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New Linux Distributions: A Short List of Keepers

March 31, 2004

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

Several new Linux distributions are born every week. Are any of these new projects worth your attention? Here is a short list of some of the more interesting among them, in no particular order.

SystemRescueCd. SystemRescueCd could be thought of as a clone of Partition Magic, only a lot more powerful, and, at $0.00, a lot cheaper. The most interesting feature of the bootable CD is its point-and-click partitioning functionality, courtesy of QTParted and PartGUI. The QtEmbedded toolkit ensures that XFree86 is not necessary to get the graphical partitioning tools running. The two tools are capable of creating and resizing FAT/FAT32, NTFS, ext2/3 and ReiserFS partitions and creating JFS and XFS partitions (resizing of JFS and XFS partitions is not yet supported). The CD also includes a number of other useful tools, such as Partimage (a Ghost/DriveImage clone), several file system and archiving applications, a memory testing utility and other software. The ISO is only around 100MB in size and a PowerPC edition is also available. SystemRescueCd is an excellent distribution to keep around and use whenever you need to (re)partition a hard disk or perform basic rescue tasks.

Puppy Linux. Puppy Linux is an independently developed Linux mini distribution. It is unusual in that it comes in 6 different variants, depending on the boot media. Puppy Linux can be booted from a CD, a USB memory device, a Zip drive, a floppy disk, hard disk, as well as a thin client off a network drive. Whatever your boot device, the entire distribution loads into a 48 - 54MB ramdisk, ready for use. Creating a desired boot device is as simple as following a text-mode wizard launched from the main desktop menu, which, incidentally, is based on Fvwm'95. Puppy Linux is remarkably full-featured for such a small product: it includes a variety of applications for a home user, including two web browsers, a mail, FTP and IRC client, basic word processing, spreadsheet and home finance applications, and a Samba client. A considerable range of multimedia applications is available too; this includes several media players, a CD burning application, an image viewer, and a scanner tool, just to mention a few. All the usual Linux utilities are present as well. Puppy Linux is definitely worth the download just to see how much useful software one can fit onto a 45MB CD! It can also serve as the perfect operating system for that old laptop that has been sitting idly in your cupboard for years!

INSERT. As Knoppix variants go, the Inside Security Rescue Toolkit, or INSERT for short, is one of the more useful distributions. The 50MB business card size CD does not come with many applications, but its ability to write to NTFS partitions, together with the presence of the GPL-ed Clam AntiVirus virus scanner on the CD means that INSERT is a great recovery and virus removal tool for infected Windows machines. It also provides many network analysis, disaster recovery and computer forensics tools, in addition to some general applications. Once booted into Fluxbox, users can download and install Mozilla Firefox for enhanced Internet surfing. Virus signatures can be updated with a single click. Because of its portability, INSERT is a worthy addition to your rescue toolkit, especially if you are unfortunate enough to having to deal with Microsoft systems in your line of work.

PCLinuxOS and MEPIS Linux. Both PCLinuxOS and MEPIS Linux have been getting good reviews and positive feedback from users. What is their secret? Simple: both come pre-configured with a variety of non-free, but essential applications, such as the NVIDIA driver, Flash plugin, Java, RealPlayer and others, and both can be painlessly updated to new versions with apt-get. Granted, these are hardly breathtaking ideas, yet they are a welcome change when compared to all major distributions, none of which integrates these useful applications into their products. PCLinuxOS, initially based on Mandrake Linux, is developed by "Texstar", a well-known personality in the Mandrake user community, with years of experience in building up-to-date RPM packages for various Mandrake releases. MEPIS Linux is based on (and is fully compatible with) Debian. Both distributions can be used as live CDs, thus providing an added value as demonstration tools. Highly recommended; either of them is perfectly suitable for new Linux users as a painless introduction to the world of Free Software.

Rubyx. Rubyx is a new, independently developed source-based distribution. As the name suggests, the distribution's package management tool is programmed in Ruby, an interpreted object-oriented scripting language developed in Japan. If you've ever installed Gentoo, you will be amazed at how much simpler, albeit not less time-consuming, the Rubyx installation process is: all that needs to be done is download a small script, create a new partition for the distribution, and run a single command from within your existing Linux installation. The script will then download, compile and install all the required base applications onto the new partition. The download process uses a custom BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer file sharing utility called WhiteWater. The project is still new and the number of available applications is not nearly as vast as the ones available for Gentoo, but the distribution should be of interest to those users who enjoy tinkering on their spare partitions, or to those who enjoy the power of Ruby.

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