Guest post by InfoWorld’s Rick Grehan offers a two-part roundup of 13 specialty Linux distros, each of which constructs a user environment tuned to a specific application or, in the case of Ubuntu Christian Edition and Ubuntu Muslim Edition, to a specific community’s computing needs. Whereas the first installment focused on small-footprint distros, system-rescue Linux, and Linux flavors geared for archaic hardware, the second installment showcases the advantages of customizing both OS components and user-level software, focusing on firewall Linuxes, a Linux SAN/NAS appliance, two Linuxes for musicians, and the aforementioned religious flavors of Ubuntu. ‘These distributions are outstanding examples of flexibility of the Linux OS,’ Grehan writes. ‘Hats off to the designers and developers who build these specialized distributions and make the fruits of their enthusiasm available to all.’
There’s a lot of ways to look at that, but I’m going to take it as a tribute as to how well it achieves its purpose of providing an easy to administer firewall.
M0n0wall is based on FreeBSD not Linux.
From the m0n0wall website: “m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web server, PHP and a few other utilities.” http://m0n0.ch/wall/