Starterkits

From ALT Linux Wiki
Screenshots

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  • UEFI boot

  • cinnamon

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  • gnome3

  • gnustep

  • icewm

  • kde4

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  • lxde

  • lxqt

  • mate

  • tde

  • xfce

🇷🇺 From Russia with love!

Intro

Starterkits Regular builds
quarterly weekly
stable current
rescue,
livecd,
installer,
vm 		rescue,
livecd,
jeos

Starter kits are built with ALT stable repository as the base; these are intended for experienced users lending them a convenient way to have a look at a DE/WM they didn't get around yet to mess with, or to deploy another system spending reasonable[1] amount of time to set it up accordingly.

These are not complete distributions: no special docs are written for each release, the design is simple and shared by all the builds — is there any sense to paint the walls just to have them repainted by the settlers? :)

There are not too many packages included: we've decided that it's better to install LibreOffice another time than to have to download it each time[2].

Each starterkit as a whole is available under GPL.

Quarterly releases are expected to happen on March, June, September, December 12 with beta available on 5th day of those months.

The September 12, 2024 p11-based release (available at nightly.altlinux.org) is based on 6.1.100 un-def kernel (some flavours vary as indicated below).

The images are published as official releases upon having received wider testing.

The previous series are available too: p10/branch, p9/branch, p8/branch, p7/branch); note that these are considered archived by now.

Flavours

The range has grown wider compared to unstable-based Regular builds as we can recommend the images based on stable branch for installation.

The kits fall into these categories:

  • rescue image;
  • installable LiveCDs with various DE/WMs;
  • classic installers (Xfce, server ones and JeOS[3] "blank");
  • OpenVZ template cache (tarball of chroot w/o kernel);
  • a cloud-geared KVM images for OpenStack[4] and OpenNebula;
  • build environment LiveCD.

Images have been built for i586, x86_64, aarch64, armh, e2k and e2kv4 architectures[5]. All of the 64-bit x86 hybrid bootable ISO images but jeos include UEFI support and should boot with SecureBoot left enabled[6]. Use dd(1) to write those to USB flash.

If an image looks broken verify its checksum against MD5SUMS. It's possible to fix a misdownloaded image using rsync and nightly.altlinux.org::nightly/p11/ prefix.

These images also get tested in VMs with 2 Gb RAM and 32 Gb of hard drive space which is good enough for any of them to perform/install (the lower threshold for the "light" flavours is around 512 Mb RAM, it can be pushed further below 256 Mb by optimizing kernel configuration for smaller systems if neccessary).

ISOs boot in English by default[7]. Press F2 and choose a different language of those supported as needed; Ctrl-Shift to switch layout.

Note that there's experimental support for Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese Input Methods in Cinnamon and LXDE flavours as of 20150912; add "lang=vi_VN", "lang=ko_KR" or "lang=zh_CN" to kernel boot parameters manually and start ibus-setup upon having booted to the desktop.

Direct download links

Please note: the links lead to fairly large files[8]; you can browse the directory too, and here's a mirror when the main site is too busy. If you need to link to those, please use permalinks: i586, x86_64, aarch64, armh.

Note the tips on suitable utilities to write the hybrid ISO image to bootable media; please do not use UNetbootin, Rufus, or UltraISO as those will cripple the result unfortunately.

Rescue LiveCD

Has command-line tools to service various filesystems, diagnose and recover system.
The most recent version is available weekly.

Installable LiveCDs

These builds mostly use systemd as init; gnustep, icewm and wmaker use sysvinit[9].

main

auxiliary

experimental

beta

  • MATE/Engineering: x86_64 (large)
  • LxQt/CNC-rt: x86_64 (large)

Classic installers

These builds mostly use the classic SysV init. All of the images but jeos include basic rescue facility and support RAID/LVM installation.

blank


Build environment

Torrents

p11

Use these torrent files for 20240912 release (more info on non-x86 builds available within Russian page):

archived versions

Status

Please see ChangeLog and BUGS files for current information.

Discussion

You're welcome to subscribe to our mailing list or join the IRC channel to discuss anything related to these images.

The bugs (unless already known) should be filed against specific products, namely Regular (for image bugs) and Branch p11 (for package bugs).

Tech note

The technology behind these images is aimed at making derivatives easy while requiring the very minimal specification of the difference added; you can try it out yourself using the builder flavour.

Links

References

  1. ↑ that is, rather small
  2. ↑ except Engineering which carries LibreOffice too
  3. ↑ Just Enough Operating System: minimalistic image with networking and package management capabilities
  4. ↑ and probably more as it carries cloud-init
  5. ↑ e2k* ones being available on request to mike@altlinux.org
  6. ↑ the notable exception being Hyper-V Gen.2 VMs which seem to lack the key for "3rd party" bootloaders
  7. ↑ except Engineering which boots in Russian by default as chosen by its author
  8. ↑ approximate size is: under half a gigabyte/medium/over gigabyte
  9. ↑ ...thus polkit doesn't really work there and additional tweaking is required if e.g. NetworkManager is needed