Introduction

ROCK is a Distribution Build Kit. You can configure your personal build of ROCK and easily build your own distribution (see the screenshots). It is software for managing operating environments. In a way it is a software development toolkit for building OS solutions.

The available config options include, but are not limited to:

Package Selection

You can select the packages you want to have in your Distribution. So packages you don't want or need are not build at all. A list of available packages can be found here.

Compiler and Optimization

You can select a compiler (by default gcc3) and optimization options for building your distribution. That enables you to highly optimize for your hardware. You can also build your entire distribution with the GCC Stack-Smashing Protector enabled for enhanced security.

Dietlibc

You can use dietlibc instead of the GNU LibC as your C library. That can be very useful e.g. for embedded systems.

And much more ...

Other options are: selection of an init-style, custom GNU configure options, cross-building, and much more. A major focus in the ROCK development always has been to make adding new features and config options as easy as possible.

Most of the ROCK Linux development is done on x86 Hardware. But ROCK Linux also supports the Alpha AXP, ARM, HPPA/HPPA64, ia64, MIPS, PowerPC, Sparc32/Sparc64 and x86-64 architectures. Others will follow and are easy to add:

The ROCK Linux Core has been ported to the PowerPC. This was done live, on stage at the Chaos Communication Congress 1999 in only 3 congress days . That was a very impressive demonstration of the high portability of ROCK Linux.

A "ROCK Linux Build Target" is a ROCK Linux based Linux distribution. The ROCK Linux build system has very flexible hooks which allow targets to modify the way the build system works. So targets can be used to create special-purpose distributions like single-disk routers, embedded systems, NCs (thin clients), set-top-boxes or cluster-nodes.

Building ROCK Linux can take a long time (a few days, even with state of the art hardware, if you build all packages with high optimization). To speed up build time it's possible to build ROCK Linux on a Cluster of Workstations.

Extending ROCK Linux is pretty easy and documented in the ROCK Linux HACKING HOWTO which comes with the ROCK Linux Sources. It describes how to write package-, target- and architecture-scripts for ROCK Linux.

ROCK Linux can also be seen as a "normal" general purpose distribution (the 'generic' target in the ROCK Linux build configuration). It's a powerful and feature-complete distribution, mostly designed for skilled Linux/Unix administrators and available for multiple platforms. It comes with over 1000 packages including X11, GNOME, KDE and XFCE desktop environments, the optional 'stone' configuration tool (most professional users prefer configuration files) and everything else one would expect from a linux distribution.

The dROCK (Desktop ROCK Linux) Target is a strip-down of the generic target for typical desktop installations.