Sisyphus Project

Distributions of operating systems produced by BaseALT LLC are based on our own development infrastructure, Sisyphus, which is supported by the ALT Linux Development Team and BaseALT LLC.

Sisyphus is currently available for the following architectures: i586, x86_64, AArch64 (ARM64), armh, ppc64le, and RISC-V. The process of porting it to other hardware platforms is also under way.

Sisyphus is based on software-building technologies which take into account the inter-program dependencies, and on proven developer interaction processes. This repository allows for making a stable branch (software platform) from time to time, which is then maintained for a long time and used as the base for building the set of ALT distributions. Similar compatible distributions are released for all hardware platforms. Repositories with binary and source packages for the supported platforms are made freely available.

ALT Linux Team is an international (mainly Russian-speaking) free software development team. The team has been in operation since 2001. ALT Linux Team is mainly focused on the Sisyphus project, including an independent repository and development infrastructure. Some members participate in developing the core components of Linux.

Since 2015, the ALT Linux team has been working closely with BaseALT LLC. Today, all the development infrastructure is owned and supported by BaseALT LLC.

Structurally, the ALT Linux Team is independent of BaseALT LLC, although many of its employees are members of the Team. Employees of BaseALT LLC and members of the ALT Linux Development Team are actively involved in international free software development projects. They hold annual conferences devoted to the development and application of free software (the Conference for Free Software Developers, and the FOSS in Universities Conference).

In addition to software development and building up their own repository, the team is engaged in promoting Linux, free cross-platform software, and free licensing in general. The community assists in the release of books under a free license.

To get directly involved in developing Sisyphus, it is necessary to become a member of the Team.
The procedure for joining the Team is described here.

Software platform

When the software products are being released, the subset of packages with closed dependencies is set aside in the Sisyphus repository. This subset is moved to an independent branch. Branches are also known as platforms, since they are used as the basis for generation of distributions of BaseALT LLC products. A new platform is released when the old branch proves unable to provide the required new features while maintaining backward compatibility.

The main characteristic of the branch is its stability. During the whole lifecycle, the platform is cleaned of critical errors and provided with security updates. All changes are committed to the stable branch only after mandatory functional and regression testing.

Platform 10

ALT Platform 10 (Aronia) supports the following hardware platforms:

  • x86_64;
  • i586;
  • AArch64 (ARMv8);
  • ppc64le;
  • armh (ARMv7);
  • riscv64.

Distributions based on Platform 10 have been released since December 2021. The following distributions are based on Platform 10: ALT Workstation, ALT Workstation K, ALT Server, ALT Virtualization, ALT Education, and Simply Linux.