Documentation / FAQ
Short answers here; long answers linked. Not answered below? The forum ↗ is fast.
LFS is our school, not our upstream. The Book follows LFS's structure and discipline (we say so on every page, and the Book's license credits it), but SkyVision diverges where a distribution needs to: a package manager (svpkg), signed binary packages, an installer, a maintained kernel config, and a security-update channel. Appendix C of the Book is a literal, honest diff against LFS 12.x.
Not as a culture-war statement — as a teaching decision. SkyVision exists so the whole
boot path fits in your head: PID 1 is sysvinit, services are short shell scripts in
/etc/rc.d, and chapter 9 of the Book explains every line. systemd is fine
engineering, but it makes the boot a library call instead of a text file, and text files are the point here.
One architecture means every package is built, tested and documented on what you actually run — small teams that port early ship late. v2 is a CPU feature baseline (SSE4.2, POPCNT — roughly any CPU from 2009 on); compiling against it makes the whole repo measurably faster without abandoning older machines that still matter. ARM64 is a 2.0-era feasibility question, decided with the community.
Point releases, not rolling. 1.0 is frozen; svpkg up
delivers security and bug fixes (1.0.1, 1.0.2 …) that never change behavior, and feature releases (1.1)
arrive about twice a year with upgrade notes in the release notes. You can always
opt single packages onto newer versions yourself with --from-source — that's
what the hybrid design is for.
If your daily life fits in ~1,800 packages plus what you're willing to build — yes, that's exactly what it's for. The Xfce desktop ISO is a complete workstation. If you need bleeding-edge GPU stacks, Flatpak-everything, or vendor software that only ships .deb/.rpm, a bigger distro will fight you less; the wiki's “coming from Arch/Debian” page is candid about the gaps.
About 55 SBU for the Book's chapters 5–10 — roughly 5 hours on a modern 8-core desktop, a long weekend on a 2-core laptop. You measure your own SBU in section 5.2 and every later estimate scales from it.
No. The Install Handbook gets you a running system in ten minutes, and svpkg works like any package manager. The Book is there for the day you ask “but what is all this, actually?” — which on this distro tends to come early.
Look at the logo: that smile on Tux belongs to the founder's eldest son. The release names will keep following the family. We are building this the way you build things for your children — carefully, transparently, and to last.
None and none. The OS makes no network connections you didn't configure;
svpkg sync talks to the mirror you chose, and mirror logs are standard web-server
logs under each sponsor's own policy. Even the download counter on this site is just mirror log grep.
GPG-encrypted mail to security@longervision.us
(key on the download page). Advisories go out on the announce list and
land in svpkg up, usually within 72 hours for kernel/glibc/openssl-class issues.
