Boston University Linux

BU Linux 4.5 (Velouria) is now available! Get a pre-made installation CD for $5 from the Office of Information Technology at 111 Cummington Street, or check out the installation page for instructions on burning your own.

The desktop edition of BU Linux endeavors to track the leading edge of Linux development while still providing a stable computing platform suitable for daily use. Like all versions of BU Linux, it features an easy installation process, integration with the Boston University networking environment, and automated security updates.

Release Notes

Previous releases of BU Linux were designed as completely general-purpose operating systems, suitable for diverse tasks from graphics workstation to lab machine to web server to supercomputer compute node. This year, we've split BU Linux into two branches. This release is Velouria, a desktop-oriented OS designed to be up-to-date with the latest and greatest end-user software. Later this summer we will release Zodiac, a server-oriented release without flashy graphics but designed for long-term stability and security. Velouria is also designed to be stable and secure, but since desktop applications (and desktop hardware) change so quickly, it will have a shorter supported lifetime than the upcoming server release. As with recent releases of BU Linux, Velouria will be supported for two years and then retired.

Currently, only i686-class machines are supported. This includes almost everything from Intel's Pentium Pro on. AMD64 and Intel EM64T systems will work fine using their 32-bit mode; watch for a 64-bit version later this summer.

This release is based on technology and software from the Fedora Core project, and it brings you all of the advances from Fedora Core 3, including new versions of the GNOME and KDE desktops, and the GCC 3.4 compiler (and a preview version of GCC 4.0). And, we've added about 300 new packages to this base, including scientific computing applications like GAP, PARI/GP, GRASS GIS, R, and Octave. There's also many great graphics apps (including the Inkscape vector graphics tool, the Blender 3D software, and the Scribus desktop publishing system) and programming tools (for example, many Perl and Python modules, and the increasingly popular SQLite self-contained database engine). And of course, no desktop operating system release would be complete without games, so we've included a nice selection of those.

Laptop users and those accessing the BU network from off-campus will be happy to learn that we now include a VPN client. Simply type sudo vpnc-connect from the command prompt to initiate a VPN tunnel. In a future release, we plan to provide a GUI to make this even easier.

Although this is a desktop-oriented release, many people use desktop systems to test what is traditionally server software including web services, SQL databases, and so on. For that reason, while network server software isn't presented as an option during the installation, many popular server programs are available for addition after the initial install. (See the section on Automatic Updates below for information on the new "yum" tool which can be used to add packages to a running system.)

However, there are a few notable exceptions. For e-mail, Velouria is configured to use Postfix, a mail transfer agent designed from the ground up for security. Postfix is very powerful and flexible and much easier to configure than the traditional Sendmail, which is not included. Note that the upcoming server release (Zodiac) will default to Postfix but will also include Sendmail and a new option, Exim. Likewise, it will include both vsftpd and ProFTPD, while Velouria only includes the simpler vsftpd.

The APT package management tool has been replaced by yum. Unfortunately, development on the version of APT we were using has come to a standstill, and it lacks support for running mixed 32- and 64-bit libraries, a necessity for AMD64/Intel EM64T support. (Note that Velouria does not yet come in an x86_64 version, but we plan to make one available by the end of the summer.) Fortunately, yum offers almost identical functionality and has a strong, committed development team. In fact, many of the new exciting features in yum would provide considerable grounds for switching even if APT continued to be an option.

Unfortunately, there is currently no good GUI tool for yum. We are tracking the development of several potential candidates and hope to add this later. Fortunately, the command-line interface for yum is simple and well-documented.

Our previous automatic update system, aptomatic, has been replaced with a yum-based system called simply bulinux-autoupdate. This system can be configured to provide notification of new updates but not install them automatically by changing config parameters in the file /etc/sysconfig/bulinux-autoupdate — see that file for details. However, we highly recommend leaving automatic updates in place for almost all desktop systems; it will greatly reduce the amount of work you'll need to do, and the chance of a machine being compromised due to unapplied updates is greater than the risk of a bad update, as all of our updates go through a quality assurance process before release.

The BU modified version of useradd — the longstanding useradd -K — is gone. Instead, the replacement add-bu-user provides the same functionality. The new program uses a Python-based directory service backend identical to that used in the graphical user management tool. This provides us with a cleaner and more robust codebase, making updates and future upgrades simpler.

Many people will remember that OpenAFS did not function properly with BU Linux 4.0 (Bossanova) when that was released. This is no longer an issue and OpenAFS is fully-supported.