Introduction

A new release is out! See the news entry from July 17, 2002.

These days, buying a GNU/Linux distribution that can be installed easily in almost no time can be the beginning of a wonderful friendship. But do you know how these distributions are developed in the first place? Probably not, so let me explain.

The Alindis project is an effort to document the steps involved with creating a complete GNU/Linux distribution from scratch. The distribution documented is the Alindis GNU/Linux distribution and serves as an example.

Details on the student research project (until August 2002)

Project title: Alindis - A GNU/Linux Distribution
Topics: Package management, choice of suitable software packages, system installation.
School: Kantonsschule Romanshorn
Project coach: Andreas Brunnschweiler
Language: English
Project license: GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version. (This might change to another free license before the final release! Stay tuned! Felix, July 17, 2002.)

Some ideas about Alindis

Alindis and the Community (July 17, 2002)

Currently, there's only one (safe) way to contact me: per email. I'd like to create more ways and possibilities for discussion in the future, such as mailing lists, IRC chat, and CVS access (an important tool for effective collaboration).

Until then, just send me your comments, suggestions, critical thoughts, whatever.

Alindis GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/Linux (July 17, 2002)

One thing is clear: the Alindis GNU/Linux distribution will be source-code-based. (That means, every package installed by this distribution will be first compiled from its original state (the source code) to the executable form.)

I'm currently examining the Debian way of package management, and happened to have an interesting discussion in the Elysiun Chat about Debian packages and installing them from source code a few days ago.

Since then, I'm haunted by the idea to base the complete Alindis GNU/Linux distribution on Debian source code packages and thereby automatically having access to a huge archive. I'll investigate this idea more when working on 1. Package management. I still have to learn a lot about Debian packaging.

Alindis and the Blender Foundation (July 17, 2002)

While following the discussions on the Blender Foundation forum on Elysiun.com, many people brought up the idea of creating a GNU/Linux distribution specificially for 3D user's needs once the Blender source code is released under the GNU GPL ("or similar", but I'm relatively sure that it will be the original GNU GPL).

I today had this idea: somewhere after Alindis 0.2, there could be a chapter in the "Advanced Topics" section that would describe how to set up an ideal environment for 3D people using free software. In the chat mentioned above (see "Alindis GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/Linux"), nobody seemed to like the idea of a source-code-based GNU/Linux distribution, but remember that the Alindis project is not the same as Alindis GNU/Linux! A chapter about setting up a 3D environment could also help new (or other) GNU/Linux distributions other than Alindis GNU/Linux, such as Debian. But it's just an idea...

Oh, almost forgot it. Here's the link to the Blender Foundation: http://www.blender3d.com/.

News

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Alindis 0.1.0 is released!

Please note the following name changes relating to this project. The "Alindis Documentation" is now the book (manual) "Alindis - A GNU/Linux Distribution", and the "Alindis Distribution" is now "Alindis GNU/Linux". These are both subprojects of "Alindis" or the "Alindis Project". These changes are already partially applied to the Alindis websites and the book.

This release marks the beginning of the Alindis 0.1 development line. The next "stable" release will be Alindis 0.2, which will be released on Monday, August 12, 2002, as my "Matura work" (student research project).

This version has a (very) much shorter table of contents and includes updated DocBook technology, as well as the new sandbox directory. The following sections are (partially) done. 1. Package management: 1.1. Concepts and 1.2. Existing solutions. 3. Installation: 3.1. The big goal, 3.2. Booting the PC, and 3.3. Booting from floppy disk. There are some licensing questions to be resolved and TODO's everywhere.

You can download it here. Because this project is intended for experienced users of GNU/Linux, there are only gzip- and bzip2-compressed tar archives.

Sunday, June 30, 2002

This news entry marks a deadline for the Alindis project.

Chapters "Installation / Booting from diskette", "Package management / Packages", and "Package management / Dependencies".

Older news in the news archive.

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Copyright © 2002 Felix Rabe
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Updated: 2002-07-18 00:28:51.