Starterkits
Intro
Starter kits are built with ALT Linux stable repository as a 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 or PostgreSQL another time than to have to download it each time.
Quarterly releases are expected to happen on March, June, September, December 12 with beta available on 5th day of those months. First of those updates has happened almost automatically on March 12, 2014 being the third official release of p7/branch starterkits.
Flavours
Starterkits are like Regular builds based on Sisyphus, technologically; the range has grown wider as we can recommend the images based on stable branch for installation while Sisyphus does require experience and attention.
The kits fall into these categories:
- rescue image;
- installable LiveCDs with various DE/WMs;
- classic installers (TDE, server ones and JeOS[2] "blank");
- OpenVZ template cache (tarball of chroot w/o kernel);
- KVM disk image[3].
Images have been built for i586 and x86_64 architectures. All of the 64-bit hybrid bootable ISO images but jeos include UEFI support and should boot with SecureBoot left enabled. 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/p7/ prefix.
ISOs boot in English by default. Press F2 and choose a different language of those supported as needed; Ctrl-Shift to switch layout.
Direct download links
Please note: the links lead to fairly large files themselves; you can browse the directory too.
Rescue LiveCD
Has command-line tools to service various filesystems, diagnose and recover system.
Installable LiveCDs
These builds mostly use systemd as init; icewm, tde and wmaker use sysvinit[4].
main
- KDE4: i586, x86_64 (~1.3 Gb)
- MATE: i586, x86_64 (~600 Mb)
- Xfce: i586, x86_64 (~450 Mb)
- Gnome3: i586, x86_64 (~800 Mb)
auxiliary
- Cinnamon: i586, x86_64 (~650 Mb)
- E17: i586, x86_64 (~500 Mb)
- TDE: i586, x86_64 (~600 Mb)
- LXDE: i586, x86_64 (~450 Mb)
experimental
A separate build of gnustep flavour based on t7/branch and sysvinit is available for testing:
Classic installers
These builds use the classic SysV init. All of the images but jeos include basic rescue facility.
desktop
server
blank
OpenVZ template
KVM disk image
Status
Please see ChangeLog and BUGS files for current information.
Discussion
You're welcome to subscribe to our mailing list 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 p7 (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.
Links
- official releases
- regular builds (Sisyphus)
- ALT Linux Rescue (Sisyphus too)
References
- ↑ that is, rather small
- ↑ Just Enough Operating System: minimalistic image with networking and package management capabilities
- ↑ 5Gb sparse image that will take up a few hundred megabytes when handled appropriately
- ↑ ...thus polkit doesn't really work there and additional tweaking is required if e.g. NetworkManager is needed