Debian base for first Pardus Community Edition

The developers of the Pardus Linux distribution have announced the first release of their new Pardus Community Edition. According to the announcement blog post, Pardus Community Edition is a "stable and useful" distribution based on Debian Wheezy. Pardus Community Edition 1.0 complements Pardus 2013 Corporate, which was released at the end of March.

Previous versions of Pardus were based on Gentoo Linux, but future releases of two new branches will be based on Debian. With the split, the developers are clearly delineating between the version of Pardus designed to be used by government organisations and companies and a more streamlined version for end users. Pardus was originally developed by a division of the Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) with the goal of creating an independent, secure and cost-effective operating system for the Turkish government. Current versions of the distribution are developed by community volunteers.

The first release is available for 32- and 64-bit systems, with the option of either a GNOME or a KDE desktop, in English and Turkish. The developers say their aim was to create a Linux distribution that is simple to use and easy to install, even for users who are not familiar with Linux. The system is installed from a live image that allows users to work with the computer while the distribution is being installed and, according to the developers, the installer will try to configure, without user intervention, as many hardware drivers as possible.

Pardus Community Edition 1.0 can be downloaded from the project's FTP servers. Source code for the distribution's own tools, such as its desktop greeter and configuration manager, is available on GitHub.

Note: This article was corrected to reflect that Pardus is now developed by volunteers.

(fab)