Base System
Though ClearOS software is indeed an independent Linux distribution, a majority of the source code comes from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yes, we have added things like Intrusion Detection (snort) and Prevention (snortsam), but less than a dozen of the upstream packages have been patched. You can find the gory technical details about which packages and why in this document. Re-inventing the wheel is something that we try to avoid. The ClearOS innovation comes from the intelligent integration and the web interface, not day-to-day software package maintenance.
For those of you who deploy CentOS or RHEL on servers, you will feel quite at home with ClearOS. You can even edit configuration files too - the web interface tries to stay out of the way.
ClearOS Core
ClearOS is split into two distinct trees:
- CentOS is a rebuild of all the Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages
- ClearOS apps and 3rd party packages are built via the ClearOS build system.
ClearOS from Scratch
The following is a step by step guide on how to transform a CentOS system into a ClearOS system. The purpose of this documentation is not to provide a production-ready ClearOS install! Instead, we hope to give a bird's eye view into the internals of ClearOS and to make those of you familiar with CentOS/RHEL feel right at home.