Vlogcanic

Slackware is among the more venerable active distros –the oldest of them all in fact.

While very apprecieated among expert users because of its design simplicity and transparence, Slackware is, in general, reliable and ligh but not too easy to set up and use. Those very characteristics had render it a good starting point for other distros to build up on usability. Absolute Linux is one of them

Customized Slackware.

Absolute Linux is Paul Sherman’s work, a longtime Slackware user who took upon himself the task to modify the old distro in order to improve user friendliness without losing the good features that have made it so long-lived.

Some of the features in Absolute Linux are:

• Lightness. The system requirements are so friendly to old computers that it can run in almost any system, including the older ones.
• Easy installation. Keeps the text based Slackware installer but its modified in order to make the process swift and easy.
• Desktop oriented. The software included in the single Absolute Linux install CD is selected for the desktop and personal user, not the webmaster.
• Reliability.
• 100% Open Source.

Absolute Linux is aimed towards the Windows user who is sick of blue screens, or having half the system’s resources eaten up by security software trying to keep virii and malaware in check. It’s also a good choice for people with a really old computer they want to bring back to life.

The system requirements to run Absolute Linux are:

• A Pentium or later processor.
• 48 to 64 minimum RAM.
• 3 to 4 GB available hard disk space.
• The ability to boot from a CD-ROM.

Version 12.0.6

Is based on Slackware 12, as announced by Paul Sherman today at the Asolute Linux Webpage, it’s free to download and use, and can be downloaded from ibiblio as a .zip archive or an .iso burnable image.

Have a look at the web page. Among other things it features a detailed installation guide with lots of screencaps.

Among the huge amount of new mini distros getting release these days is NimbleX sub100, an ultra portable Linux distro based on Slackware designed to run from a LiveCD, an USB flash drive or a hard disk.

The sub100 thing is about the fact that the total size of the LiveCD barely scratches the 100MB limit despite its inclusion of a full KDE GUI and an option to run on text mode.

NimbleX sub100 promise a very portable, powerful, light and scalable distro. It offers persistence if installed on a USB flash drive and supposedly can cope with any day to day essential task for the average user on any kind of computer.

Is your curiosity burning to get those 100MB and see if it works as well as it says? Yeah, me too.

Asianux is a distro developed by four asian Linux corporate developers in Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam: Miracle Linux, Red Flag Linux, Haansot and Vietsoftware, respectively.
Initially based on Red Hat Enterprise, the goal for this distro is not exactly to go for the final user but to build a standard common core over which the four developing companies’ products can be deployed.

Today’s release (3.0) spans three ready to download .iso images, available for the most common architectures.

I’m obviously not reporting this becaue of my huge interest in installing a Linux distro with an asian language as the default (although my machines have so many asian parts that maybe such an OS would get along better with the hardware) but because this distro’s development could be of consequence in the next few years. If this asian quartet achieves the goal of a standard common core for custom and general corporate aplications they could, at some point, just turn their attention to western markets and give Red Hat and Novell a bit of a hard time.

Time will tell.

Pioneer Linux 3.0, a commercial desktop oriented Linux distro based on Kubuntu, released today. As its progenitor, Pioneer can be used as a LiveCD which also installs itself to a hard drive. It aims to ease the transition from Windows to Linux.

The main advantage to Pioneer Linux is in the seven year technical support available to users buying the packaged version –there is also and unsupported free version ready to download.

Warren Woodford has had a long carrer as far as informatics is concerned. He’s been involved in testing and deploying household techologies such as the T1 data connection, data modems and digital banking. He held a job at NeXT in which he developed a document and multimedia integration environment called “The Library”. From 2002 on he’s been involved in Linux by founding and developing Simply Mepis, a desktop distro.

Woodford’s initial idea for his new Linux distribution was to turn Debian’s unstable branch into an friendly Linux desktop system with a friendly installation process something unavailable at the time from the big players back in those days (SuSe, Mandriva, Red Hat). The result was SimplyMEPIS’ first release on May 10th 2003.

SimplyMEPIS

MEPIS LLC is Woodford’s company and SimplyMEPIS its flagship product.

From the first version it offered an installation LiveCD (which was a novelty as previously available LiveCDs, such as Knoppix, were not installable) and focused on ease of use and installation as well as desktop tasks.

It’s available for Intel and AMD 32-bit and 64 bit architectures but KDE is the only desktop graphical environment.

Base System: Debian / Ubuntu / Debian.

From it inception SimplyMEPIS was supposed to be a way to produce a friendly and useful OS starting from Debian’s Sid and so it remained between 2003 and July 2006 when SimplyMEPIS 6.0 was released with a new Ubuntu base system and full compatibility with Ubuntu’s binary software repositories.

The move to Ubuntu didn’t last for long (only versions 6.0 and 6.5) and SimplyMEPIS 7.0 went back to Debian. This time the core system is from Debian’s stable branch and the applications are compiled from the latest sources available either from Debian’s unstable or Ubuntu. The reason for building SimplyMEPIS in such a way is, according to Woodford, to have a very stable core with up to date applications and cutting edge software so that users don’t need to reinstall their distro every six months and so the new SimplyMEPIS becomes a Linux distro with a very long useful life.

Downloads.

SimplyMEPIS can be downloaded freely from the MEPIS website and mirrors. MEPIS LCC encourages happy users to buy a download subscription from the official web site as it’s their main income source.

Other Comments.

It’s not infrequent to see MEPIS along with other big names in lists with titles such as “The top 10 Linux distros” or something alike. It’s very appreciated because of their innovations an contributions to the Linux community and for the years they helped to push hardware support and automatic configuration but, it must be said, it’s a field in which they’ve been lagging behind in the last few versions, specially when WiFi adaptors and graphics cards are concerned.