Peanut

A rather unknown Linux distribution, found at [L1 ].

(escargo 29 Jan 2007 - This now forwards to a different Linux site, apparently the successor, for something called aLinux. The LWN Distribution List[L2 ] lists them together. It says this about them, "Formerly known as Peanut Linux when v12.1 was released February 23, 2005. The name was changed to aLinux and version 12.2 was released March 24, 2005. Version 12.8 was released July 31, 2006.")

Derived from Slackware. It is worth knowing it because:

  • it tries to be small. No longer so small as it used to be, but still considerably smaller than giants like SUSE or Redhat;
  • it tends to be quite fast;
  • it has a customized version of MC. It is the first thing I miss as soon as I install any other distro. It has a very good font size setting and it somehow can be used to install just about any package: tgz, rpm, deb, you name it. It doesn't handle dependencies, but it does a very good job replacing 'rpm -xfv-whatever' or 'dpkg -i' etc.
  • it can be installed on a FAT32 partition; it gets too slow then, but Windows users may want to try it this way;
  • even in a native Linux partition, it provides the means to be launched from a MS-DOS partition and a batch file. So you don't need LILO or Grub or anything that should strike fear into a newbie's heart because it might mess with the MBR.

It is a Slackware, though. It is not too friendly to newbies sometimes.

Peanut is created and maintained by one single man, in Canada, that goes by the name of "linuxkid".

Luciano ES testifies that ActiveTcl 8.4.3 installs in it without the slightest glitch.