The Canterbury Project

April 1st, 2011

April Fool!

While all Linux distributions have collaborated and will continue to do so, this announcement was just a fake announcement ;)

We are pleased to announce the birth of the Canterbury distribution. Canterbury is a merge of the efforts of the community distributions formerly known as Debian, Gentoo, Grml, openSUSE and Arch Linux to produce a really unified effort and be able to stand up in a combined effort against proprietary operating systems, to show off that the Free Software community is actually able to work together for a common goal instead of creating more diversity.

Canterbury will be as technologically simple as Arch, as stable as Debian, malleable as Gentoo, have a solid Live framework as Grml, and be as open minded as openSUSE.

Joining the Canterbury Project Arch Linux developer Pierre Schmitz explained: Arch Linux has always been about keeping its technology as simple as possible. Combining efforts into one single distribution will dramatically reduce complexity for developers, users and of course upstream projects. Canterbury will be the next evolutionary step of Linux distributions.

Gerfried Fuchs, who gave a talk about Debian at last year's openSUSE conference, said: While DEX (Debian Derivatives Exchange) might have been a good idea in principle, its point of view is too limited. We need to reach out further for true success.

Robin H. Johnson, lead of the Gentoo Infrastructure team, in a panel of core Gentoo developers at SCALE9x: I really hate compiling-induced downtime. I've been looking forward to installing packages with just a couple of keystrokes. By building on the efforts of other successful distributions, we can take the drudgery out of system maintenance.

Michael Prokop, founder of the Grml live CD, can be quoted on the effort that we managed to create a universal live build framework with grml-live. Our vision was always that it will be universally usable to further the spreading of Free Software.

Last year's openSUSE conference had the topic of Collaboration Across Borders . Klaas Freitag, a respected member of the community, mentioned that the conference motto was set intentional and actually this is what I had in mind as a positive outcome for the conference.

Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader, comments on the Canterbury distribution: during the last year, Debian has worked a lot on the topic of collaboration with other distributions. Some initiatives have been targeted to Debian Derivatives Distribution (e.g. the Derivatives Front Desk, DEX, etc.), but we have also been happy to participate in conferences and panels with other distributions such as openSUSE and Fedora. We are proud of our recent work on collaboration and we are now ready, with Canterbury, to push these initiatives to the next, natural, step: uniting together in the next generation community distribution. Canterbury shall live long and prosper.