Starterkits

From ALT Linux Wiki
Revision as of 19:38, 12 June 2015 by MichaelShigorin (talk | contribs) (20150612)
Screenshots

  • BIOS boot

  • UEFI boot

Intro

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

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. The fifth of those updates has happened on March 12, 2015 (available at nightly.altlinux.org) and is based on 3.14.35[2] std-def kernel (some flavours vary as indicated below).

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

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 (TDE, server ones and JeOS[3] "blank");
  • OpenVZ template cache (tarball of chroot w/o kernel);
  • KVM disk image[4];
  • build environment LiveCD.

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[5]. 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; you can browse the directory too, and here's a mirror. If you need to link to those, please use permalinks.

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[6].

main

auxiliary

experimental

Classic installers

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

desktop

server

for hyper-v

blank

OpenVZ template

KVM disk image

Build environment

Torrents

Use this torrent file for 20150312 release.

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; you can try it out yourself using the builder flavour.

Links

References

  1. ↑ that is, rather small
  2. ↑ with SECCOMP_FILTER_FLAG_TSYNC backported
  3. ↑ Just Enough Operating System: minimalistic image with networking and package management capabilities
  4. ↑ 5Gb sparse image that will take up a few hundred megabytes when handled appropriately
  5. ↑ the notable exception being Hyper-V Gen.2 VMs which seem to lack the key for "3rd party" bootloaders
  6. ↑ ...thus polkit doesn't really work there and additional tweaking is required if e.g. NetworkManager is needed