A Brief Tour of New Distributions

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

New Linux distributions are being created at an alarmingly high rate, currently perhaps two or three per week worldwide. While most of them will not survive the initial enthusiasm, which is soon dampened by the realization of how much work is involved, and disappear in a few short months after launch, there are undoubtedly many great ideas which might some day develop into a major project. Just take a quick look back in time - very few people knew of Gentoo or Knoppix as recently as two years ago, but today both of these projects are extremely popular distributions with many thousands of users. It is quite clear that the Linux world is full of bright people with brilliant ideas. Inevitably, much effort is also wasted on projects of little value, serving more as a learning curve for the distribution's creator than a useful tool for the rest of us.

How does one spot a gem among the multitude of new projects? It is not easy, especially since many developers have little marketing or web page design talent and often lack fluency in English. But let's take a look at some of the distribution launched in the past year or so and try to foresee possible winners or at least identify those projects which are likely to be around for a while. It helps to organize them into a few simple categories, such as Red Hat/Mandrake-based distributions, live CDs, distributions for old hardware and specialist distributions. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a look at some of the more promising, unique or unusual Linux distributions created recently.

Red Hat/Mandrake-based distributions. These are distributions which take Red Hat or Mandrake as a base and add many useful applications purposely left out of Red Hat and Mandrake for various reasons. These are NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, multimedia applications with codecs of questionable legal status, Java, Flash, RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader and other commercial or unsupported applications. While installing and setting up all these is certainly possible in both Red Hat and Mandrake, it requires some searching around the Internet as well as time and effort to configure newly added applications. Several distributions are attempting to fill the gap and come pre-installed and pre-configured with some or all the above mentioned software.

One of the best efforts to-date, at least judging by the overwhelmingly positive user feedback in forums, is JAMD Linux. Despite the low version number (the latest stable version is 0.0.6) and relatively short time since the distribution's launch, it has succeeded in attracting a fair amount of satisfied users and in creating a large user community. Another interesting distribution falling into this category is Aurox Linux - not so much for technical reasons, but rather for its innovative distribution model. Aurox Linux is produced by an large publishing house in Poland and is included as part of a low-cost multi-lingual Aurox Linux magazine. The idea is to get this publication out to as many retail outlets as possible, including general bookstores and supermarkets. By doing so, Aurox is trying to increase the visibility of Linux and tempt potential impulse buyers. This model has proved very successful and if you live in Europe look out for a new Aurox Linux magazine, version 9.1, due to be released this week. Two more interesting projects worth mentioning here are Canada's EduLinux (based on Mandrake 9.1) and Mexico's LGIS GNU/Linux (based on Red Hat 9 with Ximian desktop).

Live CDs. This is probably the fastest growing category of Linux distributions, since it is fairly trivial to re-master Knoppix or even create a custom, bootable Linux CD from an existing installation. Damn Small Linux seems to be one of the more unique Knoppix-based live CDs; it fits on a 50MB business card-type CD and once booted, it provides a script to download and launch Firebird, the web browser, which would have taken too much space on the CD. Other live CD distributions focus on multimedia, with Dyne:bolic GNU/Linux being designed for live streaming audio while GeeXboX for general media playback with MPlayer. Another popular use of live CDs is their deployment as firewalls and Sentinix (formerly a commercial product called Compledge Sentinel, but "freed" recently) seems to be a very promising project. The last distribution worth mentioning in this category is the newly launched MEPIS Linux, a desktop distribution which one can first boot to confirm hardware compatibility before proceeding with a supported hard disk installation. The product tracks Debian's unstable branch, it is frequently updated and it supplies additional applications on supplementary CDs.

Distributions for old hardware. This is one category of Linux distributions, which has sadly been neglected by most mainstream Linux integrators. Many of us have old PCs or notebooks, which not long ago used to run Windows 95 satisfactorily, but are no longer suitable for daily computing tasks. Wouldn't it be nice to get them run a light-weight distribution with a browser, e-mail and, say, a word processor in a graphical mode? Unfortunately, distributions like that are very hard to find, but perhaps DeLi Linux or Drinou-Linux could fill this gap. Both of them are based on an older Slackware release and offer light-weight Sylpheed for email, Dillo for web browsing, SiagOffice for word processing and other low resource software on top of the Fluxbox window manager. They are certainly worth a try.

Specialist distributions. Problems need to be solved and Linux seems to be a perfect solutions for many computing tasks. Puppy Linux is a small distribution that runs entirely in a 48MB ramdisk and can be booted from floppy, USB or ZIP drives, as well as the more traditional hard drives or CD. Other USB pen drive-based distributions include SPB-Linux and RUNT, while NBROK is designed to be installed and run from a ZIP drive. Both RUNT and NBROK are Slackware-based distributions. Another interesting new project is BlackRhino GNU/Linux, a Debian-based distribution for the Sony PlayStation with over 1,200 software packages. And while on the subject of Debian, it is only appropriate to mention a brand new project called DebToo, which as you have probably guessed, is a Gentoo-style Debian distribution "recompiled for your system".

This is of course just the tip of the iceberg and some other distribution categories immediately spring to mind. What about the dozens of floppy and embedded Linux distributions? Or distributions for various non-Intel architectures? We'll look at these in a future issue of LWN.

---

(Log in to post comments)