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New Releases from CRUX, Yoper

Earlier this week, two comparatively marginal Linux distributions - CRUX and Yoper announced new versions of their products. The Sweden-based CRUX project released version 1.2, while New Zealand's Yoper Ydesktop distribution moved on to version 1.1. Besides being considered minor distributions, the two projects have a few other things in common - both are essentially one-man projects, both are optimized for the i686 architecture and both have simple text-based installers and loyal supporters. But this is where the similarities end.

CRUX www.crux.nu is the older of the two projects. Its development started in May 2000, although the first public release, version 0.5, was only made available in January 2001. Initially, updated versions were produced at a rapid pace, but recently the project has settled into a more reasonable release schedule of one new release every 4 - 6 months. CRUX is a free distribution developed and maintained by Per Lidén. The latest version comes with many package updates, inclusive of Kernel 2.4.21 and new additions of coreutils and GTK+.

Although CRUX is a Linux distribution developed from scratch and not based on any other distribution, its development was almost certainly influenced by Slackware Linux. This is apparent from its simplicity, use of BSD-style init scripts and simple tar.gz-based package management with no resolution of dependencies. However, CRUX departs from Slackware in two major areas - first one is its i686 optimization, while the second one lies in the choice of CRUX packages, especially the notable absence of KDE and GNOME desktop environments and their libraries. Per Lidén: "I have no plans to extend the current package collection that much since I believe the most important things are there already. Things you can live without, e.g. GNOME, KDE, linuxconf, etc, are never going to be included in CRUX. WindowMaker is the only available window manager.

This approach has won CRUX many followers who prefer the simplicity and low resource requirements of less powerful desktop environments over the perceived bloat of both GNOME and KDE. The project's mailing lists are fairly busy and several community web sites, including a CRUX Wiki, CRUX Community and a collection of contributed CRUX Ports have been set up by the fans of the distribution. Compared to many other one-man projects, CRUX does have decent documentation in the form of the CRUX Handbook. An older interview with Per Lidén by OSNews is another good source of information about the project's objectives.

Yoper www.yoper.com is a much younger distribution; its first public development release was announced in December 2002 and the first stable version - Yoper Ydesktop 1.0 was released in March this year. The distribution is developed by Andreas Girardet and his company, Yoper Limited. The author was interviewed by DesktopLinux.com earlier this year and this is Andreas Girardet's reply to a question about unique features of Yoper: "We are a high-performance OS -- optimized for 686 and higher. We are not a general purpose distribution, but a compact OS with ability to use packages from all other major OS's with support for 'rpm', 'tgz-native', and 'deb' integrated. The binaries we distribute are built from scratch using the latest original 'vanilla' sources. We use the best features from other operating systems and keep installation time to under 10 minutes."

Yoper's first official release was marred by a controversy over what some members of the Linux community perceived as a flashy announcement, high cost of the product and removal of older forum posts, all of which provoked heated exchanges on the Yoper forum. However, as of early last month, Yoper Ydesktop has been stripped of its commercial status and was turned into a community project with users now contributing to the development of the distribution. Yoper's latest release is available for download at no charge.

Yoper Ydesktop 1.1 comes with several interesting features. One of them is support for Gentoo's Portage technology, which has been integrated into Yoper, but other notable improvements include support for Kerberos and an experimental update function for users of the previous release. GNOME 2.2 and Evolution 1.4 are now available on the second CD, which also serves as bootable live CD based on Knoppix. Yoper Ydesktop has been optimized for speed and many users have reported increased responsiveness of Yoper's KDE, OpenOffice and other large applications. On the negative side, Yoper's web site is rather bare and it lacks detailed information about the product's features as well as any solid documentation. It will be interesting to see how the project evolves now that the product has been freed of its commercial burden, or indeed, whether it survives in the long run.

In conclusion, the well-established CRUX distribution will appeal to those who seek a lean and fast desktop/development Linux system based around WindowMaker, while the newer Yoper Ydesktop will please those users who prefer a highly optimized and full-featured KDE-centric Linux distribution. Both CRUX 1.2 and Yoper Ydesktop 1.1 are available for free download from their respective mirror sites.

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