Vlogcanic

Sidux is a desktop Linux distro based upon Sid, which Debian’s name for their current development distro.

The Sidux project was born last year on Nov 24th as a group of Kanotix developers quited in order to work on a Debian Sid based distro that would install to the hard drive from a LiveCD. It’s developed officialy from Berlin, Germany.

It includes only free software as defined by the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are usually considered to be among the most conservative ones regarding the adherence to the GPL licences.

Since its creation, Sidux has released four Sid snapshots, all during 2007, code named in greek.

So what’s the point of a Sid based distro?

Debian is among the most influential distros in Linuxland and is arguably regarded as the most stable one (theoretically, a Debian system is completely stable if configured correctly) but stability comes at a cost: the Debian project have a very thorough and lengthy test process designed to guarantee stability on the final versions so it can takes many months before any new or cutting-edge piece of software shows up in a stable Debian.

Something of the kind happens in other Debian based distros. Take Ubuntu: an app could take a bit less of time to be availalbe in Ubuntu than it does in a final Debian but it will still take some time and there’s allways the possibility that it simply won’t make it as Ubuntu’s repositories are not as extensive as Debian’s.

In other words: it makes sense to have Sid at hand in a LiveCD that’s easy to install if what you want is almost immediate access to all the latest stuff in Debian, and if stability is not your top priority.