See also: last week's Distributions page.

Distributions

News and Editorials

Goodbye Best Linux, welcome back Sot Linux. The well-known Finnish distribution Best Linux has announced a name change. Changing the name back to good old SOT Linux is now possible, as Sweden is no longer our primary market focus. Several years ago we were obliged to change the name from SOT Linux, because the word "sot" means "disease" or "soot" in Swedish, neither of which were considered desirable by our marketing department. To celebrate the return to a former identity, a new release of the SOT Linux Operating System has been announced. SOT Linux 2002 comes in Desktop and Server versions.

What happened to RunOnCD?. Joe Klemmer pointed out that the link for RunOnCD leads to a Korean error page. He also pointed out http://www.easylinux.co.kr/ that says it's the home of RunOnCD. We couldn't find any code, or even an ISO image to download though. There is a link to http://www.netian.com/~cgchoi/ where one might expect to find downloads, and there are instructions in English that start with, "If you get the images..." ...

Everything else is in Korean, a language not known to any LWN editors. So if anyone knows what happened to RunOnCD, please let us know.

New Distributions

LinEx distribution. The Extremadura Regional Government in Spain has developed the LinEx GNU/Linux distribution, which is based on Debian and Gnome. "LinEx forms part of a wider regional project which aims at promoting the Information Society in order to improve citizens' quality of life." (Thanks to Fred Mobach.)

Boot Everywhere Linux. bootE Linux is yet another minimalist Linux distribution. bootE is pronounced boot-ee and the E could mean Everywhere or Emergency - no one really knows for sure. bootE is an i386 Linux distribution and is contained on a single floppy disk. It supports only single user mode, and is intended as a repair/rescue/emergency distribution. Initial version 0.10 was released April 18, 2002.

ELJOnline: Brian Writes about His BOEL. Brian Elliott Finley writes about BOEL (Brian's Own Embedded Linux), a single floppy distribution based on tomsrtbt. "One of my initial requirements for BOEL was that it had to fit on a single floppy. I wanted to be able to boot a virgin machine from a floppy diskette and have it come up to a point where it could communicate with the network and access its hard disk(s). From that point, I figured I could pull over any scripts or tools necessary that didn't fit on the floppy itself."

Probatus released Probatus Spectra Linux operating system. Probatus Oy released the Probatus Spectra Linux operating system. Designed for workstation and server use, the Finnish made Probatus Spectra Linux comes with lots of extras, including the Probatus Spectra SDK application development environment, which supports all most common operating systems.

Distribution News

Beehive Linux. Beehive Linux has released Beehive Linux 0.5.0 (Money Shot). "Almost everything has been updated to recent versions."

Conectiva Linux. Conectiva Linux has announced (in Portuguese) the release of Conectiva 8.0. An English translation of the announcement is available via Babelfish.

Debian Weekly News. The Debian Weekly News for April 17 is out. It looks at Woody CDs, rsync and Debian, Debian over OpenBSD, KDE3, OpenOffice, and, almost as an afterthought, the Debian Project Leader election results.

Message from the new Debian project leader. The new Debian project leader Bdale Garbee has sent out an introductory announcement. "This is the first of what I hope will be a fairly regular series of messages from me in my capacity as Debian Project Leader. I intend to tackle various topics that I think deserve your attention as we move along the path towards our vision for Debian's future... but right now, I don't want to distract anyone from the effort to get woody released!"

GNU-Darwin supports AMD. GNU-Darwin now supports AMD-based computers in addition to Apple and Intel boxen, and Darwin installer CD images are available for free.

Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter - Issue #39. The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter for April 17, 2002 features an upcoming PPC Installfest in Boston, the Open Directory Project, and much more.

MandrakeSoft releases Mandrake Linux 8.2. MandrakeSoft has announced the release of Mandrake Linux version 8.2 in "retail pack" form. This version includes StarOffice 6.0 and lots more.

Mandrake Linux 8.2 for PPC. MandrakeSoft has announced the immediate availability of Mandrake Linux 8.2 PPC. It comes with Linux kernel 2.4.18; XFree86 4.2 for 3D acceleration with more graphics cards; glibc 2.2.4; KDE 2.2.2; GNOME 1.4.0; Window Maker 0.8; Apache 1.3.23; Evolution 1.01; Galeon 1.0.3; and Mozilla 0.9.8, just for starters.

Slackware. Things have been pretty quiet at Slackware this week. Either the Slackware 8.1 beta2 (released last week) is ready to become the official Slackware 8.1, or people just aren't testing it enough. In any case, the only change this week was a cvs upgrade.

Minor Distribution updates

Arch Linux. Arch Linux has released v0.2 with major feature enhancements.

Bifrost. Thanks to Tom Karlsson we have learned that embedded distribution Bifrost moved to a new URL. See http://bifrost.slu.se/ for the home page in Swedish, or http://bifrost.slu.se/index.en.html for the English version. The entry in our Distributions list has been updated as well.

Keeper Linux. There is a major new release of Keeper Linux. KLX-2.01 boots directly from CDROM with its root filesystem in ramdisk (no hard disk required). Keeper Linux was listed under Floppy-based distributions, but with this release we've moved it to the Special Purpose/Mini section of our list.

Lunar-Linux. Lunar-Linux has released a revised "Petro_e" ISO for download.

Distribution Reviews

Zee Germans and Zee Penguins: SuSE 8.0 beta 3 Review (Linux Journal). The Linux Journal reviews SuSE Linux 8.0 beta 3. "SuSE 8.0 is a great Linux distribution. It's easy to install, which has been a typical problem, has very sane defaults and provides a rich environment for those moving to Linux or upgrading to this version. While only a beta was evaluated here, it shows strong promise for really propelling Linux onto the desktop."

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol

Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.

Distribution Lists:
LWN List
DistroWatch
ibiblio
Linux.com
LinuxLinks
LDP English-language GNU/Linux distributions on CD-ROM
Woven Goods

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