Lunar Linux is an operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 maintained around a source

Source code

In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

-based package management system

Package management system

In software, a package management system, also called package manager, is a collection of software tools to automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages for a computer's operating system in a consistent manner...

 also called Lunar. The project is a descendant of the Sorcerer

Sorcerer (Linux distribution)

Sorcerer is a source based Linux distribution.Sorcerer's source management tool is called sorcery. Sorcery downloads and compiles source code in order to install and update installed software. Instead of using cryptic hard to remember acronyms, such as rpm and dpkg, Sorcerer's tool terminology is...

 Linux distribution.

The installation disk installs a complete bootstrap development system first. After the user tells the Lunar manager which packages will be required, it automatically builds the software by downloading current source code and locally compiling an optimized package. On the downside, compiling software from scratch may be time-consuming and complicate the task of keeping the packages up to date.

Currently, Lunar supports the i686 and x86-64

X86-64

x86-64 is an extension of the x86 instruction set. It supports vastly larger virtual and physical address spaces than are possible on x86, thereby allowing programmers to conveniently work with much larger data sets. x86-64 also provides 64-bit general purpose registers and numerous other...

 architecture, but has been implemented by users on SPARC

SPARC

SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....

. No install support is planned for non-x86 architectures at the moment.

Lunar Linux began as a software fork of Sorcerer

Sorcerer (Linux distribution)

Sorcerer is a source based Linux distribution.Sorcerer's source management tool is called sorcery. Sorcery downloads and compiles source code in order to install and update installed software. Instead of using cryptic hard to remember acronyms, such as rpm and dpkg, Sorcerer's tool terminology is...

 by a small team of people led by Chuck Mead

Chuck Mead

Chuck Mead is a long time member and leader in the Linux and open source communities.He works for Red Hat in their division.Mead was the former President, Treasurer, and Director of Information Technology for the Linux Professional Institute as well as the former Chief Technical Officer of...

; another distribution derived from Sorcerer Linux is Source Mage GNU/Linux

Source Mage GNU/Linux

Source Mage GNU/Linux is a Linux distribution. As a package is being installed, its source code is automatically downloaded, compiled, and installed. Source Mage is descended from Sorcerer.-Notable features:...

. The distribution leadership for Lunar Linux was handed over to Auke Kok on April 22, 2004.