Distributions

News and Editorials

Distribution List update

It is time for a look at the LWN Distributions List. The last update ran in the April 15, 2005 edition of this page. At that time there were 405 active distributions, but no mention of how many historical distributions. Now we have a whopping total of 504 distributions; 455 active plus 49 in the historical section. Compared to some years, not very many projects have been removed in the last year. Several that seemed to be dead managed to come back to life, proving that it's hard to keep a good distribution down. One example is Impi Linux. It was removed late last year when its link resolved to Ubuntu Linux. The new Impi is the official representative of Ubuntu and the official Ubuntu support provider in Africa, and a provider of customized desktop systems.

Once upon a time dead distributions had a tendency to turn into porn sites. That doesn't happen anymore. Instead they lead to domains for sale, collections of Linux links and more general shopping sites. Good-Day GNU/Linux HA Server, once a Japanese distribution, has been pointing to a Debian Apache placeholder page for at least the last six months. Others that have disappeared include ARSIG, Bluewall GNU/Linux, COSIX, Dettu[Xx], Eshida Instant Embedded Linux, Evelin, LBA-Linux, Linux/Epia, Madeinlinux, SquiggleOS and White Dwarf Linux.

Black Lab Linux was Terra Soft Solutions' Linux for HPC Clusters. That functionality was rolled into Yellow Dog Linux.

Simply GNUstep packages can still be found at SourceForge, but somewhere it stopped being a unique distribution and turned into packages for Debian Sarge desktops. Those haven't been updated since January 2004.

Conectiva and Lycoris were acquired by Mandriva last year. At that time several Conectiva employees and Lycoris founder Joseph Cheek were hired by Mandriva. Immunix was bought by Novell.

Linux-SIS was the Thai School Internet Server project. There is still a School Net web site, but it doesn't look like a Linux distribution anymore.

Finally, WHAX and Auditor joined forces to become BackTrack. So while Backtrack is on the list, the entries for WHAX and Auditor have been removed.

As usual, the list gets updated once or twice a week. If you find anything missing or out of date let us know.

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New Releases

BLAG30003 Released

BLAG 30003 is the third update of this single-CD distribution, based on Fedora Core 3 with updates from Fedora Legacy and additional applications from Dag, Freshrpms, NewRPMS, and custom packages.

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FreeRTOS.org Version 4 is Now Available

FreeRTOS.org has announced the release of FreeRTOS v4 with ports supporting Luminary Micro's Stellaris(TM) family of microcontrollers, featuring the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller core. "FreeRTOS.org is a portable, open source miniature Real Time Kernel for use in embedded applications. FreeRTOS.org is free to download and royalty free for use even in commercial applications, subject to the license."

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New MEPIS Linux Test Version Uses Ubuntu Base

MEPIS founder Warren Woodford has announced a test release of SimplyMEPIS 6.0, incorporating software from the Ubuntu Dapper package pools. This is the first version of SimplyMEPIS with an Ubuntu base. "Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, said "Collaboration with MEPIS will help Ubuntu offer even higher quality desktop packages for KDE users, and expands the number of people who can benefit from our work on system integration, desktop polish and Linux kernel reliability. The MEPIS community is vibrant and energetic and it will be exciting to be able to work more closely with them, while still respecting the ways in which Ubuntu and MEPIS are distinct.""

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rPath Linux 1.0.1 available for x86 and x86_64

rPath has updated rPath Linux 1. "Refreshed ISO images, release 1.0.1, have been made available for new installations of rPath Linux 1. These images include all updates through and including updates released on 23 March 2006. If you have already installed rPath Linux 1, you should update your current system rather than reinstall using the new images."

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SUSE 10 kernel released

The OpenVZ project has released prebuilt kernel packages for SUSE 10 distributions. "Kernel has the same functionality and feature set as base SUSE development kernel (2.6.16-rc5-git9), combined with the power of OpenVZ virtualization technology, equivalent to the latest OpenVZ development kernel (026test005.1)."

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Distribution News

Building the whole Debian archive with GCC 4.1: a summary

Over the last two weeks, Debian developer Martin Michlmayr compiled the whole Debian archive on a quad-core MIPS machine donated by Broadcom using GCC 4.1. The aim was to find problems in GCC 4.1 itself and bugs in free software projects exhibited by GCC's increased standards conformance (in particular regarding C++ code). By compiling about 6200 packages, over 500 new bugs have been discovered and submitted, 280 of which are specific to the increased strictness of GCC 4.1. In a posting to the Debian development list, Martin classified the bugs he found and offered some useful links to programmers of C++ code. In a posting to the GCC list, he proposed that GCC should only produce new errors after warnings have been shown for at least one release, giving programmers more time to fix their code. This work is part of his research on quality in free software carried out at the University of Cambridge and sponsored by Google.

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Second call for votes for the Debian Project Leader election 2006

The second call for votes contains a look at the votes so far, in the 2006 DPL elections. The voting period ends at 23:59:59 UTC on April 8, 2006.

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A day in the life of the CentOS team

It seems that the CentOS developers recently had a little run-in with the city manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, who accused them of having taken over his city's web servers. The resulting email exchange has been posted for our amusement. "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking'. I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity." It all ends happily, though.

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Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

The initial Ubuntu release - 4.10 or "Warty Warthog" - will reach the end of its 18 months of support on April 30. The delay of "Dapper" means that there will be a one-month window where 4.10 users will have to upgrade to something else (the "Hoary" or "Breezy" releases) in order to have continuous support. "The Ubuntu 4.10 release changed the landscape of the Linux desktop. Quickly gaining popularity in homes, schools, businesses and governments around the world, Ubuntu is now widely considered the Linux desktop of choice."

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Slackware 11.0 is coming

Boxed sets of Slackware 11.0 can be pre-ordered at the Slackware store. Meanwhile, the Slackware -current ChangeLog shows plenty of upgrades and bug fixes in preparation.

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New Distributions

LiveCD Linux distro supports traditional Chinese (DesktopLinux)

DesktopLinux introduces Taiwan's B2D Linux. "The new version -- B2D's sixth distribution release since March 2005 -- is called "PureKGB" and bundles applications from both the KDE and GNOME Linux environments, the project said."

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for March 28, 2006 is out. This edition looks at an RSS feed for DWN, the call for votes in the Debian Project Leader election ("which has seen the lowest participation ever in a Debian project leader election seen so far"), deprecating debmake after etch, notes from past events, the new Debian-Edu/Skolelinux release, and several other topics.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 39

The Fedora Weekly News for March 27, 2006 looks at the Fedora Core 5 release announcement, Congratulations from Fedora Project Leader, Fedora Core 5 Now Available, Announcing FUDCon Boston 2006, Fedora Core 5 Feedbacks, Macromedia Flash Yum Repository for FC5, Space Optimization for Fedora Core 6, ATrpms for FC5/i386 and FC5/x86_64, and several other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of March 27, 2006 covers the search for new members for the Security team, a Bugzilla category change, Ruby on Rails in Portage, and several other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 144

The DistroWatch Weekly for March 27, 2006 is out. "Following last week's Fedora 5 release, the next few days will be equally exciting: we are expecting KDE 3.5.2, DesktopBSD 1.0. Frugalware 0.4 and the first release candidate of SUSE Linux 10.1. Before that happens, we'll bring you news about MEPIS switching allegiance, Slackware preparing version 11.0, and Debian compiling with GCC 4.1. Also in this week's issue: Ulteo, a new distribution developed by the founder of Mandrake Linux is nearing release, while the user community of PCLinuxOS gets a new community resource. In the review section we'll take a brief look at an intriguing book entitled Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security."

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Updates for Fedora Core 5: php-pear (update to XML_RPC 1.4.5), scim-anthy (bug 178400), anthy (new upstream release), shadow-utils (FC5 update), cpio (FC5 update), libsepol (rebuild for FC5), bind (minor fixes), file (fc5 update), readahead (cleanup), gnome-applet-vm (add dependence on usermode), man (fix the encoding of the Bulgarian translation), db4 (FC5 update), gok (update to 1.0.7), gedit (update to 2.14.1), epiphany (update to 2.14.0), evolution-connector (update to 2.6.0), evolution-data-server (update to 1.6.0), gnome-power-manager (update to 2.14.0), pyorbit (update to 2.14.0), totem (update to 1.4.0), libglade2 (make non-ASCII invisible characters work), gnome-icon-theme (update to 2.14.2), shared-mime-info (bug fixes), libxklavier (update to 2.2), gnome-vfs2 (packaging fix), gstreamer-plugins-base (bug fixes), gstreamer (bug fixes), cpio (bug fix), squirrelmail (fix Japanese mail), mtr (update to mtr-0.71), tix (make sure libTix8.4.so is in /usr/lib/Tix8.4), xterm (upgrade to upstream version 211), checkpolicy (update to NSA release), libselinux (update to NSA release), libsemanage (update to NSA release), policycoreutils (update to NSA release), selinux-policy (update to NSA release), libsetrans (update to NSA release), cpio (bug fixes), kernel (upgrade to 2.6.16.1), gconf-editor (bug fix), spamassassin (upgrade to 3.1.1), mlocate (update to mlocate-0.14), scim (bug fix), system-config-kickstart (bug fixes), ncpfs (remove opt flags).

Updates for Fedora Core 4: xterm (bug 183993), tzdata (upstream 2006b), logwatch (update to 7.2.1), authconfig (bug fixes), squirrelmail (fix Japanese mail), glibc (bug fixes), mtr (update to mtr-0.71), perl (bug fixes), system-config-nfs (rebase to 1.3.19), gdm (fix the occasional crash).

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Trustix Secure Linux updates

Trustix has released a bug fix advisory covering initscripts, php4 and xinetd for TSL 2.2 and 3.0.

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New YDL 4.0.1 Errata packages posted

Yellow Dog Linux has released a new set of YDL 4.01 updates.

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Distribution reviews

DSL Linux: Small distro that packs a big punch (developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks has a quick review of Damn Small Linux. "The popularity of Linux has grown by leaps and bounds. With so many distributions of Linux out there, selecting the best operating system for your business needs can be a challenge. But if you're looking for a great bundle of software in a small package, look no further than DSL Linux (also known as Demi-Sized Linux or the more common Damn Small Linux), one of the best "mini-Linux" distributions available. In this quick review, you see how to use DSL Linux, what applications come with the package, how to load and start it on your machine, and how to save between sessions when working from a bootable CD."

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Review: Trustix Secure Linux lives up to its name (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Trustix Secure Linux 2.2. "Trustix concentrates on keeping it simple. You won't get a GUI or the latest bells and whistles. What you do get with Trustix is a small and secure distribution that incorporates IBM's Stack Smash Protection, which protects the system and applications from stack-smashing attacks. This is one of the major forms of attacks, and many secure Linux distros have this turned on by default."

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My desktop OS: VectorLinux SOHO (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks at VectorLinux SOHO. "VectorLinux provides three editions (Standard, Deluxe, and SOHO) to cater to almost any Linux user. The SOHO Edition (Small Office, Home Office) includes KDE rather than the lightweight window managers provided with the Standard Edition. Despite the resource-hungry KDE desktop, VectorLinux SOHO still manages to be probably the fastest non-source distro on the planet, thanks to its use of a Slackware base, refinement of boot and shutdown scripts, well-chosen applications, and the loading of only necessary services."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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