Different as SDE

T2 is cross-architecture.

Portability is a great advantage of T2. It is possible to cross-compile easily or add new architectures in a short time. Currently there is support for Alpha, ARM, AVR32, Blackfin, CRIS, HPPA, HPPA64, IA64, MIPS, MIPS64, Motorola 68000 (68k), PowerPC, PowerPC-64, SPARC, SPARC64 (UltraSPARC), SuperH, x86, and x86-64.

T2 is cross-platform.

Due to the nature of the automated build system and clean, parameterized packages it is easy to exchange the Linux kernel with Hurd, Minix, a BSD, Haiku, OpenSolaris or OpenDarwin to build a complete non-Linux platform. Work to support Minix and OpenBSD has begun, however this still lacks more volunteers.

Another way to utilize T2 is to build single packages into foreign binary-only systems. Systems where the kernel or user interface sources are not open, such as Apple's Mac OS X or Microsoft's Windows. T2 could be used as add-on manager for open source packages.

T2 aims to use as few patches on packages as possible.

T2 is different, it takes the form of a group of scripts for building and installing the distributions. One of the basic assumptions is that packages should be installed following the standards of their creators. This contrasts with the patched up systems created by most other distributions. T2 only patches when absolutely necessary: compile, security and bug fixes only.

T2 contains the latest versions of packages.

One great aspect of T2 is that the package configurations usually point to the latest packages and so also one of the latest kernels.

One great benefit of Open Source software is that software gets updated often. With T2 you get a tool to update your entire distribution often - instead of regularly updating the kernel and packages by hand. Together with a tool like Cfengine (GNU Configuration Engine , see \cite{CFENGINE}) you get an environment which can be updated easily. In fact T2 users tend to run really up-to-date systems.

T2 is completely self-hosting.

It has been proven that the enormous utilization of core applications within a complete T2 Linux build is a really good stress-test for these packages and helps to find bugs, reaching from very trivial to the very intricate.

T2 is complete.

Although minimal T2 distribution can be rather small (less than 10 MB for an embedded firewall) you can already get a compact functional system from the minimal package selection template. Nevertheless, T2 includes a big package repository with a wide-range of application areas: X.org, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Apache, Samba, Suid, and multiple thousands more. Among those are also quite a exceptional selection of special purpose, minimal embedded packages such as dietlibc, uclibc, busybox, embutils, dropbear and many others not commonly found in other systems.

Extending T2 is easy.

In the case you want to add a package to T2 you normally only need to fill some textual meta information. All packages get downloaded from the original locations. For each package T2 just maintains meta-data.

The build-system builds most package-types automatically and modifying a package build, or even replacing its build completely for a new target, can be achieved within the target.

Scripting is power.

Because of the fact that T2 consists of shell scripts it is easy to see what is happening under the hood. Also it gives you the possibility to change the automatisms according to your own needs. The included targets are just examples of such adaptations and contrasts to e.g. RedHat's policy not to support any automated RPM rebuilds (in addition to the often not-compileable sRPMs).

In fact the system has proves to be very powerful just because of the scripting system.

T2 is the ultimate do-it-yourself distribution.

The build and install system is easily accessible and modified to one's own needs. Furthermore the direction T2 development has taken emphasises this particular strength of the distribution.

There is no other SDE

There is no other SDE where you can define a target, with package selection, package modifications, optimization settings and cross-compile builds in such flexible and complete ways.