This is the primary development site for the Elemental Linux Server (ELS) distribution. You are welcome to look around, but be warned that anything you find here should be considered unstable. If you are looking for official releases of ELS, please visit the ELS home page at http://www.ibiblio.org/elemental/ If you want to sneak a peak at the next release, this is the site for you.
Here are some of the enhancements planned for the next release of ELS.
Dropbear SSH server is being added as an inetd-based service. This will allow remote shell access and rsync file transfers over an encrypted channel. Much safer than telnet and FTP! There is also a light-weight SSH client included.
To further improve the remote administration experience, the GNU screen program has been added to the base installation. Screen will allow you to run several sessions simultaneously over a single SSH connection, similar to the way virtual terminals allow multiple sessions on the server console.
Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices and Network File System (NFS) exports will be supported. This will allow you to do things like backup files to a USB flash drive or share files with other Linux machines over the network. One particular use of NFS would be to save space by sharing a single, read-only copy of the /usr filesystem between all ELS installations on your LAN.
The apcupsd add-on package will allow you to keep tabs on you APC brand Uninterrupible Power Supply (UPS). In the event of a prolonged power outage, your ELS box can be shut down gracefully and automatically.
The analog web server logfile analyzer is included as an add-on package to help you track the popularity of your site.
New howto documents include:
Clients for ftp, telnet and tftp now come from the GNU inetutils package. The same is true for the associated server daemons and inetd.
The Lithium release is far from complete, but you are welcome to browse the files.
ELS Helium is finally finished and available for download on the Ibiblio site and its mirrors.
The Linux kernel has been updated to the 2.6 branch and glibc has been bumped up to 2.7.
The popular PHP hypertext pre-processor has been added as an Apache module. This will enable the use of popular PHP/SQLite-based applications such as the Serendipity blogging package and phpBB web forums.
New packages include exim and mailx. There is also documentation explaining how to install the SquirrelMail web-based email client on ELS.
The Midnight Commander MP console-based file manager is available as an add-on package. Some notable features include an FTP client and ext2 undelete functions.
Smartmontools has been added to the base installation. This package keeps an eye on hard drive health for any drives that have S.M.A.R.T. technology.
OpenNTPD has been added to the base installation allowing periodic clock synchronization with network time servers.