The Linux Support Team Erlangen (LST) presents: Official announcement of the LST Distribution, Baseversion 1.8 The Linux Support Team (LST) Erlangen is a small group of students at the University of Erlangen-Nuerberg, Germany. In summer 1993 we started to maintain and support a distribution, called LST Distribution V 1.3, originally just meant to help local users, students and institutes at our university with an easy to install and well documented Linux Starter Kit, including printed LDP manuals, FAQs/HOWTOs (english) and a 50 page step-by-step installation guide (german). Things have grown, now a lot of universities are mirroring us, we have a mailing list to coordinate the LST members and FTP admins and get a lot of help, testreports and suggestions by users and developers. Features of the new baseversion LST 1.8 - follows the suggestions of the new Linux filesystem standard. - consists of a base system with Linux Kernel 1.0.9, optional tinyX or XFree(tm) Version 2.1.1 - The base system can be extended by a lot of packages, grouped in the following independent series: network, develop, text, tex, doku, grafik, misc, xappl, xdevelop, xemacs and xextra - Four different Kernels on one bootdisk are available with LILO. - Two different bootdisk available, one with SCSI support and one without. - Only one rootdisk is needed for installation from floppy disks, harddisk, NFS or CD-ROM (SLIP and TAPE in BETA Test). The same disk can be used for recovery and emergency cases. - The installation supports full preselection by means of a database for all packages including calculation of needed disk space. - An ONLINE help system is available during installation including more verbose package description/information/statistics and an ascii version of the complete step-by-step install guide. - Two modes for installation are available, newbie and expert mode. - After complete preselection, the system installs automatically from NFS, Harddisk or CD-ROM (from floppies too, but you have to change disks of course ...) You can go and drink a cup of coffee or play terminal tetris on the second virtual console during installation ;-) - After installation, a script leads you through system configuration like setup for mouse, modem, Network (Routing, Mail, News, SLIP, UUCP, DNS, hosts) mtools, filesystem and user administration, bootsetup and many more. - The LST distribution can be updated without reinstallation from scratch. A specialized script handles this secure update support. Updates for a baseversion will be provided and supported as long as the number of update disks and the complexity is reasonable. - Multi language support is prepared but not finished yet. Sorry, but most of the documentation as well as the installation scripts are still in german for historical reasons and lack of time. Any volunteers for translation and proofreading are welcome. We don't want to compete with the excellent distributions like slackware or debian. We just want to annouce the new version, that may be helpful for german users (as most of the documentation is written in german and the system is preconfigured for german users (keyboard, TeX, etc.). When multi-language support is finished, we will try to contact other distribution-maintainers and see, if we can share and exchange packages, scripts or knowledge with them. If they like to ;-) Please contact us, if you are interested. The distribution is freely available via anonymous FTP. HOME site is ftp.uni-erlangen.de Binary distribution, containing just a minimal subset of sources: /pub/Linux/LOCAL/LST.Distribution Sources can be found: LST specific: /pub/Linux/LOCAL/LST.src Linux general: /pub/Linux/MIRROR.* GNU general: /pub/gnu A list of sites that mirror us frequently can be found as /pub/Linux/LOCAL/LST.Distribution/WER_UNS_SPIEGELT Have fun with the new LST 1.8 Please mail any comments or bugreports to e-mail: ftplinux@rrze.uni-erlangen.de Your Linux Support Team Erlangen Caution ! We got informed, that some of the german CD ROM distributors apparently have taken LST 1.7 (does not even support installation from CD ROM) and a BETA Version of LST 1.8 (that probably is buggy) on their CD ROMs. Without documentation, without sources, without even "trying" to ask or contact us. Sorry for that, blame them, not us. We will not support those versions ! There will be an official LST 1.8 CD at the end of june, containing the official, tested and supported version, all sources, a selection of the Linux mirrors sunsite.unc.edu, tsx-11.mit.edu and nic.funet.fi as well as the current slackware distribution. The following distributors that will sell the official LST CD have contacted us and all agreed to sponsor Free Software Projects with a certain amount per CD. At the moment this will be LunetIX Softfair Berlin Springer Wissenschaftsverlag Heidelberg Buchhandlung JF Lehmanns NBG Verlag und Handels GmbH Emedia Verlag GmbH, Hannover Stefan Probst, Erlangen We will maintain a list as /pub/Linux/LST.Distribution/Official.Distributors We hope, that others will follow their example. Help us to convince them to sponsor Free Software Projects !