Unusual, Obscure, and Useful Linux Distros

angry tapir writes "Most people will be familiar with some of the big names when it comes to Linux — distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, and Mandriva. Most of the well-known Linux distros are designed to be used as general-purpose desktop operating systems or installed on servers. But beyond these distros are hundreds of others either designed to appeal to very specific audiences or to fulfill the somewhat niche needs of some users. We rounded up some of the most interesting Linux distributions that you might not have heard of."

Comments

What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shipping Ubuntu with a set of preinstalled applications should not qualify as a distro? Half of this list consists of that and custom wallpapers. What a waste of time.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Anonymous Coward]

MARK SHUTTLEWORTH AND CANONICAL ANNOUNCE LINUX FOR NIGGERS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ISLE OF MAN - June 1, 2009 - At a press conference today, Canonical CEO and Free Software spokesnigger Mark Shuttleworth announced the immediate availability of version 6.06 of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The latest version, known by its code name, "The Diaper Drake," includes special features designed to make Linux easier and more comfortable for niggers the world over.

"Niggers have always had trouble understanding new technology," Shuttleworth began. "Computers are no exception. Some people have said this is because niggers are dumb, but I believe the real problem is that technology has traditionally been designed for white people. Ubuntu changes all that. It was developed from the ground up with niggers in mind. It will usher in a whole new era of Afro-ergonomic computing."

Shuttleworth presented an overview of some of the features users could expect in the latest version of Ubuntu, including an Ebonics-to-English converter, African "tribal beats" sound and desktop theme, and a collection of rap music and gay pornography, "which of course will be encoded using patent and royalty-free formats," Shuttleworth added, smiling. He proceeded to elaborate, but OpenOffice.org Impress crashed at that point.

"But this release isn't just about new features," Shuttleworth said, making a quick segue to the humanitarian and ideological concept behind Ubuntu. "This new version brings black men closer together than ever in the spirit of Ubuntu." Shuttleworth then demonstrated the concept of Ubuntu by getting on his knees and sucking a young black boy's erect penis.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

It only took 12 hours for the site to load, but lets have a look at the "distro" and their roots.

Damn Vulnerable Linux unknown
Tinfoil Hat Linux unknown
CAINE Ubuntu
CAELinux Ubuntu
Ubuntu Christian Edition Ubuntu
live.linuX-gamers.net unknown
Parted Magic Ubuntu
GMusix GNU+Linux Debian
Zeroshell Linux LFS methods (i.e., actually rolled themselves)
Mythbuntu Ubuntu
Damn Small Linux Debian
Tiny Core Linux unknown

Ubuntu 41.6%
Debian 16.6%
--------------
Known Distros 58.3%

Unknown distros 33.3%
Original works 8.3%

Feel free to reply with updates if you know the origin of the unknown's.

I know from personal experience, rolling your own distro is hard work. I tried, using other distros (Slackware and LFS methods) as a guide. Just taking someone elses patched beyond usefulness sources and calling them your own isn't your own work. You aren't building, and you can't go back to the original author and submit a fix. Mine was to stay true to the original author's work, since I've seen so many problems which are directly (correctly) attributed to some distro haphazardly patching (and breaking) things.

I spent a lot of spare time writing and rewriting build scripts, hunting down sources (real quick, where is the authors site for the most current version of "ps"?), building a build environment, building the sources into installable packages. It sounds like an awful lot of fun, until you've already spent a month putting things together, and you've just gotten past the low level stuff (basic system utilities, filesystem utilities, compilers, major required libraries, and the boot loader of your choice). Wow, a month later, and we don't even have X, a desktop manager, or occasionally useful things like a web browser. Now you have to go back and check all your versions against the current version available from the author. Unless you have a rather dedicated team of folks with no day jobs nor personal lives, you'll spend your days just verifying that your packages are built from current sources.

God forbid there's a change in say glibc, which breaks some other application. Now you're notifying the author of the application, which can be a job in itself to go back and forth with them about what distro you're running (built it myself). Oh, you're own? That's good and bad. What versions of the compiler and required libraries are you using? "Sign up to my mailing list, so we can all work on it." Two weeks later, you may have a patch which may become a released version two more weeks later. If you're a good guy, and somehow have way too much time on your hands, well versed in every programming language and methodology, a genetic disposition to not sleeping, and a serious speed habit, you may be patching it yourself, and handing that patch up to the author. What? Your patch was refused because it didn't follow his methodology? It doesn't work in recursion and will break older distros (like the one right before the glibc update). Now you've fallen into what others do. I'll patch mine, but just this one, I swear. It'll be the authors true code when he releases the right fix. On to the next!

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh look! it's the rare and elusive slashdot story about how good linux is! i never would have expected that from a news source owned by a company publicly traded on the stock market as: lnux! geez no coincidence here!

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[zmollusc]

Curse you, mod point allocation bot! I need to mod parent 'eye-opening if, like me, you never considered how much work goes into a distro'.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Anonymous Coward]

" Damn Vulnerable Linux unknown"

It's based on Debbian and Knoppix. See: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=damnsmall

" Tinfoil Hat Linux unknown"

Not listed on Distrowatch, or at least I couldn't find it :(

" live.linuX-gamers.net unknown"

It's based on Arch, see: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=linuxgamers

" Tiny Core Linux unknown"

Independent (self-rolled). See: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tinycore

If you want details about Linux Distributions there's no better place I know of, or more comprehensive, than distrowatch.com. Really surprised Tinfoil is not listed!

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[jimmydevice]

I tried to build up a RT Linux distro using the latest release from kernel.org while trying to support a OMAP processor. Needless to say, since they wanted it in 30 days, I didn't get it all put together. I was shown the door. even though I had the x86 version running.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[pecosdave]

You forgot

anything Ubuntu Debian

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Cylix]

BusyBox with a custom kernel could probably have been pulled off in that time frame. As long you were quite aware of it already.

I find some of the more obscure and useful stuff is simply about finding it.

Plop is a nice busybox variant which has been design to boot and run entirely in ramdisk. I designed several rack burn utilities with plop so I could test on a closed network. The advantage of creating a single head and moving onto the next host with my usb stick was quite handy.

However, getting to that point and finding someone who had laid a good foundation was a bit time consuming.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

    hehe. Thanks. :)

    Really, I hadn't thought it was so hard until I tried. I'm glad I did. It's something every really serious senior Linux admin should try at least once. Besides a very interesting understanding of how things work beyond "type this command, watch this happen", it taught me to respect my elders, and watch for mistakes that are made (like the patching chaos that is the Redhat/Debian/derivatives world).

    After that dive in, I pray to the Slackware god, since he does things pretty damned close to the way I like. There are several finer points that I could probably argue with Patrick about over beers sometime (assuming we're ever in the same place at the same time, and he'd accept a free drink or three). Not that the argument would get anywhere, but it would be a nice discussion, and a fun excuse to drink. Bah. Who needs excuses for that? :)

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

  Thanks.  Since the only one left is tinfoil, I grabbed it, and did a little poking around.  Just based on the mentions in the readme.txt, it may be a self-rolled distro.  It to be Busybox based.  I was thinking of rolling one of those up myself, except busybox annoys me when it can't do particular things because it doesn't understand posix flags (my biggest annoyance is with cp).  That can be corrected easily enough with some select static binaries, rather than symbolic links to busybox. :)

  The busybox "cp" flags are:

  cp [-a] [-d] [-p] [-R] Source ... Target

  The posix "cp" flags are:

  cp [-f] [-H] [-i] [-p] [-r | -R] [--] Source ... Target

  There are others, I've just had quite a few occasions to boot to a Busybox based CD, and then my commands don't work.  Or worse, a script on the machine doesn't work because the flags don't work.

  So the distro tally is up to:

  Damn Vulnerable Linux     Debian
  Tinfoil Hat Linux         self-rolled (?)
  CAINE                     Ubuntu
  CAELinux                  Ubuntu
  Ubuntu Christian Edition  Ubuntu
  live.linuX-gamers.net     Arch
  Parted Magic              Ubuntu
  GMusix GNU+Linux          Debian
  Zeroshell Linux           self-rolled - LFS methods
  Mythbuntu                 Ubuntu
  Damn Small Linux          Debian
  Tiny Core Linux           self-rolled

  Ubuntu (5)        41.6%
  Debian (3)        25.0%
  Arch   (1)         8.3%
  --------------
  Known Distros (9) 75.0%
  Original (3)      25.0%

  That's still a long way from a list of distros to check out, unless you like checking out the same thing over ... and over ... and over ...

  BTW, sorry for the code formatting.  I wanted to keep my columns straight in the data parts of the post, and I don't know of a better way on here to do it.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[jimmydevice]

I had busybox on my list of tools I used and cut a systems with it using slack, but I got paranoid
after the latest kernel requirement and bailed to debian for the tools. In the end, I SUCKED and DIED.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Skapare]

Just organize the differences you make as a set of SlackBuilds and release those. Call it a derivative (unless you are a financial institution).

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Nyder]

I read your post and i'm not really sure why you are taking something someone else did and trying to keep "loyal" to his work.

If your making your own distro/branch/whatever. You snapshot whatever source your taking it from, and then just work from that. If you keep going back to the source and trying to add updates to your NOT finished work, you will never get your project finished.

You take the source, do what you need to do to get it working. Then you can go back to the updates and work them in.

Plus, if your going to follow someones source so close, just go help them out instead of stealing their crap and changing stuff for your own. Your just wasting your time, and then theirs if they are trying to help you fix something that's not working.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

    I was using Slackbuilds, but those can get complicated, with programs that require complex setups. I wish everyone just set up for "./configure && make && make install", of course with setting an install prefix so it doesn't just go stomping all over the running filesystem.

    For my old work, we ran our own Slackware mirror, and let it pull additional packages as needed. It was a very smooth operation. You have to love a network of about 150 machines, where there are just two guys doing all of the IT, and everything works like clockwork, so the only "urgent" work is the occasional page warning something is down. Of course, those come at the worst times. No woman is impressed when your phone starts beeping, when you're having an X rated adult moment. Somehow, the servers knew when it was happening, and would break something before either of us finished. :(

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[arndawg]

Tinfoil is gentoo hardened.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your experience mirrors my own w.r.t. building a GNU/Linux distribution. After spending the better part of 6 months automating the "build instructions" for Linux from Scratch (LFS) it was satisfying to have gained a much deeper understanding of the effort required to create a distribution. Now that the automated build framework is completed I have been able to successfully build and deploy a variety of systems suited to my specific needs.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[GaryOlson]

Not an attempt to be a smartmass; but, had you considered building a distro just for building distros? Database, web crawler for tracking source updates, virtual box included for compiling/testing, svn, etc....all the tools for building a maintaining a distro over time.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[metamechanical]

I was interested in the bit about busybox (namely, wondering why they wouldn't include such useful and dead-simple flags like -f), and the first page I discovered (http://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html) listed the following for cp:

cp

cp [OPTIONS] SOURCE DEST

Copy SOURCE to DEST, or multiple SOURCE(s) to DIRECTORY

Options:
-a Same as -dpR
-d,-P Preserve links
-H,-L Dereference all symlinks (default)
-p Preserve file attributes if possible
-f Force overwrite
-i Prompt before overwrite
-R,-r Recurse
-l,-s Create (sym)links

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a copypasta, you drooling 'dromer.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[zill]

" Tinfoil Hat Linux unknown"

Not listed on Distrowatch, or at least I couldn't find it :(

Hence the name...

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[raw-sewage]

Not an attempt to be a smartmass; but, had you considered building a distro just for building distros? Database, web crawler for tracking source updates, virtual box included for compiling/testing, svn, etc....all the tools for building a maintaining a distro over time.

In some respects, I think that's what Gentoo is.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Group XVII]

You mean Tin Hat Linux is gentoo hardened.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're results might vary but I've built at least a couple from-scratch linux liveCD's using gentoo's cross compile option (ie, not using a stage tarball) and slax live-cd tools. Could pull one off in about a week of spare time. At one point in a time I wrote a stageless livecd wiki article but I think it died when gentoo's wiki disappeared a couple years ago (there is a new wiki now).

I think unionfs has been replaced by something else but using gentoo you can build overlay slax modules by creating a unionfs on top of your base system and adding new packages :). Was useful back when you only had 512MB of ram, wanted to boot your system in ram, but also wanted the option to add a bunch of games to play (which would load off the CD as needed).

While I respect LFS users it isn't actually *that* hard to build your own linux distro (if you already know your way around linux). But why would you make your own when you can build on top of an already proven platform?

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[socz]

Because of previous experiences, I take into consideration the effort and time it'll take to write something up from scratch for my own customized use or just adapt someone else's work. Though, I've never released code that I didn't write.

What is interesting though, is to catch your work in action under someone else's name! I was writing scripts for mIRC (I know!) in the 90s and did some cool stuff. So one day in a channel I see familiar format and I'm like hmmmm. So of course, being a little sneaky after having been ripped off (no credit!) before, I paste some text and bam! There it is, Socrates Script 2000! Ah how sweet it was.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

I read your post and i'm not really sure why you are taking something someone else did and trying to keep "loyal" to his work.

    Over the years, I've seen many times where end users will have a fault that was a direct result of patches the distro vendor did. Basically, they install the vendor (distro) provided package. It has some nasty bug that makes the software crash. The end user goes to the software author's mailing list or forum (obvious choices for getting help with a specific program) and says "Your program always crashes. You need to fix it! Help me!" In reality, the software works fine as the author wrote it, but the vendor patches broke it. I've seen it where either applications, or even major libraries.

    It's not always just crashing problems. Sometimes there are induced security holes. I cringe every time I see an announcement on a security mailing list, where the only affected systems are from a particular distro vendor, because they inadvertently created the security hole.

    I believe in loyalty to the authors work, because they are the experts in it. If there's a fix to be made, provide it to the author, and let them include it in their future release. If you think you know the authors software so much better than them, and their program needs your patches so bad but you aren't willing to submit them back up, fork it or write your own competing software.

If your making your own distro/branch/whatever. You snapshot whatever source your taking it from, and then just work from that. If you keep going back to the source and trying to add updates to your NOT finished work, you will never get your project finished.

    You don't read security mailing lists much, do you? You'll never make a snapshot of a utopian world. Program x today may have a huge bugfix tomorrow. Distros are always putting out upgrade packages specifically to fix problems. If you just grab what's available today, and bury your head in the sand, you'll have all kinds of problems in the future. I worked somewhere, and they sang the song you're singing. They'd used a particular version of a distro years ago. Once they decided that worked for them, they kept installing the same version of that distro everywhere. They didn't do patches. They didn't upgrade anything because "We don't know what else it could break." They also found themselves vulnerable to a huge variety of remote exploits that had been corrected in subsequent patches and newer versions.

Plus, if your going to follow someones source so close, just go help them out instead of stealing their crap and changing stuff for your own. Your just wasting your time, and then theirs if they are trying to help you fix something that's not working.

    Where did I say anything about stealing anyone else's stuff?

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[Steve Max]

" Damn Vulnerable Linux unknown"

It's based on Debbian and Knoppix. See: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=damnsmall

Actually, that's Damn Small Linux. Damn Vulnerable Linux is Slackware/Slax-based, at least according to this

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

    That's kind of where mine was progressing towards. I'd grab the sources, and the build scripts were flexible enough to build new versions. My build environment did everything from scratch on a weekly basis. The project was never completed (as I mentioned), but it was set up to rebuild everything from current sources and build a fresh ISO, so i didn't have to sit around waiting for it, I could just go grab the current ISO to use. It was to take advantage of the fact that there was a scheduled weekly build, so if say a new version of zlib came out because of a nasty bug, everything that was linked to it would be updated for me too. I'm sure we all remember that happening. Automation was important, so I couldn't screw something up manually. :)

    Not every authors site has a friendly way to just check in and see what the current release is. Sometimes there are version number naming convention changes. Like their version history may go: 2.0 , 2.0.1beta, 2.0.2-rc3, 2.0.2-final, 2.0.2.1, 2.2 . You could go all crazy with regular expressions, but extra decimals, abbreviations, and text make it a nightmare to automate. Even if you just had a crawler in place to see if their releases page had changed, sometimes the authors simply add some text change, which would trigger it. Like, someone may have their releases on their front page, and put news updates also. Great. On Dec 25, you could very likely get a flurry of notices that pages changed, just to find out that a few dozen people put up a note saying "Merry Christmas". What's worse is when they move. They may have a message on their page saying that it's going to be served from a new site. You may have to go hunt it down.

    I'd suspect it has been done. I'd also suspect that those folks spend a lot of time reading false alarms.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

    My example must have been from an older busybox. I know I've seen it recently, but not everyone stays up to date on boot disk utilities. :) To find the flags, I just searched Google for "busybox cp options", and got this page, which shows the older options set.

    http://spblinux.de/2.0/doc/cp.html

  If I'm moving a lot of stuff around, especially if there are a variety of ownerships and permissions, I (out of habit) use "cp -RPp". I know "cp -a" would do the same thing in either case. It wasn't crippled, it just broke my habits, and some scripts when they ran in that environment. I'm glad they updated it.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[fishexe]

No woman is impressed when your phone starts beeping, when you're having an X rated adult moment.

Unless it also starts vibrating, and it was being used in an X-rated manner at the time. I think there's a lesson in this...

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[xiong.chiamiov]

BTW, sorry for the code formatting. I wanted to keep my columns straight in the data parts of the post, and I don't know of a better way on here to do it.

You could... only format the table that way? Not all tags need to be opened at the beginning and closed at the end, y'know.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

While I respect LFS users it isn't actually *that* hard to build your own linux distro (if you already know your way around linux). But why would you make your own when you can build on top of an already proven platform?

    I was just saying that if you're going to build on someone else's work, say that it's theirs with mods. The post I was replying to was complaining that these "distros" weren't distros, they were skins with some packages added. Only 2 of 12 were distros in their own right. The remaining 10 were existing distros with mods.

    When I take Slackware and mod the heck out of it, it's still Slackware with mods.

   

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[JWSmythe]

    Actually, I just set the input mode at the bottom to "code". For a while the code tag itself wasn't working, but I see it is again. I don't tend to use it that much.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[xiong.chiamiov]

For a while the code tag itself wasn't working, but I see it is again.

Yes, I've noticed that and wondered why. When quoting your message I saw that it used tt for monospace, although I can't for the life of me get an option to ignore html tags in this message.

Huh, I've never even click the Options button down there. It seems to be just about as well-designed as the rest of /. ;).

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[arndawg]

Ah yes. I appologize and should have double checked that before I posted. I just vaguely remembered them from the gentoo hardened mailinglist and made an assumption. ;)

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[gregben]

Care to share your homebrew "ALFS" scripts, etc. ? I'd love to avoid
reinventing the wheel, especially if what you've done is fairly straightforward
and clean.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[NateTech]

What's really interesting about your list is ...

Since Ubuntu is really a Debian derivative itself...

And since not a single one is RedHat/Fedora based...

It says something very interesting about the ability to easily roll your own distro off of Debian's choices (over a decade ago) in their packaging system, vs. RPM.

And I remember oh so clearly how .spec files and RPM were going to "change the packaging world" over that "clunky dpkg stuff you use on Debian" from oh-so many friends who bought into the (paid) marketing hype from RedHat... back in the day.

Not trying to start a distro war, just thought it was interesting that RH/Fedora distros are so almost non-existent in this particular list. Respin makes rolling a custom CD of CentOS/RHEL super duper easy these days, too...

Very interesting.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[badkarmadayaccount]

There's this idea I've had in my head for a while - RSS feeds of patches from DVCS, targeting a build server directory, with basic scripting control. That way distro makers can have almost any combo of patchsets that anybody can reasonably want, and leave them just with making the final app/version selection, and wrap the binaries up in archive*cough*package format of choice. Though some compiler features are warranted, in order to support all the different compile time options - I'd say storing the AST in a database as a compiler cache, and some language integrated macros to provide for the actual compile time options. Result will probably be a main binary, with some diffs, or a really fat ELF that ca be stripped with standard tools. I was wondering whether anybody round here think it's reasonable.

Re:What is the definition of 'distro'?

[DoomHaven]

Bookmarked

The most useful distro is...

[w0mprat]

... the live CD you have with you.

Re:The most useful distro is...

[kthreadd]

I would put my vote on a live USB stick. Usually easier to save to.

Re:The most useful distro is...

[grantek]

... the live CD you have with you.

Which is ALWAYS System RescueCD - I've never come across a better emergency disc.

Re:The most useful distro is...

[miggyb]

Really? You think putting a Linux distro on a USB stick is easier than burning a CD? There's a lot of good reasons for putting Linux on a USB stick, but convenience of setup is not and will never be one of them.

Re:The most useful distro is...

[kthreadd]

Oh no, I was refering to when you want to save the files you are working with and that it is usually easier if you boot from a USB stick instead of a CD. :-)

Re:The most useful distro is...

[mikechant]

Really? You think putting a Linux distro on a USB stick is easier than burning a CD?

Neither easier or more difficult.
I don't know what you use to put Linux on a USB stick but I use a utility which is essentially identical to a CD image burning utility - select source image, select destination drive, click on 'write'/'burn'.

Re:The most useful distro is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading comprehension FAIL.

Re:The most useful distro is...

[Tom9729]

Ever heard of unetbootin? In some cases it's even easier than burning a distro to a CD, because it will even handle downloading the ISO for you. Just stick in a formatted fat32 flash drive and within 15 minutes you can have a liveusb stick working.

Re:The most useful distro is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Score: -2

50% can't fucking read
50% idiot

Re:The most useful distro is...

[BrokenHalo]

Any Linux install disc will do. Lots of my friends swear by Knoppix or various other liveCDs, but I just use an old Slackware install disc that is usually somewhere near the top of the pile. My own Arch Linux disc hasn't been used for years (the rolling-release thingy makes installation a once-in-a-lifetime event), so it's close to the bottom of the heap.

Sort of (but not quite) off-topic:

Why, oh why do these idiots have to spread such a small article over two pages? I can't think of a single valid reason to do so (unless pissing off your readers is valid).

Re:The most useful distro is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll have to check that out. Have you looked at RIP (Recovery Is Possible)? That's been my live CD of choice for ages now.

Re:The most useful distro is...

[zx-15]

Oh, please, does it have LVM support, Ext4 and a linux kernel that can boot off CD-ROM over USB?

Re:The most useful distro is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto to this, I can't believe there was ever a time i used anything else. Keep it installed on a usb thumb drive I have on me at any given time, great for restoring systems, or hell, who knows when you may feel like re-installing gentoo onto a laptop :)

Re:The most useful distro is...

[Anonymous Coward]

You call that easy??

How to make a bootable grml USB stick:

dd if=grml.iso of=/dev/sdX

Re:The most useful distro is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Using it for many years ...

Needs a mirror?

[AHuxley]

We need a new instant mirror site for slashdot. Any suggestions?
"One of the benefits of open source software that many people are most familiar with is that it's free to download.
This means you can grab great applications — such as Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, the OpenOffice.org office suite or the GIMP photo editing program — without paying a cent.
However, the other major benefit of truly open source software (some "open source" software licences are more restrictive than others) is that you're allowed to modify a program and redistribute your altered version so other people can enjoy it.

Linux is a classic example of this: there are hundreds (at least!) of different Linux-based operating systems. Most people will be familiar with some of the big names — distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian and Mandriva.
Most of the well-known Linux distros are designed to be used as general purpose desktop operating systems or installed on servers. But beyond these distros are hundreds of others either designed to appeal to very specific audiences or to fulfil the somewhat niche needs of some users.
We rounded up some of the most interesting Linux distros out there that you might not have heard of.

Insecure by design: Damn Vulnerable Linux

Damn Vulnerable Linux is "The most vulnerable and exploitable operating system ever" according to its Web site.
It's designed for security training; it includes training material and exercises (as well as a whole bunch of flaws to exploit). As Mayank Sharma notes: "Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL) is everything a good Linux distribution isn't. Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks."

Indulge in paranoia: Tinfoil Hat Linux

Tinfoil Hat Linux is pretty much the opposite of Damn Vulnerable Linux: it's designed for the paranoid among us.

"It started as a secure, single floppy, bootable Linux distribution for storing PGP keys and then encrypting, signing and wiping files.
At some point it became an exercise in over-engineering." According to its developers, a possible reason for using it is that that "Illuminati are watching your computer, and you need to use morse code to blink out your PGP messages on the numlock key." They're joking. Probably. (In case you want more tinfoil protection, there are some links to a site about aluminium foil deflector beanies and tinfoil suits.)

CSI Linux: CAINE
CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is probably one of the coolest niche Linux distributions around. It's designed for digital forensics (so sadly, no blood spatter analysis) and was developed at the Information Engineering Department of the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia in Italy. It includes software such as TheSleuthKit and Autopsy Forensic Browser for examining file systems, data recovery applications, steganography tools and utilities for securely wiping drives (you know, in case someone else has a copy of CAINE).
Open source engineering: CAELinux

Eminently embeddable: Zeroshell
Zeroshell Linux gets its name from being designed to be solely administered through a Web interface. It's intended to be used on servers and embedded devices.
Its features include load balancing, support for 3G mobile broadband connections and RADIUS support.

Ditch Windows Media Centre: Mythbuntu
Mythbuntu is not really a niche distribution, but it is designed for a specific task rather than being a general desktop distro.
Mythbuntu is used to run PVRs and media centre PCs. As its name indicates, it's derived from Ubuntu Linux.
However, it's ditched the Gnome and by default utilises the relatively barebones Xfce desktop environment.

Damn Small Linux is damn cool

Damn Small Linux (DSL) is actually quite a well known distribution. It's not nearly as small as the amazing MenuetOS (which is a non-Linux OS writ

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just add .nyud.net to the end of the domain name. The first page seems to have been mirrored. The second, not so much.

On a side note, I wish the maker of the Digger Firefox extension added "Find page on Nyud.net" along with "Find page in Google Cache" and "Find page in the Internet Archive".

Re:Needs a mirror?

[anss123]

Damn Vulnerable Linux

Finally the distro I'm been waiting for. I'm ditching Vista!

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Bugamn]

Not only is the article page slashdotted, but it seems that some of the pages the article references (or at least the linux gamers distro) are too.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[chill]

Ubuntu Christian Edition? What's the matter? Jesux wasn't holier-than-thou enough?

Re:Needs a mirror?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I hope they get along.

Last thing we need is a literal distro holy war.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[pinkushun]

I was more partial to Ubuntu Satanic Edition

Re:Needs a mirror?

[aussieslovethecock]

shut up, fag. Your joke is fucking stupid.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[lennier1]

Did they turn gksudo into UAC?

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Linker3000]

I'm Jesux and so is my CentOS

Re:Needs a mirror?

[pinkushun]

LOL! :)

Re:Needs a mirror?

[jimmydevice]

I'd run that in a sandbox.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, Slashdot is a place where Linux people come to vent the enormous chips on their shoulders, safe in the knowledge that the Slashdot groupthink will mod any dissenting pro-Windows/anti-Linux comments into oblivion. Don't let the naive misunderstood references to 1984 fool you, this is not a place where rational debate and fact are welcome!

Re:Needs a mirror?

[jimmydevice]

No fortune -o

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, it's not 1999 any-more. The pro-Linux code has mostly moved on.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[1mck]

shut up, fag. Your joke is fucking stupid.

Bill....Is that you?

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Man Eating Duck]

We need a new instant mirror site for slashdot. Any suggestions?

Coral Cache fits the bill quite well, I have no idea why the editors don't use it. It'll create a mirror of any url you link to and navigate through, and they can take a slashdotting :)
Follow this link to check out the CCed version of the article.
If you're on Firefox the TADSEE extension provides a handy shortcut to a Coral Cache mirror when you right click a link.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[ZeRu]

Bill....Is that you?

No, Bill is a grown-up.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[AltairDusk]

Recursive Slashdotting!

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, it was Steve.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[FrankieBaby1986]

Typical Christians (Hypocritical/Not Thinking Things Through)

From the Jesux website:

No encryption provided; Christians have nothing to hide We have had concerns about the "no encryption" item ... but no worries, crypt(3) will still be there. Sorry for the confusion, we do not generally consider it as encryption, though, of course, technically it is. But since it is generally unsuitable for anything other than password authentication, we don't see any problem with it.

Umm, how about SSL for secure web purchases or banking? Or do you not mind if I have your credit card details and bank account passwords? Nothing to hide my ass. How about using the saved passwords feature on a browser? Might that encrypt your passwords? Silly Silly Silly.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[the_womble]

Jesux is a spoof, and a very clever and funny one. It sends up the attitudes of American, right wing, fundamentalist weirdos, extremely well, and is almost believable.

I wish I had thought of it.

If there is a distro holy war, it should be between UCE and Ubuntu Satanic Edition.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Attila Dimedici]

You apparently missed that it was a spoof site (and a very old one at that).

Re:Needs a mirror?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I thought SuSE went out of business.

Re:Needs a mirror?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, sorry. That isn't recursive at all. Maybe next time you try a joke on terms you understand?

The abbreviated list

[Anonymous Coward]

The site is rapidly going down the slashdotting drain. This is the twelve without analysis or explanation.

Insecure by design: Damn Vulnerable Linux
Indulge in paranoia: Tinfoil Hat Linux
CSI Linux: CAINE
Open source engineering: CAELinux
Seeking open source converts: Ubuntu Christian Edition
Frag-tastic: live.linuX-gamers.net
Hard disk wizardry: Parted Magic
Get creative: Musix GNU+Linux
Eminently embeddable: Zeroshell
Ditch Windows Media Centre: Mythbuntu
Damn Small Linux is damn cool
And then there's really small: Tiny Core Linux

Re:The abbreviated list

[Clopnixus]

Can't get to the site but if your list is complete I'm surprised there's no mention of Scientific Linux. The distro created by the Fermi National Accelerator laboratory and CERN has to be high on the list of unusual and interesting Linux distributions. Actually, works pretty well as a standard desktop too...

Re:The abbreviated list

[Vectormatic]

What surprises me is no SLAX. When i first found it SLAX was a very usable live-cd which would fit on those tiny 8cm CDs (before large enough USB sticks were affordable enough to just have a few in your bag) and had an easy startup option to load the entire image into ram

Then i check it a few months ago, it now offers an interface on the website to select from a very large library of software, click the boxes you want and presto, instant live-image completely to your own taste

Re:The abbreviated list

[arth1]

Can't get to the site but if your list is complete I'm surprised there's no mention of Scientific Linux. The distro created by the Fermi National Accelerator laboratory and CERN has to be high on the list of unusual and interesting Linux distributions.

Quote "Most people will be familiar with some of the big names when it comes to Linux -- distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, and Mandriva."
Scientific Linux is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, like CentOS.

But anyhow, the submission is wrong. "Most people" haven't heard of RHEL, Debian and Mandriva. "Most people" think Linux is a synonym for Ubuntu, and that anything you type must be preceded with "sudo ".

Which, IMHO, has done a great disservice to the Linux community, in bringing in more people who want things done The Microsoft Way, with windows blown up full screen, use of privilege escalation instead of multiple concurrent users and groups, and kitchen sink apps instead of the toolbox approach.

There have been a lot of great Linux distros over the years. Unfortunately, most of them have either sold out (like SuSE) or succumbed to internal political quagmires (Gentoo). Right now, I think Fedora is the best pretender for the throne, despite being more bleeding edge than cutting edge.
Hopefully, some of the others listed in TFA will find their fiefdoms or even aspire to greatness too.

Re:The abbreviated list

[BrokenHalo]

...and that anything you type must be preceded with "sudo ".

You can get around that by typing "sudo su".

Re:The abbreviated list

[cayenne8]

"Unfortunately, most of them have either sold out (like SuSE) or succumbed to internal political quagmires (Gentoo). "

Really?

Pretty much all I've ever used at home over the past years has been Gentoo. I don't find any problems with downloading and installing it.

Their help forums, IMHO, still continue to be some of the most helpful and friendly ones I've ever encountered.

Re:The abbreviated list

[arth1]

I have two servers at home -- one Gentoo, and one Fedora.
The software versions lag _severely_ behind with Gentoo. Samba, Squid, dovecot, pretty much any kind of network related software is going to be far older.

And then there's the issues compiling. Some packages won't compile with gcc3, because the maintainers have used gcc4 specific options without requiring a version >=4. And some packages fail if you do horrible things like changing root's shell from bash to something else, or set POSIXLY_CORRECT. Then there's SELinux, which is so far behind on Gentoo that it's not even working anymore. Required packages are no longer available.

In short, in order to keep the Gentoo system running, the /etc/portage/package.(mask|unmask|use) files grow longer and longer every time.

Re:The abbreviated list

[Larryish]

And don't forget about Car Analogy Linux.

It is like putting 2 bottles of octane booster in a 10 gallon gas tank.

Coral Cache

[0100010001010011]

http://www.goodgearguide.com.au.nyud.net:8080/article/351651/12_most_interesting_unusual_useful_linux_distros/

Come on submitters, just hit it once before you hit submit, that way a mirror exists somewhere.

These distros should become meta-packages.

[Zombie Ryushu]

These distros should become meta-packages for larger distros. You should not need to install a specialized OS because you need specialized applications or specialized configurations. The application developer would be better served working with the larger Linux community, to ensure that the usefulness of the given applications is compatible and availible across all distros and platforms. Linux should always have a diverse ecosystem, but Linux should also have a universality about it, that a given meta-configuration can be established to a given Linux with automatic dependency resolution.

Re:These distros should become meta-packages.

[MichaelSmith]

How do you propose adding to Debian to make tinycore?

Re:These distros should become meta-packages.

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Some of these, Parted Magic in particular, are just meant to be on a Live CD/DVD. Not all of the people who are going to use the Live CD are going to be full-time Linux users, or want to give up a partition for something they use once in a blue moon.

Re:These distros should become meta-packages.

[IBBoard]

Yeah, I've just had to use Parted Magic recently (great little distro - a utility, but nicely put together and presented) but it sure wouldn't be my core desktop distro.

As for the meta-packages idea, they'd either end up a) having to get included in the core distro and its repos (which will be difficult in Ubuntu, as they'll want a certain level of confidence in it) or b) stashing it in a separate add-on repo that you've got to install yourself after the main install. Either way around, it isn't as self-contained as a pre-configured distro, and I'm sure most of the apps could be or are made available outside the distro anyway.

Re:These distros should become meta-packages.

[Kjella]

I think some already are, like MythBuntu. I might be wrong, but I think it uses the same mythtv package you can install on plain Ubuntu, the distro just drops many of the standard packages and makes you boot directly into myth. The latter might be good reason to have a separate distro, what a "sane" detault is probably depends on whether it's a dedicated appliance box or not.

Re:These distros should become meta-packages.

[Gothmolly]

you sound whiny.

Re:These distros should become meta-packages.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you didn't even bother to look at the article and distros mentioned. What you suggest isn't practical for most of them. You could perhaps do it for the Ubuntu-based ones, but people like live CDs, so you might as well present them as a separate distro with their own install CDs even though they aren't greatly different and still use the Ubuntu repositories.

pfsense?

[bundaegi]

Not seen this one mentioned yet. pfsense is by far my favourite specialised linux distro.

Re:pfsense?

[simoncpu was here]

Replying to undo moderation. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, not Linux.

Re:pfsense?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because pfsense doesn't use Linux for starters, knucklehead.

Also, at this point I would hardly call pfsense obscure... Whatever though.

Re:pfsense?

[aussieslovethecock]

what's the difference, you jew?

Re:pfsense?

[tapanitarvainen]

pfSense is based on FreeBSD, not Linux.

Yeah. There're several Linux-based firewall distros, though; IpCop is perhaps closest to pfSense.

Re:pfsense?

[IMightB]

I used IpCop a long time ago and switched to pfsense. At the time I was under the impression that IpCop was based off of smoothwall and (IpCop) was pretty much a dead project.

Re:pfsense?

[tapanitarvainen]

a long time ago [...] I was under the impression that IpCop was based off of smoothwall and (IpCop) was pretty much a dead project.

IpCop was indeed originally forked off smoothwall, but it's not a dead project yet - indeed, it looks like the next major release (2.0) is going to materialize after all.

Unslung

[srussia]

It makes the Slug rock!

Slashdotted

[steveha]

Coral Cache:

http://www.goodgearguide.com.au.nyud.net/article/351651/12_most_interesting_unusual_useful_linux_distros/

List of the distros:

• Damn Vulnerable Linux
• Tinfoil Hat Linux
• CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment)
• CAELinux
• Ubuntu Christian Edition
• live.linuX-gamers.net
• Parted Magic
• Musix GNU+Linux
• Zeroshell Linux
• Mythbuntu
• Damn Small Linux
• Tiny Core Linux

steveha

Re:Slashdotted

[chaosmind]

http://live.linux-gamers.net/?s=download

also slashdotted. anyone got a torrent?

Morse code on LED

[LambdaWolf]

According to its developers, a possible reason for using it is that that "Illuminati are watching your computer, and you need to use morse code to blink out your PGP messages on the numlock key."

Nice. For the uninitiated, this is (spoiler alert) an allusion to one of the coolest (realistic) hacks in all of fiction, which occurs in the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Required reading for computer and cryptography geeks.

Re:Morse code on LED

[tehcyder]

Thanks for pointing us all towards such a little known author and title.

Re:Morse code on LED

[Anonymous Coward]

If you like him, you might also like William Gibson.

Re:Morse code on LED

[BrokenHalo]

If you like him, you might also like William Shakespeare.

Re:Morse code on LED

[DaedylusSL]

Meanwhile, what's appearing on Randy's screen is (mostly) incorrect information. A very cool plot device in a very cool book.

Gaming distro?

[Psaakyrn]

But really, I think this is all the common people would want/need if they want to replace Windows.

Re:Gaming distro?

[i ate my neighbour]

No, it's Damn Vulnerable Linux that will make them feel home.

Re:Gaming distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA(aaah...snif.) Man, you're funny.

Anyway, absurd overstatement aside, it /is/ a nice selection of Linux gaming. Such as it is.

The site is /.'d of course, so here's the game list from google cache:

The following games are included on the most recent release of live.linuX-gamers

Games that are bold are only contained on the "big" release. The genres are provided in brackets.
armagetronad (tron-like)
astromenace (shoot-em-up)
blobby2 (beachball)
chromium-bsu (shoot-em-up)
extremetuxracer (down-hill racing)
foobillard (billard)
frozen-bubble (puzzle)
lbreakout2 (breakout)
ltris (tetris)
neverball (balance puzzle)
neverputt (minigolf)
osmos-demo (ambience puzzle)
pingus (puzzle, lemmings-like)
smc (jump-and-run)
teeworlds (action)
worldofgoo-demo (puzzle)
xmoto (action, balance)
  [bold startz]
fretsonfire (music)
glest (real time strategy)
hedgewars (artillery, worms-like)
lincity-ng (city builder)
maniadrive (action driving, stunts)
nexuiz (first person shooter)
openlierox (action)
openttd (industry planner)
sauerbraten (first person shooter)
scorched3d (artillery)
supertuxkart (kart racing)
tremulous (first person shooter)
urbanterror (first person shooter)
warsow (first person shooter)
warzone2100 (real time strategy)
wesnoth (turn-based strategy)
widelands (real time strategy, settlers-like)
worldofpadman (first person shooter)
  [bold endz]

Re:Gaming distro?

[Beelzebud]

Yeah I don't see that coming close to something a gamer would replace Windows with. Like it or not, Windows beats the pants off of Linux when it comes to gaming. I wish it weren't true, but it is.

Re:Gaming distro?

[cbhacking]

A few of these are actually decent games - Wesnoth is well-designed and a lot of fun, as is Scorch3d even if it's not nearly so original - but there are a couple of major failings of that list. First of all, there's none of the big-name games, the ones that would be expected by any PC gamer looking to switch operating systems. Second, none of the games that I recognize are specific to Linux, meaning that they are not, in and of themselves, a reason to switch (at best, they are a reason not to avoid switching). Third, the list excludes a couple of very popular genres, like MMORPG (there actually are some for Linux) or even RPGs in general (plenty of those, and if usually not terribly "pretty" they are some of the best-designed Linux games out there). I realize that a LiveDVD has limited space and that games tend to be expensive in terms of install footprint, but they seem to have selected many of the "flashy" games instead of the quality ones. It's also worth pointing out that by including Wine they could add a ton of titles to that list, including some very popular Windows titles, assuming they could get redistribution rights.

Re:Gaming distro?

[hairyfeet]

You're kidding, right? Because the only games Windows users would want to play is 400 ripoffs of Quake 3 Deathmatch? Hey for some stuff Linux works great, for example it makes a damned good web server or embedded environment, but quality gaming sure as hell ain't one of them. It takes a shitload of money to even make a B class game these days, and getting thousands of guys across the planet to donate their time to the really hard work like designing a top notch game engine? Ain't gonna happen.

That is why I'd say for the foreseeable future Linux games will be nothing but maps built upon whatever engine the guys at Id are nice enough to donate. Servers and embedded yes, gaming and multimedia? Not so much. The same as I doubt Myth will ever take the place of WMC, or even windows based add-ons like Mediaportal. It takes a hell of a lot of work to support all that hardware, and writing drivers? Really not fun. With Myth I spent nearly a week fighting the damned thing trying to get it stable, whereas with Win7 WMC it was plug and play.

Which is why I guess I just won't "get it" with regards to all the resources wasted on trying to make Linux do jobs it simply isn't good at, when there are so many jobs that it is good at where those limited resources could be better put to use. Servers, embedded, forensics, HPC, kiosks, etc. Why waste all those resources trying to force a square peg in a round hole?

Re:Gaming distro?

[jedidiah]

> The same as I doubt Myth will ever take the place of WMC, or even windows based add-ons like Mediaportal.
> It takes a hell of a lot of work to support all that hardware, and writing drivers? Really not fun. With
> Myth I spent nearly a week fighting the damned thing trying to get it stable, whereas with Win7 WMC it was
> plug and play.

That's really funny considering all of the stuff you have to add to WMC just to get basic video playback working.

MCE is NOTHING to hold up as an example.

HELL, have they even gotten HD-PVR support sorted out yet after 2 years?

There's even a nice thread on Engadget now about some guy that wants to replace his
XBMC based setup with MCE. Some of the MCE user responses are a real hoot.

Re:Gaming distro?

[hairyfeet]

Example please? Because with mine (Windows 7 HP x64) I had a grand total of TWO downloads to have everything as pretty as you please (and one wasn't really necessary as Windows 7 had a driver for my tuner, I simply wanted the latest) and everything purring like a kitten. I simply went to Ninite and had it auto install the latest Klite Codec Pack (Along with FF, Irfanview, .NET, Foxit, Flash, Silverlight, ImgBurn, great site for new builds) which gave me support for all the funkier formats, installed the latest for my USB Tuner, and Voila! Everything "just worked".Now I can't tell you about HD-PVR, since my cable is analog, but it is certainly less of a PITA than Myth to setup by a LOOONG shot!

Considering my 67 year old dad, whose is about as PC clueless as they come, was able to set up his own WMC because he decided he didn't want to wait until the weekend when I was free, I'm really gonna have to ask for citation please. Does ANYONE here think my dad could have done the same with MythUbuntu or any other Myth based and had a snowball's chance in hell of having a working system? With WMC it is beyond simple for him to set up recording, schedule shows, pause live TV, watch Internet TV like Netflix or CBS.com, I honestly don't know of any way they could make it more simple.

So while there are things I would criticize MSFT over (don't like the new system restore layout, you need to make shortcuts to keep from scrolling sub layers to get to common networking tasks) I'd say WMC isn't one of them. It is easy to use, automatically downloads DVD covers for your vids, is plug and play with most current TV Tuners, and like I said if it passes the "dad test" then you know it is easy and intuitive. And it is certainly head and shoulders easier to set up and the client/server model Myth uses and a hell of a lot less of a PITA, at least with my hardware.

Re:Gaming distro?

[HeckRuler]

Yes, I understand that the latest windows distro REALLY bring itself into the arena with smash hits like:
Solitaire (card game)
MineSweeper (puzzle)

Other games of course will require additional installations.
Now, if you look at the games available to Linux and WINE with additional installs and tweaks, then the list becomes more or less identical.

Re:Gaming distro?

[jedidiah]

> Example please?

You just provided it. This sort of nonsense is why people buy Apple products.

HELL, Windows 7 doesn't even have out of the box support for simple stuff like ION. That was a nice shocker.

Sure, it's cool if you can be satisfied with the very basic low level out of the box experience.
In this case, the Internet TV options you alluded to are nice. Although they are not limited to
MCE and are available on software that's not Windows only.

OTOH, Windows in general has a nasty habit of failing in new and peculiar ways like the Netflix MCE
plugin deciding to complain about how time is setup. As if the Netflix plugin needs to be remotely
bothered or interested if my system clock is screwed up somehow.

If you have any of your own media to speak of, XBMC is a much better application to use.

> Now I can't tell you about HD-PVR, since my cable is analog,

      You better stock up on tuners. Analog has been killed by the man. It's time to get with the times.

> is plug and play with most current TV Tuners ...as if a throwback like you would know anything about that. Some of us
actually use state of the art technology here. You don't. You're in no
position to talk.

      This is the monopoly product. MOST really doesn't cut it.

      Microsoft should not be LAST to the party here or require
some sort of 3rd party hack to use a device that was ultimately
created to target the Windows user base.

Although MCE isn't the best PVR product for Windows. Fixating on it is like
going into a prize fight with both hands tied behind your back. Although it
does nicely demonstrate the problem with being brand fixated on Windows. It
takes a platform with the ultimate potential and flushes it.

MythTV for all of it's faults is at least designed with the intent of viewing
whatever you may have. In this respect, it is less cobble-ware than the
Microsoft version of the same thing. That's terribly ironic.

This sort of approach is probably why Mac users like Plex so much.

Re:Gaming distro?

[oakgrove]

Which is why I guess I just won't "get it" with regards to all the resources wasted on trying to make Linux do jobs it simply isn't good at

Your point? What was Linux good at when Torvalds first started it back in 1991? Should he have just said, oh, this kernel isn't good at anything, I think I'll just stop now.

Re:Gaming distro?

[Beelzebud]

You're being intellectually dishonest in trying to compare Wine to a native Windows install. They're more or less identical, if you omit a vast chunk of modern games that don't run correctly under Wine...

Here is a challenge: Get Team Fortress 2 to run under wine. If you can figure out how, let me know because I've tried on and off for a month. The only results I get are something that looks like it's running on a half-finished emulator. TF2 isn't even that demanding of a game.

You do Linux no favors by exaggerating its capabilities. Wine is no replacement for Windows when it comes to gaming.

Re:Gaming distro?

[hairyfeet]

You DO realize that you are complaining that Windows isn't BLOATED ENOUGH with drivers for everything OOTB, right? Funny how FLOSSies and Apple guys will bitch on one hand Windows is bloated, and in the same breath say it needs to be MORE bloated with extra drivers, most of which you don't need thanks to windows Update having most common drivers ready to go on first run. And comparing to Apple? The biggest walled garden ever created, where you will do things Apple's way and ONLY Apple's way? Oh and at a minimum 30% markup to boot? THAT is your solution?

Oh and my tuner is dual, so no worries. But comparing what? Apple TV? To MCE is about as big a joke as you can make. All Apple TV is is a giant iTunes store, not good for much else. And while XBMC is good for XP I'd say the UI on WMC is head and shoulders better, and requires almost NO setup. Finally your complaints about Netflix should be directed where it belongs-MPAA DRM which Netflix has to use, which is why WMC frequently has to jump through hoops to keep it updated. God forbid the MPAA should make anything easy, especially when you could just BT the movie and avoid the crap, but no, that would be logical.

But complaining about OOBE support in Windows 7 is a joke, since I have been building boxes using Win7 since Oct and have yet to have Windows Update not supply the drivers on first run. Since windows 7 is designed to activate and update itself over the Internet it would frankly be stupid to fill the DVD with outdated drivers when you can get fresh ones at first run.

And finally I love how you can't come up with any reasonable retort and instead become childish and throw insults like throwback. Don't blame me because your little walled garden doesn't do what you want it to. I have a quad with 8Gb of RAM that handles multimedia like a champ, never screws up, never throws errors, never needs tweaking, updates itself and my TV listings automatically, in short everything "just works". And unlike you I don't feel the need to throw childish insults. If paying 30-60% more for the Apple logo makes you happy, go right ahead. My PC does everything I could possibly want and more for less than $650 including tax. What kind of Apple desktop can you buy for that?

Re:Gaming distro?

[the_womble]

I am not a gamer, but I found Wesnoth incredibly addictive. It is easy to learn, but strategy is fairly complex, it is involving, it is just plain fun.

Re:Gaming distro?

[fishexe]

Yeah I don't see that coming close to something a gamer would replace Windows with. Like it or not, Windows beats the pants off of Linux when it comes to gaming. I wish it weren't true, but it is.

But...but...but we have Nethack!

Re:Gaming distro?

[cbhacking]

Sure... but it's also one of the best-known cross-platform open source games. Anybody looking to try Linux, and likely to be influenced by the gaming possibilities, has probably already seen Wesnoth on their current platform.

Re:Gaming distro?

[rakslice]

> Windows 7 doesn't even have out of the box support for simple stuff like ION

LOL... Yeah, I guess they could instead "support" them by saying "Atom-based platforms are for losers. You really want to spend $500+."

Puppy Linux Arf Arf

[oakwine]

My favorite, but no longer obscure. Puppy is now v. 5.0 and # 10 in page hit ranking on Distrowatch. Puppy is arguably the cutest distribution, the most sincere distribution, and the most beloved distribution. Not to mention very compact, very capable, very easy to install or run live, and very extensible. Try some now! Try some today! Puppy is good for you! Everyone should know about it!

Re:Puppy Linux Arf Arf

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you still have to download Pizza Pup to get a decent level of protection from stupidity?

(Puppy runs everything as root - and I think does something with user accounts to make them all root-level as well)

Re:Puppy Linux Arf Arf

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite, but no longer obscure. Puppy is now v. 5.0 and # 10 in page hit ranking on Distrowatch.

Cool. Good for you

Puppy is arguably the cutest distribution, the most sincere distribution, and the most beloved distribution.

WTF? None of those things are good selling poings. You want a 'cute' OS? Try Windows XP with the default playskool interface. Sincere? That doesn't even apply to an operating system. Beloved? What, you mean more than some mac users love OS X? More than Gentoo users love Gentoo? Why does this even matter?

Not to mention very compact, very capable, very easy to install or run live, and very extensible

Compact? Yes, the whole point is to run it off a portable medium. Way to not mention that at all.
Capable? At what, exactly? Does it have extra drivers or something? Are the repos magical?
Easy to install? Yes, just like every distro since Mandriva showed them how
Easy to run live? <sarcasm>Hot Damn! You guys have a LiveCD! ZOMG!</sarcasm>

Try some now! Try some today! Puppy is good for you! Everyone should know about it!

I'm getting positively sick of all the Puppy Fanboys. All you do is spout that your distro is great and magical. You never use any kind of facts, never provide any concrete information about Puppy (such as SysV or BSD init, Rolling or Versioned, RPM or DEB or other, etc).

A quick look on Wikipedia shows that Puppy can do some amazing things - persistent installs on a CD/DVD? That's cool. Running everything in RAM? I guess that's kind of cool. Those might convince me to try your distro. But sugary taglines like 'Puppy is good for you!' and 'Puppy Linux Arf Arf' just make me wonder if this is a distro targeted towards 5 year old children.

Re:Puppy Linux Arf Arf

[Scooter's_dad]

Looks like someone needs to hug a cuddly puppy.

Re:Puppy Linux Arf Arf

[Anonymous Coward]

Pizza Pup to get a decent level of protection?
Ancient. Based on Puppy 2.14.
...and this one was last released in 2007.
http://distrowatch.com/grafpup
.
Puppy runs everything as root
Yup. ZERO security.
.
This is the only extant Puplet with any security
http://google.com/search?q=multiuser+Puppy
(Released October 2009. Based on Puppy 4.2.1.)

gewg_

Ubuntu for Christians?

[milbournosphere]

At first reaction, I laughed quite hard. Upon further examination, the software included in the distro looks to be quite useful. I have forwarded Xiphos (a piece of bible study software included in the distro) on to my grandfather, who immerses himself in study of scripture. If that's your thing, I would check it out. Guess I learned about a new project today. Look at that, Slashdot taught me something.

Re:Ubuntu for Christians?

[Chunga668]

At first reaction, I laughed quite hard. Upon further examination, the software included in the distro looks to be quite useful. I have forwarded Xiphos (a piece of bible study software included in the distro) on to my grandfather, who immerses himself in study of scripture. If that's your thing, I would check it out. Guess I learned about a new project today. Look at that, Slashdot taught me something.

If you're christian... reading should teach you something.

Re:Ubuntu for Christians?

[milbournosphere]

No, that's not the case. My grandpa is, however, and his passion is studying the bible. I find that by showing an interest in his hobbies and passions, it leads to reciprocation, good discussions and a healthy relationship. We talk frequently, and he continues to show me small pearls of wisdom (I'm not talking any outrageous; just the quotes that exist in any religious text), or at least quotes that make you think for a second. He isn't a bible-thumping nut that thinks the earth is 6,000 years old or any of that crap, and he doesn't push anything onto me. As such, I am more than happy to show some tolerance and interest in what he has to show me, and I show him anything I find that will help him out. Tolerance is the key word here, and you would be apt to show some. Okay, now I'll get off your lawn.

Re:Ubuntu for Christians?

[Darinbob]

Satan on the other hand uses Windows ME.

Re:Ubuntu for Christians?

[Chunga668]

Show the christians tolerance? What tolerance has the church shown? Tolerance for homosexuality, women's rights? What tolerance. The catholic church's rape of young boys (and girls), support of nazi ethnic cleansing? Condom use in Africa? What tolerance. I disagree entirely with your assumption that I should automatically show any tolerance to these bullshit organizations. In fact I think your half-hearted support of your grandfathers beliefs is a lie. Both to him and yourself. I'm glad that you have a comfy feel-good relationship with your granddad. Try this... tell him what you really think and then see what his response is. I suspect it won't be as touchy-feely afterward. This is your responsibility. Religious moderates fully support religious extremism and provide the mechanism for their continuing hypocrisy & dogma. Be it in the middle-east, here in America and every little corner of the world. Tolerance is not what religious organizations need. It's exactly the opposite.

Re:Ubuntu for Christians?

[Abcd1234]

In all probability, you're just trolling, but...

Show the christians tolerance? What tolerance has the church shown?

Christians != "the church"

Congratulations, your irrationality has made you just another kind of bigot (and for the record, I'm a hard athiest, I'm just not an asshole about it).

Re:Ubuntu for Christians?

[Chunga668]

Congratulation, you pass. You found a flaw in my wording.
"The Church" is often and commonly used to refer to the entire group.
I could have just as easily said "The christian church".

What, exactly is your argument?

If you are an atheist I'll eat my saddle.
"Hard Atheists" so often go to bat for christians. Unlikely.

Re:Ubuntu for Christians?

[Abcd1234]

"The Church" is often and commonly used to refer to the entire group.

No, "the church" is used to refer to the Catholic church, a corrupt religious establishment that exists as its own nation, and believes it exists outside of the laws of the countries it operates in.

The Catholic Church != "The christian church".

Furthermore:

"The christian church" != Christians.

Christians are individual people, whose beliefs range from young-earth bible-thumpery, to United Church-style extreme inclusivity. From people who quietly study the bible in the privacy of their homes, to the those (such as the ones who decided to knock on my door today) who feel the compulsive need to proselytize to everyone they meet.

You seem to think they're a unified group that you can deride as a whole. That makes to a prejudicial bigot.

If you are an atheist I'll eat my saddle.

Well, enjoy, I recommend ketchup, they can be a little dry.

See, unlike you, while I'm an atheist and feel that your average Christian is on par with believers in magic or astrology, I don't feel the need to be an asshole about it, so long as they keep it to themselves.

You, on the other hand, seem to feel the need to deride all Christians, regardless of their individual behaviour. And *that* is classic bigotry. Well done! You've managed to sink to the level of the worst Christians, while simultaneously attempting to deride them. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Of course, that means you also have another thing in common with the worst Christians: a life lived in hypocrisy, without even realizing it.

Unusual, Obscene, and Useful Linux Distros

[jamesh]

That was how I read the title at first glance. So disappointed.

Re:Unusual, Obscene, and Useful Linux Distros

[jamesh]

We could have had distro's with names like DebDoesIan and YouCanLeaveYourRedHatOn

Re:Unusual, Obscene, and Useful Linux Distros

[gafisher]

Red Light Linux -- shakes your booty.

Mandriva?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is Mandriva?

Ubuntu Christian Edition

[$RANDOMLUSER]

1. Jesus saves - early and often. Or maybe you could just configure him to auto-save?
2. Who needs backups when you have faith?
3. Wait until you see our "firewall"!
4. Well, good, at least they're trying to convert those Linux heathens.
5. Some tools not included: head, finger, fsck...
6. "missionary" the only available filesystem (mount -t missionary - and then only for procreation)
7. Good news! Jesus healed the Gimp! Zombies raised from the dead!
8. Thou shalt not take the hostname in vain.
9. Honor thy PPID.
10. Thou shall not kill -9.
11. Those are penguins, not nuns!


Known bugs:
Sometimes Jesus thinks he's Richard Stallman.

vlc only plays G-rated AVIs.

$ mesg y
$ write god
write: god is not logged in

Re:Ubuntu Christian Edition

[fatp]

http://christianubuntu.blogspot.com/

Re:Ubuntu Christian Edition

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Funny stuff. I especially liked

If you uninstall Ubuntu Christian Edition, it will automatically re-install after three days.

I cracked myself up with "Honor thy PPID".
I swear to $DEITY I've never heard of Ubuntu Christian Edition before now.

Re:Ubuntu Christian Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

Ofcourse, Richard Stallman thinks he is Jesus sometimes too!

AC

Re:Ubuntu Christian Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

No fucking shit, Sherbastardlock?

Re:Ubuntu Christian Edition

[Jason Levine]

Jesus saves - early and often. Or maybe you could just configure him to auto-save?

To paraphrase an old joke:

Jesus saves.... but Moses has invested in an off-site backup system!

Re:Ubuntu Christian Edition

[jbeaupre]

Jesus saves, Buddha makes incremental backups.

Re:Ubuntu Christian Edition

[chameleon3]

5. Some tools not included: head, finger, fsck...

Don't forget 'abort'!

Makes me appreciate Bob's insights

[DreadPirateShawn]

"If you don't laugh, you didn't get it, but if you ONLY laugh, you didn't get it." [Book of the SubGenius]

If we're talking Specialist Distros...

[Lexical_Scope]

Surely BackTrack needs a mention. One stop shop for Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking, Security Analysis and pretty much anything else security-related. It might not qualify as a fully-blown "distro" depending on your definition, but it's a lot more customised than your standard "Clonebuntu" variants.

If you are even remotely interested in Network Security or Penetration Testing, it's a really invaluable tool.

Re:If we're talking Specialist Distros...

[jbn7343]

Can someone please mod parent up, Backtrack 4 is one of the most useful distros I have ever tried and is well worth a mention in a list of interesting versions of Linux. Got trained on it at college and dang if it just hasn't continued to be great since then. I would recommend that anyway trying to get into pen testing check it out, they even have a vmware version so you don't have to burn the disk or put it on a partition.

Got Slack?

[Bob_Who]

S L A C K W A R E

Re:Got Slack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware isn't so much unknown as it is ignored. It's one of the old-timey distros that simply isn't going to get the same attention as the newer ones.

With that, I'd recommend Slax to anyone familiar with Slackware and looking for a good live CD. It's a live CD based on Slackware.

You do it

[SmallFurryCreature]

What gives you the right to tell others what they should do?

If someone wants to make a carbon copy of Ubuntu but written entirely in Perl on a single line, that is THEIR business. NOT YOURS.

Re:You do it

[Anonymous Coward]

What gives you the right to tell others what they should do?

If someone wants to tell someone else that they should not make a carbon copy of Ubuntu but written entirely in Perl on a single line, that is THEIR business. NOT YOURS.

Sincerely,
The Recursion Fairy

Re:You do it

[Anonymous Coward]

What gives you the right to tell others what they should do?

I'm a born-again Christian and a Republican, you insensitive clod!

I want 64bit distro that has working Flash & S

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want a 64-bit distro that has working Flash and sound drivers. Even if I had to buy a specific sound card I'd be happy.

Of course the first time I updated it would probably switch to some new sound driver which wouldn't work.....

And then there's the issue of Adobe dropping support......

I want to use Linux, I really do! But I need to get some work done, not spend all my time tracking down drivers and patches.

They forgot Jesux!

[noz]

The original Christian distribution: Jesux!

mod up

[CarpetShark]

Yes, a very good point. Distros based on Ubuntu really shouldn't have their "origin" credited as "Ubuntu". Some credit for Ubuntu is warranted, but certainly not as the "Origin".

Re:mod up

[JWSmythe]

I only did it to differentiate between those who have chosen to use Ubuntu, and those who didn't. I know Ubuntu is a pretty skinned Debian with some extra patches. Ubuntu patches on top of Debian patches, on previously good code, what could possibly go wrong. Oh, lots.

    It's similar to CentOS being a patched derivation of RHEL. It's another layer of people messing with perfectly good code, and making it not so perfectly good. In the list provided, there were no CentOS, RHEL, nor Fedora variations, so I didn't mention them.

    I'm anything but a fan of messing with someone else's code, unless it's for internal use. Sure, I'll make my own changes to your code, but I won't then distribute it as if it was as good as the original. I know there are a lot of authors and software companies/groups who agree with me on that. My changes are usually performance patches (as necessary), and usually commented in the code that the change may be acceptable. For example, here's one I use on Apache for my web servers:

cd apache_$apache/src/include ; cat httpd.h | sed -e s/HARD_SERVER_LIMIT\\ 256/HARD_SERVER_LIMIT\\ 4096/g > httpd.h.new ; mv httpd.h.new httpd.h.

    (that's just one line of my 152 line Apache/PHP/mod_ssl build script. It's 76 lines without the comments and stdout messages showing the status of the build)

  I don't pass it off my Apache as the official Apache version though. It's known if you use my Apache/PHP/mod_ssl build script, it will make some minor changes like this. If you use my build of Apache, it's a given I've made some changes. It's amazing, I can drop this on just about any server, and it's blazing fast compared to the RH provided one. I can't comment on what changes Debian or Ubuntu make to their installed version of Apache, I haven't needed to deal with that yet for a high load production environment.

Re:mod up

[Tacvek]

Debian patches are usually kept to a miniumum, as long as upstream is still active. (Debian has become the de facto upstream for some packages, including a few GNU packages.)

The most common changes include adding a manpage if one does not exist, and tweaking the install paths so the system conforms to the FHS. Now sometimes larger changes do occur, but usually that is because upstream has not yet accepted the patch, or is sometimes a cherry picked back-ported patch from the development branch, but we try to keep these to a minimum.

Let us look at Debian's apache2 patches for an example.

The first patch adjusts "httpd --version" to display LSB_release information (i.e. identify the build as a Debian patched build).

The next patch changes an example script's she-bang line to use "/usr/bin/perl" instead of "/usr/local/bin/perl".

The next patch tweaks configuration include globbing so as not to include extra files that dpkg may create in /etc/apache2 while asking the user if they want to use the the shipped configuration file (if it has changed since the version installed, or use the customized file the user has created, or merge the changes.) This is clearly specific to dpkg-based distros.

The next patch tweaks the apxs script to not bother checking if Apache was compiled with shared library support, because Debian always configures it with shared library support, and Debian allows apxs to be used even when the "httpd" binary is not installed.

The next patch tweaks the config.layout file (which is explicitly designed to be customized by distributions!) to conform to the FHS. It also adjusts the configure script so the correct directories are used, and finally adds a #define to ap_config_layout.h.in that specifies the location of the default PID log.

The next patch further adjusts the apxs script to use httpd.conf rather than apache2.conf, tweaks the permissions it uses, and a few other path related adjustments.

It patches unixd.c to work correctly is suexec is built as a a shared library module.

The next patch changes the dbmmanage script to support both hash and btree based DBM files.

The next patch tweaks how the apxs script calls libtool to keep it from issuing an inappropriate warning.

The next patch tweaks envvars-std.in so that LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not propagated, since Debian has no need to for that, and copying in the building user's personal LD_LIBRARY_PATH is undesirable.

The next patch fixes prevents a buffer overflow attack on the htdigest executable.

The next patch changes suexec.c to use the close-on-exec flag for file descriptors, allowing the resulting error to be logged, which the existing code does not properly support (despite the claimsin the comments). This patch has also been comitted upstream.

The next patch tweaks the usage message to exose the -X flag.

The next patch tweaks logresolve to support line lengths greater than 1024 bytes. Many distos have this patch, but I am unsure if upstream has fixed it. I don't see any bug for it in Apache's bugzilla database.

The next patch is one for the configure script to permit the option "--enable-modules=none" to build an httpd with no optional modules enabled.

The next patch fixes a known security vulnerability (CVE-2007-1742) in suexec.c

The next patch fixes a segfault caused by inaproprtiately freeing memory in ab.c. This patch has been accepted upstream.

The next patch disbabled mod_deflate for HEAD requests to mitigate a ptential DOS attack.

There are more, but I am getting tired of typing them up.

Re:mod up

[FoolishOwl]

I'm an Ubuntu user, and I just finished an introductory course on Apache. The course, naturally, assumed default Apache layouts and default installations, except where it walked us through simple customizations.

So, at first I found the Ubuntu package for Apache a bit perplexing. There were a lot of changes from the Apache defaults, that I found useful and reasonable -- once I figured them out. For instance, the configuration files are rearranged, so that the basic configuration that you would expect in httpd.conf is in apache2.conf, with the expectation that local customizations will be in httpd.conf (initially an empty file). Virtual hosting is pre-configured, with a default virtual host pointing at the document root. Some of the supporting programs were renamed, e.g., apache2ctl instead of apachectl, and there were some supporting scripts added, e.g., a2enmod and a2dismod, for enabling and disabling modules.

I didn't have that much trouble figuring this out, and I'm sure someone with more experience would have figured it out more quickly -- or would have just snorted, and compiled from source. My one real complaint about any of this was that there wasn't an overview of how the Ubuntu installation differed from the Apache standards. Indeed, the documentation never once mentioned that it differed.

That wasn't nearly as frustrating as it was to discover that Ubuntu doesn't use System V-style runlevels and associated scripts, that we spent two weeks going over in a system administration course. Thank goodness for virtual machines.

My general rule is that one should stick to default settings unless one has a good reason to vary from them, if for no other reason than to remain close to the documentation, for the sake of other poor slobs who may have to maintain your system, and that nontrivial variations should be documented.

Re:mod up

[xiong.chiamiov]

Debian patches are usually kept to a miniumum, as long as upstream is still active. (Debian has become the de facto upstream for some packages, including a few GNU packages.)

The most common changes include adding a manpage if one does not exist, and tweaking the install paths so the system conforms to the FHS. Now sometimes larger changes do occur, but usually that is because upstream has not yet accepted the patch, or is sometimes a cherry picked back-ported patch from the development branch, but we try to keep these to a minimum.

Let us look at Debian's apache2 patches for an example.

[long list of patches that are neither manpage additions nor tweaks to install paths]

Things like "[preventing] a buffer overflow attack on the htdigest executable" clearly should be dealt with upstream, imo. Granted, I'm an Arch user, and thus used to getting "report it upstream" as a response on every bugreport (OT: Arch has 9 patches for apache on my count, which is still more than I'd like).

Re:mod up

[JWSmythe]

My general rule is that one should stick to default settings unless one has a good reason to vary from them, if for no other reason than to remain close to the documentation, for the sake of other poor slobs who may have to maintain your system, and that nontrivial variations should be documented.

    You're absolutely right.

    I've worked on an awful lot of machines over the years. Myself, I got annoyed that things like Apache would show up in unexpected places. To make a simple change to a web page, where no one is around that knows the right path, I've had to drop test files "echo test > testme.html", and try to hit it with the web browser. Quite a few times, I've found entire duplicates of their site in the wrong directory, because someone before me thought it was right, so they uploaded everything there. Don't ask if you can clean up for them though, they'll freak. "You can't delete those, we might need them" (and then pointing out the last modified date was 5 years previous).

    Some directory structures aren't totally distro specific. On distro X, it may be in one place in version 4.0, but another in 4.1, and yet another place from a patch. None of them are where the author intended, nor in the path shown in the documentation as you said.

Re:mod up

[pecosdave]

I moved to Kubuntu recently because Debian kept breaking stable where my notebook was concerned. I went slowly from a fully working system, to broken firewire, to no longer working bluetooth devices, to broken sound.

When I switched to Kubuntu everything but the firewire worked and one bluetooth device. I stayed on it for a good 8 months and decided to try Debian again to see if those issues were fixed. I went back to the newer version of Kubuntu and everything worked, even the stuff that was broke before.

I've been a Debian guy for year, and I used to think Ubuntu felt like Linux on training wheels, but it's getting better. I want to go back to Debian, sort of, but the way Kubuntu is improving and Debian appears to be content to break stable then not move forward, the longer I wait the happier I become staying with Kubuntu.

In fairness, my Toshiba could have a weird hardware combination, but Centrino based notebooks tend to be rather standard overall.

Hannah Montana Linux (HML)

[ChristofferC]

It's pretty sweet!

http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Home.html

Re:Hannah Montana Linux (HML)

[AHuxley]

Has a song too http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Song.html

Re:Hannah Montana Linux (HML)

[epedersen]

This just might be what I need to convert my 8 your old daughters computer to Linux.

TA Spring?

[captainpanic]

I haven't checked on the TA-Spring (or simply the spring project) updates anymore... but a year ago, that seemed like one of the best (ever) real time strategy games - as far as I'm concerned up there with the likes of Starcraft... meaning it's up there with the popular windows games.

It has it's problems for the installation (you need separate bots, maps, and sets of units), but that's really why I was hoping to have it included in this gaming distro.

The interesting bits

[blackest_k]

The highlights

DansGuardian http://dansguardian.org/ web filtering not something I'm bothered with for myself but anyone with kids should be concerned with what their children see.

Its built into ubuntu christian edition along with bible study software and other religious junk but obviously would work for any ubuntu edition.

http://ubuntusatanic.org/screenshots.php ubuntu satanic edition has some really nice art work not mentioned in the article but in the comments also there is sabily A muslim edition of ubuntu. Other religions are available even one designed to run Amiga software on, http://www.xamiga.net/

musix is a fully open source multimedia debian based distro
caine is for digital forensics

DVL might be interesting if you have an interest in security

HML

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's Hannah Montana Linux?
http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/

Re:HML

[Anonymous Coward]

Or TidOS for that matter?

http://github.com/TidOS

sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

>page1
>page2
myface.jpg

Slackware is even better now...

[Viol8]

Its always been a great distro for people who just want a stock Unix on their PC rather than a Wannabe-Windows clone but it was frequently a bugger to get some hardware working properly and also Xwin configuration was very tedious. I defected to Suse for a while because of this but now Slackware is more or less plug and play. I installed 13.0 on my Acer laptop and desktop Dell at work and it Just Worked. The only issue I had was with the wifi on the laptop but that was a kernel bug - I compiled a later kernel (yeah, slackware can still be hardcore) and wifi worked fine.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[MrHanky]

What is it with Slackware that attracts so many wannabe "hacker" types like yourself? Those "Wannabe-Windows clones" you speak of can all be just as "hardcore" (as if compiling a kernel is hardcore in any way), and the only notable architectural difference between Slack and "Wannabe-Windows clones" is that Slack uses a BSD style init instead of the not exactly Windows-like SysV.

Yes, Slack is good and well respected, but I swear that among the clueless faux-elitist morons I've come across, more are using Slack than all the other OSes combined.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[Viol8]

Nothing to do with faux elitism. Its to do with having a clean filesystem layout, sane rc.d startup files (no , its not strictly BSD like - try looking at the FreeBSD startup and you'll see what I mean) and avoiding having 10 gigs of crap that i'll never use installed on the box. Also slackware uses the stock kernel, not some hacked about version like most of the other distros so its easy to upgrade to whichever version you want , not be stuck with whichever one the distro-of-your-choice decides to offer you as a binary update.

As for "wannabe hackers" , FYI pal I've been using slackware on and off since 1994 and have probably written more unix systems code than you've ever even seen.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[JWSmythe]

Xorg became almost mindless to get configured. Just run xorgconfig, and let it do it's thing. Ok, so it's not well documented, or at least I don't read the documentation.

I was having an argument at one job, where they were very insistent that they *MUST* run a Redhat derivative. I was working on one specific machine, so it wasn't just identical hardware, it was the same machine. I found it I installed various verions of Redhat, Fedora, CentOS, and Slackware. Slackware performed like a champ. The others, not so well. Each had it's own fatal problem. Some couldn't see the network card, and no loadable module would make it work, so I added a second card when running that one. Some couldn't get into X at all, insisting the video card didn't exit. For them, I had made a backup of my xorg.conf, so I could copy it back in. Different problems came up with our own application, which was the purpose of the machine. I put Slackware on, when they were finally desperate for a solution. Slackware picked up all the devices properly, and went into X, just as it was told to.

I'm a strong believer in building kernels specifically for the machine that's in use. I don't want extra drivers. I don't want loadable kernel modules. If the hardware exists, it'll exist. Build it all in, and leave out the fluff. It cuts down the kernel build time dramatically, and improves the performance of the machine. Oh, I didn't mention, building your own kernel may as well have been a moral sin. The guy in charge of the department {sigh} once tried to build a kernel, and it didn't work. Ever since then, customized kernels were against company policy.

Most of my laptops get the dual-boot treatment. If I'm on the road, and must run a Windows app, I can boot into Windows. That's for silly things like cell modems who don't want to activate on anything but Windows, and for the occasional "But it doesn't work under MSIE" complaint, so I can bring it up in Windows and verify that they were stupid.

I've only had one laptop that didn't perform very well under Linux. There was some funky software control for the wireless network card, where the card would be seen, and an IP could be statically set on it, but there was a soft button that enabled the antenna. I didn't find a physical reason for it, so it's something they put in the card.

I know we've come a long way with Linux. There's really no messing around with every driver, trying to get sound, graphic mode video, etc, up. Usually, a generic install will make everything work fine. I remember the "good old days", when once you got Linux installed, you were trying to figure out what drivers would support your hardware

On my current laptop, an Acer Aspire 5532, there's something funky with the touchpad mouse. It doesn't accept clicks on the pad. You have to reach down, and click the physical mouse buttons. That's no show stopper. It's a known bug with these specific touchpads. The damned thing doesn't work very well under Windows either, so I use a wireless USB mouse most of the time. I can't complain much, it was a $350 laptop, and works very nicely.

My home machine dual boots (Slackware64 13.0 and Windows 7 Ultimate). I've had several instances so far where Windows messes up and doesn't want to boot. I can go into Linux and everything is fine. I have to dual boot it though. There's one game, Stargate Resistance (Wine info says it won't work) that I need Windows to play. Even then, it won't play for more than a few minutes on an ATI video card. With a Nvidia card, it plays fine, but there's a bug in the Win7 x64 driver so even Windows will randomly crash. Nice, huh? So, when I want to do something, and keep doing it, I do it under Linux. When I want to play the game, I play under Windows un

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[mikael_j]

I think the implication about the "Wannabe-Windows clones" was that there are a lot of "1337" Ubuntu users who go around preaching about how awesome Linux is even though they lack any in-depth knowledge of it, they just popped in a Live-CD and installed it using the GUI installer (which is pretty much just a matter of hitting Next until it's done).

Now, I'll admit that back in the 90s I was a bit of a Open Source evangelist but at least I had some basic knowledge of *nix, these days I keep ending up in conversations with friends of mine who have never used a terminal emulator where they try to convince me of how awesome Ubuntu is (because it's Linux!) and even when I point out that my day job involves keeping a load-balanced Linux cluster running and that I have no Windows machines at home they will keep badgering me with teh awezoomnes of Ubuntu and telling me how I should move from FreeBSD, OS X, Debian and other distros to Ubuntu. Without trying to brag about my own skills it does feel a bit like a random recently converted christian of the protestant kind trying to convert a catholic bishop to his brand of christianity even though he himself knows little of the bible beyond "jesus and god good, satan bad"...

These are the kind of users who almost exclusively run "Wannabe-Windows clones" and apply cargo-cult solutions to any problem they may have. I can understand the frustration with them.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[MrHanky]

See, this is why I think you're a faux-elitist moron: there is nothing keeping you from installing a stock kernel in other distros. Saying you're "stuck" with a hacked-about version is simply untrue. Slack is far from the only distro that allows you to install a minimal system. Arch is notorious for it, Debian can be remarkably lean, and I'm pretty sure you can do it with Fedora or even Suse if you know what you're doing. There's no distro that installs 10 gigs by default: even Ubuntu still has a 1 CD install, AFAIK.

You say you've written more unix systems code than I've ever seen (you must be old), but since you also say so many things that prove you don't know what you're talking about, you just come across as a pretentious cunt.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[e70838]

What! 94! I was using slackware in 92 (Linux 0.97, 0.99pl10, 0.99pl12, 0.99pl14, ...).

The minimum to be hardcore is not configuring and recompiling kernel, the minimum is correcting a bug in a driver (not applying a patch already made) before recompiling.
Producing your own device driver for a hardware is clearly above minimum.
Writing your own driver for something else than a hardware is most often below minimum: student housework.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[Anonymous Coward]

When people who know nothing start pushing ubuntu (or any linux distro) on other people, I'd say linux is pretty damn close to desktop. ;)

I, for one, welcome our new windows-wannabe-clone-1337-users! They are the proof that linux isn't just for nerds anymore.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[Viol8]

"See, this is why I think you're a faux-elitist moron: there is nothing keeping you from installing a stock kernel in other distros."

There is if you want everything to work properly and also don't want to fart about having to edit a copy of /proc/config.gz

"you just come across as a pretentious cunt."

And you come across as a rude little little kid who talks big but knows FA.
Go get yourself a clue.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[Viol8]

"What! 94! I was using slackware in 92 (Linux 0.97, 0.99pl10, 0.99pl12, 0.99pl14, ...)."

I was using HP-UX at that time. Linux wasn't usable for anything useful in 92.

Compiling a kernel is hardcore for the ubuntu crowd which my rather tongue in cheek comment was aimed at. If you want to go willy waving give George Micheal a call. I'm not interested.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[MrHanky]

You'll often have to reconfigure your kernel if upgrading between vanilla kernels as well, but configuring it by hand editing "a copy of /proc/config.gz" (better unpack it first) from the old kernel is going to suck, no matter what. Just do a 'make oldconfig' and take it from there, if you want to keep your sanity.

To reiterate: everything you've said just makes it evident that you're a pretentious cunt.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[badran]

MrHanky, you must have not noticed that Viol8 is hardcore as he can read and write directly to a gz with his needle. I bet that he posts to /. with the help of a phone and an ability to mimic a modem.

He is clearly too leet for you even to look at, let alone argue with.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[socz]

With GhettoBSD, installing the system successfully = hardcore!

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[socz]

My fav is when apple users come and tell me how they don't need anti virus protection because their system is so bad ass! I then proceed to explain why their system is so bad ass. Check out the BSD family tree (edited of course! (only added to, not removed/changed)) found here: BSD Family

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[fishexe]

Compiling a kernel is hardcore for the ubuntu crowd which my rather tongue in cheek comment was aimed at.

I'm not sure if you'd include me as part of the "ubuntu crowd" but I use Ubuntu exclusively and I don't consider compiling a kernel to be hardcore. I have compiled dozens of kernels with various options and tweaks (using Debian @ the time, this was over 10 years ago) and I don't consider myself at all hardcore. I use Ubuntu now because I reached a stage in my life where having everything "just work" is more valuable than the time it takes to become hardcore.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[Viol8]

"(better unpack it first)"

No , really?? I wondered what the .gz meant. Thanks for that sonny , you're a genius! Do you get extra course points from your teacher?

"everything you've said just makes it evident that you're a pretentious cunt."

Still being rude because you have a limited vocabulary? Aw, shame.

Everything you've said tells me you've never tried to build a stock kernel on some distros such as Suse and red hat.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[MrHanky]

The only time I used Red Hat was the infamous 6.0 (1999), and yes, I did build vanilla Linux kernels on it, which was my habit back when RAM was a concern. Same with Suse 6.3, the only version of Suse I ever used (although a good, solid distro). Back then, I was pretty much a noob, but configuring and compiling a kernel wasn't really all that difficult, since I used the tools that come with the Linux kernel (I used make menuconfig) instead of insisting on shooting myself in the foot by manually editing a file that wasn't even suited for the kernel version I wanted to use it on. The point is: configuring a kernel the way you mentioned is retarded, and no experienced Linux user would consider doing it that way.

You just don't know what you're talking about. You're a fraud. That's all.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[FoolishOwl]

On the one hand, yes, it's definitely great news that there are Linux distributions that people can install and use without much technical knowledge. Even if you do have the requisite technical knowledge, it's nice to have something that's working and pretty right off the CD, and since Ubuntu is Linux, you can always tweak it to your heart's content once you start acquiring the knowledge.

On the other hand, I wince when I see tutorials online that boast that you don't need to learn anything about that awful, awful command line. Or, the one guy in my sysadmin classes who was noisily a big fan of Ubuntu, and who would occasionally say things like how he decided to "geek out" and look at a config file. (He was a bright guy, but a little too tied to the GUI.)

On the gripping hand, I also wince when I read rants about how Ubuntu should jettison OpenOffice Writer in favor of LyX, or jettison Evolution and Thunderbird in favor of mutt, or otherwise move in the direction of painfully hard to configure and use, on the grounds that Linux is about suffering for perfection. Not everyone needs to be a professional system administrator, and we can make it easy for people to learn to be system administrators without forcing people who aren't interested to learn.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[Viol8]

Clue - make oldconfig doesn't remove unrecognised options from the config file. The make system fails if they're left in.

Found that clue yet?

No?

Didn't think so.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[MrHanky]

LOL, you don't give up, do you? I've never claimed to be an expert -- in fact, my qualifications are irrelevant -- but I have, without question, exposed you as a fraud. You're the one with something to prove, and the only thing you've proven is that you don't know how to maintain a Linux system.

Re:Slackware is even better now...

[Anonymous Coward]

lol sysadmin class

Unusual, Obscure, and Useful

[Hognoxious]

Is this like fast, cheap, and reliable - choose any two?

Ask the developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for a reality check! Let's get started.

The developers of each of these distributions kept them seperate from mainstream distros, because that's what they wanted to do. Obviously they had the choice of offering some kind of add-on system for mainstream distros, but they didn't, and they must have had reasons for that. If the developers didn't have that choice, or were pressured or harassed into trying to merge into an existing distro, then they probably wouldn't have done it at all.

In conclusion, mind your own business and stop worrying about whether other people are "contributing" to the world in the "correct manner" as defined by yourself, and simply let people enjoy what they do.

Voyage Linux

[brianbek]

I'd like to throw voyage-linux in there as well, (its debian lenny based). I use it alot loading linux onto embedded devices (x86). Great if the system only has a cf card for storage, load the live cd up on your desktop, and pxe boot the embedded device. After installed, two commands remountrw and remountro let you update/change stuff on the device and then set the filesystem read only again. http://linux.voyage.hk/live-cd

Never say Never again is not just a Bond movie

[Zero__Kelvin]

"There's a lot of good reasons for putting Linux on a USB stick, but convenience of setup is not and will never be one of them."

Really?

Re:I want 64bit distro that has working Flash &

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit -- parent is either a troll or an idiot.

I've been running 64-bit (open)SUSE for about 5 years (since 9.0 or 9.1, I can't remember which I started with now) on an assortment of commodity desktops and laptops, and Flash and sound have always Just Worked for me.

(PS - What sort of "work" *requires* you to have Flash and sound?)

Backtrack 4

[carp3_noct3m]

I'm suprised no-one has listed backtrack yet. I always have one flash drive and one dvd of it in my kit with me at all times (among some other things listed). It rocks for throwing up metasploit or cracking WEP real fast. It is a merge of Whax and Auditor) I also miss PHLAK.

Nobody ever gives props to ...

[damn_registrars]

The Ubuntu Satanic Edition. This list had the Christian Edition, it really should have included the Satanic as well, which is just as much of a legitimate distro as they are both based on Ubuntu anyways. Yet for some reason this one gets snubbed regularly, even having difficulties getting listed at distrowatch for some reason (while their Christian brothers have no such problems).

Re:Nobody ever gives props to ...

[TangoMargarine]

If you're talking about technical legitimacy, sure. But would Satanic have ever come about if nobody had made Christian? It seems to me that it's a reactionary, sardonic idea.

Re:I want 64bit distro that has working Flash &

[nschubach]

Being a flash developer? :P

I also run Debian (now Ubuntu) on my now 3 year old laptop with no sound issues and perfectly stable Flash 10 plugin (though I did install it manually, not using the ndiswrapper)

bio-linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always check out bio-linux, for the bioinformatics minded :-)
http://envgen.nox.ac.uk/tools/bio-linux

Silliest damn list I've evar seen

[stevegee58]

Where's systemrescuecd? Where's Backtrack?

Re:I want 64bit distro that has working Flash &

[Anonymous Coward]

The sound drivers for 64-bit are the same as 32-bit (eg. still balls, but not impossible to fix, and still easier to fix than if they go haywire in Vista or 7, where you're shit outta luck). And Flash on 64-bit is Adobe's battleground. Why do you think everyone wants to move away from Adobe's turf anyway?

Re:I want 64bit distro that has working Flash &

[Anonymous Coward]

Ima dumbfukc butta really wanta run teh linoox
reely doo

How do people like you even reach Slashdot?

Linux is crap but it is perfectly able of running the shitty Adobe Flash plug-in in 64-bits with working sound despite intense attempts to break everything every two releases.

If you can't get that to work you shouldn't be allowed near the highly dangerous electric stuff that powers your computer.

If you were complaining about graphics support you would have a point. It's entirely Linux PTB's fault that it is crap. If they didn't suck so many binary dicks, Linux could become a decent OS one day. Think "Pretty Woman".

DSL

[zogger]

Last I looked a few months ago or so Damn Small Linux looks to be abandoned ware, or close to it. Too bad, an interesting and useful little distro.

live.linuX-gamers.net is down

[The MAZZTer]

Cache of the download mirrrors page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://live.linux-gamers.net/%3Fs%3Ddownload

D'oh

[Anonymous Coward]

He spoke before he considered the ramifications of the tired old generic "everybody is wasting effort by not merging together as I see fit" argument.

I'll put in a plug for arch linux and sabayon

[shoor]

My first distro was slackware, a 50 diskette distro for my laptop back in the early 90s. Since then I've experimented with many distros, including linux from scratch and beyond linux from scratch. Mostly now I go with ubuntu from laziness, but a couple of distros that I've been favorably impressed with lately that don't get mentioned a lot are arch linux and Sabayon. I particularly like Sabayon as a live CD. (Note: Sabayon is up to 5.3, but I'm still using 5.0).

Re:I want 64bit distro that has working Flash &

[shoor]

Sabayon?

Gnewsense

[Clopnixus]

No mention of Gnewsense? Unusual - Sure is. very few distros take software freedom this seriously. Obscure - Sadly again true. Very few Linux users take software freedom this seriously. Useful - If you want to know if your hardware doesn't require non-free binary blobs then this is a good way to check.

DVL

[rcamans]

I'm not clear on this one...
Do you think that Damn Vulnerable Linux is more vulnerable than your Vista install?
What are you, a MS fanboy or something?

Aw man!

[DaVince21]

Why does the gamers distro have to be unavailable at a time like this?! I was kinda looking forward to seeing what that is all about. :(

Re:I want 64bit distro that has working Flash &

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard a lot of these stories, but it still doesn't solve the problems. You got lucky with your hardware. Are you using 64-bit?

Re:I want 64bit distro that has working Flash &

[nschubach]

Lenovo T61, Core2Duo running 64-bit (ndiswrapper isn't needed for 32-bit I thought... but it seems to be a great point of trouble for 64-bit builds that use flash with it.)