What is GoboLinux?

GoboLinux is a modular Linux distribution: it organizes the programs in your system in a new, logical way. Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin , other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another , each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that's installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way.

This is what you see in the root of a GoboLinux system:

~] cd / /] ls Programs Users System Data Mount

/Programs is where all programs reside. No exceptions. You can explore what is installed in the system by looking inside it:

/] cd /Programs /Programs] ls AfterStep E2FSProgs Htop NTP Subversion ALSA-Driver Ed HTTPD OpenOffice Sudo ALSA-Lib Eject Hydrogen OpenSSH Swfdec ALSA-OSS Elinks IBM-Java2 OpenSSL Synaptics ALSA-Utils Ethereal ID3Lib Pango SysFSUtils Ardour Expat IEEE80211 Patch Sysklogd Audacity File IMLib2 Perl TCL Aumix Firefox InetUtils Pkgconfig TeTeX Autoconf Flac Intltool PodXTPro Texinfo Automake Flex IpodSlave Popt TIFF Bash Fontconfig Iptables PPP TiMidity++ ... ... ... ... ...

/Programs] find Bash Bash Bash/4.4 Bash/4.4/bin Bash/4.4/bin/ sh Bash/4.4/bin/ bash Bash/4.4/bin/ bashbug Bash/4.4/info Bash/4.4/info/bash.info Bash/4.4/man Bash/4.4/man/man1 Bash/4.4/man/man1/bash.1 ...

/Programs] ls -l OpenOffice total 8 d rwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 2005-09-22 01:07 1.1.4 d rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2005-09-23 04:36 2.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 2005-09-23 04:36 Current -> 2.0 /Programs] ls -l GTK+ total 12 d rwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 2005-10-02 01:39 1.2.10 d rwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 2005-08-21 05:48 2.6.7 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 2005-10-02 01:39 Current -> 2.6.7 d rwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2005-10-02 01:39 Settings

Each program entry contains all files for that program, stored in a versioned subdirectory.Multiple versions of a program can be maintained simultaneously, so you can alternate between them as you desire, or even use both at the same time when necessary.