ALT Linux Team is a group of free software developers from Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Estonia and Israel. The ALT team is a community consisting of over 80 programmers. The majority among them are not ALT Linux employees. ALT Linux coordinates this project and carries out support and implementation of custom solutions.
The objective of the ALT project is to develop and support a wide spectrum of solutions based on free software, characterized by high reliability and security, convenience and availability of updates, a simple and logical interface, standards-compliant and high-quality localization and language support. All products developed by the ALT Linux Team are distributed under free licenses. The ALT project is part of the world movement for creation and distribution of free software. Among the ranks of the participants of the project are some of the developers of the main components of Linux. The work done by the ALT Linux Team is the foundation of all ALT Linux distributions.
The Sisyphus free software repository is the main storage location for the development projects of the ALT Linux. Everything that is created by the team's members is kept here in the form of source code packages and binary packages. The consistency of the repository is never compromised, which ensures that all dependencies among packages are always maintained. Any developer or user can update his or her system from Sisyphus using the apt-get utility. Sisyphus is one of four such repositories in the world, the three others being Debian unstable, Mandrake Cooker and PLD. You can always find the newest programs available in šSisyphus, but, at the same time, it always reflects the current state of development, and is thus not completely stable. Sisyphus is, to a large degree, intended for developers and experienced users, and should be handled with caution.
Sisyphus is not just a collection of software, it is rather a laboratory of solutions. Solutions designed for end users are collected in distributions, which can be used for various purposes and by various groups of users. There are also distributions made by special order of particular companies.
The first distribution created as a part of the ALT project was the multi-purpose Linux-Mandrake Spring 2001, designed to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. Its foundation was created by the IPLabs Linux Team company, and it relied upon a lot of code created by the French company MandrakeSoft, as well as its trademark. At the same time, the product was in many respects different from the Mandrake distribution. The product line of universal distributions was continued when ALT Linux Master was created.
ALT Linux has developed the Compact distribution, intended chiefly for beginners. It is made for workstations and home computers, is easy to configure and contains many office and multimedia applications and games. Compact has a large number of “clones”, created as OEM solutions upon demand by hardware manufacturers requiring such services.
All ALT Linux distributions are based on Sisyphus package repository and can be updated from it.