Frequently asked questions
Why it is called Inquisitor?
This name originates from 2004, when ALT Linux was building its new installer/configuration system. All its components’ names finished with*tor (i.e. separator,
propagator, predator,
alterator,
etc). Mikhail Yakshin came forward with a curious idea of calling new hardware
testing system an “Inquisitor” – it fitted *tor schema perfectly
and besides, it was a pun on system’s functionality with stress tests
like cpuburn.
There’s a message in ALT Linux devel-conf mailing list that started it all :)
Is Inquisitor a Linux distribution or what?
Well, yes and no. Inquisitor is somewhat you might call meta-distribution. Sure, it boasts separate Live CD that one can download and use, just as one might download any other Live CD Linux distribution, and Inquisitor can be built into bootable root that would look just like real Linux system (but customized for specific tasks).
However, Inquisitor does not have its own separate package repository. This is done purely by intent, there are several strong reasons to do so:
- There are some great and well-maintained repositories already available. These repositories usually have 95% of software we’d need to build complete Inquisitor system. It’s just a huge waste of time and effort to make yet-another-repository and rebuild everything.
- There are some industry standard distributions that most people recognize and would like to use. If we’d built our own kernel, for example, failing or passing of hardware on that kernel would mean very little: it could be a bug in our kernel build and userbase is very narrow to test it properly on huge range of hardware. Instead, if we’ll use, for example, some wide-spread kernel, such as one from ALT Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Red Hat, SuSE or Ubuntu. Same logic is applicable to all other software in the repository.
- An ability to build Inquisitor on top of multiple distributions gives it an unique feature: it’s possible to compare various distributions/repositories — in terms of hardware support, performance, stability, etc. For example, one could easily compare performance of video card X on various distributions and choose the fastest one.
