Copyright © 2005 X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV
Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html.
This document may be copied and distributed in any medium, either commercially or non-commercially, provided that the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), the copyright notices, and the license notice saying the GNU FDL applies to the document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of the GNU FDL.
X/OS is a registered trademark of X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc.
All other trademarks and copyrights referred to are the property of their respective owners.
X/OS Linux 4 is a Free and Open Source Linux distribution derived from the freely available source rpm packages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4) and supplemental products, under the requirements set forth by their trademark policy. In addition, X/OS Linux 4 provides extra packages that are not derived from RHEL4 or RHEL4-related products. Some of these packages are compiled from the rpm sources of Fedora Core Linux, and some are packaged by X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV.
X/OS has spent considerable effort to avoid using Red Hat's trademarks in any way that would imply an association with or sponsorship by Red Hat. X/OS Linux is not produced, maintained or supported by Red Hat.
The X/OS Linux 4.0 package set for i386 systems is identical to the package set from the i386 release of RHEL4 Update 1, with the following exceptions:
All packages from the Red Hat Cluster Suite (RHCS) and the Red Hat Global File System (RHGFS) have been added.
The yum and createrepo packages have been added. Yum is a popular command-line package management system, also used by other popular distributions such as Fedora. With createrepo, new-style (metadata in XML format) yum repositories can be created.
The apt and synaptic packages have been added. Apt is a port to rpm of the Debian package management system and includes utilities such as apt-get. Synaptic is the graphical user interface for apt. Although these packages are included and apt repositories are provided for X/OS Linux 4, the use of apt and synaptic is deprecated.
The Xfce 4.2.2 desktop environment has been added. Xfce includes a number of packages offering a light-weight desktop environment specifically suited for use on low-end or thin client systems.
The nmh package was added, a drop-in replacement for the well-known MH mail system — a very powerful command-line mail client provided by several separate commands.
The following packages have been renamed: redhat-logos (xos-logos), redhat-lsb (xos-lsb), redhat-release (xos-release), redhat-rpm-config (xos-rpm-config), and rpmdb-redhat (rpmdb-xos).
Besides these additions and name changes, the following modifications were made to the original packages:
The up2date and yum packages have been extended to fix the problem of showing zero-sized packages when using up2date with yum repositories. An extended yum repository can now be created by using the --size flag with yum-arch. The extended repository contains an extra file used by up2date only, so it stays backwards compatible for use with other update clients. Note that up2date does not (yet) use the new-style (XML metadata) yum repositories, as yum itself does.
The up2date and rhn-applet packages have been extended so that both support repositories accessible via SSL (https://... URLs) and password-protected repositories (http://user:password@... URLs).
Red Hat trademarks and logos have been removed, affecting packages redhat-logos, redhat-release, and anaconda-product in particular. Various other packages also required minor modifications to remove references to Red Hat.
Anaconda has been modified to properly handle the existence of various flavors of kernel module packages (standard, smp, hugemem). This change was necessary to integrate the kernel module packages for clustering. During a full install or after selecting a kernel module package, only the module flavors for the available kernel(s) are installed.
Most Cluster Suite and GFS init scripts are disabled by default so that a full install does not produce errors on startup when starting unconfigured cluster services.
Dependencies of renamed packages have been changed.
Several small changes to spec files have been made, to remove bugs or fix other issues such as not having a %clean section in the spec file.
The changelog entries of the X/OS Linux packages contain a detailed list of all changes made.
What can you expect from X/OS Linux in the future?
Availability of free update packages, immediately released without any restrictions.
New packages based on the sources from the Red Hat Application Suite (mainly related to Java development and the Eclipse integrated development environment).
Various useful packages and tools will be added in the upcoming update versions of X/OS Linux 4.
Maximum compatibility with RHEL, with the release of new major versions of X/OS Linux soon after the source packages become available.