Wires Cut Linux

Just released from YelloSoft, Wires Cut is a Xubuntu-based LiveCD for developing software. It has Java, GCC, Ruby on Rails, and several other languages and programming tools. Haskell, Lua, newLISP... The list goes on.

Wires Cut is designed for development in network-less environments. No Internet? No problem. There's even a Firefox add-on included to enable localhost web servers (AlwaysOnline).

It's geared for Macs, too. The standard touchpad gestures and wireless card work out of the box.

Give it a try! It's free and it's easy.

So... why would one use this instead of.. say.. CentOS? Or Slackware?

I need an IDE that works.
Eclipse is ok.
How about that Kdevelop. It has never worked for me. It can't compile anything and give cryptic error messages.

I am interested in giving it a shot if Kdevelop.

Sorry, no Kdevelop. It's supposed to be a really small distro--fits onto a CD. I wasn't able to put Kdevelop, Gedit, or Eclipse onto it. There's just vim, pico, and Mousepad. Will include Kdevelop, Eclipse, Gedit, Glade, and other GUIs in the next version. For now, I'm keeping Wires Cut really small. Anyone with a blank CD and a little hard drive space can use it. If you need these packages right now, they you're welcome to modify Wires Cut or make your own developer CD.

Slackware and CentOS both have GCC. That's common. But they do not have Lua, Haskell, IRB, RDoc, RubyGems, Ruby on Rails, or SQLite, SQLite Browser, and so on. These are very helpful.

Plus, they do not have the additional Firefox add-ons such as AlwaysOnline and VersionX. The first helps with localhost servers and the second allows any extension to be installed regardless of official supported versions in the metadata.

This distro exists to provide multiple programming languages without having to install anything. That's why far out things like newLISP and Hugs are included. Slackware is great, but it doesn't have everything.

Originally, the distro was simply a Ruby on Rails live cd. Now it's morphed into a developer toolkit. If you're craving a Java-Eclipse-CVS distro or a CLISP-KWrite-Bazaar distro or whatever, you're free to make one. That's the beauty of Linux. Eventually, Wires Cut will grow to have these things. For now, it's a small, experimental distro. Try it out and see if you like it.