General Information

Introduction

Asperix is a collection of Free/Open Source software more generally known as GNU/Linux Distribution. Please read the next section about the key features, implementation details, and reasonings.

Key Features

Developed from Scratch

There are many distributions that are based on other distributions. Asperix is designed from scratch, built from the raw packages with minimal changes. By idea Asperix closely follows the Linux From Scratch project.

Choice of Rival Packages

There are often debates about what to use KDE vs GNOME, KMail vs Thunderbird vs Evolution, Open Office vs KOffice, text mode vs graphics mode, etc, etc. Asperix leaves no room for such debates because it simply has all of them together. At boot time you can choose what window manager use KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc.. You can run GNOME applications from KDE and vice versa. Both Open Office and KOffice are installed and integrated, both supporting open formats, so you can choose to use any program at any time.

Complete Package Set

The default installtion includes all the packages. If you suddenly need an image editing program, you will find it already installed.

The negative impact of this approach is that there will be a lot of packages installed on the hard drive, that one will never use. Having many packages installed also has negative impact on system performance. My reasoning is that the storage space and speed become cheaper and cheaper. Sacrificing couple of gigs for convenience is reasonable. From the other once you need some program to edit some vector file you don't need to spend time looking for installation CDs and wait until the package with all its dependencies will be installed.

No Setup

In ideal world you just plug the storage media with operating system, boot and use it. If you change your video card, network, or moved the drive to another computer, then you don't have to reconfigure or set something up. All changes should be detected automatically.

The drawback of this approach is that the hardware has to be detected every time the system boots, which makes the boot process slow. My reasoning is that the boot process timing is not that important as time spent manually reconfiguring the system each time you change something.

Developer Orientation

All packages come with their header files, libraries, documentation (the so-called "devel" components). All the compilers and development libraries are required and always installed. The idea is that every additional package that suppose to be installed into system should be always built from the sources. The freshly compiled packages always work better and better integrate with the system. The drawback of this approach is that it requires some technical knowledge from the user. From the other side if the developers follow the "configure && make && make install" ideology, then the compilation and installation can be automated and wrapped into nice GUI package manager.