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2006/10/15 - update : Formilux is now hosted on a Dedibox
2004/12/20 - update : new iso image downloadable on Exosec's site
Formilux is a very light and secure Linux distribution. It
is targetted at internet servers, routers, firewalls and
semi-embedded systems. It requires a very limited administration but
needs fairly skilled administrators. Installing a secured
proxy or a firewall just requires about 12 MB and a few
minutes. For this reason, we have long been using it for critical
service recovery at customers'. Its main features are
Zero Useless File (file-level dependencies),
read-only file-system, centralized configuration,
very strict default permissions, automatic boot
recovery, protection against buffer overflows,
and many more.
We haven't had time during the last 2 years to produce an updated
image, but we have worked silently to satisfy constantly growing
customer requirements. Now that the project is supported by EXOSEC, we'll have some time to
release more often.
During the last 6 months, we have been very quiet and had very little
time to work on Formilux. However, we have fixed many bugs, and added
an easy installation tool. Packaging has been reworked too, so that
we can stay up to date. This 0.1.8BETA4 version doesn't include the
latest of everything (it even contains Apache 1.3.24 and its nasty bug),
but it's just a matter of time now to recompile everything. We are
primarily interested in reports about usability, rather than contents.
This release has now been in production for several months on more than
a dozen of servers which run stably, so we felt it was time to release
something.
Two ISO images are available :
Those links are no longer available, they were often responsible
for my server's crash
- the full version (160 MB)
(slow) which includes all the packages needed to rebuild it and to install
many more features ; this image is located on a very slow site (<128kbps).
If you're lucky and alone, it will take at least 3 hours !
- full version mirrored on Steve Bovingdon's private ftp server (128 kbps too !)
- the light version (38 MB, 20
gzipped), or even the rescue version (14 MB)
whose goal is to provide people with a very tiny bootable CD
with enough tools to backup or rescue their servers, install newer ones, and
show demonstrations of what Linux can do even in small configurations (eg:
visit card-sized CD). This last version doesn't include the packages, but
can be installed on a hard disk from itself.
The CDs should boot on almost every Pentium or greater PC, equiped with
most common IDE, SCSI and RAID controllers and CDROM drives. It now support
boot-time USB keyboard/mouse since this seems to have stabilized.
This release 0.1.8 is based on Linux Kernel 2.4.18-wt6 and GLIBC 2.2.5.
An Apache server will automatically start and serve a copy our web
site :
http://www.ant-computing.com/
We'll do our best to build newer releases and enhance the package
management. We wish we had more time to spend on this and on the server
development.
We only provided free tools (mostly GPL). The packager, the system pre-loader
(preinit) and the scripts themselves are also GPL, and as such, their
sources will be publicly available within a little time. Just the time
for us to clean things a bit. But you can redistribute the CD freely as
long as you don't remove our copyright from it. If you want to make
money from it, please contact us !
Enjoy,
Benoit & Willy
Contacts:
http://www.ant-computing.com/
http://formilux.ant-computing.com/
benoit@ant-computing.com - web site
willy@ant-computing.com - web site
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