Lowarch

I'm glad to officially announce the release of the very first version of Lowarch: Lowarch 0.1.0 (Duhsala).

Lowarch is a lightweight Arch Linux base distribution for old systems with i486 processors and newer. Arch Linux's flexibility and simpicity of design makes it perfect for old machines, but the whole Arch Linux is optimised for the i686 and x86_64 architectures, and will not run on anything less.
Lowarch builds on the elegant design of Arch Linux, and tries to change it into a optimal low-end distribution.

Lowarch is not a full port of Arch Linux. Only packages that seem usable on old machines, and packages neccessary for newer architectures will be maintained. As Lowarch evolves, there will probably be other differences as well.

The package selection will probably prioritise three main uses for old computers:

• Servers
• Simple office use
• Fun and games

For other special needs, Lowarch, using the uname hack, makes a good i486 build environment on newer machines.

Main features:

Server: Apache, Php, Mysql, Samba, several ftp servers
Desktop: Xfce4 and Fluxbox
Office: Abiword
Multimedia: Audacious, RipperX, Apolos, Gimp, Inkscape, Graveman
Games: Black-box, GL-Chess, LBreakout 2, Freeciv, and many more

Todo:

• Make installation floppies.
• Go through the package selection, delete unneeded packages and include more important ones.
• It needs a lot more testing. Especially the ftp install, which has not even been tried. It has also not yet been tested on a i486 machine, only on i586 and i686 (yes, it works on i686 machines as well..)
• Make a more leightweight installer on the cd. It also needs wireless card support.