Common Questions

What's in a name?

The Adélie penguin is closely related to the Gentoo penguin, and Adélie Linux traces its roots to Gentoo Linux. Adélie is not a Gentoo fork and has little, if anything, to show for that now. The penguin itself was named after the wife of a French explorer.

Who's behind Adélie?

Officially, no single individual. We're a group of like-minded hackers who want a better Linux distribution.
Historically, it was started by A. Wilcox and others around 2015 but has taken on several forms since then.

Which libc does Adélie use?

Adélie uses the musl standard C library.

What does your userland look like?

We're currently offering a GNU Coreutils based userland by default.

Which package manager does Adélie use?

The Adélie Linux system uses the APK package manager. APK was chosen because it is very fast, and its dependency resolver is one of the more performant and efficient package managers available for Linux.

Which init system and process supervisor does Adélie use?

Adélie uses OpenRC and s6 for these purposes.

Which computer architectures do you support?

Right now we're focused on 32- and 64- bit versions of ARM, POWER, and x86.
We're hoping to add SPARC support soon.

How do you test your software?

We have over a dozen physical servers and vintage computers covering all of our supported architectures (and more).
Our developers use Adélie to develop Adélie on both servers and desktops.

How do I install my own software?

If you are building it from source or downloading it, you should take care to install it to /usr/local/ or your HOME directory so as not to interfere with the normal operation of your system.

Do you offer free support?

Our developers and other tech-savvy members of our community, like yourself, spend time in IRC and on mailing lists.
Please visit our contact page for more information.

Do you offer paid support?

What we call "Enterprise Support" is handled by a separate organization and we will gladly refer your inquiries. Depending on the nature of such an inquiry, you may be directed to an individual software consultant who acts in their own capacity.

I've found a bug, what should I do?

The most important thing to do is bring it to our attention. We can help you find a temporary workaround.
If you want to contribute directly, please file a bug report on our issue tracker.

Independent by design.

Adélie is an independent Linux distribution committed to integrity, privacy, and user freedom. Your donation might be tax-deductible.