Ark Linux installer |
|
| Company / developer | Bernhard Rosenkraenzer et al. |
| OS family | Linux |
| Working state | Current |
| Source model | Open source |
| Latest stable release | 2008.1 / May 14, 2008 |
| Latest unstable release | Alpha / January 14, 2010 |
| Update method | APT |
| Package manager | RPM |
| Kernel type | Monolithic (modular) |
| License | Various |
| Official website | http://www.arklinux.org/ |
Ark Linux is a Linux distribution maintained by a group of volunteers and aims to be easy to install and use. Its default desktop environment is KDE.
Ark Linux is available both as an installable CD and as a Live CD, and is free software.
Contents |
The primary goals of Ark Linux are:
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.[5] Nothing else is included, for example server-centric applications and development tools 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 Adobe Flash) is available.
Ark Linux uses APT-RPM, a version of the APT for the RPM, with Kynaptic (a KDE port of Synaptic) as the graphical frontend, to manage its packages.[6] Future releases of Ark will use ZYpp as a replacement,[7] making Ark the first third-party distribution to use the native package manager of openSUSE.
In addition to its releases, Ark Linux has 4 package trees:
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.[8]
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:
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.
|
||||||||