 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 126, 14 November 2005 |
Welcome to this year's 46th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The controversy over Nexenta's use of GPL software in its OpenSolaris-based distribution and the never-ending GNOME vs KDE flame wars dominated the headlines last week. We will briefly look at the above stories before examining other interesting events and releases of the week. We also feature an exclusive interview with Barry Kauler, the founder and lead developer of the increasingly popular Puppy Linux. And to prove that a new distribution is born just about every day, we have added seven new ones to the waiting list last week - including a controversial one called "Open Windows", developed by -- wait for this -- a law firm! Happy reading!
 Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in ogg (7.40MB) or mp3 (8.19MB) format (courtesy of Shawn Milo).
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
Content:
- Miscellaneous news: Nexenta, SUSE, Debian, Mandriva, Linspire, Gentoo, BSD
- Interview: Barry Kauler, Puppy Linux
- Released last week
- Site news: On donations, SourceForge links
- New additions: Nexenta
- New on waiting list: Bio-Linux, BU Linux, Hackett Linux, loonix-live, Open Windows, OpenWrt, Tukaani Linux
Miscellaneous news: Nexenta, SUSE, Debian, Mandriva, Linspire, Gentoo, BSD
 A controversy, complete with some colourful language on a public mailing list, accompanied the recent launch of Nexenta. For those of you who haven't followed the story, Nexenta is a new, unique distribution that attempts to marry the OpenSolaris kernel with GNU and Debian software utilities. Unfortunately, the two parties are covered with different and mutually incompatible licenses: while all GNU and Debian software is released under the GPL, OpenSolaris is licensed under the CDDL. This makes the attempted marriage rather awkward - as an example, one can't link a GPL-ed utility, such as Debian's APT against a CDDL-ed library, such as the C library that ships with OpenSolaris.
In their eagerness to release a product, the Nexenta developers have decided to ignore the license incompatibility. In their quest for purity, some Debian developers threatened legal action against Nexenta. The resulting discussion was long and unpleasant. The sanity only returned after some members of the Debian community, including Anthony Towns and Ian Murdock expressed embarrassment and amazement over how some Debian developers reacted to the whole issue. Regardless of who is right and who is wrong, shouldn't there be a more civil way to resolve these disputes, especially when considering that both OpenSolaris and Debian are classified as Free Software?
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 The second major controversy of the week was a 'yet another flame war' between the developers and supporters of GNOME and KDE. This followed the initial announcement by Novell that the company was planning to drop KDE from its enterprise-class products, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell Linux Desktop. The reaction was fierce. Some SUSE users seemingly misunderstood the whole issue, fearing that their preferred desktop environment will be removed from SUSE Linux as well. As a result of this backlash, Novell has now confirmed that all its enterprise operating systems "will continue to ship with both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments."
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 While many SUSE users have been taking advantage of Debian's popular APT utility to install applications from third-party repositories, it seems that there are also some Debian users who would love to see SUSE tools included in their preferred distribution: "This page contains information about the YaST2 for Debian (aka yast4debian) project. YaST2 for Debian tries to bring a simple and graphical administration tool to the Debian distribution. YaST2 from SuSE/Novell is released under the GNU GPL and consists of different modules for different administration tasks. We are porting the YaST2 source code to the Debian system and its configuration files." An intriguing idea. If you want to find out more please visit the yast4debian page.
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 Some five weeks after the formal release of Mandriva Linux 2006 to members of the Mandriva Club, the CD and DVD images of the "Free" edition (i.e. containing Free Software only) are now available for free download. Mandriva Linux 2006 is built on top of the Linux kernel 2.6.12 and includes a development version of the X.Org X window system (version 6.9), together with the two most popular desktop environments - KDE (3.4.2) and GNOME (2.10.1), as well as the usual range of desktop and server software. Good early reviews of the product have been published by Linux.com, The Jem Report and Linux Tips For Free. We have tested Mandriva Linux 2006 on three computers and found it to be working perfectly fine on two, while completely failing on the third - due to a compatibility issue between the system's Matrox graphics card and Mandriva's CVS version of X.Org. As always, it is a good idea to test the product before spending money on it.
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 Besides Mandriva, Linspire has also produced a quiet new release. Numbered as version 5.0.347, the new installation CD image was only announced on the company's user forums, rather than in a formal press release and it appears to be just a minor bug-fix product without any new features. It is provided as a convenience to existing Linspire customers who wish to install the product on a new computer or who had issues with the original Linspire Five-0. It is interesting to note that while new CD images of Linspire 4 appeared frequently, often in two-month intervals, Linspire 5.0.347 is the first new release in more than eight months.
Linspire 5.0 - one of the most elegantly designed and user-friendly distributions available today.
(full image size: 1,664kB)
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 The latest issue of the Gentoo newsletter has confirmed that the distribution will now default to installing the system from "stage3" binaries. Previously, users were encouraged to install a very minimal system only ("stage1"), then proceed with compiling additional applications. This method of installing Gentoo, while very educational, usually took several days to complete. The "stage3" method is much faster, since many packages are installed as pre-compiled binaries. Of course, users can still recompile them at a later stage if they wish to take advantage of additional optimisation features.
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 If you have installed one of the recently released BSD operating systems on your desktop computer, you might have been somewhat disheartened by the complete lack of any desktop branding in FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, as most applications (or ports) ship in their default states. To remedy the situation, consider visiting daemonisch.be. This web site has made available a handful of simple but effective desktop wallpapers for the three most popular BSD operating systems in various resolutions and file formats. Now there is no reason why you shouldn't proudly display your operating system preference to people walking past your monitor!
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| Interview: Barry Kauler, Puppy Linux |
Interview with Barry Kauler, Puppy Linux
 Although Puppy Linux is a relatively new arrival on the Linux distribution scene, its popularity has skyrocketed over the past few months. Barry Kauler, the founder and lead developer of this minimalist, yet feature-rich operating system was kind enough to answer a few questions about the beginnings of Puppy and other topics of interest.
DW: Barry, thank you very much for your time. Let's start with the usual: please introduce yourself. How old are you? Where do you live? What do you do for living? When and why did you start experimenting with Linux?
BK: I'm 55 and live in a rural region of Western Australia, about 350 km North North East of Perth (the capital city of Western Australia). I have qualifications in electronic engineering and lectured at universities and technical colleges for most of my working life, then a few years ago dropped down to part-time lecturing. This year, no lecturing at all... Puppy has taken over my life.
I was a "Windows person", and developed Windows applications, the most well-known being EVE, my Embedded Vector Editor -- which is a complete vector graphics editor yet only about 80 kb. ...I guess I'm obsessed with simplicity and smallness. I find everything is bloated, and too slow. I see apps created with layers of software, I see complex servers (font, sound) being used when, from my own knowledge of the hardware/software basics tells me that a small 1 kb program would do the job.
DW: Can you briefly describe the beginning of Puppy Linux? How did it all start?
BK: A few years back I was using Linux distros and thinking how big and slow everything is, so decided to create my own distro, built from scratch. I started from the "Boot disk HOWTO" and gradually added stuff, basically file-by-file. The end result is the Puppy you see today.
DW: Puppy Linux is obviously designed as a very light-weight distribution suitable for old and low-resource computers. As such, it is similar to Damn Small Linux (DSL). Have you tried DSL? If so, how would you compare the two - from the point of view of users trying to decide which one is more suitable for their needs?
BK: DSL is based on Debian, so I suppose if that is an issue then go for DSL. In some ways it's like asking "which model car is the best?" It's difficult to generalise. The best advice is probably to try both, then choose the one that you like and does what you want.
DW: Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Puppy Linux is the fact that although it comes as a 60MB ISO image, when I boot into it, I have a pretty complete Linux system with just about any application I might desire. How is this possible - especially when considering that most major Linux distributions now come on DVDs containing as much as 4GB of applications?
BK: This comes back to the way I built Puppy, file by file. I also made unfashionable choices, like going for Tcl/Tk. If you browse the menu in Puppy, you will find that the selection of programs is somewhat eclectic. A mixture of Xlib, Tcl/Tk, GTK1, GTK2, Ash/Bash apps. If I found a small program that did the job, I used it. Some of the apps seem very dated, for example, I use ROX-Filer version 1.2.2, which was the last GTK1 version, also the last version that used a simple and small mime-type handling system -- very old, but it is rock solid and works fine. Then there is Ical, a very old Tcl/Tk calendar program -- slightly quirky user interface, but still easy to use, and above all quite small.
On the other hand, Puppy has, where we think it necessary, the latest of some applications -- AbiWord for example. Gnumeric is scheduled to be updated to the latest version for Puppy 1.0.7 -- although 1.0.6 is just out the door, we Puppy developers are on a "heroin drip" and are now flat out on the next version -- there are typically 6 - 8 weeks between Puppy releases.
DW: Puppy Linux is no longer just a one-man project - it has evolved into a large community with many "kennels", not to mention users. Can you tell us more about this? If I get an idea about extending or improving Puppy Linux, how would I go about it?
BK: For the first approximately two years of Puppy's life, it was mostly me, with occasional input from some others. In the last six months there has been an acceleration of interest, and some of the other guys have become addicted like me. I suppose I modelled Puppy along the "Slackware model", with me as "dictator", but we are moving to a more community based model. Development is still very informal, we still haven't even got a formal bug reporting system.
Joining us is kind of a "do your own thing". This lax management model does have some advantages also. There is a developers page, with suggestions for projects, also the Wiki has a to-do list, so anyone can find something that interests them and just start working on it. Then start chatting on the forum, and in a kind of ad-hoc fashion we all communicate and share information and files. Note also, it has become so easy to create your own custom Puppy, and I notice one of them, Grafpup, has listed as a new distro on DistroWatch.
DW: What's the difference between PupGet and DotPup? Why is there a need for two package managers?
BK: We have this thing called "Puppy Unleashed", which is a collection of all the binary packages that are used to create the live CD, with a build script. The build script allows choice of which of these packages to use, then creates the ISO. The packages *not* chosen become PupGet packages. These are available on the Internet and can be installed with the PupGet package manager. That is, the packages that didn't make it onto the live-CD can still be downloaded and installed into a running Puppy. For example, there is OpenOffice.org and Amaya.
So, think of PupGet packages as the official Puppy packages. DotPups on the other hand are unofficial. These can be knocked together by anybody. They are intended to be very easy to install. Some of them work fine, some are experimental. We now have tools to make it very easy to create a DotPup package, and an easy installer, although they don't need any installer -- basically you just download a .pup file then click on it, then it's installed -- like in Windows!
Note however, recently we have tools to create your own custom live CD with any mix of PupGets or DotPups that you want, so the distinction between these package systems is in some ways blurred.
DW: Is the Puppy kernel vanilla or do you patch it? Any plans to move to kernel 2.6 or are there specific reasons why you are sticking with the 2.4 series?
BK: There was a version of Puppy that used a 2.6 kernel, 1.0.2 I think, but we went back to the 2.4 series. Two main reasons: something seemed to be wrong with NTFS in that particular 2.6 kernel, and people complained it wouldn't boot on some older PCs.
The 2.4 kernel has only two patches, NTFS and SquashFS ...why the kernel developers haven't made SquashFS part of the kernel I don't know -- I know the author of SquashFS applied sometime back (anyway, that's changing the subject!).
DW: One thing that fascinates me about Puppy is the very verbose changelog/news page describing the developments on a daily basis. While many other distribution developers struggle to produce a half-decent release announcement, you obviously enjoy maintaining a blog-style changelog. Why is that?
BK: I guess it is my teaching background. I also used to write correspondence courses. Also, I get annoyed, as we all do, when an otherwise fine open source product lacks documentation -- so I want to be sure that Puppy is well documented. Even the live CD has over 3MB of docs, something quite amazing considering its size -- even the "man" command works (not the actual man command, our replacement).
DW: Puppy has been in development for a while and, in terms of its original design goals, it is now pretty much feature complete. So what's next? Where is Puppy heading? What are your long term plans for the project?
BK: I don't consider Puppy feature complete yet. We have a to-do list. For example, hardware support is not all it could be. Puppy uses OSS for sound, but I'm not so sure if we should move to ALSA. Puppy also uses PDQ for printing, bucking the trend to CUPS. We do have DotPups for ALSA and CUPS, but for the official CD, maybe I won't go for either of those. PDQ is very small and simple, and we may put Perl into the live CD then use PDQ-O-matic as linuxprinting.org to get support for more printers (currently we have Gimp-print drivers, built-in to the live CD).
DW: What do you do when you are not in front of a computer? And more importantly, what do you think should be done to get the Australian rugby team out of the current unprecedented slump?
BK: I like walking. Rugby, what's that? ;)
P.S.: I would also like to send a thanks to all the new and long-term contributors to the Puppy project. Some people, like GuestToo who developed the DotPup system, have been around for a year or two, quietly and consistently helping. There are dozens of names, so I won't attempt to list them all here!
DW: Barry, once again, thank you very much for your time and good luck with your efforts!
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| Released Last Week |
Puppy Linux 1.0.6
Puppy Linux has been updated to version 1.0.6: "Puppy Linux version 1.0.6 released. The two big items in this release are AbiWord 2.4.1 and the multisession DVD. With the 2.4 series, AbiWord has come of age. This is now professional wordprocessing, and Puppy enhances the pleasant experience with a large number of plugins included in the live CD, including grammar checker and equation editor. The Puppy multisession DVD-R is a very smooth experience. For the uninitiated, this boots up from DVD and saves everything back to DVD, no hard drive required at all." Read the Puppy Linux release notes for further details.
IPCop Firewall 1.4.10
A new update to IPCop Firewall has been released. From the release notes: "Upgrade Squid to 2.5.STABLE12; permits user to introduce a delay between VPN launch and IPCop 'connection'; make Snort use binary login, more resilient, don't exhaust inode with random IP logging; allow dmzholes to use IP/mask instead of IP. Simplify blue -> green holes management; fix transparent proxy on blue broken when transparent on green off; add scheduled shutdown / reboot capability to IPCop; VPN fix no default values for advanced options when advanced options not used; VPN correctly display advanced options default values when not set...."
GeeXboX 0.98.7
GeeXboX, a Linux-based media player, has been updated to version 0.98.7: "This may be the first time that a GeeXboX release has been made without a player update, but the enhancements were significant enough and so we bring you the new version 0.98.7. GeeXboX now enters the 'digital era' with a feature that many users have been waiting for: the DVB cards support. ... Detailed Changelog: Linux updated to 2.6.14; updated uClibc to 0.9.28; support for FUSE (Filesystem In Userland) 2.4.1; support for driver firmware auto-loading; updated Syslinux to v3.11; added a DVB Free-To-Air channel scanner...." See the release announcement on the project's home page for more details.
RR4 Linux 2.65
A new, cutting-edge release of the Gentoo-based RR4 Linux live DVD is now ready - complete with a new kernel 2.6.14, upgraded X.Org 7.0.0rc1 and Firefox 1.5rc1, the latest GNOME Office packages, as well as newly included WINE and Blender builds: "I'm proud to announce that the neverending release has arrived. The changelog: installer Portage snapshot fixed; ATI drivers updated to 8.18.8; xdelta patch script more efficient; update installer icon, works perfectly under GNOME; Radeon 7500 Mobility, NVIDIA TNT and NVIDIA GeForce 6800Go properly detected; mouse wheel properly configured in X.Org 7.0 RC1; IPW2200 firmware downgraded to 2.2...." Find more details in the release announcement.
Red Flag Linux 5.0
Red Flag Linux 5.0 "Workstation" for i386 and x86_64 processors has been released. The new version, boasting improved reliability, usability, security and hardware compatibility, is built on top of Linux kernel 2.6.9 and supports Chinese (GB18030 and Big5 encodings), Japanese, Korean and English languages. The familiar Windows-like desktop and control panel from Red Flag 4.1 continues to be the main desktop feature, but the addition of development software means that the product can also be turned into a powerful workstation or development platform. See the distribution's product page (in Chinese) for more detailed description.
AUSTRUMI 0.9.9
AUSTRUMI is a small, business card-size live CD based on Slackware Linux. Version 0.9.9 has been released with the following changes: "removed SQLite, added PostgreSQL, added phpPgAdmin; updated system libs glib2, GTK+2, Glade; added Dillo, wget; removed GQview, added GImageView; added Pavuk - multiprotocol file grabber; updated AbiWord, fbpanel, Firefox, Gnumeric, Hydra, LAME, Nmap, vsftpd, XChat, X.Org; removed game gSoko added games Bombic, FloboPuyo, Digger; added RPM and DEB file support." Visit the distribution's home page for more information and a detailed history of changes.
Parsix GNU/Linux 0.70
Parsix is an Iranian Linux live and installation CD with support for input in Farsi and other convenient utilities for speakers of the language of Iran. Version 0.70 was released today: "We are pleased to announce that a brand new version of Parsix GNU/Linux is available now. This version includes GNOME 2.10.2 and OpenOffice.org 2.0.0 and will be distributed at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) 2005, Nov. 16-18, Tunis. Parsix GNU/Linux 0.70 is built from scratch using KANOTIX 2005-4 and is optimized for hard disk installation. Added many packages like AbiWord 2.4.1, GnuCash 1.8.10, Evince 0.4.0, Camorama, GnomeMeeting, Synaptic, Tasksel, Aptitude.... xFarDic multilingual dictionary is updated to 0.7.3 and now supports multiple word databases." The release announcement.
Parsix GNU/Linux 0.70 - a new version of the Iranian live CD was released last week.
(full image size: 1,219kB)
* * * * *
Development and unannounced releases
- PCLinuxOS .92-test3, the release announcement
- Arch Linux 0.7.1-pre1, the release announcement
- dyne:bolic 2.0-beta4, the release announcement
- Damn Small Linux 2.0-rc2, the release announcement
- Guadalinex 3-beta1, the release announcement (in Spanish)
- PC-BSD 1.0-rc1, the release announcement
- SME Server 7.0-beta6, the release announcement
- StressLinux 3.1-rc3, the release announcement
- Klax 3.5-rc1, the release announcement
- Kororaa 2006-beta2, the release announcement
- ParallelKnoppix 2005-11-08
- Kurumin Linux 5.1-alpha4
- ADMELIX 11-2005
- Vector 5.1-beta1 (SOHO edition)
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Web Site News |
Donations feedback
It has been suggested in the forum last week that we should provide an easy way for DistroWatch readers to contribute to our monthly donations pool. Not a bad idea, except there are two small problems. Firstly, your money will change hands twice so the middleman (eg. PayPal) will grab a portion twice (instead of just once if you donated directly). Secondly, our credit card processing service has banned "donations" as a product, so we can't just put up donations buttons on the web site without breaking the contract with the credit card service. Nevertheless, if you still wish to contribute towards the monthly donations pool, you can do so on the Advertise page (in the right column). Please don't forget to leave a comment (or send us an email) so that we know the purpose of the payment and can add it to the current month's donations pool.
On a related note, we received an email from amaroK's Greg Meyer: "We wanted to formally acknowledge and thank you for your very generous donation of $300 to the amaroK project. Today we reached our project fundraising goal and we are all very excited about the great new features being added during 1.4 development. You have been very supportive in the past with the assistance you have given us in publicizing the live CD, and this generous donation will be put to very good use."
* * * * *
Broken download links
Several readers reported "broken download links" in some of our news articles. Upon investigation, it turned out that the direct links to ISO images provided by SourceForge now indeed appear broken - clicking on them would take you to a "not found" page. However, the links still work if you copy them and paste them into an Xterm window. As such, we will continue providing these direct links - after all, if you are like us, you probably download large ISO files using a reliable download tool such as wget or curl, rather then a crash-prone web browser.
* * * * *
New distribution additions
- Nexenta. Nexenta is a complete GNU- and Debian-based open source operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris kernel and runtime. It is a result of an inspiration and desire to build a complete system based on the SunOS kernel and GNU software.
* * * * *
New on the waiting list
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DistroWatch database summary
And with this we'll say good-bye until next Monday. We hope you've enjoyed this issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Ladislav Bodnar
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • Issue 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Issue 1045 (2023-11-13): Fedora 39, how to trust software packages, ReactOS booting with UEFI, elementary OS plans to default to Wayland, Mir gaining ability to split work across video cards |
| • Issue 1044 (2023-11-06): Porteus 5.01, disabling IPv6, applications unique to a Linux distro, Linux merges bcachefs, OpenELA makes source packages available |
| • Issue 1043 (2023-10-30): Murena Two with privacy switches, where old files go when packages are updated, UBports on Volla phones, Mint testing Cinnamon on Wayland, Peppermint releases ARM build |
| • Issue 1042 (2023-10-23): Ubuntu Cinnamon compared with Linux Mint, extending battery life on Linux, Debian resumes /usr merge, Canonical publishes fixed install media |
| • Issue 1041 (2023-10-16): FydeOS 17.0, Dr.Parted 23.09, changing UIDs, Fedora partners with Slimbook, GNOME phasing out X11 sessions, Ubuntu revokes 23.10 install media |
| • Issue 1040 (2023-10-09): CROWZ 5.0, changing the location of default directories, Linux Mint updates its Edge edition, Murena crowdfunding new privacy phone, Debian publishes new install media |
| • Issue 1039 (2023-10-02): Zenwalk Current, finding the duration of media files, Peppermint OS tries out new edition, COSMIC gains new features, Canonical reports on security incident in Snap store |
| • Issue 1038 (2023-09-25): Mageia 9, trouble-shooting launchers, running desktop Linux in the cloud, New documentation for Nix, Linux phasing out ReiserFS, GNU celebrates 40 years |
| • Issue 1037 (2023-09-18): Bodhi Linux 7.0.0, finding specific distros and unified package managemnt, Zevenet replaced by two new forks, openSUSE introduces Slowroll branch, Fedora considering dropping Plasma X11 session |
| • Issue 1036 (2023-09-11): SDesk 2023.08.12, hiding command line passwords, openSUSE shares contributor survery results, Ubuntu plans seamless disk encryption, GNOME 45 to break extension compatibility |
| • Issue 1035 (2023-09-04): Debian GNU/Hurd 2023, PCLinuxOS 2023.07, do home users need a firewall, AlmaLinux introduces new repositories, Rocky Linux commits to RHEL compatibility, NetBSD machine runs unattended for nine years, Armbian runs wallpaper contest |
| • Issue 1034 (2023-08-28): Void 20230628, types of memory usage, FreeBSD receives port of Linux NVIDIA driver, Fedora plans improved theme handling for Qt applications, Canonical's plans for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1033 (2023-08-21): MiniOS 20230606, system user accounts, how Red Hat clones are moving forward, Haiku improves WINE performance, Debian turns 30 |
| • Issue 1032 (2023-08-14): MX Linux 23, positioning new windows on the desktop, Linux Containers adopts LXD fork, Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ form OpenELA |
| • Issue 1031 (2023-08-07): Peppermint OS 2023-07-01, preventing a file from being changed, Asahi Linux partners with Fedora, Linux Mint plans new releases |
| • Issue 1030 (2023-07-31): Solus 4.4, Linux Mint 21.2, Debian introduces RISC-V support, Ubuntu patches custom kernel bugs, FreeBSD imports OpenSSL 3 |
| • Issue 1029 (2023-07-24): Running Murena on the Fairphone 4, Flatpak vs Snap sandboxing technologies, Redox OS plans to borrow Linux drivers to expand hardware support, Debian updates Bookworm media |
| • Issue 1028 (2023-07-17): KDE Connect; Oracle, SUSE, and AlmaLinux repsond to Red Hat's source code policy change, KaOS issues media fix, Slackware turns 30; security and immutable distributions |
| • Issue 1027 (2023-07-10): Crystal Linux 2023-03-16, StartOS (embassyOS 0.3.4.2), changing options on a mounted filesystem, Murena launches Fairphone 4 in North America, Fedora debates telemetry for desktop team |
| • Issue 1026 (2023-07-03): Kumander Linux 1.0, Red Hat changing its approach to sharing source code, TrueNAS offers SMB Multichannel, Zorin OS introduces upgrade utility |
| • Issue 1025 (2023-06-26): KaOS with Plasma 6, information which can leak from desktop environments, Red Hat closes door on sharing RHEL source code, SUSE introduces new security features |
| • Issue 1024 (2023-06-19): Debian 12, a safer way to use dd, Debian releases GNU/Hurd 2023, Ubuntu 22.10 nears its end of life, FreeBSD turns 30 |
| • Issue 1023 (2023-06-12): openSUSE 15.5 Leap, the differences between independent distributions, openSUSE lengthens Leap life, Murena offers new phone for North America |
| • Issue 1022 (2023-06-05): GetFreeOS 2023.05.01, Slint 15.0-3, Liya N4Si, cleaning up crowded directories, Ubuntu plans Snap-based variant, Red Hat dropping LireOffice RPM packages |
| • Issue 1021 (2023-05-29): rlxos GNU/Linux, colours in command line output, an overview of Void's unique features, how to use awk, Microsoft publishes a Linux distro |
| • Issue 1020 (2023-05-22): UBports 20.04, finding another machine's IP address, finding distros with a specific kernel, Debian prepares for Bookworm |
| • Issue 1019 (2023-05-15): Rhino Linux (Beta), checking which applications reply on a package, NethServer reborn, System76 improving application responsiveness |
| • Issue 1018 (2023-05-08): Fedora 38, finding relevant manual pages, merging audio files, Fedora plans new immutable edition, Mint works to fix Secure Boot issues |
| • Issue 1017 (2023-05-01): Xubuntu 23.04, Debian elects Project Leaders and updates media, systemd to speed up restarts, Guix System offering ground-up source builds, where package managers install files |
| • Issue 1016 (2023-04-24): Qubes OS 4.1.2, tracking bandwidth usage, Solus resuming development, FreeBSD publishes status report, KaOS offers preview of Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1015 (2023-04-17): Manjaro Linux 22.0, Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0, Arch Linux powering PINE64 tablets, Ubuntu offering live patching on HWE kernels, gaining compression on ex4 |
| • Issue 1014 (2023-04-10): Quick looks at carbonOS, LibreELEC, and Kodi, Mint polishes themes, Fedora rolls out more encryption plans, elementary OS improves sideloading experience |
| • Issue 1013 (2023-04-03): Alpine Linux 3.17.2, printing manual pages, Ubuntu Cinnamon becomes official flavour, Endeavour OS plans for new installer, HardenedBSD plans for outage |
| • Issue 1012 (2023-03-27): siduction 22.1.1, protecting privacy from proprietary applications, GNOME team shares new features, Canonical updates Ubuntu 20.04, politics and the Linux kernel |
| • Issue 1011 (2023-03-20): Serpent OS, Security Onion 2.3, Gentoo Live, replacing the scp utility, openSUSE sees surge in downloads, Debian runs elction with one candidate |
| • Issue 1010 (2023-03-13): blendOS 2023.01.26, keeping track of which files a package installs, improved network widget coming to elementary OS, Vanilla OS changes its base distro |
| • Issue 1009 (2023-03-06): Nemo Mobile and the PinePhone, matching the performance of one distro on another, Linux Mint adds performance boosts and security, custom Ubuntu and Debian builds through Cubic |
| • Issue 1008 (2023-02-27): elementary OS 7.0, the benefits of boot environments, Purism offers lapdock for Librem 5, Ubuntu community flavours directed to drop Flatpak support for Snap |
| • Issue 1007 (2023-02-20): helloSystem 0.8.0, underrated distributions, Solus team working to repair their website, SUSE testing Micro edition, Canonical publishes real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 |
| • Issue 1006 (2023-02-13): Playing music with UBports on a PinePhone, quick command line and shell scripting questions, Fedora expands third-party software support, Vanilla OS adds Nix package support |
| • Issue 1005 (2023-02-06): NuTyX 22.12.0 running CDE, user identification numbers, Pop!_OS shares COSMIC progress, Mint makes keyboard and mouse options more accessible |
| • Issue 1004 (2023-01-30): OpenMandriva ROME, checking the health of a disk, Debian adopting OpenSnitch, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1003 (2023-01-23): risiOS 37, mixing package types, Fedora seeks installer feedback, Sparky offers easier persistence with USB writer |
| • Issue 1002 (2023-01-16): Vanilla OS 22.10, Nobara Project 37, verifying torrent downloads, Haiku improvements, HAMMER2 being ports to NetBSD |
| • Issue 1001 (2023-01-09): Arch Linux, Ubuntu tests new system installer, porting KDE software to OpenBSD, verifying files copied properly |
| • Issue 1000 (2023-01-02): Our favourite projects of all time, Fedora trying out unified kernel images and trying to speed up shutdowns, Slackware tests new kernel, detecting what is taking up disk space |
| • Issue 999 (2022-12-19): Favourite distributions of 2022, Fedora plans Budgie spin, UBports releasing security patches for 16.04, Haiku working on new ports |
| • Issue 998 (2022-12-12): OpenBSD 7.2, Asahi Linux enages video hardware acceleration on Apple ARM computers, Manjaro drops proprietary codecs from Mesa package |
| • Issue 997 (2022-12-05): CachyOS 221023 and AgarimOS, working with filenames which contain special characters, elementary OS team fixes delta updates, new features coming to Xfce |
| • Issue 996 (2022-11-28): Void 20221001, remotely shutting down a machine, complex aliases, Fedora tests new web-based installer, Refox OS running on real hardware |
| • Issue 995 (2022-11-21): Fedora 37, swap files vs swap partitions, Unity running on Arch, UBports seeks testers, Murena adds support for more devices |
| • Issue 994 (2022-11-14): Redcore Linux 2201, changing the terminal font size, Fedora plans Phosh spin, openSUSE publishes on-line manual pages, disabling Snap auto-updates |
| • Full list of all issues |
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View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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