Weekly Edition
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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 If you find anything missing or out of date let us know. (Log in to post comments)
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