Welcome to RSC Linux!
What is RSC Linux? On which projects is this Linux distribution based and what are the planned goals of it? Which advantages and disadvantages does RSC Linux have and can other projects or distributions somehow profit from it? Why does RSC Linux exist at all and what is its history?
It is a very customized and small Linux distribution with server services for 32 bit server systems and bases on the development tree of the Fedora Project. RSC Linux is developed and maintained by Robert Scheck, so it's mainly for my personal use. The distribution name "RSC Linux" comes from my nick name "rsc" which is just an acronym for my full name.
The first ancestor of RSC Linux was born at May 3rd, 2003 when I set up my dedicated server the first time. The base installation was a Red Hat Linux 9, but this distribution reached its end-of-lifetime at April 30th, 2004 and the at that time existing Fedora Legacy Project was very slow and had - at least in my eyes - a worse update support. I evaluated an upgrade to Fedora Core, but from my opinion even at this time many unneeded package dependencies were introduced and unwanted changes were done. An upgrade to an enterprise-class Linux distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American enterprise Linux vendor wasn't possible at this time, as CentOS didn't exist and when using the original enterprise-class Linux distribution, I would have switched to the stable tree while I was looking for totally up-to-date packages the first time.
Over the years, RSC Linux got its own flavour, so there are many differences which can be seen as the advantages or disadvantages of this Linux distribution: RPM5 is used everywhere to replace the mostly dead rpm.org project, there is no LDAP, Hesiod, LVM2 and SQLite support as I don't see any need for it. Further on, the default charset is ISO-8859-1, because UTF-8 causes trouble at several points and is currently disliked by many other people, too. RSC Linux has absolutely no legacy support, meaning there are no compatibility packages to get older software working somehow. As it is a Linux distribution optimized for server systems, no X is available and only server services are included which can be used on a dedicated server.
The development of RSC Linux helped to find countless bugs and packaging issues within Fedora. Most of this issues have been solved in Fedora, but some of these suggested changes were refused by some the Fedora maintainers - so these features only stay in RSC Linux. And I've to be blamed, that IDN support is available in several network command line tools included at Fedora and RSC Linux. Finally RSC Linux is a small and very stable but nevertheless a bleeding edge Linux distribution...