Dear all,

I am developing a research project on free/open source projects and I decided to focus on linux distros. At this stage I am selecting the projects to analyze and I am looking for active and non-active projects.

While I have no problems to select active distros (as it's plenty of), it seems more difficult to identify non-active distros. I already scanned the Distrowatch list of projects, but I found no cases, except for White Box.

The projects I look for are non active projects, that:
- were active in the past (i.e. tens developers eventually participated to the project)
- make available the archive of their mailing list
I prefer to avoid formerly-active projects that became non-active as a consequence of a forking.

If you can think about any distro with these features, please reply to this message.

Thank you in advance

Alessandro
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Go to this page and make your choices!

http://distrowatch.com/search.php

http://distrowatch.com/search.php?status=Discontinued may be the better page to look at - there are 54 distributions listed as discontinued.

Dear Xavier,
dear hilyard,

that was my first idea, but none of the 54 discontinued projects (with the exception of White Box had a real active past (meaning, a group of some tens developers continuously participating to the project) or, if they had, they became discontinuous after a forking.

This is way I was looking for other suggestions.

Thank you, anyway.
Alessandro

Corel Linux was by the Corel people and based on Debian - it died years ago. Your better bet may be to look on Sourceforge for particular projects. They usually have a mailing list on the site itself and you can then gauge the participation level and other things. Most dead distros tend to be either very old or run by one or two people who then have other ways to fill their days.

http://futurist.se/gldt/

Check out the timeline, that should give some pointers.

Distributions have tended to proliferate. The number of active distributions is probably ever-growing.