What is Calculate Linux

At the beginning I wrote the title “Calculate Linux 10.9 Development,” but I understood that perhaps I should start with what Calculate Linux is . What was it created for and what are the goals and objectives of the project.

Going to Distrowatch , it becomes clear that there are not just a lot of active distributions, but a lot of startups, and even more startups. Nevertheless, it would be imprudent to rely on a little-known distribution kit, and all the available free solutions back in 2005 did not suit us. What did we need? The smallest is the roaming user profile. So that, by analogy with the Windows solution, the user could work under his account in his session without being tied to a computer. At that time we studied a lot of solutions, twisted samba, nfs. Find a working and at the same time the optimal solution was not easy. Pack all this in a package and offer to use others, as it turned out it was even more difficult.

By that time, RedHat was on the host, and SuSE Linux was tested on the desktop. After some time, perhaps after the next update, the muscle (mysql) suddenly stopped running. No resuscitation, including from the source did not help. Apparently insufficient experience, but nonetheless. As a result, taking the server from the provider, we installed a tested SuSE on it. Yast is certainly a wonderful package manager and not only, but the better the system management tools, the higher the dependence on it. When I first saw Gentoo, I got sick with this system. Here is everything that the doctor has prescribed: optimization, selective dependencies (USE flags), community, documentation and, most importantly, completely manual configuration of configs. Ebuilds certainly help in some places, but once you touch the settings file, you take full control of it. I really got goosebumps after the remote assembly of Gentoo (from stage1 of course) from under SuSE on the server in the cabinet, and then on the host. After transferring the servers, nothing prevented Gentoo from being installed on desktops.
')
Here I want to make a small digression. Of course, the system on the server and on the desktop does not have to be the same. Another thing is that working in a single system is much easier.

Any attempts to install Gentoo on the desktop always lead to stage4 . That is how the first images of Calculate Linux 7.6 were. For the "purity" the archive did not contain anything extra. All settings, decorations, fonts and themes were stored in a separate installer package (calculate), which occupied about 16 MB. Why Calculate? So called our company with the same site.

For 2 years, the distribution was released strictly every month. For convenience, the numbering is selected as the year and month. In fact, this is a very high tempo, but in spite of this, each release contained significant changes, because the differences should have been enough to make it interesting to download and update the system. For the update, the mechanism for expanding the archive into a separate disk partition was selected, followed by configuration via profiles. In the future, the profiles were renamed to the settings templates.

Three years later, Calculate won certain positions, having entered the first hundred of popular distributions in the Distrowatch rating , became recognizable and beloved by many. The distribution kit still does not have a graphical installer, but attracts with its speed of installation, full compatibility with Gentoo, a thoughtful interface and regular releases of new versions.

Calculate Linux 10.9 and 11.0 are currently under development . But this is already in the next article ...