Subject: LST 1.8 Distribution released
From: "Ralf Flaxa (Inf4-Hiwi - Turowski)" <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Jun 1994 19:32:08 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce

The Linux Support Team Erlangen (LST) presents:

Official announcement of the LST Distribution, Baseversion 1.8

The Linux Support Team (LST) Erlangen is a small group of students at the
University of Erlangen-Nuerberg, Germany.    

In summer 1993 we started to maintain and support a distribution, called LST
Distribution V 1.3, originally just meant to help local users, students and 
institutes at our university with an easy to install and well documented Linux
Starter Kit, including printed LDP manuals, FAQs/HOWTOs (english) and a 50 page
step-by-step installation guide (german).  

Things have grown, now a lot of universities are mirroring us, we have a
mailing list to coordinate the LST members and FTP admins and get a lot of
help, testreports and suggestions by users and developers.

Features of the new baseversion LST 1.8

- follows the suggestions of the new Linux filesystem standard.
- consists of a base system with Linux Kernel 1.0.9, optional tinyX or
  XFree(tm) Version 2.1.1
- The base system can be extended by a lot of packages, grouped in the following
  independent series: network, develop, text, tex, doku, grafik, misc, xappl,
                      xdevelop, xemacs and xextra
- Four different Kernels on one bootdisk are available with LILO.
- Two different bootdisk available, one with SCSI support and one without.
- Only one rootdisk is needed for installation from floppy disks, harddisk,
  NFS or CD-ROM (SLIP and TAPE in BETA Test). The same disk can be used for
  recovery and emergency cases. 
- The installation supports full preselection by means of a database for all
  packages including calculation of needed disk space.
- An ONLINE help system is available during installation including more verbose
  package description/information/statistics and an ascii version of the
  complete step-by-step install guide.
- Two modes for installation are available, newbie and expert mode.
- After complete preselection, the system installs automatically from NFS,
  Harddisk or CD-ROM (from floppies too, but you have to change disks of
  course ...) You can go and drink a cup of coffee or play terminal tetris
  on the second virtual console during installation ;-)
- After installation, a script leads you through system configuration like
  setup for mouse, modem, Network (Routing, Mail, News, SLIP, UUCP, DNS, hosts)
  mtools, filesystem and user administration, bootsetup and many more.
- The LST distribution can be updated without reinstallation from scratch.
  A specialized script handles this secure update support. Updates for a
  baseversion will be provided and supported as long as the number of update
  disks and the complexity is reasonable.
- Multi language support is prepared but not finished yet. Sorry, but most
  of the documentation as well as the installation scripts are still in german
  for historical reasons and lack of time. Any volunteers for translation and
  proofreading are welcome.

We don't want to compete with the excellent distributions like slackware or
debian. We just want to annouce the new version, that may be helpful for german
users (as most of the documentation is written in german and the system is
preconfigured for german users (keyboard, TeX, etc.).  

When multi-language support is finished, we will try to contact other 
distribution-maintainers and see, if we can share and exchange packages,
scripts or knowledge with them.

If they like to ;-)

Please contact us, if you are interested.

The distribution is freely available via anonymous FTP.

HOME site is ftp.uni-erlangen.de

Binary distribution, containing just a minimal subset of sources:

	/pub/Linux/LOCAL/LST.Distribution

Sources can be found: 

	LST specific:	/pub/Linux/LOCAL/LST.src
	Linux general:	/pub/Linux/MIRROR.*
	GNU general:	/pub/gnu

A list of sites that mirror us frequently can be found as

	/pub/Linux/LOCAL/LST.Distribution/WER_UNS_SPIEGELT

Have fun with the new LST 1.8

Please mail any comments or bugreports to

e-mail: [email-masked]

Your

	Linux Support Team Erlangen

Caution !

We got informed, that some of the german CD ROM distributors apparently have
taken LST 1.7 (does not even support installation from CD ROM) and a BETA 
Version of LST 1.8 (that probably is buggy) on their CD ROMs.
Without documentation, without sources, without even "trying" to ask or
contact us. Sorry for that, blame them, not us. We will not support those
versions !

There will be an official LST 1.8 CD at the end of june, containing the
official, tested and supported version, all sources, a selection of the
Linux mirrors sunsite.unc.edu, tsx-11.mit.edu and nic.funet.fi as well
as the current slackware distribution. The following distributors that will
sell the official LST CD have contacted us and all agreed to sponsor Free
Software Projects with a certain amount per CD. 

At the moment this will be

LunetIX Softfair Berlin
Springer Wissenschaftsverlag Heidelberg
Buchhandlung JF Lehmanns
NBG Verlag und Handels GmbH
Emedia Verlag GmbH, Hannover
Linux Support Team Erlangen

We will maintain a list as /pub/Linux/LST.Distribution/Official.Distributors 

We hope, that others will follow their example. Help us to convince them 
to sponsor Free Software Projects !

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