Ark Linux

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Ark Linux

Ark Linux installer
Website	www.arklinux.org
Company/ developer	Bernhard Rosenkraenzer et al.
OS family	Linux
Source model	Free software
Latest stable release	2008.1 / 2008-05-14
Kernel type	Monolithic kernel (modular)
License	Various
Working state	Current

Ark Linux is a free Linux distribution. Due to the similar sounding name, it is sometimes confused with Arch Linux. Ark Linux is built around KDE.

Ark Linux is available both as a normal, installable operating system and as a Live CD.

Ark Linux is a free software project maintained by volunteers.

1 Philosophy
2 Content
3 Package Management
4 Releases
5 External links
6 References
7 See also

[edit] Philosophy

The primary goals of Ark Linux are:

Being easy to install and learn.^[1]
Including all tools and applications a typical desktop user will need.^[2]
Including only tools and applications a typical desktop user will need -- avoid becoming "bloated".^[3]
Making installation of additional software as easy and fast as possible.^[4]
Being a technically sane development environment.^[5]
Remaining 100% Free Software.^[6]

[edit] Content

The Ark Linux core system is made up of one CD that tries to provide what the typical new desktop user will need, such as an office suite, Internet access tools, instant messaging and filesharing clients.^[7] Nothing else is included, for example server-centric applications are not part of the core system.

Many applications that are not included in the core system can be installed online using Advanced Packaging Tool, and are available on add-on CDs.

Additionally, a separate online repository of unsupported software (this includes software that's free to use, but not open source, such as NVIDIA's 3D driver or Adobe Flash) is available.

[edit] Package Management

Ark Linux uses APT and RPM, with Kynaptic (a KDE port of Synaptic Package Manager) as the graphical frontend, to manage its packages^[8].

In addition to its releases, Ark Linux has 4 package trees:

Dockyard: Tested packages belonging to the core system.
Dockyard contrib: Tested packages that are not part of the core system, e.g. due to licensing restrictions
Dockyard-devel: Development tree (core system). Normally usable, but may break at times. After testing, packages are moved from Dockyard-devel to Dockyard.
Dockyard-devel contrib: Development tree (not part of core system).

A standard installation receives updates and extra packages from the Dockyard and Dockyard contrib trees.

For Ark Linux packagers, a number of small convenience tools are included, commonly known as the v* toolchain (even though not all the tools start with a v). They are designed to help generate patches and spec files for the RPM source packages.^[9]

[edit] Releases

All releases are tested snapshots of the Dockyard tree (see Package Management above) - a default installation will update from the Dockyard and Dockyard contrib trees.

There is no need to reinstall when a new release is made -- since the Dockyard tree gets updated, a user automatically gets the new release by running an apt-get dist-upgrade.

The first test release (1.0 alpha 1), basically a proof of concept that showed Linux could be installed in 3 mouse clicks, was made in August 2001.

Subsequent public releases include:

2005-03-19 - Ark Linux 2005.1
2005-03-31 - Ark Linux 2005.1-SR1
2005-12-10 - Ark Linux 2005.2
2006-08-02 - Ark Linux 2006.1, Ark Linux Live 2006.1
2007-08-17 - Ark Linux 2007.1, Ark Linux Live 2007.1
2008-05-14 - Ark Linux 2008.1, Ark Linux Live 2008.1 -- Last KDE 3.x based release

However, there is usually a Dockyard ISO available (see Package Management above), which sometimes will be updated further than the last release. For example, the Ark Linux 2007.1 release encountered some hardware support glitches, such as not detecting AHCI SATA controllers. A hot-fix ISO was released, which included this functionality, but the version number was not increased, as other known errors were yet to be fixed. This means that the currently suggested installation ISO (Dockyard) is not the latest official release.

[edit] External links

Ark Linux official website
Ark Linux at DistroWatch (Note that DistroWatch shows all software included on any of the add-on CDs in addition to the software in the core OS; it doesn't show software included in the contrib repository though)