 DistroWatch Weekly |
| Tip Jar |
If you've enjoyed this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, please consider sending us a tip.
(Tips this week: 0, value: US$0.00) |
|
|
|
 bc1qxes3k2wq3uqzr074tkwwjmwfe63z70gwzfu4lx  lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhhxarpw3jkc7tzw4ex6cfexyfua2nr  86fA3qPTeQtNb2k1vLwEQaAp3XxkvvvXt69gSG5LGunXXikK9koPWZaRQgfFPBPWhMgXjPjccy9LA9xRFchPWQAnPvxh5Le paypal.me/distrowatchweekly • patreon.com/distrowatch |
|
| Extended Lifecycle Support by TuxCare |
|
|
| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Kororaa (by Flavio de Oliveira on 2006-05-15 15:32:25 GMT from Braslia, Brazil)
About Kororaa, I think 90% of Linux distros use some non-gpl driver or application... I do not think add those drivers are violating the GPL.
2 • kororaa & kernel GPL (by sgrosse on 2006-05-15 15:36:09 GMT from Erfurt, Germany)
I am personally very happy about the exclusion of non FOSS/GPL stuff out of the kernel. I think the aim of the linux community should be to get a bigger share in the desktop market. But the Kernel programmers make it more and more impossible.
If you are a user, you want to get the things running out of the box. At the moment there is no Distro of the big ones I know who support everything out of the box. You have to install many things for yourself which is not always that easy. (WLAN, 3d, mp3, dvd, ntfs support etc.)
I think the strategy that there is no god beside FOSS/GPL is wrong. FIRST linux should have a big market share, THEN it has some more arguments/power to try to get the producers offering open source drivers.
I fear that if the kernel people are staying so narrow minded the producers simply drop their support completely. Why bother? The money is in M$...
At least someone should have the CHOICE if he wants an FOSS/GPL edition or a nicely WORKING one with not 100% FOSS/GPL...
Chris has done a great Job also for the community so I think he should get merits nothing else.
TMHO
3 • An Unholy Alliance (by cheetahman on 2006-05-15 15:36:36 GMT from Burlington, United States)
That is funny
4 • correction of #2 (by sgrosse on 2006-05-15 15:37:42 GMT from Erfurt, Germany)
of course I meant I am NOT happy about the exclusion of non GPL stuff
5 • Couple of Comments (by towsonu2003 on 2006-05-15 15:43:06 GMT from Baltimore, United States)
"several major open source software companies, including Google and Red Hat"
uhm, google? open source? lol :)
I reallly liked the "Opinion" section.
6 • Re: kororaa & kernel GPL (by tajji on 2006-05-15 15:45:54 GMT from Espoo, Finland)
I think it's more like too late to try to get the producers offering open source drivers if there will be Linux that is already full of closed stuff.
Also, about WLAN, 3D (ATI/NVIDIA), MP3, DVD, NTFS support - it's just illegal to support many of those, regardless of whether you want to bundle just OSS software or not. WLAN binary blobs can't often be redistributed. MP3, DVD, NTFS are illegal to support without paying royalties / licensing patents.
Linux is getting more and more popular anyway. While it's doing that, people could require more and more open source drivers and open formats. For example, Intel had its 3D drivers completely open - ATI / NVIDIA should do the same. Ogg Vorbis AND FLAC should be made more dominant instead of inferior MP3. DVD and stuff just suck in both DRM and patent-encumbered formats way (also, most people use standalone players anyway).
7 • Kororaa (by AC on 2006-05-15 15:49:20 GMT from , United States)
While I agree that singling out Kororaa seems arbitrary (I'm not sure about the legal distinctions though.) I think we shouldn't be so blase about non-free drivers and the like. Consider this: users readily accept the proprietary nvidia drivers. Development on the free nv drivers ceases. Microsoft or some other company buys out Nvidia and stops making Linux drivers. (They've already done similarly buying anti-virus companies and discontinuing GNU/Linux versions of the product.) Suppose this happens with a few key proprietary items that GNU/Linux users thoughtlessly became dependent upon. Suddenly, we're having to play catch-up.
8 • Kororaa (by Daniel Mery on 2006-05-15 15:49:53 GMT from Seffner, United States)
Flavio you are rigth. Kororaa team go ahead all linux user support you
Regards,
dmery
9 • Kororaa -- let it live (by TD on 2006-05-15 15:53:43 GMT from Chapel Hill, United States)
Kororaa is a great project, and it's a shame they are under attack for something that many distros do.
I think that Suse, Xandros, Ubuntu, etc. avoid this issue by clearly distinguishing their GPL projects from their non-GPL add-ons.
If you build a distro with any binary-only or proprietary content included by default, then release that distro as "GPL" then it is a technical violation of the GPL because the source is not free to be read and modified by the end user.
Ubuntu, for instance, gets around this by providing a GPL product (without support for closed source items like multimedia codeces, graphics card drivers, etc., etc.) and leaves it to the user to stumble upon the "unofficial" ubuntuguide.org. From there the novice user spends a while arguing with his apt sources, then apt-getting and configuring whatever closed-source binaries he wants.
I think there is a project called Fedora Frog that tries to do the same thing for Fedora without as much hands-on configuration and download.
Suse gets around it by including a "non-free," non-GPL disk. Only their first 4 (or so) disks are GPL, the last one is not. Other distros just include the non-free things in unofficial apt repositiories or in their boxed (commercial) products.
A general litmus test for this is that if your distro downloads free as a GPL'ed product, but supports the latest graphics cards and multimedia formats then it is probably in violation of the GPL.
This kinda stinks, since one thing that made me love Kororaa is that it detected almost everything on my system automatically and gave me almost immediate eye-candy joy.
Cutting edge media and graphics are likely to always be closed source (it's in their buisness-model's DNA). GPL forbids direct inclusion of these modules.
This almost guarantees that any pure GPL project will seem, on its surface, "behind the times" on first run, because it can't play the latest Flash or DVD or run the latest 3D shooter. This means every pure GPL project will need an "unofficial" arm (an apt repository set, a "non-free" disk, ... something outside the GPL) if it is to remain competitive with that other operating system.
10 • 8 Dmery (by AC on 2006-05-15 15:56:00 GMT from , United States)
Speak for yourself.
11 • No subject (by AC on 2006-05-15 16:02:12 GMT from , United States)
A mere aggregation of GPL and proprietary software does not violate the GPL. That's not the issue when various codecs and such aren't shipped with the rest of a distribution. There are actually a variety of issues, including restrictions imposed by the software's creator (Flash, Java, RealPlayer), patent issues (various codecs), and DMCA violations (libdvdcss).
The issue with the video drivers is the only one tied specifically to the GPL and that's because a driver that plugs into the kernel is arguably a derivative work (not a mere aggregation) and by not being licensed under the same terms as the GPL, is in violation. But this is tricky, because the driver itself may not be "derivative", possibly only the "glue" that allows the driver to function is. That's why it's controversal.
12 • Kororaa (by kilgoretrout on 2006-05-15 16:15:33 GMT from , United States)
The assault on kororaa lacks credibility for several reasons. First, the name of the author of the threatening email has never been disclosed which sounds very fishy to me. Second, the email did not come from the FSF which one would normally expect in the case of a claimed GPL violation having the potential impact that this issue might have; rather, the email purportedly came from some unkown/undisclosed kernel developer. Third, a small, relatively unkown, community project was threatened rather than the many large commercial distros that include closed source graphics drivers with their distros. Fourth, this issue has been discussed to death and I don't recall even the most ardent FSF type folks claiming the bundling that kororaa does violates the GPL; their objections are on philosophical grounds not legal grounds. This extreme position has never been publically espoused by the FSF AFAIK.
After considering the above, I'm not sure whether kororaa has been the victim of some silly internet hoax or whether this is some kind of publicity stunt.
13 • CentOS Live CD (by rglk on 2006-05-15 16:17:52 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
What a nice surprise! I'd long meant to check out one of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clones, just to see in what ways an enterprise-class Linux distro differs from a consumer-oriented distro. An acquaintance of mine who values stability and maturity in an OS above everything (he's a businessman whose life depends on having a server/desktop running 24/7) is running CentOS and spoke well of it.
So I checked out CentOS from the new live CD. Good move by them; it'll give them more exposure. I like the idea of CentOS. They take the entire code from RHEL which is open source, strip off anything proprietary to Red Hat, e.g. their icons, artwork and any references to the RH brand name, recompile the packages, add some of their own improvements and release the result. For all intents and purposes, you get RHEL or something better, without the documentation, support and upgrade mechanisms that you pay good money for to Red Hat, Inc. However, CentOS stands by their product, they'll support any current version for six years.
What you get presumably is a tried and true, very well tested, very stable middle of the road Linux OS that you can rely on. I find it fun to work with, it looks quite nice (Gnome desktop, with a pleasant theme), feels nice, is responsive and pretty fast, and the live CD includes a nice choice of packages. Overall, I have a good impression of it.
The full, installable version of CentOS comes on four CD's; you'd get a very big OS with that. If you want peace of mind and don't need a flashy, cutting edge OS that's potentially flaky or buggy, you probably won't go wrong with CentOS. I'd be tempted to use it on a daily basis, but then, I'm already committed to something else.
Also see the following brief review:
http://os.newsforge.com/os/06/03/24/1947230.shtml
Robert
14 • 12 kilgetrout (by AC on 2006-05-15 16:18:50 GMT from , United States)
Excellent points and I agree, it's very fishy. You may be right.
15 • gpl graphics drivers (by ssam on 2006-05-15 16:27:42 GMT from Warrington, United Kingdom)
lets hire programmers not lawyers, and fix the gpl driver issue properly.
xgl works fine with the open source ati/radeon driver for r200 ati cards, and with the open source intel drivers.
how much would it cost to hire a team to reverse engineer and document the workings of a gaphics card, like was done with the broadcom wireless chipset.
or could some more people to work on the open graphics card be hired.
16 • Popularity ranking for every distribution (by Grzegorz Dąbrowski on 2006-05-15 16:58:07 GMT from Poraj, Poland)
I would like to see popularity of Pingwinek distrubution. Only I know that it's placed betwean 100 and 400 place. Why not put every distribution in the popularity page?
17 • What?!?! Something Works??? (by Me on 2006-05-15 17:01:39 GMT from Gretna, United States)
How dare anyone include non-gpl stuff in a distro?!? What are they trying to do -- actually make the thing work so that people can get some use out of it? How dare they!?!?!
18 • Comments on least popular distros (by SuSE Lover of Korean on 2006-05-15 17:02:13 GMT from Boston, United States)
I am not sure the least popular distro list reflected the real popularity of distros. For example, the Haancom is no longer active distro (now I remember their name is Haansoft Linux), and the Haansoft linux is moderately popular among Korean Linux users. However, usually thouse non-English speaking poeple visit their own forums and websites which are quite active (Sorry, I do not have any idea about other distros, but I am pretty sure other guys also do on their own-e.g. Japanese, Chinese or other non-Roman alphabet using distros).
I think we all may expand our resource pools of Linux distros if distrowatch.com could collaborate with those societies. Just my humble opinion.
Cheers
SuSE 10.1 Lover
19 • Nvidia/Ati Drivers (by Flavio de Oliveira on 2006-05-15 17:04:16 GMT from Rio De Janeiro, Brazil)
Nvida and Ati drivers, at least the companies say, do not use anything from the kernel... The Nvidia answered Kororaa about this doubt:
"The NVIDIA kernel module consists of two pieces: a binary-only
portion and a kernel interface layer (aka the "shim"). The
binary-only portion is not Linux-specific (the same code is used
on Windows, Solaris, etc), and does not include any Linux kernel
header files when it is built. The shim is provided in source code
form with the driver package, and this is the piece that is compiled
for your version and configuration of the Linux kernel. The shim
is the only piece that references Linux kernel data structures or
macros, and only does so to the extent that is needed to provide
the functionality of a modern graphics driver. After the shim is
compiled, it is linked with the binary-only portion, to produce
the final NVIDIA kernel module."
20 • RE: Popularity ranking for every distribution (by Joe in Minneapolis on 2006-05-15 17:07:34 GMT from Minneapolis, United States)
"...those who are interested in further analysing the DistroWatch page hit statistics can find the complete data file in CSV format here [http://distrowatch.com/text/newhpd.csv]. The file has no headers, but the right-most column represents data for yesterday, the second column from the right represents data for the day before yesterday, etc. The file is updated daily at around 30 minutes past midnight GMT."
21 • Selling Grandma to the Glue Factory (by Charles on 2006-05-15 17:15:10 GMT from Saint Louis, United States)
First, I liked the article on net neutrality. I contacted my legislators saying that I am for it. That was a helpful article and I hope to see others like it.
The followup, while one can understand the concern, is anything but neutral and fair. If this site is to become a political blog, I can go elsewhere. As a FreeBSD user that compiles most things from source, having become tired of Linux and its fundamental flaws - now at last the software that I use works properly and predictably - that would be easy. I have used this site for about three years during my Linux sojourn from Debian (in which I had to compile kernel modules from third-party source the first time I installed it) through Fedora (3, 4 [yuk] and 5 [yeah]), SUSE (can I think for myself, please?), Mandriva (oh, my system blew an O-ring) and Ubuntu (works great when you attach the super-secret proprietary repos). I have liked this site for its information - some of the best.
Yet I think that (1) the NSA thing was off-topic and (2) the US Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that such activity was legal.
Now those who think dealing with a netwar (see Michael Chrichton's State of Fear) and only waiting until the terrorists blow something else up or child sexual predators claim a victim or victims to provide a legal pretext in order to protect a sacrosanct abstraction of privacy have the freedom to do so.
I am also free to believe that the public good is measured one life at a time. I support the idea of lifelong hard labor without TV and all the amenities instead of the death penalty. Three hots and a cot will keep you alive, even when you don't like it. I support stopping the massacre of the unborn. I support stopping the eugenics programs with stem cells, GM-food and the like. I know how IBM, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and other paragons of the left like Margaret Sanger were supporting the hideous Third Reich (The War Against the Weak). I cannot bring myself to believe that it is moral to sacrifice victims on the altar of privacy and due process when a minimally-invasive alternative exists to analyze patterns and help locate criminal elements. I believe my position to me morally defensible even if no all will agree with it. Welcome to freedom.
I do not do things of which I should have any public shame. I am happy to provide a level of transparency for the public good.
Others may feel differently and they are so entitled. Yet this site is not a bully pulpit for a political agenda, although that line gets blurred. I think that the GPL helps blur that line, another reason why I am a BSD fan. Not all of us like George Soros and Jerry Brown. I am also too aware that the freedom fighters of today are usually the fascists of tomorrow. Are we really talking privacy or license for the moral degeneration of our time?
22 • Click fraud on Distrowatch (by Distrowatch reader on 2006-05-15 17:59:26 GMT from Bullhead City, United States)
Why do do some commercial Distros like SOLARIS get any place in Distrowatch and GNU/Linux GPL distros. get this ???
The second least visited page during the past 6 months on DistroWatch was that of Burapha Linux, a Slackware-based, server-oriented distribution developed by a university in Thailand. This was followed by ROSLIMS Live CD, a Romanian variant of KNOPPIX designed for medical students. The table below lists the 100 least frequently visited distribution pages on DistroWatch.
the booby price for the least popular distribution page on DistroWatch goes to SCI.Linux, or Southern California Internet Linux.
This gets OLD in light of McNeeleys comments about LINUX.
And yes I am trying a FreeBSD distro now.
In your bottom 100 list
I have tried freeduc and jollix I liked them both.
23 • Freedom fighters of today are usually the fascists of tomorrow and O-rings (by Troy Banther (agnustic) on 2006-05-15 17:59:34 GMT from Portales, United States)
I completely agree with you the freedom fighters of today are usually the fascists of tomorrow.
One-party political systems in the US or elsewhere, a single `proprietary` harware and software vendor, and of course single-minded individuals are, as Albert Bandura would say, a marvel to behold.
As far as my Mandriva 2006 O-rings - haven't had it fail since I installed it. Must be a RTM issue.
It's also interesting to watch the heated politics between the seperate BSD `projects`. Especially the Open one.
24 • RE: Selling Grandma to the Glue Factory (by Scott on 2006-05-15 18:01:04 GMT from Columbus, United States)
I'm sorry that you wanted an article under a section titled "Opinion" to be neutral and fair. I'll tell you what, Chuck...you sure are a stand-up guy and it's great to read so much about you. I've always wanted to know what makes Chuck tick.
What is it about people like you...you know the type...you come on to a site that is, for the most part, about linux distributions and you attack linux, incoherently complain about something in the OPINION section, and defy the sensibilities of what you know to be the majority of the readers. We called that trolling back in the day...and my, my, my, I think we still do today. Good luck finding a fascist BSD site with neocon subscribers, Chuck!~
25 • RE: 17 Me (by BSD/Linux_Freedom_Fighter on 2006-05-15 18:15:25 GMT from Fullerton, United States)
Linux was and continues to work just fine without closed binary drivers from ATI & Nvidia or any manufacturer. If distros start making concessions to allow more and more proprietary software & drivers to be included in the distro then you are defeating the purpose of Free Software and going against the Free Software values that Linux was built on. If you want a OS with a bunch of closed, proprietary software-- because that is the only way you think you can get work done--then stick with Windows or OSX. Happy DRM and TCP dreams.
26 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2006-05-15 18:29:49 GMT from Washington, United States)
To 15:49:20 GMT
I keep on hearing this logic that if we allow non-free drivers, then users will use proprietary drivers, and then development on free drivers ceases. This slippery slope argument is a fallacy, plain and simple. Why? Allowing the use of non-free drivers could increase the use of free operating systems and could allow for more converts to free software ideology. Widespread adoption of Linux could provide the incentive that NVIDIA and ATI needs to opensource their drivers.
I think the solution to the problem is to put the proprietary linux drivers onto the hardware itself.
27 • SUSE and Ubuntu (by Anonymous Penguin on 2006-05-15 18:55:44 GMT from Milano, Italy)
Ladislav wrote:
>>Luckily, things have changed and SUSE is now not only a great community project and one of the most important innovators in the Linux distribution world, it is also the only real challenger to the current leader - Ubuntu. Go, SUSE!<<
Exactly. Personally I feel that SUSE is *much* more polished and complete than Ubuntu. Besides it has always been one of the best desktop distros, even when you could only buy it (which I happily did) or perform an FTP download.
28 • savetheinternet.com ***What about non-US citizens?*** (by Eta Carinae on 2006-05-15 20:17:30 GMT from Wellington, New Zealand)
Hmmmm ...
I would ***love*** to show my support of the "save the internet" campaign (and I **am aware** that the proposed legislation is US legislation. However, surely it would also affect those **outside'' the US? Wouldn't the site **like** to show support from those outside the US?
I went to the website and after entering my details, I was told that I "was not eligible" as I am outside the US.
Ok - I'm fine if the site highlights the data from US citizens. But surely - such a campaign would be much more effective ***if it could ALSO show the level of support from the rest of the world!**.
Oh well, that's my rant for the morning .... :-))
29 • GPL/Kororaa/RR64 (by Soloact on 2006-05-15 21:05:02 GMT from Redding, United States)
Kororaa shouldn't stop development just because of a threatening email. Do other distros get the same threats? I doubt it.
I wonder if the email was sent by someone trying to push the GPL3. Could be the same people who try to get people to call Linux, "GNU/Linux", just for keeping their ego stroked.
This, of course, is my personal opinion, so no need to flame me for argument's sake.
On another point, in the "Development and unannounced releases" section, RR64 is mistakenly listed as "RR54", might want to correct that. RR4/64 are excellent distros, in my opinion.
30 • irony (by Matt T on 2006-05-15 21:07:04 GMT from Iowa City, United States)
I find it ironic that the least clicked on distributions are suddenly getting lots of exposure. Won't this extra exposure superficially increase the distros' click through numbers?
31 • NSA communist > Charles (by AQ on 2006-05-15 21:47:27 GMT from Cleveland, United States)
"Others may feel differently and they are so entitled. Yet this site is not a bully pulpit for a political agenda, although that line gets blurred. I think that the GPL helps blur that line, another reason why I am a BSD fan. Not all of us like George Soros and Jerry Brown. I am also too aware that the freedom fighters of today are usually the fascists of tomorrow. Are we really talking privacy or license for the moral degeneration of our time?"
And you are not a communist who believes it is the right of the government to force others to obey your point of view? Have you ever heard of the term liberty? It is something we generally fight for in the open source world, and something that the originators of the US fought for in 1776.
I can't tell you how sick and tired I am of right-wing communists, you make the left-wing communists smell like roses in comparison.
Please explain how giving our liberty away willfully and having the "majority" determine our approved use of it is any better than having it taken away by a terrorist. I see, you will be "alive". You have far too much faith in government, and might find yourself more comfortable in the soon to be fully Communist again Russia.
32 • SUSE (by Johannes Eva on 2006-05-15 22:07:32 GMT from Dreieich, Germany)
Sad to see that there are so much extremists even in the linux and free software world.
Go on Kororaa!
And long life to OpenSUSE!
33 • "Bottom 100" (by JAG on 2006-05-15 22:43:04 GMT from Linden, United States)
Hey! Ladislav...How's it going...???
Could you make that list a fixture on the site...maybe opposite the other list?
34 • Nsa is too funny (by Paul on 2006-05-15 22:43:13 GMT from Saint Louis, United States)
I just have these visions of our esteemed congressmen and senators sitting around an NSA speaker phone glued to breathy voices whispering "What are you wearing... that sounds hot." And "a double cheese pizza... that'll be $10". And "that plaid skirt was so gross."
The biggest crime, in my opinion, was that our Executive Branch was so silly they thought they could actually listen to billions of phone conversations and learn something other than who callers are voting for on American Idol. Riveting.
35 • Interpretation of DW H.P.D. ranking list (by rglk on 2006-05-15 23:02:48 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
The H.P.D. figures presumably reflect the number of attempts to connect from the DW website to the websites of the various distros, nothing other than that. That may vaguely reflect the intensity of interest in any given distro among the readership of DW.
To what extent the readership of DW reflects the actual community of desktop users of Linux/BSD is unclear, and to what extent the "interest" of that small subset reflects actual distro usership is even more obscure. As was recently revealed, some two thirds of the logons to the DW website come from machines that run Windows, as far as I recall. Even if some of these people sign in from work where they may be obliged to use Windows, it nevertheless appears that a big chunk of the readership of DW are Windows users that may not use Linux and are merely interested in it. How would you assess the significance of their interest? In the absence of actual experience with Linux distros they will be swayed by hearsay, fashion, marketing hype and the drumroll around "major new releases" of "major" distros.
The remainder of the readership of DW, and their patterns of clicking on distro links, will be influenced by the same marketing factors and may be unrepresentative of the bulk of Linux users in other respects as well. Presumably, many of them are promiscuous Linux enthusiasts. They wouldn't be reading DW if a. they weren't Linux enthusiasts and b. they had no interest in distros other than their own. What if in reality 80% of all Linux desktop users are staid and faithful users of just one distro and aren't interested in exploring any others? After all, of the 90% of all desktop users that use Windows probably close to 90% have no interest in any other OS.
What would be really interesting to know is the actual usage distribution of the various distros, i.e. the fraction of all users of Linux desktop distros that use any given distro on a daily basis, as their main OS. I have no idea how one could get this data, or even an approximation to it. What kind of analysis or reasoning one should NOT apply is demonstrated in the article referred to in this week's DW Weekly (from Nuxified.org) which gets everything wrong and draws utterly unwarranted conclusions from the DistroWatch H.P.D. figures. The author doesn't seem to have a clue about polling and interpretation of polling data. If there is anything that the H.P.D. data may be said with some confidence to be an indicator of, it's fluctuations in consumer interest and preferences in a massively hyped item in a mass market, not popular usage.
For what it's worth, I've collected a different set of figures that may be equally as meaningful or meaningless as the DW H.P.D. figures in assessing the popularity of different distros, if by popularity we mean the fraction of users that actually use a distro on a daily basis compared to the total number of users of all Linux desktop distros.
If someone installs a Linux distro and uses that distro, he'll have questions and run into problems. The most common place to go to to have them answered is a users forum. Most distros have just one forum, and with most of them you have to sign up as a member if you want to post. So why not take a look at the membership numbers of the principal users forums of a number of distros.
Gentoo: 113816
Ubuntu: 111587
Fedora: 68054
FreeBSD: 67463
Mandriva: 30393 + 14295
SUSE: 22005 + 8848
Xandros: 21044
Knoppix: 20770
DSL: 12147
Slax: 6556
Arch: 6067
Kubuntu: 5775
VectorLinux: 3581
Puppy: 2207
PCLinuxOS: 2157
PC-BSD: 2146
VLOS (Vidalinux): 1940
Feather: 1280
... and so on.
Some distros have more than one principal users forum (undoubtedly with overlapping membership), hence the multiple numbers. Debian has no forum per se; it has many different mail lists, some of which are extremely active (e.g. debian/user with hundreds of posts every day). They can also be read as Usenet newsgroups through gmane (e.g. gmane.linux.debian.user). I wasn't able to extract figures for Mepis, slackware, Kanotix, and CentOS from their users forums.
Robert
36 • New Release (by JAG on 2006-05-15 23:03:07 GMT from Linden, United States)
Puppy 1.09 Community Edition...
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/LatestNews
37 • Re #30 (by rglk on 2006-05-15 23:40:11 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
Matt T wrote:
"I find it ironic that the least clicked on distributions are suddenly getting lots of exposure. Won't this extra exposure superficially increase the distros' click through numbers?"
That applies throughout: the most clicked on distros get lots of coverage and exposure which superficially increases these distros' click through numbers which leads to even more talk about them which increases their H.P.D. even further .. and so on. What the resulting ranking signifies is anybody's guess; it certainly ain't quality, innovation, outstanding feature or even market share or actual usage in the real world.
Robert
38 • COPE news item on DN (by charleston on 2006-05-15 23:42:35 GMT from Horley, United Kingdom)
Saw this over the weekend on DN about COPE / Internet privatisation:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/08/1352255&mode=thread&tid=25
with the full interview via Real
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2006/may/video/dnB20060508a.rm&proto=rtsp&start=27:35
My reading of this is that the telecos are in a very weak position right now; just keep on pushing though.
39 • Re #34: Nsa is too funny (by charleston on 2006-05-16 00:03:25 GMT from Horley, United Kingdom)
??? but the work to computerise phone monitoring was completed in the late 1980's. It's trivial to digitise conversations, do word look up, compile hit rankings and identify specific dialogues which score high, all by machine. The big-scoring conversations then go on for extra (human) analysis.
Phone taps are not all listened to; the thing which (had) saved the world from George Orwell's “1984” police state was the human labor cost.
But computerisation and key word ranking algorithms has, for nearly 2 decades, made the process affordable.
:) take a look at the date on this piece: http://duncan.gn.apc.org/echelon-dc.htm
40 • RE: 35 • Interpretation of DW H.P.D. ranking list (by ladislav on 2006-05-16 00:05:31 GMT from Taipei, Taiwan)
why not take a look at the membership numbers of the principal users forums of a number of distros
Because it's very easy to manipulate those numbers. Just take a look at the Linspire forum at http://forum.linspire.com/ and you'll see what I mean - their membership number currently stands at over 436,000. This is more than the membership numbers of Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, FreeBSD, Mandriva and SUSE forums combined!
Of course I don't have any proof that this is an artificially inflated number, but I seriously doubt that Linspire has half a million self-registered forum users. As you might know, Linspire has always argued that their user base is not a typical computer user, i.e. not the type of user that would go and register on some forum just to discuss the operating system they are using!
So no, I don't think that counting members on user forums is a more accurate way of determining distribution usage or popularity. Sure, they are fun and can give out some interesting information, but ultimately, like the DW page hit statistics, they prove nothing.
41 • Kororaa (by andrew on 2006-05-16 00:43:00 GMT from Wellington, New Zealand)
Top marks to the developers of Kororaa. As a user I don't really care if a driver is closed or open source. I just want it to work. Don't get me wrong I believe open source is extremely valuable but it will never be the only thing that is available. I certainly don't mind having a mix and believe the users should have a choice.
42 • Re #35 & 40 H.P.D. ranking (by rglk on 2006-05-16 02:09:12 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
I'm glad you brought up the Linspire forum membership count. I'd seen it too and had reserved mentioning it for a later post, just to get a good laugh. Perhaps they have ambitions of becoming the Enron of the Linux distro world, and that includes cooking the books. My guess is that every time you go to their homepage, you're being registered as a member. E.g. a Google search for "Linspire" comes up with 9.2 million hits. And they have close to half a million registered members? Humbug!
As to the numbers that I posted, I wouldn't dismiss them so easily as possibly being manipulated. Many of these forums use the phpBB software or clones thereof which collect usage statistics automatically. To tamper with it could easily be discovered and revealed as outright fraud.
E.g. the membership list in phpBB can be inspected - you can simply count down the numbers. I'm not enough of a cynic to believe that there are many distro webmasters who spend much time populating their membership list with non-existent people. For the distros that I included I tend to believe their numbers.
How to interpret these numbers is another matter. Gentoo probably never purged their membership list. Some of them may be dead, others may have signed on ten years ago and since switched to other distros. For all forums, many "members" may have never gotten beyond asking one question about an install problem, only to give up, and then perhaps switch to Linspire.
As to the Ubuntu numbers, forum membership as well as H.P.D., I don't know. I can only say that I've been having a recurring vision of an army of Ubuntians logging in to their faith's website every morning by way of DistroWatch, just to jack up the H.P.D. numbers.
Seriously, I think that Ubuntu (and more so Kubuntu) is a plenty good distro but it doesn't really stand out from two dozen others that are equally as good. Their phenomenal popularity, if it's real, would make a good subject for students of the psychology of mass movements. Of course, the money behind it also helps.
We probably agree on two things: 1. Accurate numbers of actual distro usage are damn hard to come by, and 2. they would be damn interesting to have.
Robert
43 • 24 • RE: Selling Grandma to the Glue Factory by Scott (by warpengi on 2006-05-16 02:50:53 GMT from Calgary, Canada)
Hey, thanks for that Scott. So well done I don't need to add my 2 cents.
44 • re: 35 • Interpretation of DW H.P.D. ranking list (by Gilligan on 2006-05-16 03:22:15 GMT from Washington, United States)
Ain't it sweet when two completely independent sources correlate so strongly?
If you take the top eleven distros from distrowatch, remove the three for which there are no available forum membership numbers, the remaining eight are, in fact, the top eight on the forum membership list!
I'd say, that makes the numbers quite meaningful!
45 • Kororaa (by spiritraveller on 2006-05-16 03:44:05 GMT from Atlanta, United States)
They should comply with the GPL, period.
If they must distribute proprietary drivers, there are ways of doing that without violating the GPL. Just have a script that compiles the module after it is on the user's computer. That way they aren't "distributing" GPL code in violation of the license. The GPL only governs distribution. Every other distribution that lets you install nvidia drivers does it this way.
Yes it is harder, but that is the point. We want it to be harder to distribute proprietary code. Contributors don't want to see the code that THEY wrote distributed as a proprietary product.
Let's have a little respect for the GPL. Without it, Linux might never have become what it is today.
46 • The least popular distro (by rglk on 2006-05-16 03:46:00 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
Well, the folks from the least popular distro, SCI.Linux, got at least one thing right: they install Webmin by default. Any distro that comes with Webmin and ntop installed by default gets two bonus points from me. These are terrific web browser based system administration tools that should be available by default in any decent distro. The fact that none of the top 20 distros offers these features by default tells you something about herd mentality: 50 KThis and KThat apps thrown at you with KDE but essential tools of the utmost utility overlooked.
I have to take that bonus point away again from SCI.Linux, though: their homepage wallpaper shows humans surfing. What, no Tuxes?
Robert
47 • NSA=good IslamoFascism=bad (by william johnson on 2006-05-16 04:13:53 GMT from Clementon, United States)
I know that Gentoo number is bogus. There aren't 113 living who can install
it, let alone 113,000. Get real ! I especially love that huge,cryptic list of
fonts you get to choose from.
Reading some of these posts proves conclusively that no two words
were ever more meant to go together than "clueless + liberal".
I don't know anyone who gives two sh*ts about the NSA monitoring
and data mining phone calls. I say crank it up,NSA., keep us safe,forget
about the whining tree-huggers and global warming kooks.
48 • RE: #35 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2006-05-16 04:24:04 GMT from Milano, Italy)
Kanotix does have a list of registered users, but I believe you can access it only if you are registered yourself. Anyway, right now they are 6577.
There are many serious flaws if you want to use the number of registered members of an user forum as a popularity measurement. One of the most serious is: how many still active?
For instance Libranet has 3995 registered users, but maybe only one or two dozens active (as Libranet is regarded by almost every user as dead and buried)
BTW, I have just noticed that rglk said much better than me what I am trying to say.
49 • re: #28 (by x on 2006-05-16 04:52:13 GMT from Burlington, United States)
Contact your government, maybe their input through the Secretary of State may give insight to our senate's Committee on Foriegn Relations.
The US taxpayers paid for the development of the Internet. If they turn it over to the telecommunications industry, then they owe the entire amount, from the beginning, plus interest back to the taxpayers. Even they cannot afford to pay a lump sum or find a bank with enough money to loan for the amount that would be due. There are taxpayers who do not use the services of any of the companies mentioned, so cash is the only repayment method available. Without reimbursement, they will face many years of litigation, as the trial lawyers test the constitutionality for fun and profit.
50 • NSA & other intelligence services (by x on 2006-05-16 04:59:12 GMT from Burlington, United States)
So much of what they do is classified that we question them. It helps to remind them of their oath to protect the constitution. Most are ethical individuals. But, then the NAZI's truely only had the support of a minority of Germans, the rest followed out of fear.
51 • Re #44 & 35: H.P.D. ranking (by rglk on 2006-05-16 05:08:45 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
Gilligan wrote: "Ain't it sweet when two completely independent sources correlate so strongly?"
I wouldn't say they correlate strongly, the relative numbers and rank order are quite different. E.g. Ubuntu and Gentoo are equally "popular" by the number of forum members but are separated by eight positions in rank on the hit list, and Ubuntu gets four times as many hits per day as Gentoo but isn't four times as popular by forum membership numbers.
If you take the forum membership numbers seriously, they cough up a few surprises. However, they jive with my guts feeling.
Xandros is probably much more widely used than the #18 rank would indicate. They keep a low profile, come out with a new version only every 1 - 1.5 years which then generates a minor amount of news, and then they disappear again from view. Yet a lot of people buy or use that distro. I'd say they're underhyped.
PCLinuxOS is probably greatly overhyped; the low forum membership number is really a bit shocking.
Perhaps the same holds for Mepis for which we have no membership numbers.
DSL, I think, is also overhyped, their #6 ranking on the H.P.D. list is really absurd.
FreeBSD is probably underhyped - only 20% of the popularity of Ubuntu, by H.P.D.? This is the biggest open source Unix distro, and I think this website and its readers are still somewhat cool toward the BSD's, greatly favoring Linux. Hence, the disproportionally low degree of interest in FreeBSD.
One thing to consider though is this: wouldn't you expect that a dream distro that works absolutely perfectly and gets everything right would have zero forum membership? No snags, no problems, no questions, nothing to talk about, works like a Rolls Royce. Then, do the high Gentoo and Ubuntu forum membership numbers indicate that they are the crappiest distros that get nothing right, are full of snags and bugs and are impossibly hard to use so that every user has to go for help to the forum? Remember the Maytag ad.
Robert
52 • Kororaa (by Ken on 2006-05-16 05:09:22 GMT from Palo Alto, United States)
To state a conspiracy theory, I think the controversy about Kororaa has been started/helped somehow by Novell. Think about it: Novell was the only company showcasing XGL and all its goodiness. Kororaa is the only other distro to showcase XGL on KDE -- and this has definitely not gone down well with the now GNOME-sabotaged Novell.
53 • All of it. (by Douglas on 2006-05-16 05:55:53 GMT from Oak Harbor, United States)
To start with NSA is not listening to intrastate calls just international calls (and more). They have been doing that for a long time. They are watching WHO you talk too and when and not just in the USA but everywhere.
Ask Germans or Russians or many others, what they think of thier governments spying on them? Yes, maybe today the USA is "good" but what about 20 years from now? We need our laws to protect us from crazy people that may take over at some point; some may say that are in control now. LOL
As for Gentoo being the number one in the number of people on their list? Well it is the only distro I have used (I liked it too!) that you NEEDED to get on a list to get it running. I would think that a plug and play system would have a very small number of users online looking for help.
I with a little open help from Ladislav Bodnar, wrote some programs that post to a web page, graphs of this sites hits. What I found as I wrote and tested them is that no matter how you look at the numbers, they mean only what Ladislav Bodnar says they mean. Any thing else is fun but not very useful even after all sorts of filtering.
54 • H.P.D. rankings (by rglk on 2006-05-16 06:32:49 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
Some more numbers relating to the "popularity" of Gentoo and Ubuntu:
Registered users of forum:
Gentoo: 113851
Ubuntu: 111770 (I believe that also includes Kubuntu)
Total articles posted in forum:
Gentoo: 3,215,791
Ubuntu/Kubuntu: 1,033,273
Most users ever online:
Gentoo: 1850
Ubuntu: no figures
Users currently online (1:45 a.m. EST USA):
Gentoo: 156
Ubuntu: 565 (207 members, 358 guests) [the Ubuntu membership map shows a heavy representation in Europa where it's now around 8 a.m.]
Aside from the forum, Gentoo also provides some 50 different English-language mail lists. I haven't been able to find subscription numbers for them. Gentoo has at least 500 active developers, and hundreds of "retired" developers. Their names are all listed on the Gentoo website. No figures for that from Ubuntu.
Debian has no forum but offers more than 100 mail lists. The three biggest ones have between 20000 and 30000 subscribers each. Presumably these people are active users - you wouldn't stand getting your mailbox filled with postings every day unless you're interested in the distro. Add to that the (unknown) number of users that read these lists on the Usenet via Gmane. My sense is that Debian has a lot more users than Gentoo.
Draw your own conclusions.
To William Johnson: I'm curious, if you know that the Gentoo membership number is bogus, what's your source for that claim? Can you present the evidence?
Robert
55 • RE: #54 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2006-05-16 07:46:09 GMT from Milano, Italy)
"To William Johnson: I'm curious, if you know that the Gentoo membership number is bogus, what's your source for that claim? Can you present the evidence?"
I am not William Johnson, but I know my own experience.
Besides beeing registered there as "Anonymous Penguin", I was previously registered with another user name which I haven't used since December 2004 and which I invalidated by deleting all my personal info. So we now at least of an invalid entry, which to visitors looks like still active.
56 • RE: #55 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2006-05-16 07:49:18 GMT from Milano, Italy)
Edit: "So we now at least of an invalid entry, which to visitors looks like still active." should be of course "So we know at least of an invalid entry, which to visitors looks like still active."
57 • Re: H.P.D. rankings (by Ariszló on 2006-05-16 09:17:00 GMT from Szeged, Hungary)
If you are using Gentoo, you simply have to visit the forums to get around. With Ubuntu, you are not that clueless.
58 • William >more communism? (by AQ on 2006-05-16 10:28:18 GMT from Cleveland, United States)
William, again, do even the smallest amount of research on the communist Soviet Union, and you would see exactly what happens when individuals give away their privacy to the state.
Hint: it is used against non-violent political dissidents of whomever is in power, with secret police used to imprison or kill them.
My copy of the US Constitution reads that this is a Republic, not a communist state. A famous phrase of the revolution was "give me liberty or give me death", not "give me security because I fear liberty".
It's simply mealy-mouth communism you advocate, so I don't see how you can even compare yourself as any different to the Liberals. You are both Communists.
59 • Linux that works and keeps working (by Terry on 2006-05-16 11:06:15 GMT from Chullora, Australia)
The title says what I hope to find. I have yet to find a distro that works close to 100% of the way it's supposed to work. I fear that if I do, it'll be one of the many distros which are updated for only a few months, whereupon they are replaced by new versions which work no better than those they replace.
I thought I might have found that with CentOS but the trouble there is that its kernel is so old, my hardware probably will not work.
I am bemused by the attitudes that prevail amongst Linux users. GUI bad; command line good. Help bad; incomprehensible, unindexed man pages, howtos, whathaveyous, good. Drivers that work bad; endless mailing lists with so many questions and so few answers good. Why are so many people trying to make MS look good?
60 • RE: #59 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2006-05-16 11:25:15 GMT from Milano, Italy)
"I am bemused by the attitudes that prevail amongst Linux users. GUI bad; command line good. Help bad; incomprehensible, unindexed man pages, howtos, whathaveyous, good. Drivers that work bad; endless mailing lists with so many questions and so few answers good."
Dear friend, what gave you those impressions? I have posted thousands of times to help other users (granted, now I am a bit tired, but that is another story)
I believe many of us prefer a GUI (else why is SUSE so popular, just to mention one?) and drivers which work out of the box: not many among us are masochists, IMO.
However manpages and howtos have also their place.
61 • My Reply to post #59 (Terry) (by serge on 2006-05-16 11:31:19 GMT from Clarkson, Canada)
Hi Terry: Your assessment of Linux is so accurate and I liked it. I experimented with many Linux distros, and there is always a "show stopper" at some point. IMHO this is a consequence of the nature of the Linux, i.e., there is no centralized body that would guide and coordinate the whole thing. But it is FREE, so how can we complain. Maybe UBUNTU (I'm not using it BTW) will bring some change to that.
serge.
62 • Kororaa / Xgl controversy... (by Lionel Debroux on 2006-05-16 11:38:32 GMT from Grenoble, France)
There's a three-way choice:
* a nearly completely free OS, with several proprietary bits, that works fine and fast for everyday tasks like listening to music or gaming at high resolutions with decent framerates. Examples: Kororaa with Xgl, VLOS, Mandriva, MEPIS and several others.
* an OS without any completely proprietary bits, even if the licenses can be different from GPL and LGPL, that won't read my MP3s or read a number of video formats (including DVDs) out of the box, which makes it unusable for newcomers, unless someone knowledgeable spends some time adding useful packages (because it's extremely hard to find new "naked" or GNU/Linux computers...).
Yes, I know that the *nix packaging system is somewhat better in many aspects than that of Windows. Example: Ututo-e (reviews say that despite improvements, it still sucks somewhat functionality-wise), quite a number of GNU/Linux distributions.
* a completely proprietary OS, with proprietary drivers everywhere, that will perform everyday tasks just fine. It just works. Examples: Windows, MacOS.
A significant number of guys in the community don't seem to be getting that the functionality drawbacks of a completely-free GNU/Linux / *BSD distribution (#2) do _hinder_ adoption of alternative (mostly) free software OS (#1), favoring the obvious proprietary choices (#3) !
"Your thing sucks 'cause it won't read my MP3s, Windows just works !"
A proud MEPIS user, Lionel Debroux.
63 • Re: 62 • Kororaa / Xgl controversy... (by talij on 2006-05-16 12:43:50 GMT from Nokia, Finland)
Hi. The thing is not that simple. An user using OpenOffice.org and even closed-source, but open-standards based SIP VoIP phone in Windows and Ogg formats for video and audio is more likely to do more good to the OSS world than a Linux user using Skype and using MP3s etc.
64 • Violated the GPL? Of course not. (by Jade on 2006-05-16 13:11:07 GMT from Auckland, New Zealand)
"do you believe that Kororaa has indeed violated the GPL"
Of course not.
The GPL envisages a mixture of Proprietary and Free kernel modules.
Just read the following from the kernel header file: /usr/src/linux/include/linux/module.h
/*
* The following license idents are currently accepted as indicating free
* software modules
*
* "GPL" [GNU Public License v2 or later]
* "GPL v2" [GNU Public License v2]
* "GPL and additional rights" [GNU Public License v2 rights and more]
* "Dual BSD/GPL" [GNU Public License v2
* or BSD license choice]
* "Dual MPL/GPL" [GNU Public License v2
* or Mozilla license choice]
*
* The following other idents are available
*
* "Proprietary" [Non free products]
*
* There are dual licensed components, but when running with Linux it is the
* GPL that is relevant so this is a non issue. Similarly LGPL linked with GPL
* is a GPL combined work.
*
* This exists for several reasons
* 1. So modinfo can show license info for users wanting to vet their setup
* is free
* 2. So the community can ignore bug reports including proprietary modules
* 3. So vendors can do likewise based on their own policies
*/
Clearly, this envisages both Proprietary and Free kernel modules.
65 • 64 (by AC on 2006-05-16 13:27:06 GMT from , United States)
No one denies that one is free to compile a kernel with proprietary modules. The GPL only covers distribution. That's what is at issue here.
66 • clueless+ whatever william johnson is (by AC on 2006-05-16 13:34:12 GMT from , United States)
Making blanket "good", "bad" equations, simply asserting that only a certain number of people could possibly install Gentoo (who's "clueless"?), tossing around anecdotal arguments for support for the NSA (I can name one conservative who expressed concerns, Joe Scarborough, specifically discussing the government being able to identify whistleblowers and other confidential informants this way, crippling the press as a bulwark against corrupt government), and pure name-calling without even identifying that beliefs that you feel deserve to be called "clueless", let alone taking time to refute them... oh you're a paragon of cluefulness and reasonableness, aren't you.
Now, we don't just know what makes Chuck tick. Thank you.
67 • Then don't claim it is GPL (by Jade at 2006-05-16 13:38:23 GMT from Beijing, China)
"No one denies that one is free to compile a kernel with proprietary modules. The GPL only covers distribution. That's what is at issue here."
Then don't claim it is GPL. Damn simple eh?
http://linux.coconia.net/copyingXP.htm" target="_blank">How To Clone Windows XP/2000 Installations.
http://linux.coconia.net/suse/ntfs.htm" target="_blank">Writing to Windows XP/2000/NT (NTFS) from Linux using NTFS-FUSE.
68 • No subject (by Jade at 2006-05-16 13:42:36 GMT from Beijing, China)
Sorry -- for those interested:
How To Clone Windows XP/2000 Installations.
http://linux.coconia.net/copyingXP.htm
Writing to Windows XP/2000/NT (NTFS) from Linux using FS-FUSE.
http://linux.coconia.net/suse/ntfs.htm
69 • Damn simple eh? (by AC on 2006-05-16 14:19:49 GMT from , United States)
But derivative works of a GPL work must also be covered by the GPL. That's part of the nature of the GPL.
70 • H.P.D. (by linbetwin on 2006-05-16 15:39:48 GMT from Ploiesti, Romania)
To the person complaining about the H.P.D. rankings: it's not that you don't understand what the H.P.D. is and is not, you just insinuate that it is Ladislav's list of favourite distros or a result of the herd mentality of the DW readership. If you think you can do better, please put those 500 distros to the test and rank them according to your criteria. And don't forget to don your tin foil hat!
Those 100 000+ members on the Gentoo and Ubuntu forums are not all using those distros as their main OS. Also, please note that the Gentoo forums were started many years before Ubuntu's. Also, a distribution that is too buggy to be used does not have more members on its forums, it has little or no installed base.
The fact that you consider all top distros to be the same shows just how much you know them. Ubuntu may be overhyped, but it is also unjustly frowned upon and dissmissed. PCLinuxOS is underhyped, if anything. DSL's rank shows on what hardware many (if not most) people are running Linux.
To my knowledge, H.P.D. does not represent how many times a distribution's homepage is reached via DW, but rather the distribution's info page _on_ DW.
71 • Clueless (by Jerry on 2006-05-16 16:54:10 GMT from Union, United States)
From http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Personal_Information
"The Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. § 552a) protects personal information held by the federal government by preventing unauthorized disclosures of such information. Individuals also have the right to review such information, request corrections, and be informed of any disclosures. The Freedom of Information Act facilitates these processes."
For those who have a problem with the activities of the NSA I have provided you with a resource. Not that you are going to do anything because that would require effort beyond calling people "fascist neocons" and "rightwing communists." It took me all of 2 minutes to come up with this, http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/a/217165.htm which was pointed out by Charles. Rather then respond with any sort of logical argument he gets called a "fascist neocon" a "rightwing communist" and a "troll".
To paraphrase one of the "enlightened" commentators, "what is it about people like you that make you so terrified of any dissenting commentary or opinion?" You howl about "your" freedoms but you refuse to accept that others may disagree with you. Those who refuse to join your little mutual admiration society are given cute little names like fascist, nazi, communist, etc. Because you are too cowardly to test your own beliefs.
72 • Re: #59 • Linux that works and keeps working (by rglk on 2006-05-16 17:03:35 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
If you liked CentOS (essentially = RHEL) because for you it came close to 100% of the way it's supposed to work, check it out again. No old kernel there; the current version 4.3 uses kernel v. 2.6.9 and probably supports a lot of modern hardware.
If stability and reliability are your main concern, perhaps slackware will fit the bill. They still use the old kernel 2.4.32, presumably because that series was very stable.
Perhaps one can't have it both ways. If you want to have trouble-free operation, you may have to go with an older kernel, e.g. slackware which will work very well once you've managed to get through a somewhat complicated installation. But it may not support all of your cutting edge hardware.
If you want support for your cutting edge hardware, go for a Linux distro with the latest kernel that supports the latest hardware, with the understanding that it is less likely to be troublefree.
Robert
73 • Another Communist Neocon falls off the truck (by AQ on 2006-05-16 17:15:11 GMT from Cleveland, United States)
Try this one on for size, you clueless Communist. It's something those of us who believe in this country call the United States Constitution.
"Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. "
Your quoted "source" is apparently to make us feel comfortable handing over the 4th amendment because we'll be able to see what the NSA is doing with it after the fact? Our Constitution was created to keep the government small... do you not understand that?
And "cute sdmiration society"? You believe the government has no limit to its size, that it doesn't have to obey the very document that it was founded on, and that the state has the authority to do whatever it wants to anyone. Yes, that does make you a fascistic, neocon, communist dirtbag.
I howl about my freedom as the forefathers did, as they opposed tyranny, and fought for the liberties that you take so much for granted that you wish to give them away at the drop of a hat. Of course you should also move to a communist country also as you would be more comfortable there.
74 • NSA and the direction the United States of America are headed (by linbetwin on 2006-05-16 17:47:44 GMT from Ploiesti, Romania)
This controversy is useless and so is calling each other names. Enjoy the freedoms that your children and grandchildren will not have. And, if it makes you sleep better at night, tell yourselves that you will be able to defend these freedoms and keep them forever. But whether you, or anybody else, likes it or not, the US is going through the same historic phases that all empires have gone through. Yes, I know, the United States are a Republic, not an empire. So was the Roman Empire, they still called themselves a Republic even in the days when the Roman Emperor was worshipped as a God. As in Rome's case, the decline of freedom in the US will be slow, gradual and "for the common good". It is not Bush's fault, or bin Laden's "achievement". It is a fact of history.
75 • How are the H.P.D. figures computed? (by rglk on 2006-05-16 18:16:13 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
linbetwin wrote:
"To my knowledge, H.P.D. does not represent how many times a distribution's homepage is reached via DW, but rather the distribution's info page _on_ DW."
I may have misintertreted how the H.P.D. figures are computed. Perhaps Ladislav can clarify.
The link at the bottom of the Page Hit Ranking column takes you to a paragraph that includes the following:
"The counters are no longer displayed on the individual distributions pages, but all visits (on the main site, as well as on mirrors) are logged. Only one hit per IP address per day is counted."
Does that refer to visits from the distro's info page on DW to the distro's homepage as well as to any download mirros for the distro? That's how I had interpreted it. Or does it refer to visits to the distro's info page on the main DW site as well as on any DW mirror site? More likely the latter, but that could be made more clear. I hadn't been aware that DW is propagated on mirror sites.
If the latter is correct then the H.P.D. figures are simply an indication of interest in a distro that has been stimulated in a reader by his seeing some reference to that distro somewhere else in DW. That could be a mild interest, just wanting to learn a little more about a distro, or it could be a keener interest that leads to clicking on the distro's homepage or download page. The latter clicks, however, wouldn't be counted toward the H.P.D. figure.
Regardless of which of these is correct, it's a fair assumption that the H.P.D. figures largely track what's in the news on DW. Perhaps the H.P.D. column should be renamed "Top Newsmakers" to prevent folks from misinterpreting it as a ranking list of top distros in terms of actual usage.
Robert
76 • More NSA (by charleston on 2006-05-16 20:01:16 GMT from Horley, United Kingdom)
Now I'm no expert, but it seems to me the struggle is between the Consitution and an Act. Which wins?
The Constitutiopnal view is put here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff05152006.html
...basically, a Warrent is called for on an individual basis, needing probable cause
4th: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Meanwhile... "Government Begins Tracking Phone Calls of Journalists": http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/16/145201&mode=thread&tid=25
As a GNU Linux interested, educated group, are we all here not interested in FREEDOM?
77 • aq, perhaps you should learn to read. (by Jerry on 2006-05-16 20:10:39 GMT from Union, United States)
Thank you for proving my point. Rather then read or do any sort of research you fire off a knee-jerk retort. And lacking any sort of informed response you resort to name calling.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that the NSA collecting phone numbers is not a violation of the 4th Ammendment.
What comes around goes around.
If you wish to engage in name calling then by all means do so but if you are going to complain then you are nothing more then a sorry coward. Just so you know, I served for 5 years in the Marines 3 Battalion 1st Marine infantry regiment. I earned and fought for those freedoms and the "right to gripe." So unless you're a vet, your forefathers fought for freedoms you did not. Piss off and shut the F*** up.
78 • Re: #70 H.P.D. (by rglk on 2006-05-16 20:19:55 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
Linbetwin wrote:
"Those 100 000+ members on the Gentoo and Ubuntu forums are not all using those distros as their main OS. Also, please note that the Gentoo forums were started many years before Ubuntu's. Also, a distribution that is too buggy to be used does not have more members on its forums, it has little or no installed base."
I'm plenty aware of the points you're making about the weakness of any attempts to draw conclusions on distro usage from forum membership data. My conclusion that the buggiest distros ought to have the largest users forums was just a joke to point out the absurdity of drawing conclusions on usage from such data. I guess I should have added a smiley.
"The fact that you consider all top distros to be the same shows just how much you know them. Ubuntu may be overhyped, but it is also unjustly frowned upon and dissmissed. PCLinuxOS is underhyped, if anything. DSL's rank shows on what hardware many (if not most) people are running Linux."
I've been putting the top distros as much through their paces from live CD's, HD installs or in VMWare as I have the lesser known distros, and it is precisely from such experience (i.e. having checked out heaven knows how many - 60, 70, 80? - different distros in several times as many different releases) that I'm saying that the top distros (to be specific: Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, MEPIS, Knoppix, PCLinuxOS) are remarkably alike, and they seem to be becoming more and more alike rather than diverging, if one puts differences in eye candy aside. E.g. none of them use anything other than KDE or Gnome as a desktop environment when there are at least a dozen different ones available in GNU/Linux. One has to go to the smaller, lesser known distros to find a bit more variety and a willingness to experiment.
In the light of the discussion of what the H.P.D. rank means you can't conclude much from DSL's rank, certainly not that many (if not most) people are running (desktop) Linux on older or low-powered hardware. My impression, gathered from reading thousands of posts in Linux users forums, Usenet newsgroups, and mail lists, is that in the majority of cases in which people reveal their hardware, it's not older equipment that they run (and that DSL is particularly suited to) but quite up-to-date equipment.
I myself ran DSL on my then two-year old desktop for a while, not because of lack of computing power but because I thought it would be a good way to learn more about Linux, by getting under the hood and doing that on a lean, comprehensible distro rather than on a full-fledged standard distro that installs 3 or 4 GB of software.
Robert
79 • Reasonable expectation of privacy. (by Jerry on 2006-05-16 20:57:33 GMT from Union, United States)
Charleston, Lindorff fails to apply a "reasonable expectation of privacy" to his argument. As far as our phone number goes we do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This was already deemed constitutional in Smith -v- Maryland in 1979.
How can people complain when this issue was decided 27 years ago? If someone has a problem with it then call then they need to call their representitive and get them to expand on the 4th Ammendment.
80 • SuSE and Ubuntu (by Clint Tinsley on 2006-05-16 22:28:42 GMT from Salt Lake City, United States)
>>Luckily, things have changed and SUSE is now not only a great community project and one of the most important innovators in the Linux distribution world, it is also the only real challenger to the current leader - Ubuntu. Go, SUSE!<<
I think the oldest version of SuSE Linux that I have purchased was 6.0 or 6.1 and I have bought every version since 10.0, retail boxed, aka "Professional" although Novell has saw fit to no longer refer to it that way. I will not be installing or buying 10.1 as I have evaluated "upgrading" my 10.0 system with it, not even going there; seems to be the only way to upgrade SuSE 10.0 is to NukeNPave. I installed it on a test system, not going there either, too many things appear to be broken and gnome looks too much like Windows. IMO, SuSE 10.1 is not in the same league as Ubuntu as a great community project; if this was horseshoes, SuSE would not even be in the box. SuSE is a Novell project, very little community it it now. In terms of great "community" distro's, I would give that to Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu and right now, FC5 would be one on the post with Ubuntu close by.
81 • Re: # 79 Reasonable expectation of privacy (by Charleston on 2006-05-16 22:41:01 GMT from Horley, United Kingdom)
Hm, googling for Smith -v- Maryland 1979. It says: data mining for call records is legal. And this is where I am not expert- so why is there a fuss? Did it get overturned, or is that ruling just for Smith?
Also CNN (today) says all the telecos are falling over each other to deny they helped NSA.
But yes, I had Echelon stuck in my mind and the data mining of content. Hope it never goes that far!
82 • Re: #81 (by Jerry on 2006-05-17 00:15:36 GMT from Elizabethtown, United States)
Below is the text from http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/a/217165.htm Another reasonably non-biased article is here http://www.forbes.com/business/services/feeds/ap/2006/05/16/ap2751464.html
and here http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002709----000-.html
NSA Call Record Collection Probably Legal
Right or not, moral or not, effective or not, the NSA's massive collection of the records of almost every phone call made by almost every American since shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, does have recent legal precedent under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1979 ruling in the case of Smith v. Maryland.
Smith v. Maryland and the Fourth Amendment
During a criminal investigation, the victim of a robbery told police he had been getting phone calls from the suspected robber. Without getting a warrant, police installed a surveillance device called a "pen register" at the central telephone office. The pen register recorded the phone numbers called by the suspect from his home phone. When the pen register revealed that the suspect had placed several calls to the victim's phone, the suspect was arrested and eventually convicted of robbery.
The convicted robber appealed, claiming that the warrantless collection of his call records violated his Fourth Amendment rights protecting against unreasonable search and seizure.
Both the state court and U.S. Supreme Court, in Smith v. Maryland, disagreed, ruling that pen registers do not constitute a search in the traditional sense and may be used without a warrant. Since the only information collected by the pen register -- the phone number called -- is automatically shared with the phone company, with the knowledge of the caller, the Court held it unreasonable to expect the information would remain private.
If as they claim, the NSA has recorded only phone numbers, and not conversations, their massive surveillance program represents the world's biggest pen register and would thus enjoy the legal status established by the Supreme Court in Smith v. Marlyand.
My question for the "alledged freedom lovers", where was their outrage at echelon, able danger, and carnivore during the Clintoon years that actually monitored the content of conversations?
83 • Linux that works and keeps working (by Terry on 2006-05-17 04:00:07 GMT from Chullora, Australia)
I'm thinking more and more that CentOS is the one to try. I had been wavering between that and Debian Etch but the latter sounds too geeky for me. It takes long enough to get a simple installation like Mandriva looking and working (more or less) the way you want without having to assemble a personal encyclopaedia of command lines.
It may seem strange to take time thinking about which distro to try next but I've just had the trauma of trying to get SuSE 10 (64 bit version) into reasonable working order. I spent hours on it and in the end gave up. I do not want to do that again.
Linux developers and their managers do not seem to be short of egos. How else to explain the sheer number of distros? So many distros but, when you examine them critically, so little choice.
84 • 83 (by Tim on 2006-05-17 04:22:54 GMT from Denver, United States)
"It takes long enough to get a simple installation like Mandriva looking and working (more or less) the way you want without having to assemble a personal encyclopaedia of command lines."
Give a look at PCLOS, especially the MiniME version. It installs quickly, runs blazingly fast and via synaptic, is simple to customize. Everything needed is in the repositories (over 5000 items) and the devs listen at the forum when someone asks for a package. Sometimes the requested package appears within just hours of the request. Re the forum: you won't find a more helpful and understanding bunch anywhere I have been.
85 • Off subject from last week (by Scott Wilson on 2006-05-17 05:18:39 GMT from Phoenix, United States)
I see a lot of discussion about the US and some it polices about the internet, but i wonder if any of our european freinds have been noticing the number of stations that have dropped streaming media from their web sites. I use to watch Austrian TV and some German channels on the interent. But since the EU and MS ruling the number of streaming media seems to be dwindling? Any idel or reasons why?
86 • Re #83 Linux that works and keeps working (by rglk on 2006-05-17 06:36:34 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
If you don't want to go through the trouble of a full HD install before you commit yourself to a new distro, there are Linux live CD's waiting to be tried. They're available for practically every major distro. CentOS just came out with one. PCLinuxOS is in fact a live CD/HD install combo. There are live CD's for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mepis, Mandriva One 2006, Vector, Slax, Kanotix, etc. etc., you name it. It's the easiest thing in the world to check them out. I download 3-4 of them every week and test drive them. It takes me only half an hour per distro to get a sense of what they have to offer.
If you'd like to install Debian, it couldn't be easier than doing that through GenieOS. That gets you 100% pure Debian Stable plus some extras, and you can upgrade from there to Unstable if you wish. There is nothing geeky about etch; it's quite stable. If you're so keen on getting a Linux system that works and keeps on working forever, you can't do better than going with Debian. Perhaps you know the saying about Debian: "install once and upgrade forever". I know of people who installed Debian five years ago and never reinstalled the system, keeping their personal configs and customizations forever. They just keep running apt-get dist-upgrade every year or so.
Robert
87 • The least popular distros (by Claus Futtrup on 2006-05-17 09:44:46 GMT from Horsens, Denmark)
It is fun to see the least popular distros listed from 1 - 100. The comment that these distros deserves more attention is probably true, but one should remember that they do not live in the shade of other distros ... because one of the really great things about Distrowatch is the fact that any distro can get its day of fame, when they announce new releases - right there on the front page of Distrowatch.
88 • #74 linbetwin (by octa on 2006-05-17 14:09:08 GMT from Topeka, United States)
"This controversy is useless and so is calling each other names. Enjoy the freedoms that your children and grandchildren will not have. ..."
Unfortunately, you have hit the nail on the head -- well-said. There are five stages of grief when something is lost: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. These arguments are between stage 1 versus stage 2 people, and I saw a stage 3 in there somewhere. Myself, I'm in stage 4 already.
89 • Boot from pcmcia (by k7m on 2006-05-17 18:35:07 GMT from Odessa, Ukraine)
How boot live cd from pcmcia?
Puppy,MoviX,GeeXbee,AustrumiDragonFly...
90 • Zenwalk? (by Anonymous on 2006-05-17 22:20:58 GMT from Schmargendorf, Germany)
Zenwalk could do a good job by working on their distribution - especially the installer - instead of producing worthless statistics.
It would be a fine Linux (Slackware with Xfce and w/o KDE) if it could be installed and made working.
91 • Re #90 Zenwalk? (by rglk on 2006-05-18 01:41:59 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
I wonder what problems you've had with installing Zenwalk. Since it's not a live CD, it has to be installed before one can evaluate it. Thus everybody who has said good things about Zenwalk, and there have been plenty such folks, has succeeded in installing it and got it working. I certainly have.
I would admit that their installer which I presume is the current official slackware installer is a bit tedious but it does the job. Once you're done with the install which may take an hour or more, you'll enjoy the result.
Perhaps you could send your note to the Zenwalk developers. I'm all for making this distro more user-friendly. It's a fine distro.
Robert
92 • Kororaa (by DajomU on 2006-05-18 08:40:08 GMT from Skarvedalen, Norway)
Who cares if Kororaa includes some propritary drivers in order to get things to work. If there are some computer nerds that cannot accept that, then WHO CARES!!!
Then what about suse, xandros, redhat? I am wondering if the GPL guys are using flash on their linux desktops or do they have mp3?
I am asking my self. Since Linux is only the kernel, are you violating GPL if you don't compile it into the kernel?
93 • OS NEWS WebSite "DICTATORIAL" measures taken in the Kororaa-proprietary NVIDIA a (by Angel--Fr@gzill@ on 2006-05-18 11:43:49 GMT from Bruxelles, Belgium)
"OS NEWS" WebSite "Dictatorial" measures taken in the Kororaa-proprietary NVIDIA and ATI kernel modules controversy over violation of the General Public License (GPL)"
It is sad to say that a WebSite that some people think is related somehow to Open Source software could have, in my view, such an IRESPONSABLE, DICTATORIAL, and FASCIST behaviour towards the readers and towards the Open souce movement!
All this is the cause of "Thom Holwerda", one of the staff members of the "OS NEWS" Web Site. This guy has had already many angry disputes with the readers, as regular readers of the site know.
He shows regurlarly his views on the topics and threads and answser, and act in a very impolite, selfish, insulting and disgraceful way to many that do not agree with his views!
YES, he does all that despite being a member of the staff, and at the same time posting as a reader (whitout any shame for it!), while having the privileges of censuring, banning, not being moderated up or down by the readers, and acting in what I consider, a DICTATORIAL and FASCIST way, to impose his views and to gain notoriety.
His views in serveral ocassions hurt the Open Source movement, I think, but he takes advantage of his "GOD-like" privileges as a staff member, to impose them, and influence in this way other readers!
I obviously think that this is bad...
I posted a comment in the OS NEWS thread over the Kororaa-proprietary NVIDIA and ATI drivers, in wich I exposed this (in a moderate way) and asked "Thom Holwerda" to refrain from behaving in that way...
He answered me in a disgraceful way (as he usually does with other readers that don't see eye to eye with him), and finally, after another answer of mine, and some interventions of some readers he prohibited from posting! I have the next message when I enter a thread in OSNEWS :" Your account is currently prohibited from posting. Please contact osnews-crew@osnews.com if you have any questions comment"
Some readers posted some comments, more or less, agreeing with me, and what I said about this kind of behaviour. I am talking about the behaviour of "Thom Holwerda" and the "HARM" he does to the OPEN SOURCE software with his attitude, and to the FREEDOM in the internet while abusing and trying to influence whith his antidemocratic methods, taking advantage of his position. I am not talking of the differnen views that anyone cant maintain about Kororaa XGL, or anything...
One guy, though, said simply: "Ban this crackpot, Thom" ( a smart guy? a frind of him?...)
You can follow the thread ind the OSNews website, is the same "link" that Distrowacth put above in this DistroWatch Weekly The main comments are at the end of the thread ( http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14605 ). Anyway, I will write another post here, just after this one, summarizing and 'Pasting" the posts about this attitude.
I do not say that you have to boycot OSNEWS. Anyone can do what he/she wants, but I, personally, will visit OSNews, much less than before, or hardly ever, until I have references of a change of attitude by this guy ("Thom Holwerda"), or until he has been dismissed...
Whatever is your opinion about the Kororaa controversy, if you are for LIBERTY, DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM of SPEECH, and RESPECT worldwide, and you care for LINUX and the OPEN
SOURCE software, I would encourage YOU to send your views and comments about this behaviour of "Thom Holwerda" to the OSNEWS e-mail ( osnews-crew@osnews.com )or post them in the OSNews Site in a thread, or other sites related to Open source (Here in DistroWatch, in Slashdot) etc.
I am sorry about the kororaa XGL, that I actually love and have. I think is a "Catch 22" situation, as a couple of guys explain very well at the end of the OSNews thread ( There cant be free open drivers, PERIOD By TechGeek; and Very simple By sorpigal), or as some have exposed, also very well, here in Distrowatch readers' comments.
94 • Zenwalk (by tom at 2006-05-18 13:54:27 GMT from Helena, United States)
Nice review of some 'lesser known' distros. I am now typing this from Puppy Linux booted in Windows (qemu) using Dillo (NOT FIREFOX). Highly advise this to some who are forced to use an alternat OS at work !!!
Download qemu manager for windows, it make life much easier !!
http://www.davereyn.co.uk/download.htm
It is always nice to try something new.
At any rate, I use Zenwalk as a primary Light OS. I did not find it difficult to install, you need to configure a few configuration files (helps if you know how to use vi), but i was up and running quickly. This is a nice link to a good tutorial on vi:
http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.html
Of the small distros my favorates are:
Puppy, Austrumi, DSL, and Wolvix. Wolviz in particular runs very fast as a live CD, too bad no (easy) HD install, no time to fiddle with the install scripts described on the website.
95 • Zenwalk rules !!!!! (by Caraibes on 2006-05-18 15:07:59 GMT from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)
Hi Friends !
Zenwalk is a major distro, as it represents an "easy & accesible" Slackware, or a "more polished" Vector...
To me, it has been like a revelation... I am using it most of the time... Writing from it right now...
In my book (as of today...) :
-best hdd installed distro = Zenwalk 2.4.
-best live-cd = Puppy Linux.
All the others are nice, but these 2 represent my personal choice...
96 • Re #94 Zenwalk (by rglk on 2006-05-18 17:37:22 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
tom wrote:
"Of the small distros my favorates are:
Puppy, Austrumi, DSL, and Wolvix. Wolviz in particular runs very fast as a live CD, too bad no (easy) HD install, no time to fiddle with the install scripts described on the website."
From among the small distros (around 50 MB) one should also mention Feather which a year or two ago was a major competitor to DSL and which is still under active development; a new version is about to come out, I believe.
I switched from DSL to Feather because DSL couldn't handle the Intel i810/830/845 family of mobo integrated video chipsets. They use the KDrive Xvesa video driver which on many of these Intel video systems gives Tux blue feet and G.W. Bush a purple face (video RAM shared with system RAM; Xvesa doesn't support this). Eventually, in more recent versions, this marginal DSL video support failed completely, and DSL would crash my machine all the time. Feather uses the same video driver but they tweaked it in such a way that it was still usable on my system. In the end, I also liked Feather better.
Austrumi is astonishing: everybody should try it to see how excellent a distro can be built in 50 MB of space. Wolvix is also a first rate distro, one of the best of the slax descendents, but it belongs in the midsize range of distros (460 MB).
Robert
97 • Selling Grandma (by Me on 2006-05-18 17:57:41 GMT from Gretna, United States)
The facts in the Selling Grandma opinion piece are highly disputed. See stories below, and these are just two of many (with the second one even leaning toward the concept that the majors phone companies might have lied in some way). Regardless, just a few days later, the USA Today report is becoming highly suspect.
I hope this leads to fewer or no political opinion pieces in Distrowatch. I'd sure love at least one safe haven from the political blahblahblah in this world.
http://www.thestate.com/mld/charlotte/business/14597393.htm?source=rss&channel=charlotte_business
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20060518/tc_cmp/187900307
98 • #96 Feather (by tom on 2006-05-19 00:11:35 GMT from Helena, United States)
Thanks for the tip on Feather. I think I'll be staying with Puppy.
I agree, Wolfx is not a "light weight", I mentioned it because of how fast it runs as a live CD, very impressive.
After testing several light distros on qemu, Puppy is by far the fastest. Surprizing number of features as well.
Interestingly, ELive, although not a lightweight, runs fairly fast on qemu as well.
All in all an interesting week for me looking at light distros. The less I see, the better.
99 • Review of MCNLive-Leuven v.2 - a terrific, fast live CD (by rglk on 2006-05-19 03:30:09 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
Over the past year or so I've been following the development of MCNLive, a live CD based on Mandrakelinux/Mandriva. I thought it was a shining light among the group of midsized live CD's (200-400 MB), other excellent members of which are SAM, STX, Slax and its many descendents, etc. A new version, MCNLive-Leuven v.2, based on Mandriva 2006, was released two weeks ago, and again I'm very impressed by it.
The entire distro (332 MB) can be loaded into RAM and run from there, freeing up the CD-ROM drive. It runs very fast from RAM, and since the packages are highly compressed and are unpacked on the fly, you get a lot of software with the 332 MB, possibly more than with the new Mandriva One 2006 Live/Install CD which is twice as big. The choice of applications is excellent (it includes the entire KOffice suite), and the look and feel of the desktop and the various apps is very good, as has traditionally been true for MandrakeLinux.
You can also install the distro on a flash memory stick (e.g. 512 MB), and provided your BIOS supports booting from USB devices, boot it and run it from there. Since the partition holding the distro is mounted read-only, just like a CD-ROM, you won't prematurely degrade your flash memory with excessive writes. The rest of the thumbdrive memory, outside of the MCNLive partition, is still available for reads and writes as usual.
If your BIOS is older than two years and you can't boot from USB storage devices, you can still install and run the distro from a thumbdrive, booting it with the CD and then removing the CD after a few seconds, leaving RAM and CD-ROM drive still fully available. I ran it in this mode on my 4-year old desktop: booting to a full KDE desktop took 90 seconds, loading Firefox and Kwrite took 7 and 5 seconds, respectively.
There are many other nice touches in this live CD that you won't find even in big mainstream distros. E.g. Realplayer and many media player codecs are included. I tested support for Internet live audio streaming by going to my favorite radio station www.bach-radio.com. When I went to that URL in Konqueror, within 5 sec music was streaming via gxine. When I went to it in Firefox, within 5 seconds Amarok was playing the station. That's fast.
If you want to save a file, you can write it to a thumbdrive, HDD, CD-RW or floppy. Also, all hard drive partitions are mounted by default (the Linux partitions read/write); hence you can access all the files from your other OS's. Clicking on an MS Word document in my Windows XP partition started up KWord and loaded the doc; the entire process took only 6 seconds.
You can even install additional applications from the command line or the Mandriva Control Center via urpmi although these apps will be gone when you exit the OS. Running Linux in this way, one doesn't have to worry about rootkits, trojans, viruses, ad & spyware, cookies etc. - it's all gone the moment one exits the OS.
The developers, a bunch of Mandriva enthusiasts from Holland, have put a lot of thought and expertise into putting this distro together; in particular, they have done a great job with the mklivecd scripts from Mandriva. This live CD is really quite a different beast from the new Mandriva One 2006 Live CD.
All in all, this is a terrific distro that's among the fastest I've run, if it's not the fastest, when run from a USB thumbdrive.
Robert
100 • Re: Selling Grandma to the Glue Factory (by Robert Storey) (by Jim Black on 2006-05-19 04:38:36 GMT from San Antonio, United States)
Mr. Storey's writing reveals a great deal of ignorance of the law and of how the intelligence activities work. The law says there is much precedent (including a SCOTUS decision) saying requesting unpersonalized traffic information from the carriers. Notice "unpersonalized". What was turned over would have been no more than what telephone number called what number and how long the circuit lasted. Essentially what the police can get with a phone call. It is NOT a wiretap.
How would it be used? Guessing from 30-years ago experience working in the area, a computer scans the telephone numbers to match with those on a known hit list of already developed terrorist and colaborator numbers. If you are not calling your friendly Al Qaeda suspect, you would never match and the computer goes on to the next number. Unless you have known connections to Al Qaeda, that is the end of it. If you are a known Al Qaeda associate, the numbers are put up to another level of analysis for further processing.
Bottom line: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. If this still offends your precious sense of privacy, suffice it to say that I would rather see your delicate senses offended than have another bomb blowing up (1993) or airplane inciden (9/11) because a bad guy was not caught because some goddamned lawyer got in the way. So if it offends you, up yours and the horse you rode in onl.
101 • #99 MCNLive Leuven (by Chris on 2006-05-19 11:28:52 GMT from Osdorp, Netherlands)
@Robert: Would you mind that we (The MCNLive crew) publish your short review?
Or can you contact me - email adress on my website or on the MCNLive CD?
Thank you very much much,
--chris
102 • Re #101 (by rglk on 2006-05-19 15:47:06 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
Chris,
That's fine, go ahead. Congratulations on your good work. Sorry to hear that you may be leaving the project; that would be too bad. If you do, please leave a trace on the MCNLive website or your own; I'd like to keep up with you.
Robert
103 • No subject (by Chris on 2006-05-19 17:30:22 GMT from Osdorp, Netherlands)
Thanks, Robert.
And I don't leave the project, but in the future I will be concentrating more on the mklivecd scripts. The actual build and design process of MCNLive will be done by other members of the team.
--chris
104 • Finally !!! (by Caraibes on 2006-05-20 10:47:02 GMT from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)
Hey Ladislav,
I see that today, saturday morning, you finally released the information about the new Puppy 109ce.
I thought you were boycotting it, since it has been released about a week ago, and no coverage in Distrowatch...
I almost thought you were tired of reading good things about Puppy in the DWW comments, so you just wouldn´t write about the new release...
Well, it seems it was just a little mistake, or a little misunderstanding...
105 • MCNLive-Leuven v.2 (by x on 2006-05-20 16:13:36 GMT from Burlington, United States)
Robert, thanks for the short review. Have you run into any problems or limitations on what you have tried to do?
Chris, thanks for your contribution.
106 • Re #105 MCNLive-Leuven v.2 (by rglk on 2006-05-20 20:31:47 GMT from Edgewater, United States)
Re MCNLive-Leuven v.2:
Problems: None so far. At first, I thought there was a problem with RealPlayer playing only video but not audio for some URL's but that was a false alarm. In fact, the RealPlayer browser plugin setup passes all the tests, including handling notoriously fastidious sources of streaming audio/video such as BBC Radio 3 on-demand audio replay and PBS Nova's replays of segments of "The Elegant Universe".
. .
Limitations: It would be nice if one could save customized changes in the default configuration (e.g. themes, fonts, Firefox bookmarks, KNode newsgroups, etc.) to a thumbdrive, to be reloaded on bootup, and perhaps also have a home dir on a thumbdrive, comparable to what Knoppix, Kanotix and some other live CD's provide.
Also, if you want to run the distro in English, you only have the option to log in as root, not as a regular user. If you want to run it in English as a regular user, you'll have to create that user as root and then log in again as that user. It would be nice to have both options available from the login screen.
Robert
107 • Should you upgrade from SUSE 10.0 to SUSE 10.1 (by Anonymous on 2006-05-22 00:24:04 GMT from Rohnert Park, United States)
As of today (May 21, 2006), I would say in short: Not Yet.
SUSE 10.0 (with KDE 3.5.2 update( is a very stable and very nice version of SUSE Linux.
So far, SUSE 10.1 is stable... but has lots of "wrinkles" and its spite of it release status, is so far in my view of "Beta level."
Like in the past, within about one month or so, most of the serious annoying bugs will be worked out, and then an update will make lots of sense.
The release of the "boxed version of SUSE 10.1" may be the signal, because I do not believe that one would be satisfied with OpenSuse 10.1 as of today.
-
108 • RE: #107 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2006-05-22 05:31:54 GMT from Milano, Italy)
"The release of the "boxed version of SUSE 10.1" may be the signal, because I do not believe that one would be satisfied with OpenSuse 10.1 as of today."
Unfortunately my experience tells me that the boxed version is identical to the downloadable one (except for size, of course).
And besides the boxed edition is already available.
Number of Comments: 108
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
| | |
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| *NEW* NovaCustom |
NovaCustom PrivacyGuard Laptops - Escape from Big Tech
The NovaCustom PrivacyGuard Laptop is ideal for anyone who prioritizes privacy. Comes with Dasharo coreboot open source firmware and Zorin OS Pro, free from influence of Big Tech.
|
| Archives |
| • Issue 1172 (2026-05-11): Fedora 44, dealing with extra fonts, Fedora plans to provide AI tools, problems with Ubuntu's new coreutils, TrueNAS extends its development cycle, postmarktetOS improves the boot splash screen, Redox ports tmux |
| • Issue 1171 (2026-05-04): Xubuntu 26.04, extending memory with VRAM, Ubuntu plans AI features, Devuan developer forks GTK2, Mint introduces hardware enablement builds, Linux running on a PlayStation 5, local kernel exploit found in Linux |
| • Issue 1170 (2026-04-27): ENux 5.2.1, picking a second distro, AlmaLinux expands CPU support, FreeBSD publishes Status Report, Ubuntu MATE skips 26.04 release |
| • Issue 1169 (2026-04-20): Lakka 6.1, free software and source-based distributions, FreeBSD Foundation publishes compatible laptop list, Debian holds Project Leader election, Haiku progresses ARM64 port, Mint to extend development cycle, Linux 7.0 released |
| • Issue 1168 (2026-04-13): pearOS 2026.03, EndeavourOS 2026.03.06, which distros are adopting age verification, Arch adjusts its firewall packages, Linux dropping i486 support, Red Hat extends its release cycle, Debian's APT introduces rollbacks, Redox improves its scheduler |
| • Issue 1167 (2026-04-06): Origami Linux 2026.03, answering questions for Linux newcomers, Ubuntu MATE seeking new contributors, Ubuntu software centre is expanding Deb support, FreeBSD fixes forum exploit, openSUSE 15 Leap nears its end of life |
| • Issue 1166 (2026-03-30): NetBSD jails, publishing software for Linux, Ubuntu joins Rust Foundation, Canonical plans to trim GRUB features, Peppermint works on new utilities, PINE64 shows off open hardware capabilities |
| • Issue 1165 (2026-03-23): Argent Linux 1.5.3, disk space required by Linux, Manjaro team goes on strike, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA driver support and builds RISC-V packages, systemd introduces age tracking |
| • Issue 1164 (2026-03-16): d77void, age verification laws and Linux, SUSE may be for sale, TrueNAS takes its build system private, Debian publishes updated Trixie media, MidnightBSD and System76 respond to age verification laws |
| • Issue 1163 (2026-03-09): KaOS 2026.02, TinyCore 17.0, NuTyX 26.02.2, Would one big collection of packages help?, Guix offers 64-bit Hurd options, Linux communities discuss age delcaration laws, Mint unveils new screensaver for Cinnamon, Redox ports new COSMIC features |
| • Issue 1162 (2026-03-02): AerynOS 2026.01, anti-virus and firewall tools, Manjaro fixes website certificate, Ubuntu splits firmware package, jails for NetBSD, extended support for some Linux kernel releases, Murena creating a map app |
| • Issue 1161 (2026-02-23): The Guix package manager, quick Q&As, Gentoo migrating its mirrors, Fedora considers more informative kernel panic screens, GhostBSD testing alternative X11 implementation, Asahi makes progress with Apple M3, NetBSD userland ported, FreeBSD improves web-based system management |
| • Issue 1160 (2026-02-16): Noid and AgarimOS, command line tips, KDE Linux introduces delta updates, Redox OS hits development milestone, Linux Mint develops a desktop-neutral account manager, sudo developer seeks sponsorship |
| • Issue 1159 (2026-02-09): Sharing files on a network, isolating processes on Linux, LFS to focus on systemd, openSUSE polishes atomic updates, NetBSD not likely to adopt Rust code, COSMIC roadmap |
| • Issue 1158 (2026-02-02): Manjaro 26.0, fastest filesystem, postmarketOS progress report, Xfce begins developing its own Wayland window manager, Bazzite founder interviewed |
| • Issue 1157 (2026-01-26): Setting up a home server, what happened to convergence, malicious software entering the Snap store, postmarketOS automates hardware tests, KDE's login manager works with systemd only |
| • Issue 1156 (2026-01-19): Chimera Linux's new installer, using the DistroWatch Torrent Corner, new package tools for Arch, Haiku improves EFI support, Redcore streamlines branches, Synex introduces install-time ZFS options |
| • Issue 1155 (2026-01-12): MenuetOS, CDE on Sparky, iDeal OS 2025.12.07, recommended flavour of BSD, Debian seeks new Data Protection Team, Ubuntu 25.04 nears its end of life, Google limits Android source code releases, Fedora plans to replace SDDM, Budgie migrates to Wayland |
| • Issue 1154 (2026-01-05): postmarketOS 25.06/25.12, switching to Linux and educational resources, FreeBSD improving laptop support, Unix v4 available for download, new X11 server in development, CachyOS team plans server edtion |
| • Issue 1153 (2025-12-22): Best projects of 2025, is software ever truly finished?, Firefox to adopt AI components, Asahi works on improving the install experience, Mageia presents plans for version 10 |
| • Issue 1152 (2025-12-15): OpenBSD 7.8, filtering websites, Jolla working on a Linux phone, Germany saves money with Linux, Ubuntu to package AMD tools, Fedora demonstrates AI troubleshooting, Haiku packages Go language |
| • Issue 1151 (2025-12-08): FreeBSD 15.0, fun command line tricks, Canonical presents plans for Ubutnu 26.04, SparkyLinux updates CDE packages, Redox OS gets modesetting driver |
| • Issue 1150 (2025-12-01): Gnoppix 25_10, exploring if distributions matter, openSUSE updates tumbleweed's boot loader, Fedora plans better handling of broken packages, Plasma to become Wayland-only, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1149 (2025-11-24): MX Linux 25, why are video drivers special, systemd experiments with musl, Debian Libre Live publishes new media, Xubuntu reviews website hack |
| • Issue 1148 (2025-11-17): Zorin OS 18, deleting a file with an unusual name, NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD refines upgrades, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1147 (2025-11-10): Fedora 43, the size and stability of the Linux kernel, Debian introducing Rust to APT, Redox ports web engine, Kubuntu website off-line, Mint creates new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak development resumes |
| • Issue 1146 (2025-11-03): StartOS 0.4.0, testing piped commands, Ubuntu Unity seeks help, Canonical offers Ubuntu credentials, Red Hat partners with NVIDIA, SUSE to bundle AI agent with SLE 16 |
| • Issue 1145 (2025-10-27): Linux Mint 7 "LMDE", advice for new Linux users, AlmaLinux to offer Btrfs, KDE launches Plasma 6.5, Fedora accepts contributions written by AI, Ubuntu 25.10 fails to install automatic updates |
| • Issue 1144 (2025-10-20): Kubuntu 25.10, creating and restoring encrypted backups, Fedora team debates AI, FSF plans free software for phones, ReactOS addresses newer drivers, Xubuntu reacts to website attack |
| • Issue 1143 (2025-10-13): openSUSE 16.0 Leap, safest source for new applications, Redox introduces performance improvements, TrueNAS Connect available for testing, Flatpaks do not work on Ubuntu 25.10, Kamarada plans to switch its base, Solus enters new epoch, Frugalware discontinued |
| • Issue 1142 (2025-10-06): Linux Kamarada 15.6, managing ZIP files with SQLite, F-Droid warns of impact of Android lockdown, Alpine moves ahead with merged /usr, Cinnamon gets a redesigned application menu |
| • Issue 1141 (2025-09-29): KDE Linux and GNOME OS, finding mobile flavours of Linux, Murena to offer phones with kill switches, Redox OS running on a smartphone, Artix drops GNOME |
| • Issue 1140 (2025-09-22): NetBSD 10.1, avoiding AI services, AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access performance, Mageia addresses service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support |
| • Issue 1139 (2025-09-15): EasyOS 7.0, Linux and central authority, FreeBSD running Plasma 6 on Wayland, GNOME restores X11 support temporarily, openSUSE dropping BCacheFS in new kernels |
| • Issue 1138 (2025-09-08): Shebang 25.8, LibreELEC 12.2.0, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, the importance of software updates, AerynOS introduces package sets, postmarketOS encourages patching upstream, openSUSE extends Leap support, Debian refreshes Trixie media |
| • Issue 1137 (2025-09-01): Tribblix 0m37, malware scanners flagging Linux ISO files, KDE introduces first-run setup wizard, CalyxOS plans update prior to infrastructure overhaul, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
| • Issue 1135 (2025-08-18): Debian 13, Proton, WINE, Wayland, and Wayback, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, KDE gets advanced Liquid Glass, Haiku improves authentication tools |
| • Issue 1134 (2025-08-11): Rhino Linux 2025.3, thoughts on malware in the AUR, Fedora brings hammered websites back on-line, NetBSD reveals features for version 11, Ubuntu swaps some command line tools for 25.10, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA support |
| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
| • Issue 1131 (2025-07-21): HeliumOS 10.0, settling on one distro, Mint plans new releases, Arch discovers malware in AUR, Plasma Bigscreen returns, Clear Linux discontinued |
| • Issue 1130 (2025-07-14): openSUSE MicroOS and RefreshOS, sharing aliases between computers, Bazzite makes Bazaar its default Flatpak store, Alpine plans Wayback release, Wayland and X11 benchmarked, Red Hat offers additional developer licenses, openSUSE seeks feedback from ARM users, Ubuntu 24.10 reaches the end of its life |
| • Issue 1129 (2025-07-07): GLF OS Omnislash, the worst Linux distro, Alpine introduces Wayback, Fedora drops plans to stop i686 support, AlmaLinux builds EPEL repository for older CPUs, Ubuntu dropping existing RISC-V device support, Rhino partners with UBports, PCLinuxOS recovering from website outage |
| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • Issue 1121 (2025-05-12): Bluefin 41, custom file manager actions, openSUSE joins End of 10 while dropping Deepin desktop, Fedora offers tips for building atomic distros, Ubuntu considers replacing sudo with sudo-rs |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
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.
|
| Random Distribution | 
Ekaaty Linux
Ekaaty Linux was a Brazilian community distribution based on Fedora. Its single-CD releases are geared towards desktop use in business and home environments, with KDE desktop, Smart package manager, BrOffice.org office suite, Kontact personal information management suite, and antivirus/antispam tools forming the backbone of the distribution. Ekaaty Linux supports English and Portuguese languages only.
Status: Discontinued
|
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
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.
|
|
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
