Specialized Distributions [LWN.net]

A question that comes up from time to time is, 'Why are there so many Linux distributions?' Distributions are created for many reasons. There are probably almost as many reasons as there are distributions. Some are created as school projects, allowing a student to explore the internals of an operating system. Many more are created to serve a particular purpose. Older hardware and limited disk space? No problem. Want something that boots from a floppy or CD-ROM? Several are available. Some want the functionality provided by proprietary products, while others want their system to be completely composed of free software. There are firewalls and security enhanced versions, servers and desktops, multimedia and clustering distributions, seemingly something for everyone. Except that not everyone agrees on just what it is that makes a distribution perfect.

Thanks to the GNU GPL anyone can download a Linux kernel, some GNU packages and libraries and create their vision of the perfect OS. Of course it also takes some knowledge of computers and programming, some hardware, and of course plenty of time. Still, LWN announces a new distribution almost every week. Some have been in existence for a while, only new to LWN. Others are fledgling distributions, created to fill a perceived void in existing systems. Some are built from scratch, but many start with an existing distribution and add or subtract software to create that perfect distribution. Today's crop contains old and new but they were all created to meet a specific need.

RUNT (ResNet USB Network Tester) is Slackware Linux designed to run off of a 128 MB USB pen drive. It consists of a boot floppy image and a zip file, similar to zipslack. It is intended to be a fairly complete Linux installation for use as a testing tool capable of booting on any x86 computer with a USB port and a bootable floppy drive. The initial version is RUNT 0.92.
BBIagent.Net provides a suite of applications to create the software for booting a computer as a broadband router and firewall. Based on the hardware configurations and connection type, you can download your own boot file which is written into a single 1.44MB diskette. Router software can be downloaded to the same diskette to complete the system. This is a Linux based system which uses Java tools to create a bootable floppy with router software. The software utilites provided by BBIagent.Net are free to use. Version 1.5.0 was released November 7, 2002.
The folks at NPACI offer the Rocks Cluster Distribution. This special purpose distribution starts with Red Hat Linux 7.3 and adds tools to make clusters easy to manage, configurable and secure.
LinuxMedNews reports on the first demo CD for GnuMed. This project is based on KNOPPIX, in cooperation with Debian-Med.

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Specialized Distributions [For Advocates]

Posted Dec 5, 2002 17:34 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

One of the questions I get is 'Why are there are so many distributions?'.

I found the best thing to say 'How many OEM versions of Microsoft WinXXX are there?' The vendors get the ability to tweak for their hardware they are shipping (especially on Laptops) but you as a user dont know what has changed or that your CDrom of Win2000 from a Dell is different from the Compaq version. The thousands of Linux distros are a similar thing, but you do know that they are different.