Distributions

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.

Comments (3 posted)

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for September 9, 2003 is out. This week looks at the Rio Karma 20, possibly the first industrially manufactured digital audio player that supports the Ogg Vorbis audio format; an open letter to the European Parliament; Debian and the FSF; Politics in Free Software; and much more.

A second revision of the current stable Debian distribution (woody) is underway. No dates have been set yet for the 3.0r2 release, which will add many security fixes to the stable version.

Comments (2 posted)

Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 36

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of September 9, 2003 is out. This week looks at the success of the second Gentoo BugDay; a continuing look at Gentoo security issues; and more.

Full Story (comments: none)

LynuxWorks Embedded Beta Based on 2.6 Kernel (eWeek)

eWeek takes a look at BlueCat Linux 5.0, due out in November. "The San Jose, Calif., company this week will announce availability of a public beta program for the next version of its embedded Linux operating system, BlueCat Linux 5.0, which is based on the as-yet-unreleased Linux 2.6 kernel."

LynuxWorks has also put out a press release announcing the availability of the beta release.

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Mandrake Linux

MandrakeSoft has released 9.2RC2. The QA team would like to get feedback on upgrades from Mandrake 9.1/9.0/8.2, and any of those last few bugs. (Thanks to Mark Walker)

Comments (none posted)

Slackware Linux

It's been a busy week at Slackware according to the slackware-current changelog. Various sources have been patched and recompiled, including some the kernel 2.4.22 modules. Lots of packages have been upgraded, and some have been recompiled to take advantage of a new libmad. There are also more ham radio package updates from Arno Verhoeven.

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Trustix Secure Linux

Trustix reports a speed bump in the mailing lists as they are being moved to a different machine. If you've been having trouble getting in touch with Trustix, or haven't been getting mail, this could be why.

Full Story (comments: none)

Kernel patches for specialized distributions

openMosix has released the latest clustering extensions to the Linux kernel, version 2.4.22-1.

uClinux has released v2.6.0-test5-uc0 of its Linux kernel for MMU-less processors.

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evelin

evelin is a Linux distribution based upon Mandrake. Its main purpose is to be kept secure and small, while providing the basic functionality that system administrators might need. It runs within its own chroot jail on an existing Linux system. The initial release is version 0.1, dated September 5, 2003.

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GNOPPIX 0.5 released (GnomeDesktop)

FootNotes notes the release of GNOPPIX 0.5. GNOPPIX is a live CD distribution of the Knoppix variety, but it is based around the GNOME desktop.

Comments (none posted)

Linare Linux Desktop OS launches

Linare Corporation has announced its entry into the desktop Linux business; the distribution is KDE-based and retails for $19.95.

Comments (7 posted)

wrt54g-linux

wrt54g-linux is a mini-distribution for the Linksys wrt54g 802.11b/g access point and router. It includes basic tools such as sh, syslog, telnetd, httpd (with cgi-bin support), vi, snort, mount, insmod, rmmod, top, grep, find, nfs modules, etc. The installation script runs in about 20 seconds and installs strictly to the RAM disk. The initial release, version 0.1, is dated September 6, 2003.

Comments (none posted)

Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux has released v0.4.6 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This version features many patches, the addition of traceroute, fixes for a rendering problem with netcardconfig, and modifications to startx so that it will save selected settings for the next X session."

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floppyfw

floppyfw has released v2.9.5 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This version features bridging with ebtables and iptables, ISO images, images for the Soekris NET45xx boxes (and probably other CF/DoC-based systems), and PCMCIA/HostAP support."

Comments (none posted)

Recovery Is Possible!

RIP! has released v6.2 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: PPP/PPPOE support has been added."

Comments (none posted)

Sentry Firewall

Sentry Firewall has released v1.5.0-rc4 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: In this version, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 2.4.22-ow1, along with the IPSec+X509 patches and software. Bind9 and Snort were moved to a chroot environment. The configuration scripts were also updated to include new NIC module dependencies, and network configuration support should now work properly with most 10/100BaseT NICs."

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stresslinux

stresslinux has released v0.2.6 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: All boot kernels have been upgraded to 2.4.22 with some extra networking modules. ISA-Bus and ISA-PNP is now working. Syslinux, smartmontools, and netio were upgraded to new versions. Pcopy is now included for drive mirroring. A display bug in sl-wizard at 80x25 mode was fixed. ASUS-CUV4X-D was added to sl-wizard."

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Debian Review (Distrowatch)

Distrowatch reviews Debian GNU/Linux. "Debian - there has never been any other Linux distro quite like it. Long a favorite of the geek elite, there is no doubt that Debian is popular. Sign up for the Debian-user mailing list, and you can expect to receive about 300 messages a day. Perhaps (just perhaps) there are more people using Redhat, Mandrake or SuSE. However, if bigger means better, then Debian is the undisputed champion - Debian's "stable" branch boasts 8710 "packages" (packages = precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation). In Debian's "unstable" branch there are about 13,000 packages (more than six gigabytes worth). If software was sold by the kilogram, then Debian would fetch top dollar. However, this massive collection of excellent software is free, the work of hundreds (or thousands) of unpaid volunteers. Put that in your pipe and smoke it."

A discussion about this review can be found at DebianPlanet.

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