We are glad to announce a release candidate of our upcoming StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-5.0.0 codenamed "Kishuf". We invite anybody interested to install this test release and help us find eventual problems in this distribution prior to its official release. Please report any bugs to our Bugzilla or use this forum.

For clues how this distribution looks like, please visit OS-Dir. They published some nice screen shots of the installer and desktop. Scheduled release of AS-5 including the x86_64 architecture is for the 2nd of April 2007.

The DVD ISO images can be downloaded from any of our mirrors, for example:

ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/startcom ... 86-DVD.iso
ftp://ftp.belnet.be/linux/startcom/AS-5 ... 86-DVD.iso
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/s ... 86-DVD.iso

or find another mirror from the download page.

There are various installation methods, including network install and AS-5 installs also on vmware just fine. Here some guidelines:

DVD

You may download the DVD image and burn the image to a DVD ROM available for download from the ~iso directory. This requires, that you can boot from a DVD device. Burn as image not data, insert the DVD and change the settings in the BIOS setup program (if needed). Press <Enter> after the initial screen and the setup program will guide you through the install.

Harddrive

If you already run a form of Linux you can download the DVD image and save it at a spare partition (Don't use the partition you actually want to install AS-5). This can also work with a FAT formated partition. Download also the boot.iso, like for network install and point the installer to the DVD ISO image.

CD - Network

The ~os/images/ directory contains the file boot.iso. This file is an ISO image that can be used to boot the StartCom Enterprise Linux installation program. It is a handy way to start network-based installations. To use boot.iso, your computer must be able to boot from its CD-ROM drive, and its BIOS settings must be configured to do so. You must then burn boot.iso onto a recordable/rewriteable CD-ROM.

Provide the mirror location ftp.belnet.be for example and directory /linux/startcom/AS-5.0.0/os/i386 when asked for the URL.

Disk-On-Key - Network

Another image file contained in the images/ directory is diskboot.img. This file is designed for use with USB pen drives (or other bootable media with a capacity larger than a diskette drive). Use the dd command to write the image.

Note:

The ability to use this image file with a USB pen drive depends on the ability of your system's BIOS to boot from a USB device.

A few packages have been updated and fixed so far and should be installed on the RC 1. Notable that the Yum Extender doesn't work until the first update. However the package updater works just fine and once all updates are installed, one can use Yum Extender to manage the system, including removing, installing and updating any of the packages.

Judging from data we received from our download mirrors on updates made by AS-5 systems, approximately 1000 systems are installed so far and updated. Maybe there are some more, but they didn't bothered to update yet.

Also not many problems (bugs) have been reported until now and our testings also confirmed only some linkage and compile problems in addition to the already updated packages. This means that we are close to the official release

Somebody posted a Image for VMware here. The link for download is to the right. Please note that StartCom is not responsible for it, including the naming convention of the file download.