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1) Why is it called Rubix?
Joshua Rubin is the designer and principle developer and maintainer of Rubix
Linux. Rubix seemed natural since it is only one letter different from Rubin.
Just like Linus Torvalds created Linux, Joshua Rubin created Rubix.


2) Why does the world need Rubix?
Rubix Linux was concieved during a time when the primary developer of Slackware,
Patrick Volkerding, was extremely ill. The fate of Slackware was uncertain since
it primarily used a "one man" development model. At the time, Joshua Rubin was a
happy Slackware user, but as it started to look unmaintained, he switched to
Arch Linux. Arch Linux had many advantages over Slackware, but was simply too
bleeding edge and the development did not seem well controlled. Joshua saw a
need for a Slackware-like, stable, supported distribution, with modern
ammenities such as dependency tracking package management provided with Arch
Linux's "pacman" package manager. Further, Joshua wanted to increase security,
but not in ways that would be imposing to the end user. The result ended up
being Rubix Linux.

5) What architectures does Rubix run on and how are packages optimized?
Rubix was initially designed to work on x86 architectures, i486 and newer. Rubix
will be ported to the AMD64 platform after the 1.0 release. Most x86 packages
are compiled with -march=i486 -mtune=i686. This means that the packages can run
on any 486 and newer machine, and will use optimizations for 686 if they are
available. Further, most packages are compiled with -Os, this is nearly -O2, but
without some rearranging that can inhibit the benifits of using position
independant executables (PIE). PIE, and Stack Smashing Protection are also used
to increase the security of packages, and packages are also assembled without
using an executable stack wherever possible.