14 DAY TRIAL // 4MLinux Server Edition, a special distribution based on Busybox, Dropbear, OpenSSH, and PuTTY, is now at version 8.2 Beta.
According to the developer, 4MLinux Server Edition 8.2 Beta is just an updated version of 4MLinux 8.1 Server Edition using 4MLinux 8.2 as the core system.
The 4MLinux developer has tried to keep the size of its distributions as low as possible, and that is also true for the server edition. Despite the fact that it comes with a large number of packages and specific applications, 4MLinux Server Edition only weights 152 MB, which is actually quite low.
“The servers controlled by the inetd daemon are now: FTP (vsftpd 3.0.2), HTTP/HTTPS (Busybox 1.22.1), SSH/SFTP (OpenSSH 6.5p1), and telnet. The programming environment includes the thttpd build of PHP 5.5.11 (with cURL 7.35.0 support), Perl 5.18.2, and DBMS (SQLite 3.8.3.1, MariaDB 5.5.37 with Adminer 4.1.0).”
“The main security components are 4MLinux Firewall 8.2 (based on iptables 1.4.21) and Clam AntiVirus 0.98.1. A proxy server (Polipo 1.1.0 with TOR 0.2.4.21), a VNC server (x11vnc 0.9.13 with EchoVNC 2.40a), and rsync 3.1.0 are also available,” explained the developer in the announcement.
A number of important aspects can be deduced from the changelog. For example, the 4MLinux OS has made the switch to MariaDB like a number of other Linux distributions, it uses a few of the Tor technologies, and most of the packages that have been included are very new.
Although this is a Live distribution that can be booted from a USB drive, it's also possible to install it. You have to keep in mind that this is a development version, which means that it's not yet ready for production. The development cycle of the 4MLinux distributions is pretty short, which means that the final build of the Server Edition should arrive pretty soon.
The developer of 4M Linux is also responsible for a number of other flavors, like the Rescue Edition and the Allinone Edition, which are also quite small in size.
4MLinux is a mini Linux distribution focusing on the following four Ms: Maintenance (system rescue Live CD), Multimedia (e.g. playing video DVDs), Miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and Mystery (a collection of Linux games).
More details about this Linux distribution can be found in the official announcement. You can download 4MLinux Server Edition 8.2 Beta right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.