Symphony OS

Symphony OS, SymphonyOne or Symphony Linux, is a Live CD Linux-based operating system, developed by Ryan Quinn, Jason Spisak, and Alexander Drummond. The distribution was dormant until 29 June 2011, when a new build was released.

At first, Symphony OS was based on Knoppix. Since its May 2006 release it is no longer based on Knoppix, but rather on Debian unstable, and features a functional hard drive installer. Symphony OS 2007 Preview, was based on Ubuntu 7.04.SymphonyOne was released on April 1, 2008. The release of version 2008.1 is based on Ubuntu 7.10.

The primary difference between Symphony OS and other distributions is the addition of the Mezzo desktop environment. This environment, like other aspects of Symphony, was designed with an eye towards extreme simplicity and usability. An example is that WLAN-Networks can work automatically with no user action. Symphony also includes its own Mozilla-driven application environment, called Orchestra.

Symphony OS uses a custom packaging system utilizing the <tt>*.sym</tt> package format; through a simple GUI a user may install any application in the Symphony library without dealing with "dependency hell". Because Symphony is Debian-based, it also supports the Debian package format.

Orchestra

Orchestra is an incomplete rapid application development environment which is being written for Symphony OS. It allows programs composed of HTML and CGI-style Perl to run as...
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