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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."
... the live CD you have with you.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
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is everything a good Linux distribution isn't. Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks."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
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
Replying to undo moderation. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, not Linux.
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...
Coral Cache:
http://www.goodgearguide.com.au.nyud.net/article/351651/12_most_interesting_unusual_useful_linux_distros/
List of the distros:
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
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!
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
People, what a bunch of bastards
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.
That was how I read the title at first glance. So disappointed.
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
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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!
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
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'.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
" 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!
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.
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?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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? :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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. :)
... Target
... Target
... and over ... and over ...
The busybox "cp" flags are:
cp [-a] [-d] [-p] [-R] Source
The posix "cp" flags are:
cp [-f] [-H] [-i] [-p] [-r | -R] [--] Source
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
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.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Tinfoil is gentoo hardened.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
> 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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.