What is Orange JeOS?
Orange JeOS ("Juice") is a "just enough operating system" (JeOS) built from the popular CentOS distribution. This JeOS eases the building of hardware, software and virtual appliances. Orange JeOS install images can be as small as 200 MB and yet provide a fully functioning Linux operating system, with networking, security and the RPM/YUM package tools all supported. More specifics on what is (and, as importantly, is not supported) can be found in our Project Manifesto. The Orange JeOS Project currently generates several flavors of install or virtual images - including Core, GUI, VMware and Xen versions.
Why Orange JeOS?
We built Orange JeOS both because we needed it for ourselves and for several customers. The basis of the Orange JeOS Project actually started in 2006, when we had to build a custom Linux distribution for a physical appliance and used first Fedora, then CentOS as the basis of our distribution. We have been very happy with CentOS since our first release and have continued to customize our humble scripts with major releases of both CentOS and our required tools. We decided to open source the project to contribute to the same community that has contributed so much to us.
Stability
Orange JeOS is stable enough to be used in a production system. Several versions of Orange JeOS images have been running in production environments for over 26 months. Orange JeOS installations are at least as stable as the underlying CentOS distribution, but should actually be more stable since the number of packages (and therefore the attack surface) has been considerably reduced. The Orange JeOS tools also update all core packages from update YUM repositories during the image build, including security enhancements and bug-fixes. We do not recommend using any beta versions in a production environment.
License
All Orange JeOS install images and build tools are open source software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
