Submitted by “Apart from a KDE desktop and applications, the developers of the Pardus 2007 Linux distribution have built an entire distribution from scratch. Pardus, released last month, has its own multilingual installer, custom dependency-resolving package manager, and an INIT system that slashes boot times by several seconds. The distribution has come a long way since its first release in 2005, when it was based on Gentoo and lacked a package manager. Thanks to its custom tools, it’s one of the easiest Linux distribution to run and manage.”
It’s nice to see a research project progress that well.
As far as I know, Pardus has been developed to replace proprietary operating systems in our country (Turkey). They’ve not only built a nice and localized version of Linux, they’ve also added several interesting features to make it attract outside attention.
It looks nice, especially that it’s from Turkey, but don’t we have all we need with our current distros such as Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, etc…?
NEVER!
Free software is about freedom, one of those freedoms being choice. The more distributions, the more chance that one of them will suit your specific neeeds.
There’s only one problem with:
“The more distributions, the more chance that one of them will suit your specific neeeds.”
There are many that are pretty much all the same
Edited 2007-01-26 22:00
The Mudur service loader seems very cool, I’m having a little difficulty reconciling the concept of a python-based service loader to speed things up, but their logic seems sound enough and it doesn’t seem overly complex.
Can anyone confirm in real-world use if it has a dramatic improvement in bootup?
When I tested it I found the first boot after installation quite slow (like a minute or more), but subsequent boots were fast (about 35 seconds). In the same range as Debian Etch or Arch Linux in my box.
I wouldn’t say it’s a dramatic improvement over other init systems, but it does boot fast.
I read the whitepaper they wrote on Mudur (just about the only English technical documentation they have), and it looks pretty cool. Essentially they take everything out of /etc/inittab and just have it start their Python script. The usual init still manages daemons, and they have a small daemon written in C that manages service configurations.
They do some smart things besides parallelism. For example, instead of sleeping for a moment after starting a service to give it time to open its communications channels (sockets, ports, etc.), they poll on them and start dependent services immediately after they come up.
They also have some smart remarks concerning Ubuntu’s Upstart. We already have a powerful event-driven resource manager in udev, so why not use it? It seems like they really put some thought into this and came to some interesting conclusions.
As for Python, they say it takes a second or two to load the interpreter and libraries into memory, and from there it’s really fast. Using a high-level language allowed them to trim their 10,000-line shell-based init system to a svelte 1,500 lines of Python.
If we would only give it a shot, Python could turbocharge the free software community. Not only is it easier to write, but it’s easier to understand, maintain, and extend. Reinventing so many pieces of a distribution seems like hard work, but they really didn’t have to write that much code to accomplish their goals.
At LinuxQuestions http://shots.linuxquestions.org/?linux_distribution_sm=Pardus%2…
Good to see an excellent new distro coming out. Them Turks look like they’ve cooked up a nice one. I wonder how long it will take before the English localization is 100% finsihed… And when it is what will it look like? Does anyone here remember the old “Germanglish” in various early English SuSE releases?
Ooh, pretty screenshots! Custom configurator to soothe over longing for YaST… Looks tasty.