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Desktop ROCK Linux started as a personal project in the winter 2000/2001 to create a ROCK Linux CD that contains all the packages, like XEmacs, KDE, and a bunch of other desktop related tools, we had to recompile for each ROCK Linux installation. This fork happened from the ROCK Linux v1.3.11.
Only a few friends used dRock in the beginning of 2001 - but soon it started to spread and is now used by several students here in Berlin and other places where the initial dRock developer had to set up computers. Also people from Costa Rica, Spain, France and Ireland sent in some reports ;-).
The goal of dRock is not to create a self-installing and graphical installation, but to create a distribution which can be used, by administrators to create an environment for normal users that contains all the needed desktop and office applications. But in contrast to the other self-installing, self-configuring Operating Systems, dRock simply works - everyday.
After a very long development period the first stable version 1.4.0 got released on December the 18th 2001 and a bug-fix release followed two month later.
Since the ROCK Linux folks also added many desktop related packages, the biggest difference is the much smother installation and pre-configuration. For example our kernel should be sufficient for most desktop machines and normally no recompilation is needed. dRock includes ReiserFS and ext3 support, APM (for power-off on shutdown) and also Direct Rendering and ALSA work without a kernel compile and we also took care that details like IDE DMA and MTRR support is present. The setup.d scripts got many usability improvements too, and we have prepared config files like modules.conf, devfsd.conf and XF86Config - which are nearly blank after a vanilla ROCK installation. We also introduced a ASCII-menu based installer making the packages selection much easier.
Because of a lack of time we never updated the glibc to a recent 2.2 version, but after I got deeper into the 1.7 scripts I noticed that is fairly easy to update to glibc-2.2.x. So I did it on a rainy afternoon - and also made 99% of the package description and build variables 1.7 compatible. Maintaining a package is nearly as simply as copying it into the other tree ;-)
After three Release Candidates dRock-1.6.0 should be released in Jun 2002.
During the 18th Chaos Communication Congress we met with many ROCK Linux developers and discussed the possibility of uniting the two ROCK Linux trees by restructuring the whole Build-System and introducing the possibility that build "Targets" can modify the package build.
So now I work most of the time for ROCK Linux 1.7, and nearly all packages got merged and switching to Gnome2 is also nearly finished.
The setup.d and config examples part has to be finished, the whole script environment of 1.7 needs to be completed and the installer needs to be written. The 2.0 installer will feature dependency detection, much improved network installation including listing the mirrors and (automatically) package updating.
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