versions with 0.9.x, from 0.9.1 to 0.9.19.
• What would have been 0.9.20 started with a new naming system, as the first v20. And it went from v20.1 to v20.26.
• This vXX had some alpha and beta versions (v21ax and v21bx), you can check the ChangeLog.alpha and ChangeLog.beta files in the v21.7 branch.
• v21 went from v21.1 to v21.7.
• I'm not really sure about the contents of the v21.7b21_fr branch, seems to be a fork made from the last beta version of v21.7 (v21.7b22 was renamed as v21.7). It seems to have a different parser and you can define in the local_options file: #define DISCWORLD_ADD_ACTION. It's included here, but I'm not really sure about the changes included, and the v21.7 branch should be newer, although without some of the changes done in that fork.
• v22 had v22.1 and several alphas and betas of v22.2, which was never published. v22.2b14 (Dec 12 2003) was the last version of MudOS.

These are the versions we currently run (or plan to run) in the Maldorne MUD cluster:

*v22.2b14 compiles and starts, but the heartbeat timer never fires on modern Linux (Debian 12), so uptime() is permanently 0. We confirmed this both under emulation (arm64 host) and natively on x86_64.

The cause is a one-line change in driver/ualarm.c: the #include "std.h" was moved from line 39 (inside the #ifndef HAS_UALARM block) to line 1 (before the guard). On modern glibc, std.h defines HAS_UALARM, so the entire fallback ualarm() implementation is skipped. MudOS then uses the system's ualarm(), which does not work correctly with the driver's signal-based heartbeat loop.

The fix is to move #include "std.h" back inside the #ifndef block (i.e. revert that specific change from b14). We verified that b14 with this single revert works correctly with a production mudlib. This fix is applied in the v22.2-maldorne branch.

The name "MudOS" is copyrighted by Erik Kay, Adam Beeman, Stephan Iannce and John Garnett (1991-1992). The entire package is additionally copyrighted by Tim Hollebeek (1995). The license permits modification and redistribution for non-commercial use. See the driver/Copyright file in any version branch for the full text.

Historically, some time after the MudOS project became unmaintained, there was community discussion about forking and naming rights. The main community fork is FluffOS, originally created by the Discworld MUD team to maintain their own driver patches independently.

Our -maldorne branches (e.g. v22.2-maldorne) are not new versions of MudOS. We do not claim any rights over the MudOS name, trademark, or project. These branches are minimal forks of specific MudOS versions with only the fixes strictly necessary to run pre-existing mudlibs on modern Linux (Debian 12), solely for preservation purposes. They exist because the original source code has not been maintained since 2003 and does not compile or run correctly on current systems without small patches. We publish the resulting Docker images solely for our own non-commercial use and for the benefit of the MUD community.

Changes ported from v21.7b21_fr (patches originally created by the developers of Final Realms and Reinos de Leyenda):

Maldorne additions:

Maldorne additions: