D i s t r i b u t i o n   S c i e n t i f i c   L i n u x   -   S o C


    I n t r o d u c t i o n

    This distribution has been built to fit the needs of the SoC Departement
    of LIP6. It is based upon the Scientific Linux Distribution.


    R e p o s i t o r y   M e r g i n g

    Instead of having a core distribution and asides repositories, the SLSoC
    have all packages from the repositories directly merged into the core.
    This distribution is kept in synchronisation with the 5x flavor of
    the Scientific Linux.
      Packages that comes from repositories others than SL are systematically
    rebuilt from source (sysadmin paranoia).

      Special note for the "experimental" repository: it contains the latest
    kernel 2.6.23.13 along with Xorg 7.3. It supersedes the corresponding
    packages from the SL distribution and containts incompatibilities with
    it. As such it's the only repository wich is *not* merged with the main
    tree. It has been built in order to benefit from the latest intel
    video driver (for 945GM) and xranrd 1.2 on my Dell D430 laptop.


    U p d a t e   P o l i c y

    All the security updates are continuously merged into the distribution.


    R e p o s i t o r i e s

    Additionnal packages have been took from the following repositories :

    1. - Fedora Core 6, 7, 8 & 9 (download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora).
    2. - EPEL                    (download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel).
    5. - JPackage                (www.jpackage.org).
    3. - Dries                   (dries.ulyssis.org/rpm).
    4. - Livna                   (rpm.livna.org).


    M o d i f i c a t i o n s   o v e r   S L

    1. - yum :
         A new command has been added to yum : "synch" which keep a computer
         strictly synchronised with one package group. Note that for this
         command to work special "flattenned" groups have to be created in
         the distribution xml comps.

    2. - Eclipse (& plugins) :
         Upgraded to version 3.3. This implies the upgrade of java-ecj and
         a whole bunch of java packages from JPackages.


    D i s t r i b u t i o n   B u i l d e r

    The set of tools used to automatically rebuild and keep in synch the
    Distribution could be found in the "5x/i386/i386/dim" subdirectory.
    The keystone tool is DiM (DIstribution Manager).