Distributions

News and Editorials

MostlyLinux, SkatOS and Momonga Linux

This week we will take a look at three distributions that have been around for a while, but are new to the LWN Distributions List.

MostlyLinux is a software company based in Jharkhand, India. The company does mostly the same things other Linux companies do including Enterprise support, corporate training and custom distributions. They also are building a distribution called MostlyLinux. MostlyLinux 9.1 is the latest offering. The distribution is based on Fedora core 1 with lots of additional software.

MostlyLinux chooses packages based on functionality, without the licensing concerns that have kept some of these packages out of Fedora. This is not a system for free software purists. MostlyLinux 9.1 contains a kernel with XFS and NTFS support; it includes multimedia applications like Mplayer, Ogle and Xine; a full suite of packages from LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project); and more. A list of available packages can be found here.

SkatOS was found earlier this week while looking for Xwoaf (X Windows on a Floppy). A current home page for Xwoaf could not be found, but there is a reference to it from the SkatOS home page. SkatOS is a bootable stand alone XSkat card playing system that fits on either one single floppy disk or one ElTorito-boot CD. It features full network client/server support so you can play Skat over LAN with your friends. SkatOS version 1.0 runs XSkat 4.0 based on BusyBox 0.60.5, uClibc 0.9.24 and TinyX 2.2.1 with kernel 2.2.26. Version 1.0 was released August 8, 2004.

Momonga Linux is the successor to Kondara Linux. A Momonga (aka Pteromys momonga) is a flying squirrel found both in Europe and Asia. It's an animal known for a self-asserting behaviour, despite its small size. The Momonga Project, like the momonga, is small and not well-known, but assertive. This general purpose distribution is developed mostly by Japanese programmers, but it supports English just as well and the Momonga web site provides English content, together with English-language mailing lists. Momonga supports eight different Japanese input method servers, a selection of which is available directly from the GDM login screen. Ruby is the scripting language of choice for the project which seeks to be a distribution developed by and for its own users, compatible with next-generation standards, with comprehensive documentation. The first stable version of Momonga Linux was released earlier this month.

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Distribution News

Knoppix 3.6 'aKademy Edition' announced at the KDE World Summit (KDE.News)

KDE.News reports on the release of Knoppix 3.6, "aKademy Edition". "Last-minute bugs were fixed, and the finished version demonstrated exclusively in an aKademy tutorial on Knoppix, indicative of the strong relationship between the Knoppix and KDE developer and user communities."

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Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for August 24, 2004 covers various sarge release topics, KDE package descriptions, web application maintenance, viewing the buildd queue, the Debian Open Use Logo License, closing bug reports, and more.

Here's some Bits from Debian legal, a look at some of the hotter threads on the debian-legal mailing list from August 16 - 22.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 3, Issue 34

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of August 23, 2004 is out. In this edition: the first Gentoo UK Meeting will be held September 4, Gentoo 2004.2 via BitTorrent, hardware upgrade for web forums, a new Operations Lead for the Release Engineering team, Christian Andreetta is the featured developer of the week, and more.

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DistroWatch Weekly #63

This week the DistroWatch Weekly covers Linux in Europe, the release of Momonga Linux 1, some discussion on why Gentoo seems to be declining (according to DistroWatch page hits), and more.

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Fedora Core

There is a Fedora Core 2 kernel-2.6.8-1.521 update available. Included in this new upstream kernel are several fixes on the networking front, including traffic shaping and window scaling fixes.

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Mandrakelinux

Mandrakelinux has updated galeon and epiphany packages. These have been built against latest mozilla to fix some bugs.

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Minor distribution updates

Feather Linux

Feather Linux has released v0.5.7. "Changes: This release includes an upgrade feature, so that users of 0.5.6 can seamlessly update. Midnight Commander now has more features. Experimental ReiserFS support for hard drive installs is now available. aircrack, udhcpd, Dillo 0.8.0, and ndiswrapper 0.10 were included. Fixes to various scripts were made, and the user's system configuration can now be restored from an HTTP or FTP site."

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ImageStream Enterprise Linux Version 4.2.0 for routers

ImageStream Enterprise Linux Version 4.2.0 is available for ImageStream's router customers. Click below for release notes.

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LEAF Bering-uClibc

LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall) has released Bering-uClibc 2.2 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Changes from rc1 include updates of dnsmasq and busybox. The most notable changes from the latest stable version include an update of Linux kernel (2.4.26), a rework of linuxrc, the introduction of a new leaf.cfg and a more flexible module loading scheme, an update to dash 0.5.1, and a redesign of pcmcia support. dnsmasq replaces dhcpd and dnscache."

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Always Current Lineox Enterprise Linux 3.032 Available

Always Current Lineox Enterprise Linux 3.032 is out. Support for x86_64 has been added to this release.

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TopologiLinux

TopologiLinux has released 5.0Beta2 Demo with major feature enhancements. "Changes: It is now possible to run the distribution from inside Windows using coLinux."

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ttylinux

ttylinux has moved to a new web site and released v4.0. "Changes: This release switches to glibc-2.3.3 and updates all other packages to their latest versions."

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Distribution reviews

Hands-Off Fedora Installs with Kickstart (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet kick starts a Fedora install. "In this article, I'll explain how to set up a basic Kickstart environment and perform an install. I tested this process extensively on Fedora Core 1 and briefly on FC2. It may work for Red Hat 9, as well."

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