Kororaa GNU/Linux is back

Sam Varghese
Friday, 04 March 2011 10:08

Opinion and Analysis

GNU/Linux distributions are like ships in the night - they come and go and sometimes disappear from sight altogether. Some last just a few months, while others, despite being the brainchild of a single individual, stay on for years and years.

But it's not often that a distribution changes its parent and returns. That's what's happened to Kororaa GNU/Linux, a distribution that was begun by Canberra-based Christopher Smart (pic below) in 2005.

Like many users, after he started using GNU/Linux Smart moved from distribution to distribution until he finally found one that he liked - Gentoo, the distribution that allows one to customise every bit according to one's hardware.

Kororaa was created because he wanted a way to install Gentoo quickly and easily, without having to build the entire system from scratch. He had an itch and in true geek fashion he decided to scratch it.

However, Smart came up against a hurdle in November 2007 when he wanted to put out a binary distribution and found the work involved too much for one person to handle. Work on Kororaa (Maori for a species of penguin found in Australia and New Zealand) stopped.

"Then the Gentoo-derived Sabayon came along and I didn't see much need for an easier version of Gentoo, as it seemed to fit the bill quite nicely," Smart told iTWire.

"Always having been a bit of a distro-hopper, I went back to Debian, then to Ubuntu, but I was never happy. I have always been drawn to Fedora because of many reasons, but primarily their freedom drivers (promoting free culture and free software over proprietary solutions), but also because they stick to upstream and improve it there for the benefit of everyone, rather than doing their own thing.

"Fedora is responsible for many of the great desktop enhancements we take for granted today, like AIGLX (Accelerated Indirect GLX), D-Bus, DeviceKit, HAL, NetworkManager, Ogg Theora, and PolicyKit."