Vlogcanic

Bluewhite64 Linux is developed from Romania as an unofficial 64 bit port of Slackware, that oldest of all active dsitros. The aim is to mimic the user experience of the intel x86 distribution at its best, according to the project’s official launch announcement.

Project Bluewhite64 has been active since May 2006. Their first development version was released in may 30th 2006. Two full Bluewhite64 versions have been released since, v11 and v12, based on Slackware 11 and 12 respectively. They were initially available as installation CDs or DVD but, in time, the project made LiveCD and LiveDVD versions available as well.

The latest member in Bluewhite64 family is a minimal version based on version 12 that works as a LiveCD.

MediaInLinux, now known as ArtistX is an italian Linux distro aiming to collect and provide the largest possible amount of free software for the arts and multimedia edition –graphics in two and three dimensions, music edition, audio edition, video edition, animations, etc. According to the official website, ArtistX transforms a computer into a fully fledged multimedia production studio.

Back in the old days of Mediainlinux (2004-2005) the distro was a Knoppix based LiveCD with Gnome in the desktop. Later, as it became ArtistX, it evolved into a LiveDVD based on Debian with much more software to offer –practically every piece of free software available for multimedia edition in the world is there — and with both Gnome and KDE.

BLAG Linux and GNU is a single disk Linux distribution based on Fedora. It’s developed in England since 2002 by the Brixton Linux Action Group.

The distro is made for processors in the i686 family and makes a point of including free software only. It aims to provide a Linux system with all the apps you could possibly need for personal, multimedia, desktop and office use using only non patent incumbered software, all in one single installation CD.

BLAG Linux and GNU is among the few Linux distros that combine freedom and usability successfully enough to have Richard Stallman’s approval.

If Novell, Sun and Canonical decided to become major players in the open source and free software field it’s because Red Hat showed them the game was well worth playing.

Red Hat is the corporation behind the very successful Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution and is also Fedora’s main sponsor –Fedora being the free and community developed Linux distro from which RHEL forks itself nowadays.

Fedora was born as Fedora Core wen Red Hat discontinued RHEL’s non-commercial brother, Red Hat Linux, in 2003, and has been among the most powerful, cutting edge and respected Linux distributions from its inception, honoring Fedora’s mission: to be about the rapid progress of free and open source software.

Six Fedora Core versions were released between 2003 and 2006 and then it became simply Fedora from version 7 and onwards. Besides the change in name, the distro became available as LiveCDs or LiveDVDs instead of the older five-cd-pack installation bundle.

In some ways, Fedora is both a Linux distro and an idea. It’s influence in the Linux world is huge, as Debian’s, because Fedora’s approach to development is not to come up with stuff particular to Fedora but to contribute in the upstream projects so that such improvements are used by almost any other distro.

RHEL is based on Fedora so that Red Hat’s investment in community development pays off in the commercial product. This is the business model that caught Novell’s eye and prompted them to buy SuSE and fork it into OpenSuSE and Suse Linux Enterprise.

As most of the older and more complete distros Fedora is commonly used as a base for new Linxu flavors. Some examples:

• Yellow Dog Linux
• CentOS
• Scientific Linux
• BLAG Linux and GNU
• Red Flag Linux

Even if Fedora lost a bit of ground in the desktop arena to Ubuntu, Suse and Debian, it still remains one of the most robust, reliable, cutting-edge and respected distros in the Linux world while RHEL is, arguably, the most successful extant service distro.

Damn Small Linux (or DSL) is one of the smallest Linux distros available today. It’s free, it’s fast and it’s 50 MB. Initially started as John Andrew’s personal experiment in order to find out how many useful free software applications could be crammed into 50 MB, Damn Small Linux turned into a larger project with a larger and very passionate development community.

It’s based on Knoppix and uses Fluxbox instead of Gnome, KDE or Xfce in order to achieve maximum efficiency and lightness so that it runs on some really dated hardware — version 4.0 runs on 486DX computers with as little as 16MB RAM. Every application included in Damn Small is chosen to provide as much funcionality possible with as little resources as possible. The kernel series is 2.4 instead of 2.6 so the distro remains compatible with a lot of older hardware no longer supported by the later kernels.

The driving idea behind DSL is to keep adding apps and funcionality, almost a fully featured desktop, to their distros while keeping 50 MB in size and able to run in any kind of system.

DSL standard issue is a LiveCD which fits into a bussiness-card-size CD-R –that includes web browsers, text editors, file managers, PDF viewers and almost all the essential desktop software any user could need. You can use it as a LiveCD, install it to a hard drive or install in to a usb flash drive and use it as a LiveUSB. Since data persistence is supported you don’t need to lose any of your work by finishing your sessions.

The latest Damn Small Linux release is version 4.0, still 50 MB and fully featured.

Damn Small Linux Spin-offs.

The DSL development team is currently working in a parallel project to DSL called Demi Small Linux which will use the 2.6 kernel series and, while keeping a focus on efficiency, will feature a bigger limit in size in order to be more functional ans user friendly.