About

SolusOS is a Linux distribution that mixes innovation with old ideals, coming together to give you a fantastic out of the box experience for all of your computing needs. Please note that SolusOS 2 is currently in active development, and it will be some time before we release stable media. We’ve been around since the end of 2011/the beginning of 2012, and currently developing the next iteration of our project, SolusOS 2.

You are more than welcome to join us in our journey of development. SolusOS is an open source project and you are more than welcome to dive in.

What we are

  • Open source
  • Linux based
  • Lightweight
  • As vanilla as we can possibly be
  • Free
  • Built from scratch (We use the Linux/GNU/FOSS collection, but have no parent distribution)

Requirements to run SolusOS 2

At present, we target x86 hardware, and use an i686 optimised toolchain. This allows for greater performance on the vast majority of modern computers in the last few years. In the near future we will also target 64-bit (x86_64) hardware, as and when we reach our beta stages.

Built from scratch?

This term is used to mean that the distribution has no parent project or distribution. We maintain every aspect of the project ourselves, and as such have no direct upstream (apart from the software we actually use). An example of from scratch would be Debian or Slackware, which were built from the ground up and have no upstream and do not derive from other works. SolusOS 1 was a derivative of Debian, but SolusOS 2 is “from scratch”. We use the PiSi package manager, specially adapted to suit SolusOS. Our repository grows almost daily, with the eventual aim of providing a stable and vanilla software repository to enable users to fullfill their daily computing tasks, and to enjoy themselves as they did with SolusOS 1′s focus on hardware enabling, usability and multimedia focus (i.e. codecs, drivers)

We also intend to freeze the majority of our repository when we are in our beta stages, and will run a security audit against our entire infrastructure and software repository. Security layers will be then implemented, and the correct upstream relations established to enable rapid positive reaction to any security issue that either we find or is reported. This will not only benefit our desktop users, but those using SolusOS in a server deployment, allowing us to keep the uptime on these machines with specialist upgrade routes implemented via our package management system.

SolusOS Eveline (Legacy)

SolusOS 1 is now the legacy release, as it is very near to EOL. It was based on Debian Squeeze, providing up to date applications on top of the existing repositories. We maintained an extra 7k packages through updates and inclusions on top of our upstream repository, enabling us to provide an “out of the box” experience for users. This meant that users could install SolusOS within a matter of minutes, with the majority of their hardware already working, and many functions and formats supported straight away. We also provided driver management, and simplistic tools to make the life of users easier from day to day. We intend to implement these visions within SolusOS 2, so that SolusOS 2 can be viewed as a continued improvement from our visions in SolusOS 1.

SolusOS Servers

All of the SolusOS servers are provided by DediServe, a fantastic Irish hosting company. They’ve provided us with hosting from the very beginning of the project, back when we were little more than a Twitter announcement. We’ve never experienced a single uptime issue that we haven’t caused ourselves, and have benefited from a fantastic infrastructure as a result. More recently DediServe supplied us with a 16-core server to power the build system behind RepoHub, our repository maintainence and build system. We now enjoy a distributed framework enabling us to correct and update our packages in our Git repository, after being code reviewed in our Phrabricator system, and built and deployed within an incredibly short amount of time.  In the future this will enable us to rapidly deploy security updates to all SolusOS installations, whether it is in the desktop versions or headless server installations.

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