It was on those times that I stumbled upon a minimalist hobbyist linux distribution named Peanut Linux. It was one of the more well-known linux distributions during its time for sporting a spiffy desktop and easy to use installer. During that time, the Peanut Linux community was a lively band of people from different walks on life looking for the best linux desktop experience ever. Mind you, these were the days when Red Hat was still available in boxed form, Caldera was still around, and most of the installs were done using text displays.

From its minimalist origins (the first Peanut Linux version I used was 8.4, if I remembered correctly), running enlightenment, the distribution went on from being a distro of only about a little less than 100mb to about 700mb in 12.4, while changing it’s name to aLinux from Peanut Linux (we acquired the name to use Peanut Linux in pnutproject from Jay 5 few years ago, since like what he said, the Peanut was now like a Watermelon in size).

It has also changed considerably from being a tgz based package to an rpm one in 9.x and in 12.3, through last time efforts to revitalize the sagging aLinux community, a few of us experimented and suggested with Jay that he implement apt4rpm (using synaptic and rpm repositories).

Why am I blabbing this out? Peanut Linux was what started me fully in experimenting and implementing linux on my desktop, and indirectly introduced me to learn server administration on my own.

I even made a respin of Peanut Linux for use in the company I was working with to be used as promotion materials (rebranded of course to show our company logo as wallpaper). The company I was working for had short courses and I was tasked to develop a module to teach linux basics to students (linux during that time was only known to systems administrators and practically the Philippines during that time was largely – and still is – a Microsoft country). The teaching module I made for the short course was based on, as you may have guessed it, Peanut Linux. Jay even helped me out with the respin.

Anyways, back to the present, a few weeks ago, I talked to Jay (we remained friends during the years), and asked him if he can package up the unreleased version of aLinux for me to give a short review. aLinux was considered a dead distro; practically all of us from the Peanut Linux community moved on – some even joined the PCLinuxOS community, others created their own Linux distribution from scratch, a person I know moved to BSD (he was one of those responsible for testing apt4rpm on aLinux 12.1/.2, along with Craig and I). Jay always preferred to work alone – we can only suggest, it was his baby.

And so on February 22, 2010. aLinux 12.9 stable was released to the public on ibiblio, after practically 3 years of waiting.

Is aLinux radically changed, sporting a new GUI installer or live cd mode? This I can say, if you’ve used Peanut/aLinux before, expect the install process to be wholly the same.

Cd boot screen is now a little bit prettier.

Installs are practically the same

aLinux is indeed a blast into the past. Whereareas grub is used by practically all distributions nowadays, aLinux still uses lilo.

It is also one of those distributions which still uses KDE 3.5.10 as it’s main DE. Call me old school, but I still prefer KDE 3.5.x over 4.x.

For such a hobbyist distribution, you may wonder why the size of the cd installer is over 1 Gig. It is because the whole development system of aLinux is included by default.

I always reminisce and smile whenever I see the apt4rpm system that we helped tested and ported to aLinux – those were the good old days of pnutproject, when I had so much free time, unfortunately, real life came and well, I got married, and got busy with my work as well.

How did I find aLinux 12.9? It surprisingly worked real well, for a hobbyist distribution. Packages were as usual, a hybrid of pretty old stuff and new libraries. GCC is a bit outdated; WINE is included in the install as well (it’s old though).

The planets screensaver for the screensaver settings in KDE always crashed for me. Other than that, all else worked fine.

Playing with it, I’d have to say that it’s pretty good and fast, once you get over the outdated install. All in all, if you want some distribution just to play around and experiment, this might be an option for you.

What’s next for aLinux? I frankly do not know. Jay pops in and out of the picture more often than not, and sometimes disappears for months at a time. He releases whenever he likes.

For me, all I can say is this: without hobbyist distributions like Peanut/aLinux in the past, I wouldn’t have learned about linux and use them for practically all of my work now (servers and the like). I only keep windows for web development and the games – all licensed of course. Thanks for all the fish!

If you’re wondering what aLinux was, it was a linux distribution derived from looplinux and was basically a hybrid of sorts (in it’s early days, it was very slackware linux inspired, but sporting rpms as it’s package format) and was featured in distrowatch years ago.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20050829

I asked him how he was, and what’s up in aLinux land (which hasn’t seen a release for quite a while). In fact, I haven’t worked on pnutproject for quite a while either with Craig… real life since has taken over and I’ve been working quite busy for a start up company which I’ve been in for almost 3 years (never had so much fun programming and doing cool stuff with linux too!).

To make the long story short, aLinux lives, but not for distribution… yet. I don’t know if Jay would release it to the public either (it still uses KDE 3.5.x, btw which I still prefer over KDE 4.x).

Anyways, here’s the screenshot for you to enjoy. Have fun!

This would be my first blog post about Open Source and Tech stuff.  This would also be my personal blog site as well (I’ll try to be figuring out how to categorize these writeups in this blogging site, so please be patient with me )

Funny thing how this came about.  I’ve been wanting to do this for years, but haven’t gotten to it until now. In the past I’ve written articles for wine-reviews like playforlinux, and some other stuff for a friend of mine Tom Wickline, and helped out on a few open source projects like aLinux and pnutproject (even was a wine applications maintainer).

To make the long story short, I landed a job in a small tech company, and got sooo busy, that I had hardly time to tinker around like I used to… until now

So here I am, running Ubuntu 8.10 on my Neo Vivid 1100 (installed through Wubi) on a SmartBro Prepaid Account (coz my internet got messed up).

Anyways, that that.  I’ll be writing stuff for the next few days when I’m not that busy – starting with how to connect to smartbro prepaid – probably