I will make some of my work pub­lic.

The best can­di­date is one that will prob­a­bly not ap­peal to any­one: my per­son­al lin­ux dis­tro.

I have it, I use it all the time. It's not pub­lished yet, though, since it con­sists of a base Cen­tOS + a lot of work.

So, I will try to make it sys­tem­at­ic, call it an in­staller, and drop it on the un­sus­pect­ing au­di­ence.

Don't hold your breath, though.

Here are some of the fea­tures:

• Serv­er ori­en­t­ed. I use it for my clients' server­s.

• Qmail+­­couri­er+vpop­­mail+round­cube+s­­pa­­mas­sas­s­in+­­cla­­mav mail sys­tem.

• Squid prox­­y+fw­builder fire­wall

• Smart for pack­­age man­age­­ment

• runit-based boot/ser­vices.

• KDE as a GUI. Ac­c­s­si­ble via FreeNX/se­cure VNC.

• Open­VPN for sim­­ple VPN man­age­­men­t.

• Cus­­tom cher­rypy-based ad­min tools

• No SeLin­ux (sor­ry, it's a pain in the but­t. Se­cure, but a pain).

• Bac­u­la for back­­ups

• Cus­­tom tool to back the whole disk to a bootable DVD (Sys­tem Res­cue DVD)

• /etc in SVN+­­Trac (yes, re­al­­ly, and the ad­min tools force you to use it)

• Prob­a­bly djbdns for DNS.

All in al­l, it's a pret­ty or­di­nary Cen­tOS-based thing, ex­cept that the switch to runit makes ser­vice man­age­ment way sim­pler and reg­u­lar ( you can do things like hav­ing a non-­root us­er that can man­age some ser­vices, yay!)

On the oth­er hand, the cher­rypy-based tools would prob­a­bly need a bit of a rewrite, since some are pret­ty crud­dy.

Most­ly, I have been gath­er­ing these pieces over the last 6 years as I re­al­ly don't like the way any of the Lin­ux serv­er dis­tros are built.

I based it on Cen­tOS be­cause do­ing the whole dis­tro by hand is way too much work.

I can prob­a­bly show it around June, if I don't get too side­tracked. Hope­ful­ly, some­one will read this list and tell me "but graxzst lin­ux al­ready does all that!" ;-)