Welcome to the Hyperbola wiki!

To access all the available documentation on the English wiki, follow the Menu or the Index of HyperWiki.

What is Hyperbola?

Hyperbola is a Free Software and Free Culture project aiming to provide a fully free as in freedom GNU/Linux operating system called Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre. It is a complete independent system based on the package-management from Arch GNU/Linux and using patchsets from Debian development for stability and security, with resulting packages optimized for i686 and x86_64 CPUs under Long Term Support (LTS). Hyperbola aims to keep its package and management tools simple, stable and secure. The primary goal is to give the user complete control over their system with 100% free software, free culture, security, privacy, stability and init freedom.

Development is focused on a balance of simplicity, elegance, code-correctness and bleeding edge Free Software.

Its lightweight and simple design makes it easy to extend and mold into whatever kind of system you're building.

You can find us on irc or forums.

There will be some stability changes between 0.x versions (Milky Way) as we make it to version 1.0 (Canis Major), where we plan to have Long Term Support.

When Hyperbola first started?

The idea of Hyperbola was born in FISL17 (Porto Alegre, Brazil) when people encouraged coadde and emulatorman to develop a fully free distribution based on Arch in combination with Debian level stability. Additional ideas such as building all packages from source instead of through a version control system, providing strong checksum (eg. SHA512) and signature verification, was inspired by Gaming4JC. In turn, this inspired emulatorman to develop the Hyperbola Packaging Guidelines and make an organized distribution.

Official development of Hyperbola began by our founders on April 15th of 2017. The project launched its official IRC channel in Freenode and webserver (located in Bissen, Luxembourg) on Gandi. The site went live May 20th of 2017 and our first stable version on was released July 13th of 2017.

What is the reason about Hyperbola origin name?

The name of Hyperbola was Crazytoon's idea. He was one of Hyperbola founders who had plans to develop Hyper Bola, a new modification of his Bola character adapted as the official mascot of Hyperbola. In mathematics, a hyperbola is an open curve with two branches - the intersection of a plane with both halves of a double cone. Since both terms produces a word play, Hyperbola was the chosen name by our founders.

Crazytoon passed away prior to the Hyper Bola mascot being completed, but coadde has continued its development and will release it soon.

If Hyperbola is a fully free distribution, is it following the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG)?

Yes, it is our main goal. Hyperbola is the first Brazilian distribution listed by the Free Software Foundation as a Free System Distribution, true to the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines. Hyperbola contains its own social contract and packaging guidelines which are the commitment that we make to follow the philosophy of the Free Software Movement.

What is Long Term Support (LTS)?

Long Term Support (LTS) is a type of special versions or editions of software designed to be supported for a longer than normal period.

Unlike distributions such as Arch which are rolling release models, our goal is extend the period of software maintenance; it also alters the type and frequency of software updates (patches) to reduce the risk, expense, and disruption of software deployment, while promoting the dependability of the software.

See our releases page for further details.

How Hyperbola stability works?

The job of Hyperbola, independently of Freedom is, and always is, to develop a Stable version of Arch. Hyperbola releases several versions prior to releasing the stable branch. The other releases are means to that end. You may find these other releases perfectly usable for whatever use you have for them.

Understand, however, that Testing is testing; things are expected to break from time to time. Testing is just what it says it is; it is for testing whether it works reliably prior to its release as a future Stable. You may well find Testing reliable enough, and in fact others have remarked that Hyperbola Testing is more reliable than some other distributions' Stable releases.

Corollaries to this in the commercial world are Development, Testing, and Production. In theory, businesses do not let anyone anywhere near their Production servers until they have proven their latest release is not going to break anything which currently works, and whose new features or functionality have been documented to the business's satisfaction. This is what Hyperbola's Stable name means: that, once released, the operating system remains relatively unchanging over time.

YMMV. Caveat emptor. You get what you pay for. As the saying goes, “If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces”. ;-)

See our packaging guidelines for further details about our development.

What privacy is found in Hyperbola?

Our objective is to support the privacy of our community, it means we strive distribute all software to be secure from global data surveillance revealed in the publication of Snowden's NSA documents. We offer additional hardened packages which remove lower level protocols that may cause privacy leaks, metadata/fingerprinting, and vulnerabilities.

What is the Init Freedom Campaign?

The Init Freedom Campaign is about restoring a sane approach to PID1, one that respects diversity and freedom of choice. We refuse init systems that breaks portability, ignores backwards compatibility, and replaces existing services, forcing into adoption (eg. systemd).

Is Hyperbola based on other distributions?

No, Hyperbola is just using the package-management from Arch GNU/Linux and patchsets from Debian with special emphasis on stability, privacy, security and init freedom. We build all packages from scratch on our own, optimized for i686 and x86_64 CPUs.

We support the https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom made by Devuan and forked some Parabola projects such as the blacklist and libretools, however Hyperbola is not a distribution based on Devuan, Parabola, etc. The system is completely independent!

General documentation

The Installation Guide will walk you through the process of downloading an ISO from our repositories and installing Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre on your system.

Be sure to take a look at the Hyperbola Social Contract, it guides us in all we do.

FAQ

Our frequently asked questions is to provide answers to questions often asked by users who moved to Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre from the Arch GNU/Linux and other GNU/Linux ones. It discusses issues caused by making the system completely free.

IRC Channels

The official Hyperbola channel is #hyperbola, hosted on Libera Chat.

Acknowledgement

Some parts of this wiki article are based on the Init Freedom Campaign and ParabolaWiki.