LEAF Project

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The LEAF Project (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall) is a collection of Linux distributions that began as a fork from the The Linux Router Project (LRP) "linux-on-a-floppy" distribution. Most users of these distributions are primarily interested in router and firewall functionality, particularly as combined with the convenience of major features of general Linux distributions such as shells, packet filtering, SSH servers, DNS services, file servers, webmin and the like. LEAF is a common choice when commercial NAT routers are insufficiently flexible or secure, or are unattractively nonconformant to open source philosophy.

LEAF is capable of running a powerful NAT firewall with several ancillary services on hardware generally considered obsolete, such as 486 workstations with no hard disk. Electric power requirements of such hardware can be significantly lower than more modern equipment, especially when no hard drive is running.

LEAF is intended to work well with read-only storage media, such as write-protected floppy drives or optical disks. Distribution sizes range from a single floppy disk to several hundred megabytes.

LEAF distributions typically include software carefully engineered to be economical in executable size, such as shorewall, uClibc, dropbear and busybox.

LEAF's origins lie in Debian Sarge, though many boot processes and daemon control mechanisms have been modified heavily.