 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 188, 5 February 2007 |
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Welcome to this year's 6th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! As usual, this week's issue focuses on a variety of distributions and topics. We'll start with a frightening financial analysis of Mandriva Corporation whose most recent financial results were published last week. The news section then looks at the release process of the Fedora Project whose latest -- and incomplete -- test release came, once again, without any release notes or other useful information. Also in the news: Ubuntu has quietly scrapped the idea of including the 3D desktop in Feisty Fawn, openSUSE and Linspire brace for surprise announcements, Red Hat's Matthew Szulik has kind words to say about Linus Torvalds, and Nexenta announces plans to produce more frequent development releases. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch January 2007 donation has been awarded to the GQview and Kaffeine projects. Happy reading!
Content:
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Feature Story |
Analysis: Mandriva - a slow financial demise? (by Matthias Schoener)
 I am writing this, because there's a story that out there that I am afraid is not being told: It's the story of the slow financial demise of Mandriva. Very very quietly, Mandriva posted their results for their most recent fiscal quarter and year on the investor page of their web site. I saw no comment on it on DistroWatch, OSNews, Slashdot, or anywhere else.
Before getting into just how bad the numbers are, let me say that I used Mandriva for a long time, and was a Silver Club member for several years, until I just recently switched to openSUSE, because I became concerned about Mandriva's future after they laid off Gaël Duval, and also, because their x86_64 support was initially very slow to materialize.
In any case, I am far from a Mandriva "basher." I am a KDE user, and I feel that among the major distro communities, Mandriva and openSUSE are really the only ones that were strongly committed to KDE. So, I am certainly not looking forward to see either one of them go.
Comparing to the previous financial news releases, I see the following primary trends:
- Revenue: Full fiscal year revenue is up 1.4% (from €6.52 million to €6.61 million). However, fiscal 4th quarter revenue is DOWN 8.2% from €1.46 million in 2005 to €1.34 million in 2006.
- Operating expenses: Full fiscal year operating expenses have increased from €7.62 million to €8.69 million, or 14%. However, in the fourth quarter, expenses were down from €2.27 million in 2005 to €2.07 million in 2006, an 8.8% reduction.
- Operating loss: Netting operating revenue against operating expense, the loss for the fiscal year 2006 has almost doubled to €2.08 million, compared to €1.1 million in 2005. In the fiscal fourth quarter, this trend has been reversed, somewhat, as the loss seems to have shrunk from €810 thousand to €730 thousand, or 9.9% better.
However, due to extraordinary items, the net loss for the 4th quarter 2006 at Mandriva has more than doubled from €400 thousand to €840 thousand, and the full year net result has gone from essentially break-even to a €2.84 million loss.
It is worth noting that Mandriva's fiscal year ended on 30 September 2006. So the results that were posted last week are really already 4 months old, and the fiscal first quarter 2007 is already behind Mandriva. Mandriva hint in their news release that at least expenses have been contained, with the monthly expense run rate having been reduced from €670 thousand in 2006 to €530 thousand in 2007. I can only assume that this has been achieved through further lay-offs, which were not publicly announced.
Since Mandriva's shares are not traded on a regulated exchange, but rather on the Marché Libre in Paris (which is similar to the so-called "pink sheets" in the United States), they are under no obligation to furnish detailed quarterly results, and in fact they do not. So, for one thing, we do not know how much cash is left in Mandriva's coffers. Given, however, the drastic expense cuts, one has to assume that it's not much. Mandriva's stock seems to have lost about three quarters of its value over the past year; it now trades at €1.4, and trading is very thin. So raising new cash through a secondary offering seems all but impossible.
Unless revenue trends reverse very swiftly, I don't think that we will see Mandriva make it through this year as an independent public company. It will have to be sold or liquidated.
This leaves me with the following questions: What plans do the leadership at Mandriva have for the future? Are they looking to sell? If so, is there a potential buyer? How long can they last, without a cash infusion? What will happen to the distribution in the event of a liquidation? What's going on inside the company, now? Are the lead developers, package maintainers, etc. still with the company? Are they getting paid? What is their outlook? How does Gaël Duval feel about the trouble at the company that he founded, and that then kicked him out. Does he still have a financial stake in it?
It is sad to see this happen to a company that has brought me so much joy with their product. Over the years, I paid more money to Mandriva than I ever did to Microsoft (or now, Novell), but I always thought that the people there were worth it, and that their product should thrive. I hope it will continue to do so.
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| Miscellaneous News |
Fedora's forgettable Test1 release, Mandriva adds non-free repository, Ubuntu defers Beryl plans, interview with Red Hat's Matthew Szulik, Adriane Knoppix
 The first test release of Fedora 7 was announced last week, just a couple of days behind schedule. As has become customary in the development of Red Hat's community distribution, Test 1 is rarely a serious release and often nothing more than a joke. Firstly, last week's build came as just a subset of the intended final product; instead of the promised "Fedora Desktop", "Fedora Server" and "Fedora KDE" editions, the developers only released a 3-CD "Fedora Desktop". Secondly, there were no release notes, not even a hint at changes, known issues or testing requests. In fact, the entire release seemed like something made in a desperate haste - as if the developers came to work on Monday and, realising that they had to release something, they just pulled some packages out of the "rawhide" development tree, placed them on a bootable DVD, and spent two minutes making a release announcement.
This is disappointing for a popular distribution which many people watch and test with keen interest. Although the intended changes from Fedora 6 to Fedora 7 are certainly considerable (and yes, there are some positives, such as the installable live CD for the i386 systems or the beautiful new icon set), there are really no excuses for releasing a product that is nowhere near ready for an early alpha test, let alone serious testing and bug reporting by the larger Fedora user community. This fiasco raises serious questions about the testing procedures at Fedora: is the traditional scheduling of the three tests faulty (perhaps the first test arrives too soon, long before the majority of the new features have been implemented) or is it the way the developers treat the first test (they clearly don't give themselves enough time to prepare for the release)?
Whatever the reason, the Fedora testing process must be re-evaluated, with clearly defined responsibilities and release tasks before every test release, not just the second and third. Otherwise the project risks that many Linux users who enjoy helping with testing and bug reporting will go and download a beta of a distribution that treats its testing community with more respect than Fedora.
Fedora 7 will be the first Fedora release providing an installable live CD.
(full image size: 460kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
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 Mandriva's Adam Williamson has published an update on the development of the upcoming release of Mandriva Linux 2007.1. Among the more interesting points in the blog post, Williamson reveals that a new non-free directory, containing popular graphics drivers and other proprietary software, will become available to all users, not just those who purchase one of the commercial editions or the members of the Mandriva Club. In fact, the directory is already available in "Cooker" so those users who run the Mandriva development branch should now be able to test the non-free part of the distribution. This change has been apparently brought about by the fact that other distributions, notably Ubuntu and openSUSE, provide non-free directories to their users and Mandriva is simply catching up with the competition. Better late than never.
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 Speaking about upcoming releases, it seems that Ubuntu's new version, 7.04 "Feisty Fawn", won't come with as much eye candy as originally planned, after all. Those who hoped for a well-tested implementation of the various 3D desktop features with Compiz and Beryl will be disappointed as these have now been deferred to a later Ubuntu release, probably the one that will come out in the third quarter of 2007. From Ubuntu's Launchpad: "Feature specification: Composite (Compiz/Beryl) installed by default. Implementation Status: Deferred. There is no chance that this feature will actually be delivered in the targeted release. The specification has effectively been deferred to a later date of implementation."
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 Potentially interesting (and mysterious) news about openSUSE has recently reached the DistroWatch team. According to SUSEPortal.cz (a Czech portal maintained by Jiří Větvička, a Bratislava-based openSUSE contributor), starting with version 10.2 Novell has stopped providing commercial boxes of the Czech edition of openSUSE. However, to compensate the users in the Czech Republic, it is preparing a major surprise. This will only be revealed in early March, but the official Czech openSUSE web site at openSUSE.cz has an intriguing message which translates as: "From 10 August 2005 you can use openSUSE. From 1 March 2007 you won't want to use any other distribution." Whether the upcoming "surprise" is of regional importance only or whether it has global significance, we don't know yet. But the mysterious announcement certainly gives a good reason to keep an eye on openSUSE Czech Republic for further updates.
* * * * *
 openSUSE is not the only distribution that keeps us on our toes. Freespire, which has delayed its promised 4th alpha and first beta releases, is also preparing a surprise for its users. Answering a question on the distribution's mailing list about the recent delays, Kevin Carmony, the CEO of Linspire, replies: "We'll have an update soon. You'll understand the meaning to our madness soon enough, and we ask for your patience and indulgence for just a few more days." Linspire has already delivered a number of unexpected announcements to the Linux user community in recent months, including the opening up of the distribution's development process in the form of Freespire, freeing up the Click 'N Run (CNR) software repository, and announcing the availability of CNR to other distributions. What is it now? We'll have to wait and see....
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 The Czech Republic has been attracting more than its fair share of Linux investment dollar in recent months. One of the largest ventures was the opening of a 207-employee Red Hat development and research centre in Brno earlier this year, which will make the second largest Czech city a significant contributor to the development of Red Hat's products. As a result of this initiative, ABCLinuxu.cz has conducted an interview with Matthew Szulik, the CEO of Red Hat, Inc, about the new centre and a variety of other topics. Asked whether he would like to employ Linus Torvalds, Szulik replies: Well, you know, asking whether we'd like to have Linus Torvalds is like asking a basketball team whether they'd like to have Michael Jordan. The answer to that is obvious. I think both Linus' value systems and also clearly his technical competency are compliment to any organization. And his leadership and his vision for the Linux kernel and the open source software has always been inspiring to me." Read the rest of the entertaining interview here.
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 LinuxAsia 2007, an open source conference taking place this week in New Delhi, India, has brought together a number of well-known open source developers. One of the attendees was Klaus Knopper of KNOPPIX fame whose presence at the conference resulted in an interesting announcement about a new product called "Adriane Knoppix". It turns out that Adriane, the wife of Klaus Knopper, is visually impaired so the couple has been working on a live CD designed for people with similar disabilities. DistroWatch already lists two projects that provide Linux-based operating systems for the blind, BrlSpeak and Oralux, but unfortunately neither of them has been particularly active in recent months. No details have been given about the projected availability of the new KNOPPIX variant, but the new live CD will certainly be a useful addition to the world of Linux distributions.
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 Nexenta, a project which has built a hybrid operating system consisting of the OpenSolaris kernel, Debian utilities, and Ubuntu software packages, has already produced 6 alpha releases for public testing. Despite the early success, it seems that Nexenta's first stable product is still some months away. To speed up the development, the project has announced that it will release more frequent ISO images for testing: "To improve the quality of development releases, we decided to introduce 'unstable' ISO releases which will be available with or without announcement." The first such CD image was released last week and is available for download from here: elatte_install_a7test1-b55_i386.iso (630MB).
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Finally, an interesting analysis of one aspect of the open source development world - the enormous number of open source projects that exist today. Charles Babcock from Dr. Dobb's looks at some of the reasons for this phenomenon: "There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions -- most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out." Anybody who is about to launch a new open source software project or start a Linux distribution should read this excellent 6-page report.
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| Released Last Week |
DragonFly BSD 1.8
Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 1.8: "1.8 is our fifth major DragonFly release. DragonFly's policy is to only commit bug fixes to release branches. The biggest kernel change in this release is the addition of virtual kernel support and a virtual kernel build target (VKERNEL). Virtual kernels are systems-in-a-box... you can run a complete kernel as a userland process. All standard non-hardware-specific applications will run inside the virtual kernel. Performance depends on how heavily an application interacts with the VM system and how often it makes system calls, since these operations have to bed forwarded by the real kernel to the virtual kernel." Find more information in the comprehensive release notes.
Trisguel GNU/Linux 1.0
Rubén Rodríguez Pérez has announced the release of Trisguel GNU/Linux 1.0, a 100% free, Debian-based distribution sponsored by the regional government of Galicia in Spain and with complete support for the Galician language. The project's first stable release comes with kernel 2.6.18.6 and includes GNOME 2.14, IceWeasel 2.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4, 3D desktop with AIGLX and Compiz, pre-configured software repository containing additional Debian 4.0 packages with security updates, new installer with improved hardware detection, support for assistive technologies, new live system which can be installed on USB storage devices, and other new features. For more information please read the full release announcement (in Spanish).
Famelix 1.3
Famelix is a Brazilian desktop Linux distribution which mimics the look and feel of Windows XP. The project has released version 1.3 earlier this week with the following characteristics: many updates and bug fixes in order to facilitate the migration of users from Windows XP to Linux; Linux kernel 2.6.17; KDE 3.5.5; switch to udev for improved hardware recognition; addition of BR-Office.org; various improvements to the KDE desktop and Samba integration; simplification of the launch menu; improved hardware support for wireless network cards, webcams and modems. Visit the screenshots page and read the release announcement (in Portuguese) for further information.
RUNT Linux 5.0
RUNT is a Slackware-based distribution designed to run from 256 MB bootable USB pen drives and containing a fairly complete (text mode only) Linux system for hardware and network testing. A new version 5.0 was announced earlier today: "RUNT 5.0 is built from Slackware 11.0 and has updated versions of nearly every package. Of greatest significance is the much newer 2.4.33.3 kernel, which now supports most SATA controllers, as well as prism54 wireless devices. With all of these updates comes a substantial increase in size. I was unable to keep RUNT under 128 MB this time and maintain the level of usability in past releases. This version takes up about 200 MB when unpacked, so at least a 256 MB flash drive formatted with 4k clusters is required." The release announcement, downloading links and installation instructions can be found on the project's home page.
MCNLive "VirtualCity"
After a week of testing, the final version of MCNLive "VirtualCity" has been released: "MCNLive 'VirtualCity' Final. Designed to run from a 512 MB USB Flash Drive or from a CD, this new version comes bundled with VirtualBox OSE, an easy to use virtualisation software which lets you run virtual machines at almost native speed. It seems that Mandriva 2007 and VirtualBox are a dream team. Create virtual machines, run existing VMs from your hard disk. Use this live CD (or live USB) in combination with a USB hard drive, packed with your favourite operating systems. The perfect mobile solution. Or just use it to discover what this virtualisation is all about." Visit the distribution's home page to learn about the new release.
Annvix 2.0
Vincent Danen has announced the release of Annvix 2.0, a Mandriva-based, server-oriented and security-enhanced Linux distribution: "Today marks the fourth public release of the Annvix Linux distribution. It was exactly 50 weeks ago when 1.2-RELEASE was made available; this version is the fruit of almost a year's worth of hard work. Some of the new features include: 2.6.16.39 kernel with RSBAC and AppArmor support; updated services including PHP 5.2.0, MySQL 5.0.27, PostgreSQL 8.2.1, and Apache 2.2.4; a greatly enhanced installer; a completely overhauled init system; the use of the tcb suite for authentication; the use of apt-rpm as the default package manager...." More details in the release announcement.
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Development and unannounced releases
- Trustix Secure Linux 3.0.5-rc1, the release announcement
- SaxenOS 1.1-rc2, the press release
- Pioneer Linux 2.0-rc1, the release announcement
- Linux MCNLive 2.2-beta, the release notes
- Fedora Desktop 7-test1, the release announcement
- Dreamlinux 2.2-beta2, the release announcement
- Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu 7.04-alpha3, the release announcement
- Beyond LFS 6.2.0-rc1, the release announcement
- GeeXboX 1.1-rc1, the release announcement
- Atomix Linux 4.1 (mini-live)
- Caixa Mágica 11 (live)
- Kurumin Linux 7.0-rc4
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
January 2007 donation: GQview and Kaffeine receive US$250 each
We are pleased to announce that the recipients of the DistroWatch.com December 2006 donations are the GQview (US$250) and Kaffeine (US$250).
GQview, a GTK+ image viewer, has been around for many years and has established itself as a powerful software package for displaying a variety of digital image formats. Kaffeine, on the other hand, is a relative new arrival on the Linux scene, but has gained popularity at a rapid pace in recent years. It is designed as a KDE front-end for the xine engine and many KDE-based distributions now offer it as their default video player.
As always, the monthly donations programme is a joint initiative between DistroWatch and three online shops selling low-cost CDs and DVDs with Linux, BSD and other open source software - LinuxCD.org, OSDisc.com and TheLinuxShop.co.uk. The three CD/DVD vendors contributed US$50.00 each towards this month's donation to GQview and Kaffeine.
Here is the list of projects that received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme:
Since the launch of the Donations Programme in March 2004, DistroWatch has donated a total of US$11,890 to various open source software projects.
* * * * *
New distributions added to database
- NimbleX. NimbleX is a Slackware-based mini live CD which is able to boot from a mini CD, USB storage device or from another computer on the Local Area Network. Its main features are small size, a varied selection of software packages, and good hardware support.
- Trisquel GNU/Linux. Trisquel GNU/Linux is a 100% free Debian-based Linux distribution with support for the Galician language. Its main purpose is to provide an operating system for varied audience, including home and office users, educational institutions, multimedia workstations, etc. Trisquel GNU/Linux consists of three editions: "Trisguel" (a GNOME-based distribution for home users), "Trisguel PeME" (a GNOME-based distribution optimised for office use) and "Triskel" (a general purpose KDE-based distribution). The project is developed by the Universidad de Vigo and sponsored by the Council for Innovation and Industry of the regional government of Galicia, Spain.
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New distributions added to waiting list
- CowMet. CowMet is a French Linux distribution built from Linux From Scratch, using a unique, graphical package management system.
- CDriveBack. CDriveBack is a Linux live CD which makes it simple to back up and restore the C: drive of a Windows XP system.
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DistroWatch database summary
And this concludes our latest issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 12 February 2007. Until then,
Ladislav Bodnar
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Still waiting for SimplyMEPIS (by Soloact on 2007-02-05 10:18:29 GMT from United States)
I know it's coming soon, but I'm still waiting for the official release. So far the 64 bit betas are working fine, at least for me, an end user.
Perhaps Novell will buy up Mandriva, and we'll have Susnovdriva. For some reason, it seems like it would make sense for Novell to acquire them.
Thus ends my 2 cents this week.
Thank you, Ladislav!
2 • Fedora vs. Ubuntu test (by Michael at 2007-02-05 10:36:09 GMT from Austria)
Fedora 7 may fail to deliver release notes, but my test installation from the live CD was flawless. In contrast, Ubuntu 7.04 test 3 has still serious kernel problems. On my hardware, I needed this kernel option to do an installation (from alternate CD): hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false.
So, the Fedora bashing seems somewhat unfair.
3 • Ubuntu 3D desktop (by Sander Marechal on 2007-02-05 10:39:31 GMT from Netherlands)
It's good to hear that Ubuntu dropped the "non-free drivers by default" idea. I guess the community had had more impact that I would have suspected. I really hope that they will pick up the community's other idea too: Make installing the drivers afterwards easier.
The most vocal support for non-free drivers by default I read were all from people relatively new to Linux that thought hunting down packages in Synaptic and modifying xorg.conf is too difficult.
4 • Mandriva (by Sige on 2007-02-05 10:52:19 GMT from United Kingdom)
The news about Mandriva is very sad. However, they, along with many other Linux wannabe s, have always had the wrong business model. Trying to make money from repackaging the freely-contributed efforts of other folk has only been successful for a single individual, possibly the most hated man in today's world! Those who have succeeded in this overburdened distro world - and made themselves a decent source of income - have recognised that it is the add-on services that people need and will buy. The shining example is Klaus Knopper; now we learn that, apart from his diligence and attention to detail, just what a thoroughly decent human being this man is.
5 • The Fedora bashing is disqualifying, Ladislav! (by Béranger on 2007-02-05 10:55:03 GMT from Romania)
There isn't a single argument that would justify such a strong bashing of Fedora7 Test1!
(And no, I am *not* a Fedora fan!)
6 • A better alternative do Kaffeine (by ceti on 2007-02-05 11:41:49 GMT from Brazil)
Kaffeine is fine, but KMPlayer is far superior. It's a front-end not only to xine, but to MPLayer and GStreamer, too. And the interface is better and nicer.
7 • Re: Ubuntu 3D desktop (by tajji on 2007-02-05 11:48:10 GMT from Finland)
They have not yet dropped (as such) the idea of non-free drivers, the deferred feature is about not having beryl/compiz loaded by default. Composite will be enabled as default, but it's not used without the user installing beryl or compiz - this time however those should really work out of the box.
When it comes to "non-free drivers by default", it has been clear for some time that even though it's still on track, it's not like people would think it will be. In short, open source drivers will be for all Intel graphics (naturally), ATI Radeon 7000 - X850 and older NVIDIA cards. Closed binary drivers will be used for the newest Radeon X1300 - X1950 that don't even have 2D support in the open-source drivers because of AMD/ATI, but on those cards Composite will be disabled because ATI's closed drivers suck so bad (Composite works on the open source drivers for Radeons up to X850).
Finally, NVIDIA's newest cards should have closed source drivers enabled, but it is planned that in Ubuntu 7.10 they will again be replaced by the new open source Nouveau drivers, if they are just stable enough and provide basic 3D acceleration.
8 • Mandriva (by Caraibes on 2007-02-05 12:24:34 GMT from Dominican Republic)
It is really too bad that Mandriva has been loosing money. I surly hope they don't go bankrupt, as they are providing an outstanding distro : MDV 2007 !
Now, who knows ? Maybe MDV will be bought by another company, and the dev's work will go on as usual ...
I can see another distro that would not be happy with the dissappearance of Mandriva : PCLinuxOS... They would have to find another base, and it would be tough, as all PCLOS goodies are straight from Mandriva (control center, hardware recognition...)
Anyway, I am optimistic, as 2007 seems to be a better year for Mandriva, they sold a bunch of usb pendrives, and the reputation of the distro seems to go up again.
Good luck !!!
9 • Mandriva's Poor Form (by gb8e on 2007-02-05 12:29:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
Really sorry to hear this news. I was introduced to Linux with Mandrake in the late 90s. I have, in the past year, been using PCLinuxOS -- if Mandriva goes up in smoke will it have a knock-on effect?
10 • LinuxAsia penguin (by just john on 2007-02-05 12:48:58 GMT from United States)
To me, the icon next to the LinuxAsia announcement looks like the 4-winged penguin I associate with Knoppix.
I've no problem with such recycling, but it got me wondering: Has anybody come up with a multi-winged (and maybe multi-faced) penguin that would look appropriate for India or Thailand?
11 • Mandriva and PCLinuxOS (by Fla_Snowman on 2007-02-05 13:03:52 GMT from United States)
Caraibes and gb8e, I don't see why PCLinuxOS should suffer if Mandriva disappeared. Yes it was originally based an Mandrake but it has developed a life of it's own. The 2007 version is brand new code.
That said, I'd hate to see Mandriva go, their new Metisse desktop on the live cd is really fine. They do have a good distro.
12 • Debian 4.0 (Etch) (by Chris Zotos on 2007-02-05 13:06:04 GMT from South Africa)
Where on Earth is Debian 4.0 (Etch) ?!?
I thought it was supposed to be released in December 2006...
If anybody knows the development status of the final and stable version of Debian 4.0, please let me know.
13 • Fedora Bash (by vipernicus on 2007-02-05 14:03:36 GMT from United States)
So, was Fedora Core 7 stable and secure? From your intense bash session, we are left with the assumption it is horrible in all ways, though I didn't see anything about instability or lack of security. What was so bad about it?
14 • OpenSuSE (by linux user on 2007-02-05 14:10:57 GMT from United States)
After the deal with Microsoft future of the SuSE Linux has many question marks. I am so sorry for SuSE which was very good distro.
15 • debian 4.0 etch release (by linuxfanboy on 2007-02-05 14:32:16 GMT from Austria)
Yep, december 06 was originally planned, but there were internal disturbances about the dunc-tanc (spelling?) affair, which lead to a couple of developers reducing their commitment to or even taking a break from their projects.
You might want to take a look at the release-critical bugs chart:
http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
Looks to me like it's gonna be march or april, but don't quote me on that :-)
At first I was annoyed too, but when I thought about it I realized that I'd much rather have them get their act together and release a polished product than rush it.
Especially a distribution release that has pretty stable daily and weekly builds as well as a current netinst image people can use whenever they want.
Cheers to you ladislav and the other distrowatch-guys!
16 • Is Red Hat For Sale? (by M. Edward (Ed) Borasky on 2007-02-05 15:01:25 GMT from United States)
I'm not generally the sort that starts rumors, but it just seems to me at least plausible, given the Microsoft/Novell deal, Oracle's plan to build their own Linux distro and the financial difficulties at Mandriva, that just maybe Red Hat will end up as a division of a large company, like IBM or HP, in the not-too-distant future. Comments?
17 • RE: 15 (by happy-go-lucky on 2007-02-05 15:08:10 GMT from Finland)
That December release was never carved in stone and all the talk about Dunc-Tank delaying the release is just uninformed hogwash.
What has actually delayed Etch, is that preparing a kernel for Etch has taken more time than was initially expected. And there still needs to be another Installer release candidate. But those final pieces seem to finally start coming together.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/01/msg00007.html
Not that the release matters much, IMHO. Debian stable is mainly for servers, I'm happily using a mixture of testing and unstable as my desktop. ;)
18 • I have long ditched mandrake/mandriva (by Michael scb on 2007-02-05 15:19:58 GMT from Malaysia)
I feel that mandrake/mandriva should have been driven by L_executives, not B_executives.
For example, microsoft is very much steered by a W_executive.
If it was controlled by B_executives, i wouldn't be surprised if
lots of highly educated end users would defect Windows and champion a free/independant state/open source. Or just join
Apple.
Apple was and is still truly run by an A_executive.
19 • RE: maybe Red Hat will end up as a division of a large company, like IBM or HP (by Béranger on 2007-02-05 15:23:40 GMT from Romania)
> maybe Red Hat will end up as a division of a large company, like IBM or HP
Thanks, but no, thanks. OS/2 died under the umbrella of IBM.
"Oracle's plan to build their own Linux distro" is just nonsense. Without
Red Hat, Larry would sell "Potato Chips Linux". (He will sell "Fish & Chips Linux" anyway, as he can't understand what an enterprise distro really means.)
20 • Pity for SUSE, Pity for Mandriva (by Helmut Kriege on 2007-02-05 15:28:45 GMT from Germany)
What a pity for SUSE due to the Microsoft - Novell deal! Thats one distro i shall never look at again!
But then - to see Mandriva in serious financial difficulties is very sad. They have done so much pioneering work to Linux. Just think of unrivaled graphical tools, the MCC, of hp-printer integration, and so on. They have really gotten a lot moving, and made lots of progress. And after all Mandriva is one of the finest distros. I personally would be very, very sorry to see them go!
21 • Re: OpenSUSE (by Vukota on 2007-02-05 15:46:32 GMT from United States)
I don't see question marks. Actually it seem they are doing great after the deal (both OpenSUSE and Novell).
22 • redhat for sale?? (by ray carter at 2007-02-05 16:17:01 GMT from United States)
Seems to me that much could be accomplished by a RedHat - Mandrivel merger.
23 • Adriane Knoppix (by Laurel on 2007-02-05 16:28:48 GMT from United States)
This sounds very interesting; hopefully we'll have a download link soon. I am anxiously awaiting the release of Debian 4.0, because my computer has no Internet connection. I'm looking forward to better accessibility, better localization, and more educational software. Keep up the good work, Distrowatch, and various project developers! Maybe someday, my dream computer will be a reality...accessibility isn't just about disabilities, after all.
24 • Re: 12 Debian Etch (by Sam Avery-Quinn on 2007-02-05 16:51:18 GMT from United States)
Having run Etch since December without a single problem (and wow, hey, I'm a linux newbie too!) I'm not sure what all the delay is really about. Check out this article for more on the internal Debian politicking going on with the release.
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS3128387759.html
25 • In my opinion (by Theodore Dreiser on 2007-02-05 16:54:37 GMT from United States)
the problem with some distros is that they are being developed
by a bunch of egotistical knuckleheads who have no clue what the
people want in a linux distro.
Contrast that with Texstar as he inexorably grinds away towards
perfection with PCLinuxOS. Thank goodness he is around.
I do not even bother looking at the other distros anymore, i know they
won't work as good as PCLinuxOS 2007.
26 • 25 (by ex-man on 2007-02-05 17:12:11 GMT from United States)
The problem with some comments is that they are made by a bunch of egotistical knuckleheads who have no clue what other people want in a linux distro.
pclinux is good for some people, but good luck using it for serious computation. pclinux is very limited for many of us. Maybe that's why almost all Linux users use a different distro.
27 • RE 24 : "since December without a single problem " (by dbrion on 2007-02-05 17:19:33 GMT from France)
It is a factual argument, and one person's experience. If I wrote I have been runnin professionnaly Windows XP since november _2003_, out of obligation, without any problem, you would think I am biased.... These are however (obligation and 1300 days without problems) _two_ facts. In the link fairly provided by and by last weeks DWW, too, one can see that people "deliberately" slowing down a release is not considered as an inconvenient.
In fact, instead of developping, they seem to have done some intensive bug hunting, which is normally done with less insight by users. This lead some of my colleagues to switch from Mandriva or White Boxes (where they felt obliged to do some wild bug hunting { it does not mean they found bugs, but they were unsure} ) to the next release of Debian for professionnal use....
In the worst case, suppose one has a life expectancy of 70 yrs. What is a 4 months delay compared to good quality distribution?
28 • Re: 12 Debian Etch (by Darkman on 2007-02-05 17:31:37 GMT from United States)
Do you actually use Debian Etch? I’m running the 64-bit version and have been unable to break it. Etch is amazingly stable and solid. Not a surprise, as it's been frozen for at least a month. It is also the fastest OS I have ever experienced—it boots in 20 seconds on my AMD64 box.
29 • Sigh... (by 1c3d0g on 2007-02-05 17:36:50 GMT from Aruba)
#5: quiet. It appears that every time you open your mouth, you have to criticize the author, this excellent site or something related to it. So what's YOUR problem, really? Don't like what you read? Then don't fucking read it! And stop wasting people's time with your useless comments.
30 • No subject (by Paya on 2007-02-05 17:40:44 GMT from Iran, Islamic Republic of)
While Beryl is easy to install it's not what you'd expect the average newbie to do with their fresh installations. So what's the big deal? Well competition with other OSes is one thing. I think PCLinuxOS is the eye catching distro to watch out for in 2007!
31 • In What way (by Jere7miah on 2007-02-05 18:07:51 GMT from United States)
#26
Please give an example of how it's limited. I Run PCLinuxOS at a pretty large company for multiple tasks. Such as a file server a development machine and multiple desktops. I've been a Linux user for over 10 years, and not that it matters but I am RedHat certified, but choose to run PCLinuxOS instead. I wonder if your post isn't made by a egotistical knucklehead, obviously there may be an issue between the keyboard and chair and not the use of the OS itself. Granted it is Linux no matter what distro and if you're an actual Linux User compiling isn't really that hard. So what can't it do?
32 • RE: 24 (by happy-go-lucky on 2007-02-05 18:27:13 GMT from Finland)
I've got similar experience, Etch has been rock-solid for months now. :)
BTW, the linux-watch article you link to is pretty clueless. The columnist has just read some developers' blog entries and then he puts two and two together, getting twenty-two as the result. The whole article starts off with a major misinterpretation -- he quotes a blog note by Andreas Barth and, soon after that, the very same blog note was updated and Barth refuted the columnist's interpretation of his words.
The whole Dunc-Tank disagreement was a tempest in a teapot. It didn't have much effect on the release schedule (for good or bad), but arguably it has managed to improve the quality of the upcoming Etch release. The Debian project leader Anthony Towns evaluates the possible success of Dunc-Tank in a recent interview:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=189708751&rid=-219
33 • Bleh (by UZ64 on 2007-02-05 18:28:14 GMT from United States)
I seriously wish Mandriva would either die, or come to their senses. I'm getting sick of hearing about their endless stream of downright stupid decisions and [therefore] expected financial problems. They're constantly making the news, and it's almost never "good" news. I'm surprised people even continue to support them at all when it comes to their distros, really.
I know that sounds harsh (and it is), but damn--something NEEDS to be done at Mandriva if they expect to be around much longer. It almost seems like they're trying to get all this negative press just to be the main focal point of the news. :|
34 • unfortunate choice of icon (by E. Hill on 2007-02-05 18:32:20 GMT from United States)
In the bad Icon choice area I find Pioneer Linux's choice of the Bucking Horse a very poor choice. As this is a open source world why would they use a copyrighted icon. This is the official and copyrighted property of the State of Wyoming. I would think they could come up with a better choice that is more to the spirit of the Linux world. But this is just my oppinion.
35 • SaxenOS (by Anonymous on 2007-02-05 19:10:12 GMT from United States)
Glad to see another beta from SaxenOS. This is a great distro for older (PII era) machines. I still have STX (predecessor to SaxenOS) on an old PII 400 and it works great.
36 • Debian Etch (by IMQ on 2007-02-05 19:25:19 GMT from United States)
I, too, have been running Debian Etch on one of my test machine since November 2006. I did the installation from a weekly-build and have been running *apt-get* to keep the system up to date.
So far, I experience zero problems. Upgrades ran completely everytime I did *apt-get*.
I intend to keep this running until it gives me a BSOD :)
There will be no re-install for this partition even if Debian officially release the 4.0 in the near future. But I will install the final release on another PC and keep it running until the next release.
PS: I am glad there are numerous distros available today that will serve my needs for computing perfectly. In fact, too many for me to settle for just one. ;)
37 • No subject (by Today Pardus on 2007-02-05 19:26:01 GMT from Sweden)
Mandriva will continue as a free (non-commercial) project (as long as the company allows it), why shouldnt it? And it can take the catchy name OpenMandriva. :)
Why keep an eye on Czech-OpenSuse? Isnt Suse the same all over the world?
Knoppix* found his commercial project!
Nice to see that Nexenta is alive, I have been worried that it was about to die. I will try the latest image tonight.
Nice to see that I'm not the only one favoring Kaffeine in KDE, and nice that someones donating money to them. Feature requests involves support for .idx subtitles and more configuration options (thinking mainly on looks). Thank you Ladislav.
re: 5 by Beranger
"There isn't a single argument that would justify such a strong bashing of Fedora7 Test1!" is this coming from you? :) you are the harshest critic out there.
re: 29
Strong opinions makes interesting discussions.
38 • OpenSuSe - Novell - SuSE - Bashing (by Quentin at 2007-02-05 19:55:29 GMT from New Zealand)
I have to say, people harping on about the Novell/MS deal and how they don't like SuSE anymore need to get a life. Bashing Novell because of a business decision that involves M$ is childish. Sure MS are a bunch of tossers, but Novell have and are, doing some awesome things for Linux. On the enterprise desktop they are making stides no other distro is doing. The development of XGL is a prime example of the great things they are doing, not to mention the opening of the OpenSuSE build service. Don't crash them because of one decision, because what they have done for the Open Source community, and what they still continue to do, far outweighs their decision with MS.
39 • 31 (by ex-man on 2007-02-05 19:57:30 GMT from United States)
Because it doesn't do what I want the way I want it to. Other distros do things more the way I want them to. If you want to compile your own packages, go ahead. If you want to put up with a limited selection of packages that are out of date, go ahead. If you want to put up with a slower system, go ahead.
I once ran a few simple tests (not scientific because I don't care that much) for numerical computing that I do related to my job. A default debian installation, with my necessary packages installed from the debian repositories, versus a default pclinux installation, with my necessary packages installed from the pclinux repositories. The debian packages were up to date and add-on packages were available. The pclinux packages were many months behind and none of the add-ons were available. I ran a few loops with various computations, 24 total. I also included ubuntu and opensuse in my test. Debian was the fastest, opensuse second, ubuntu third, and pclinux last. Debian was 42% faster than pclinux on average. Maybe this is worthy of a more serious comparison but for me was enough.
Now, please check the post I was responding to, and ask about the names the author of that post was using to describe developers of other distros, and the statement that other distros "won't work as good as PCLinuxOS 2007" and you can understand my reply to that comment.
40 • Re. 39 (by UZ64 on 2007-02-05 20:42:28 GMT from United States)
Well said, ex-man. I can understand being disappointed in Novell's "deal" with Microsoft, but the pure hatred toward the openSUSE project itself is just nonsense. And as you said, even Novell themselves have been doing a lot of good in the Linux world... just one bad mistake.
41 • Mandriva can go (by kwink81 on 2007-02-05 20:48:26 GMT from United States)
As a free software supporter, I meet the news of Mandriva's troubles with dry eyes. Although most distros are friendly to some non-free software, Mandriva took it to a much higher level. Almost to the point where the non-free stuff was the selling point, not a supplement. So as long as Red Hat keeps doing well, and caring about user freedom, I'm happy.
42 • fedora (by Jason at 2007-02-05 20:57:05 GMT from United States)
This cycle of fedora is all messed up because of them merging core and extras. I think the proof will be in the final product
43 • Why are you bashing fedora? (by Sultan Khan on 2007-02-05 21:28:31 GMT from Canada)
Fedora 7 Test 1 looks just fine! There are many improvements and it's quite stable. Who cares about release notes? Their first priority was the product, not an itty griity not on minor changes.
44 • Fedora and Beryl (by Ohnonymous on 2007-02-05 21:35:01 GMT from United States)
There's less pressure on Fedora thanks to their flexible schedule and respins, so it's no big deal really. It's like Dapper is to Ubuntu or Gentoo stable to Sabayon. If it doesn't work, just use what will work. It's not like they expect you to really *use* a test release.
Thank goodness Ubuntu is deferring Beryl. Beryl has been improved dramatically just over the past week, but they still have a long long way to go.
45 • #1) Mepis/#25 PCLinuxOS (by Artb Levine on 2007-02-05 22:33:43 GMT from United States)
I too await the distribution release of the new SimplyMepis.
I love using/running Mepis. I have run cose to 40 something distro's so far and I keep going back to Mepis, and the new VectorLinux is very nice too, as is the new Knoppix, and I like GoblinX quite a bit too....
PCLinuxOS is, IMNSHO anyway, just pitiful.... it even looks stupid..... Like something for a somewhat below average 2nd grader.... I find it absolutely abhorant.
Choice is a good thing.... whether you follow my wonderfully fine and well thought out example and go with a fine quality distro like Mepis, or follow the bad examples of others who wrongly lead you astray down such horrendous paths as PCLinuxOS, choice is still a good thing....you can always go back and choose the right way later when you get tired of playing in kiddie-land.
But in the meantime, I think it's just great that you have found a distro that works well for you and suits your needs and methods and madness, whether that choice suits my needs or not is completely irrelevant.
Thanxxx for another great issue of DW2!!!
46 • Just about time! (by Ronald Liberal on 2007-02-05 22:55:30 GMT from United States)
I've been trying several distros over 2 years to find an alternative to windows xp. Finally, Sabayon is the only distribution with so many out-of-the-box goodies. It's complete!
47 • Death of Mandriva (by justinwhitaker)
Oh dear.
I signed up for the Silver level package in December, and now.....nothing. A bad year, or bad quarter, doesn't really mean much. At worst, they reenter bankruptcy protection and restructure.
If they are forced to sell, well, Mandriva is still worth something, both as a brand, and as a collection of code: no one will buy it and bury it.
If it gets bought, then the first thing I hope the buyer does is can everyone outside of the developers and get a team that can turn Mandriva around. If I had the money, that's what I would do. Mandriva deserves a better fate.
If no one has the stomach for rescuing Mandriva, then most of it is GPLed. It will live on as a community effort of some sort.
So mountains out of molehills, and news of Mandriva's demise are premature. Not to say that Mandriva's financials aren't bad, it's just too soon to write them off.
Must be a slow news week.
48 • Mepis vs. PCLOS (by UZ64 on 2007-02-05 23:16:51 GMT from United States)
"PCLinuxOS is, IMNSHO anyway, just pitiful.... it even looks stupid..... Like something for a somewhat below average 2nd grader.... I find it absolutely abhorant."
Nothing more abhorrent than the above quote itself, and the rest of your topic...
"... whether you follow my wonderfully fine and well thought out example and go with a fine quality distro like Mepis, or follow the bad examples of others who wrongly lead you astray down such horrendous paths as PCLinuxOS"
No thanks; your self-proclaimed "wonderfully fine" and "well thought out" advice is the exact opposite of fine and well thought out. Nothing but an opinion from your own personal experience that just happened to be bad, and you're passing it off as facts, and reasons NOT to use PCLOS and to use Mepis instead. Off of personal experience, I could personally claim the exact opposite, although neither distro is so bad that it truly deserves all the bashing you're dealing out.
"...you can always go back and choose the right way later when you get tired of playing in kiddie-land."
Funny. I had a feeling *you* were a little kid as I was reading your post. There is no "right way" or "wrong way." Some people like some things that other people most definitely will not. You're right on one thing though... choice is good. It's just amusing that you even say that yourself, yet blast an OS based on its looks and tell people NOT to use it.
49 • #48 (by Glenn on 2007-02-05 23:43:52 GMT from Canada)
Hi.
I kind of think that the author of #45 was just yanking your chain. :-)
He even points it out in his statement "whether you follow my wonderfully fine and well thought out example and go with a fine quality distro ...."
Heavy duty sarcasm there. Pretty funny actually.
I say, if you find a distro that fills your requirements and works for you then that is THE great distro (for you) and with good justification. Isn't the linux world great where we can argue about our choice of distro, WEEKLY.
We only get the chance to argue about choices of distros in the Windows world every 5 years or so. :-)
glenn
50 • Artb Levine/pclinuxos (by postaldave on 2007-02-06 00:01:27 GMT from United States)
"who wrongly lead you astray down such horrendous paths as PCLinuxOS,"
wow! did texstar sleep with your sister or something? what bitterness.
reading that comment and the fedora and Mandriva news, this is the most depressing distrowatch weekly ever. stronger distros tend to drag the other struggling distro up to higher quality.
51 • Debian-Installer RC2 -- Call for testing (by happy-go-lucky on 2007-02-06 00:53:40 GMT from Finland)
Daily built images of Debian-Installer Release Candidate 2 have just been made available and the developers call people to test it. Debian-Installer RC2 should be the version that will be used in the final Etch release, unless testers report unexpected problems with it.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/02/msg00004.html
52 • PCLinuxOS (by Groundskeeper Willie on 2007-02-06 01:19:27 GMT from United States)
I have three Linux installs, at present: Ubuntu Edgy, OpenSUSE 10.2 x86-64, and PCLinuxOS 2007 RC1. I see a lot more packages for Ubuntu than for the other two install. Unfortunately, it's a heaping load of mostly "nothing I want." Ubuntu is my least favorite of the three. OpenSUSE's package manager completely blows. So, I spend most of my time in PCLinuxOS. It is the best desktop Linux I have experienced, to date -- even better than SLED. I don't do scientific calculations with my desktop. I use it for more mundane tasks such as creating word processor documents, editing graphics, opening spreadsheets, browsing the web, listening to music, burning a CD, etc. For all of these things, PCLinuxOS shines above any other distribution I've used. I don't have to stare blankly and wait to answer the prompt as Automatix gets snagged on fifty different installs. I don't (usually) have to scour the forums for some 12 step command line "recipe" for how to do configure something that should already be enabled. I don't have to wait five minutes for the system to figure out what packages are available to be updated. Sorry if others don't like it, but for me it works just fine -- and looks great, to boot.
Sorry, I'm trying to keep this on a positive note (after all inter-Linux bickering is playing right into the hands of Microsoft), but does anyone else find it odd that the "even look stupid" or "tired of playing in kiddie-land" comments comes from a Mepis user? Mepis has some great tools, but if any distro looks as if it were designed by a second grader, this is the one. Even Mepis users know that the look is in serious need of an upgrade (which is very much to their credit -- can't wait to see what it looks like when they've finished):
http://www.mepis.org/node/11647
53 • Distro Choices... (by JAG on 2007-02-06 01:22:00 GMT from United States)
All you guys should just relax...get your own PUPPY (Linux) and go play!
54 • Linux trial and trial and more trials (by Matt on 2007-02-06 02:38:23 GMT from United States)
I am new to linux. I have been trying different flavors off and on for a number of years. It started with Red Hat 7, I've tried alot of different flavors since then. Mandrake,Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, Knoppix, Vector, Puppy, and the only one that seems to play nice with all my stuff is PClinuxOS. I'm not a power user, I too use it for all the basic stuff: surfing the web, e-mail, the once and awhile chatting, listening to music, watching movies, working on documents. And probably the one thing people are looking at when they are deciding on what OS they want to try is how aesthetically pleasing everything is. I feel that if they are willing to give linux a shot more power to them. What ever flavor is your choice. And that is a beautiful thing.
55 • No subject (by Groundskeeper Willie on 2007-02-06 02:50:50 GMT from United States)
I have my own Puppy! It is wonderful!
56 • Sister (by Texstar on 2007-02-06 03:36:05 GMT from United States)
I'm sorry about your sister. :P
57 • how arrogant of you to assume that.. (by neighborlee on 2007-02-06 04:27:57 GMT from United States)
reply to #3:
------------
..your view is the only one relevant ? is linux now becoming a dictatorship with the loudest voices coming from the whinny snot-nosed l33t'ers ?
pathetically shallow.
if choice is REALLY what linux is all about, then why not give that.
including non-gpl drivers, that atm ARE THE ONLY GIG IN TOWN.
;)
cheers
58 • 54 (by ex-man on 2007-02-06 05:07:15 GMT from United States)
I agree with your points. There are many good distros out there. The question is to find the best. That distro is different for each user. That is why it is ignorant to talk about "Distro A is better than Distro B". Like saying "My mom is better than your mom".
#49: > We only get the chance to argue about choices of distros in the Windows world every 5 years or so. :-)
Actually, there is no argument, Microsoft kills off the other versions of Windows every 5 years and makes the decision for you. Maybe that's a good thing. That way I don't have to waste time choosing which security problems and other pains are the best.
59 • No subject (by Nattie on 2007-02-06 05:51:49 GMT from United States)
I hate this distro-bashing crap. To any would be Windows converts out there, we are looking like the jackasses they want us to look like. If you bash a distro, you effectively are bashing them all. IMO, all distros are trying their best to be useful OS'es with the resources and talent they have. We all know these resources are scarce and some developers devote most of their waking hours to Linux, and what they think it should be. To the #45 post: this is just an awful thing to say about PCLinuxOS! I too have tried DOZENS of distros. Personally, I liked 90% of them. I like seeing where we are headed...what somebody's vision is of what a desktop should be and CAN BE. I use Windows XP and I USE PCLINUXOS and I can tell you it's just a great distro. Beautiful graphics. A great forum where Texstar answers posts all over the place. Friendly people. Painless upgrading. "Out-of-the-box" usability and a great selection of apps on ONE CD...not 5. There are many good distros and I'm not bashing anybody. I'm just saying I use it and I love it and you must have some underlying agenda with such a negative rant.
60 • Mandriva (by Jean-yves on 2007-02-06 06:17:15 GMT from New Caledonia)
Mandriva is not dead, despite the bad results.
They all work very hard to make the best distro they can for the end user in the respect of the free software spirit:
- many, many, Many packages available, ease of use, extended hardware support (ie: automatic printer configuration - plug and play )
- ALL software written by mandriva are under GPL (MCC, rpmdrake, the wonderfull diskdrake, drakwizards etc. )
- back towards the bleeding edge spirit...
And added to that they develop comercial "SOHO" products like : Corporate server, corporate desktop, pulse, etc.
the path toward the success of those commercial products is very slow (ok : slower than expected) . I think the year 2007 will be a good one for mandriva. Even if warly is leaving mandriva... there is so much good guys there...
regards,
jy
61 • re distro-bashing (by Anonymous on 2007-02-06 07:44:47 GMT from Sweden)
re:5, 13, 59 (and probably more)
The first part of the Fedora review I agree is very personal but he has valid points he wants to address, a) late release b) no release announcement.
Whats wrong with point out the stuff that he finds negative? And shares it with the community. Do you mean that just because its opensource it shouldn't be criticized and questioned?
Ladislav, continue the good work.
62 • Fedora 7 Test1 Bashing (by Tim Lauridsen on 2007-02-06 08:23:51 GMT from Denmark)
I dont understand the bashing of Fedora 7 test1.
* Fedora Test1 releases as always been snapshot in time of Fedora Rawhide.
* Release Notes are not scheduled to be finished at the Test1 release. And as far as i can remember, it has not been so i the previous Test1 releases.
* There is a lot going on in the Fedora Camp, because of the merge of Fedora Core + Fedora Extras, so lot of thing need to fall into place.
* If it have been a Test3 after feature freeze, then i could understand your disapointment.
New stuff in Fedora 7 Test1:
* Gnome 2.17.x
* Xorg 7.2.x
* New Echo Icon Theme.
* Installable Live CD.
I is the most stable Test1 release i have tried so far, It is the first time i have been able to run a Test1 release as my primary system.
63 • re 62 "Installable live CD" (by dbrion on 2007-02-06 09:09:36 GMT from France)
It is one of the worst ideas in the Free World :if one uses life CDs as demo to young pple, they may be happy with Linux and bring the Cds to their parents home. If there is an intutive installation button, one may be sure that they will try to install, and that their parents will be very angry with Linux.
Freesbie and Kaella separate the function of installation and the demo function.
64 • Choice of distro? An extension of your identity. (by h3rman on 2007-02-06 09:18:27 GMT from Europe)
I'm getting this feeling that most people end up using their distro of choice by logo, icon set, font choice or image.
I mean, it's all Linux/FLOSS, right?
I just discovered I had never tried Mandrake/iva. Is that a bad thing? Should I try it? But then, I don't have much to complain at the moment and I'm not really a KDE person.
For a lot of people, their distro choice is some kind of extension of their identity. I have no idea why, really, but it makes sense. Just as you can tell a bit more about a person depending on the car (s)he drives, you can tell that a "Gentoo" person might be a bit different from a "Zenwalk" person.
And that's fine, I guess.
It's better than being a protestant or catholic and then killing each other or something. I mean, it's hard to kill someone who is bashing your favourite distro on an online forum somewhere.
Not that it matters a single grain of salt in the real world.
Let's face it, the Great Distroitis is just a great form of entertainment.
65 • Mandriva (by K9Kool on 2007-02-06 13:57:51 GMT from United States)
I find it amusing Mandriva is losing money. If they do business with everyone the way they did with me, then it is no surprise. I like to support the distros I use so when 2007 came out, I went to their store and bought the download version powerpack for 76 bucks . They sent me a download link that did not work so I tried to contact them. I was completely ignored. Five days later I finally got one of their main forum people to try and correct the issue. They ignored him also. I filed a case with PayPal. They ignored them also. Three weeks later PayPal got my money back without a word. I love their product but who ever implements their service MOB needs to take customer 101. I have 20 years technical service experience. I would be happy to advise them, but they probably would ignore me.
66 • Mandriva (by ex-man on 2007-02-06 15:48:10 GMT from United States)
I don't know if things have changed now, but when I tried Mandriva a while back, I got the impression that I was a second class citizen for trying the $0 version. I don't mind giving some financial support, and indeed have donated to many projects, but it just didn't sit well that I should have to pay a lot of money before I could even see what Mandriva did that other free as in beer distros did for free. It takes at least two months to really understand the unique features of a distro.
It was a real turnoff for me and I'm guessing many thousands of other potential users. If you want to make money from open source software (some of which I have written) you need a different, more creative business model from Mandriva. It comes as no surprise at all that they would have financial difficulties.
67 • Mandriva (by hobbitland on 2007-02-06 16:17:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi, Mandriva should not have spend money buying competitors.
I like Mandrake 9.2 but 10.0 was worse for me. Didn't like the club
thing plus name change was bad.
Using Ubuntu 6.10 now.
68 • belenix dvd - howto ? (by Fotograf on 2007-02-06 17:25:36 GMT from Canada)
they say: After downloading the segments execute the following command to join them and get the complete ISO:
cat belenix_dvd.iso.1 belenix_dvd.iso.2 >> belenix_dvd.iso
is this CAT command for my current Windows or it should be executed under Linux ? to create iso .....
69 • Groundskeeper Willie - agreed (by Fotograf on 2007-02-06 17:29:58 GMT from Canada)
52 • PCLinuxOS (by Groundskeeper Willie on 2007-02-06 01:19:27 GMT from United States) -
I do agree ! The PCLinux is most user friendly to me - after testing >50 distribs in the last 5 years !
70 • re 68 : Belenix Windows cat. (by dbrion on 2007-02-06 17:35:56 GMT from France)
You should use a cat which has the same function as in linux: if you have Windows, add Cygwin or Mingw. I used cygwins' cat without any problem. I did not test with Msys/Mingw ...
Good luck.
71 • 2 re68: need more help (by Fotograf on 2007-02-06 17:55:08 GMT from Canada)
just downloaded Cygwin setup and it downloaded 14mb more linux-like stuff into directory ! Do not know what to do under my Windows XP ? How to create an dvd-iso from those 2 files of Belenix ?
72 • RE: "68 • belenix dvd - howto ?" (by Ricardo / RR_Fang on 2007-02-06 18:02:37 GMT from Brazil)
Hi,
As my Windows XP HD is bigger (and i can´t delete it, family-related issues), i ended up downloading both the Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris on it... After a while thinking about how to assembly the ISO, i found out that the simplest way on Windows is "copy /b part1 + part2 + part3 [...] file.iso" on a DOS console.
Hope this helps ya :)
73 • RE 71 cat , cygwin and Belenix (by dbrion on 2007-02-06 18:09:05 GMT from France)
You should first be sure that Cygwin is working (you should have it installed) It looks like a Linux Konsole, a little uglier however...
and you can type bash commands...
PLS notice that your Windows XP will become then more beautiful, with the help of REDHAT (it was their way of curing Windows addicts)...
However, I think 14 M is very minimalist (one can get 80% of Linux/*nix CLI and X).
Then, you should go where the iso.1 and *iso.2 are, by the command cd
and then enter the cat.
Once you ve made the iso, you can burn it as usual under XP,
or submit it to VMplayer / VirtualBox (qemu is slow on Windows,)...
74 • tnx to DBRON - the job is done ! (by Fotograf on 2007-02-06 18:39:12 GMT from Canada)
OK - I did install that 14 mb of Cygwin on Wind_XP and clicked on the icon = resuling in DOS-like screen.....could not use Copy and Paste *cat belenix_dvd.iso.1 belenix_dvd.iso.2 >> belenix_dvd.iso * so I did it maynually - typing and it works !
created an iso = md5 checksum is perfect ! Burning now into my DVD and will test ib by booting soon
75 • RE 74 : "could not use Copy and Paste " (by dbrion on 2007-02-06 18:47:11 GMT from France)
How can you make a cat whith mouse clicks?
BYTW Cygwin emulates linuxes consoles, among many good things. Perhaps you can find good Linux manuals (this is the way I taught myself many Linux commands)...
76 • RE: 29 • Sigh... (by 1c3d0g on 2007-02-05 17:36:50 GMT from Aruba) (by Anonymous on 2007-02-06 19:23:05 GMT from Romania)
The very nice Aruban inhabitant who can only defend Ladislav the militant way: "It appears that every time you open your mouth, you have to criticize the author, this excellent site or something related to it. So what's YOUR problem, really? Don't like what you read? Then don't fucking read it! And stop wasting people's time with your useless comments."
I found his comment even less useful. Hey, pal, if you only want a single opinion, go live in North Korea!
Criticism of Ladislav's unjustified bashing of Fedora 7 Test1 have been posted several other times: #2, #13, #43, #59, #61, #62.
I just think Ladislav had a bad day, and forgot to detail what he didn't like in Fedora. Or, of course, like he was accused in the past (not be me!), he's "sold to Mandriva" :-D
PCLOS 2007: all folks here seem to have not noticed that PCLOS 2007 was not released! It was a beta, a test, whatever. The final release was even delayed "due to numerous issues brought to light by our first test release". (I don't have a sister, so I am not afraid of Texstar! ;-)
In the meantime, I am satisfied on my old junky laptop with Pardus 2007. Yep.
Belenix: this looks like a joke. To only provide "in the old Sun style"... chunks that you have to concatenate... this sounds like a joke. The whole image is less than 1 GB.
And, of course, "BeleniX is not OpenSolaris."
Shameless promo: Mandriva Corporate Server 4 is a nice server solution, and it's 279 EUR a year (250 EUR/yr, download-only). Should you decide you don't need updates, it's free to use.
77 • RE: cat belenix_dvd.iso.... (by Anonymous on 2007-02-06 19:26:44 GMT from Romania)
Instead of the whole Cygwin stuff for issuing "cat belenix_dvd.iso...", there are two other solutions:
1. GNU utils for Windows should have "cat": http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
2. Windows should have: copy /b file1 + file2 endfile, see http://www.ss64.com/nt/copy.html
78 • distro select.. (by KiM on 2007-02-06 21:43:44 GMT from Egypt)
guys.... the choice of a distro is a personal choice and reflects the way every body looks so its not a matter of war any more...u have ur choice athers have their choices... as we are happy with these choices then its just opinions..
Ladislav!! may be u have been so harsh on Fedora.. may be they were in rush but finally they are one of the best distros out there...
if people have read about the windows installer of Ubuntu and Debian.. what do u think???? i believe its a real bomb for microsoft...
waiting for next issue...
thx Ladislav...
KiM
79 • Mepis vs. PCLinuxOS (by vukota on 2007-02-06 22:07:18 GMT from United States)
MEPIS:
latest test release - I couldn't even get to boot from live CD on my laptop.
I use to have 3.3 on my machine as a main desktop, but didn't look too much at it after updates made my machine useless.
PCLinuxOS:
0.93 - had problems with ACPI on my other laptop and it had limited number of older applications (by default).
2007.beta2 - Looks very nice (read: designed with simplicity and functionality + eye candy) and it works on my first laptop without a hitch, but it is not production ready (mounting samba shares didn't work from GUI).
80 • No Appreciation?? (by WindsOfChange on 2007-02-06 22:20:33 GMT from United States)
I may be a bit of a noob/plinker with Linux but I have noticed something for awhile and will make the following observation/judgement call.
I believe there is no appreciation on the part of people who can get a fully functioning os for free. All it costs is 1, 2, 3 or maybe 5 or so cd's that can be purchased ETREMELY cheap.
Corporate distros or those that are but a labor of love by some, I am thankful for. I get so much for absolutely free.
Learning curve and some frustration, YES. But I am slowly moving away from ms and have only one problem to solve and will be done with the overpriced bloated spyware from Redmond.
Microvell or Novellsoft, whatever one wants to call it is a disappointment for me, but after reading the whining of some for several weeks I may go Suse, it is after all, FFRREEEEEE.
If I were Tex I would tell everybody to shove it. I was on the PCLinux board recently and the complaining by some was pitiful.
Gotta have the newest and latest and gotta have it NNOOWWWW!!!!!
It's a good os and FREE!!
Anyway, that is something from the heart of a plinker and I really like the DW site and DWWeekly. Good stuff.
Lighten up folks. And enjoy what Linux has to offer, not bellyache about what you think you're not getting.
81 • Distro choice (by Voislav on 2007-02-06 22:51:50 GMT from Canada)
It's funny all this bickering about favourite distros, it's sort of like deciding which of your kids do you love the most. That's the beauty of Linux, almost infinite choice and whatever works for you, just go with it.
Having used both Mepis and PCLOS, they are both great distros and the devil is really in the detail. Currently, I am running Mepis for a sole reason that Mepis 6.0 came out last and there is so little difference between the two, at least from my point of view, that I can't be bothered to switch until a new version of PCLOS is out.
It's really sad the way Mandrake/Mandriva really fell behind, back in the day they were the trendsetter as far as desktop Linux goes (used versions 7 and 9 for a looooong time, had 9.2 on my desktop until about a year ago, just loved it). I think that the company really lost direction with the whole Conectiva deal, which was supposed to bring all this great new stuff, but just didn't pan out. Hopefully, they can raise the money from somewhere to overhaul their operation and go back to producing top quality destop.
82 • Belinix Live DVD problem (by Fotograf on 2007-02-06 23:04:38 GMT from Canada)
rebooted my comp AMD2500 1Gb RAMN with Live DVD-
no GUI ! harware problem ! GF 6800GS probably NOT supportes ? All Live Linuxes work fine (e.g Knoppix).....
83 • RE: 76 (by ladislav on 2007-02-06 23:14:19 GMT from Taiwan)
So criticism of an aspect of a distribution is now called "bashing"? If you guys really believe it, then it's your problem, not mine!
I stand by what I said. Please remember that Fedora is not made by some Joe in his parents' basement, but by the richest and most powerful Linux company on earth. The fact that they don't bother to provide ANY release notes for their test1 releases is a cause for concern, to say the least. Obviously there are those of you who don't care or don't believe it matters at all, but I disagree strongly.
Just compare the Fedora 7 test1 release with the first beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The latter came with a 38kB release announcement detailing every aspect of the release, as well as known issues and requests to beta testers to focus on certain aspects of the distribution. The release notes on the CDs and DVDs came as 150kB HTML files, each in 16 languages, including Gujarati and Tamil. Now I certainly don't expect Red Hat to make the same effort with a Fedora test release, but providing absolutely NO release notes and sending out a release announcement that many one-man projects would be ashamed of is a disgrace and an insult to the Fedora user community!
Here, just compare these two announcements and then tell me that I am wrong:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhelv5-announce/2006-September/msg00000.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2007-February/msg00000.html
If Fedora wants to shed its image of being just a test bed for RHEL, then those responsible for the Fedora test releases need to make a lot more effort. That was the subject of my criticism and I think it's a very valid one.
Of course, you are welcome to disagree....
84 • Mandrake's dooming (by werner, cayenne at 2007-02-06 23:22:49 GMT from France)
Mandrake also fails with the most natural things. For example, most used for internet in France is the Sagem Fast800 USB modem. Although there exists something like ueagle-atm and ueagle-data anywhere on some Mandriva CDs, for persons familiary with Linux and much more for others its impossible to get this working. Long time they could have put in them control center an item which install this automatically, and on all CDs that packages. In practics this means, that even in France, with Mandrake, almost nobody could use internet.
85 • No subject (by ex-man on 2007-02-07 02:41:34 GMT from United States)
Ladislav,
I actually agree with what you said, and more importantly, why you said it. We do need to have some standards. Those standards should apply to all distros, but particularly to the high profile distros. We need more comments like yours in high profile outlets like distrowatch. I didn't see any "bashing" in what you wrote.
86 • RE: belenix 0.5.1 dvd (by johncoom on 2007-02-07 04:00:09 GMT from Australia)
For those who can use BitTorrent but still can not put the two parts together ?
The complete dvd ISO on the LinuxTracker that "catwalk" has put together
for people - there is even a md5sum of the ISO shown for those that want it :-)
See here http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=3540
For those that have not already got the parts of the complete ISO ?
this might be another, easier way to get the complete dvd ISO ?
hope that helps ?
87 • RE 84 "with Mandrake, almost nobody could use internet" (by dbrion on 2007-02-07 07:26:51 GMT from France)
With the Sagem USB modem, no one should use Internet, unless being inconsistent with ritual antimonopolist positions.
The intellectual value of such a modem is fairly negative, too:
it uses a direct USB plug; if you have 2 USB plugs, plus a USB rat, you cannot put a hub for USBKs, USB disks.
The only sensible thing one can write about the SAGEM USB "modem" is
CHANGE IT
I feel proud for Mandriva not to support minsdless purchases of no use hardware....
88 • RE: 84, 87 I hate crap, blobby hardware (by h3rman on 2007-02-07 07:42:59 GMT from Europe)
I totally agree with you dbrion.
I'd like to say to all those whiners complaining about Linux not supporting this or that piece of crap hardware, just get rid of it and buy some better stuff with open drivers and if you don't want that, you're obviously not ready for Linux.
Or maybe you enjoy having your system crash on a regular basis because that f***ing blob messes things up in the kernel?
If you want to use crap hardware like USB-modems, USB WLAN adapters, new ATi graphics cards, what ever, go use Crap OS (TM). That might work with it.
89 • Linux distros for complete newbies (by rglk on 2007-02-07 08:23:27 GMT from United States)
About two weeks ago I started testing 8 or 9 state-of-the-art Linux Desktop distros with the particular objective of finding the top three Linux distros suitable for clueless computer users. The person I had in mind was an 83-year-old friend of mine who has trouble even running Windows XP. I wanted to wean him from Windows after he'd spend $700 in the course of a few months for the services of the Geeksquad or his "PC Doctor" to fix a hosed Win XP. I myself use Arch Linux and haven't looked much into "easy to use" Linux distros lately.
What I was looking for for my friend was a foolproof Linux distro that was ultra easy to use, did EVERYTHING out of the box, would never balk or act up, look good, run fast and would make him glad that he left Windows behind.
For reasons that I explained in earlier posts here on the DW forum (some of them idiosyncratic, e.g. the requirement that the distro should come on an installable live CD), some of the candidate distros fell by the wayside early on. This included Puppy 2.13, Kubuntu 6.10 and openSUSE 10.2. Left in the running were PCLinuxOS 2007 Test 1, SimplyMEPIS 6.0.4 beta4, Mandriva One 2007, Linux Mint 2.1 and Freespire 2.0 alpha3 build 1.1.84.
I tested these 5 distros (on live CD's) on my 6-months old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop (Intel Core Duo 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB SATA HDD, Intel 945 Graphics Adapter, BCM4311 wireless card), paying particular attention to the following features:
How good is hardware support, particularly for video, WiFi, touchpad (e.g. vertical and horizontal scrolling), sound. Is everything working out of the box?
Overall good looks and polish of the default desktop (my friend probably wouldn't know how to customize the KDE or Gnome desktop)
How well organized are the Desktop menus?
Quality of the default fonts
Are other HDD partitions and external USB thumbdrives or HDD's automounted? Do they work plug and play?
How extensive and well chosen is the complement of applications installed by default (I'm not sure my friend would be capable of installing any additional apps, non-free plugins, etc., not even with something as easy to use as Synaptic, C'n'R, etc.)
How good and how easy to use are those default apps?
How well is streaming audio handled and how easy is it to use the default media player? (I went to seven test websites that provide streaming audio and that frequently have proven to be problematic, e.g. BBC Radio Player Replay)
Same with streaming video + audio (e.g. went to Google Video, youtube etc., did everything run smoothly from there?)
Easy of installation (I went through with the installation from live CD up to the point at which changes would be written to the HDD; the capability of the installer of easily supporting dual booting with Win XP was essential)
Ease of upgrading, e.g. with security patches
How much of the following non-free software comes preinstalled: RealPlayer, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Sun Java JRE, media codecs for mpg, wmv, avi, quicktime?
And a number of additional checks.
I ran all of these tests on my Dell laptop, bearing the skill level of a complete Linux newbie in mind, who would be almost entirely computer illiterate and likely to stumble over the most minor obstacles. The results were entered into a huge table that covered three sheets of 8.5x11 in. size paper.
The winner was PCLinuxOS. I'm quite impressed with this distro, even at the current Test 1 stage. The way it comes on the live CD, i.e. out of the box, this is a highly polished, very good looking, stable and full-featured distro, with an excellent selection of applications, well-organized menus, very nice looking fonts, excellent hardware recognition, lots of non-free software preinstalled - I could go on and on in praising it. It passed practically all of the tests on my Dell laptop with flying colors. If there is one Linux distro that's almost "ready for the desktop" and suitable for the inexperienced and perhaps computer averse Windows refugee, this is it.
Linux Mint (which is a supercharged Ubuntu), ran a close second. I'd have lots of good things to say about this distro, too, in spite of my strong preference for KDE over Gnome.
Mandriva I'd put in third place. Mandrakelinux was my first Linux, four years ago; I left it and moved on to Debian because I didn't like the rpm package management. But the current Mandriva 2007 is a mighty fine distro.
MEPIS came in fourth - a bit of a surprise. I'd always kept versions of MEPIS on a HDD partition and previously had much preferred it over PCLinuxOS. But in these tests MEPIS just didn't match up to PCLinuxOS. The MEPIS desktop badly needs a face lift, the menus are disorganized and cluttered (my friend would get lost in them), and while there were a few aspects in which it did as well as PCLinuxOS, in many it fell behind.
Last but not least was Freespire. I tested the current alpha version; they're still a ways away from a final release of v.2.0. I'd always had an aversion toward Linspire (I don't like their corporate ways); thus I was very surprised how well Freespire fared. This is a very, very good distro, judged by the criteria that I spelled out above, and it may well become one of the top three distros as far as suitability for Linux newbies is concerned.
After I'd done all of these tests on my Dell laptop, I got ahold for three days of my friend's Toshiba Satellite M55-S3314 laptop (about 9 months old) and put these five distros through their paces on this machine. The specs: Pentium M 740, 512 MG RAM, 80 GB HDD, Intel 915 graphics adapter, Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 BG.
PCLinuxOS did extremely well on his machine as well but it failed a critical test: I wasn't able to obtain wireless connectivity. The native ipw2200 driver was installed by default but it didn't work. The next option, running a Windows driver via ndiswrapper, also flopped. I tried two different Windows drivers, including the most recent one from Intel that worked with all the other distros on this machine - they didn't work in PCLinuxOS. The wireless networking config utility wasn't working as yet in PCLinuxOS Test 1, and trying to install the Windows drivers from the command line failed massively: every time I modprobe'd ndiswrapper, the laptop would reboot. Probably some incompatibility between the version of the ndiswrapper module and the version of the kernel. I'd expect that this problem will be fixed in the final version.
To make a long story short, on my friend's laptop Linux Mint came in first and Mandriva second. Next I installed these two distros on his HDD, using the GRUB from Linux Mint as the master bootloader. The installs went easily and the two distros were running terrifically on his machine. I thought running Linux on a laptop cannot possibly get any easier than this. No problems at all!
Guess what? My friend has had his machine back for 4 days, and he just couldn't handle Linux! Neither Linux Mint nor Mandriva! He went back to Windows XP, and immediately was aggravated and mystified there by the antics of the "EZFirewall" (Toshiba crapware) that certainly were voluminous after the recent fresh reinstall of Win XP. He hates Windows and can barely handle it but he could handle the two easy Linuxes that I'd installed for even less.
After all the work I'd done on this failed project, I thought I should at least pass on to you some of my observations. My 83-year old friend is befuddled even by the operation and programming of his brand new Amana dishwasher. If you're only slightly more tech savvy than he is, I honestly think you ought to be able to handle Linux Mint and Mandriva easily and the other three distros I tested as well. They're all very fine Linux distros and really easy and fun to use. GNU/Linux has taken great strides in user friendliness over the past few years, and I think it soon will be competitive with Windows and even with Mac OSX in this regard.
Robert
90 • Alleged "News" of Mandriva's problems (by wobo on 2007-02-07 09:28:35 GMT from Germany)
First of all, I find it somehow astonishing that most of the commentors take a really bad researched article as "news"! But let me start with the contents of the article:
How can the author say that Mandriva posted their last results "very very quietly"? That's BS! They announced them as usual on their website and in a newsletter to the subscribers. That there were no comments on some third party sites is not Mandriva's fault!
Then the author goes about some figures but never says where the figures resulted from nor what Mandriva plans to do or already did to improve the situation. Much of the bad results of last fiscal year resulted from the change to a 12-month release cycle, of course this caused a loss in sales. Then there were some new investments, some payback of older depts.
Now, Mandriva has already set to work some plans to improve the situation. Astonishingly the author tells that there is a quarter that we do not know anything about (Oct - Dec), but if he had really read the not-so-hidden announcement on Mandriva's website he could have read that some of them already paid off during those 3 months.
For all the commentors: Please, take your time to read up on author's assumptions first and do not take them as news! Take the article as what it is: a badly researched piece.
wobo
91 • RE 89 wobo, you are too harsh (by dbrion on 2007-02-07 09:57:32 GMT from France)
With your criticism of DWW analysis of Mandriva's doom. Indeed, I found ONE (0+0+...+1) point of intellectual quality, that was the -fairly provided - link:
it showed that corporate & consulting increased by almost 50%, while users decreased. I do not know whether this is such a bad thing (perhaps equipment vendors are thieves in little French provincial towns, but USB keys with a system installed should be more exepensive than naked USBKs... )
How can they pay developpers with users? Perhaps by selling kleenexes (with a nice penguin, of course) to dry eyes each time Mandriva is said to be dying . I am sure they could make a lot of money...
92 • RE: Ladislav && Fedora (by Béranger on 2007-02-07 10:44:06 GMT from Romania)
> Please remember that Fedora is not made by some Joe in his parents' basement,
> but by the richest and most powerful Linux company on earth.
> The fact that they don't bother to provide ANY release notes
> for their test1 releases is a cause for concern, to say the least.
Ladislav, please remember that Fedora is a community-powered, RHAT-sponsored only, test bed distro. The commercially-grade support is only available in RHEL WS, ES, AS, now Desktop and Server with RHEL5.
> Just compare the Fedora 7 test1 release with the first beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
Just compare a test bed distro to an enterprise distro.
Then, compare a Test1 with a Beta1. "Test" could be anything between Alpha and Beta, or something else. It's "test". Most Beta releases just work. Most test releases just crash. (This one just works.)
93 • RE 91 (by wobo on 2007-02-07 11:11:36 GMT from Germany)
I do not think that I was too harsh. This is a serious matter and writing an article which is very near to FUD on a popular site as DW does not help anybody. Such articles stay in people's minds, at least in such people's minds who do not read up on the author's assumptions. I still meet people at exhibitions and elsewhere who say "Is Mandrake still around? I thought they were bankrupt?" They are very surprised to hear that this was all fixed years ago!
Example: Last year one of the biggest German banks, the Deutsche Bank, gave their annual report with an excellent result and an all-time high on revenues. The chairman announced that they will restructure some parts and will have to send 2000 employees back home. So, our author of the DW article would write an article about the Deutsche Bank, stating that they plan to dismiss 2000 employees, so the bank must be in serious trouble!
See my point, if anybody takes such a view as "news"?
That's why I was so harsh! But, mind you, I did not criticise DW, just the author.
wobo
94 • At least, you should have waited one day or two (by dbrion on 2007-02-07 11:44:56 GMT from France)
Before smartly explaining the difference between folklore (there is also the Loch Ness monster, the "marroniers" phase of growth, ....) and facts. Now, Mandriva is thought as being chronically bankrupt, and pple are happy to read what they have been thinking for years... That leads to funny ritual points...
Perhaps , in 5 years (always bankrupt) Mandriva will call one of her releases Phenix...
95 • RE: 92 (by ladislav on 2007-02-07 12:25:43 GMT from Taiwan)
Please remember that Fedora is a community-powered, RHAT-sponsored only, test bed distro.
Ah, of course! How could I forget! Now that you've explained it to me so nicely, I finally understand! Yes, you are right - it's perfectly acceptable to produce a Fedora test release without any release notes. In fact, I think that all distributions should follow Fedora's lead and never publish any release notes for any release! Maybe they shouldn't even announce it; just upload the ISOs to an FTP server and you are done! I am pretty sure that at least 15 people will discover the new ISO image within the first 24 hours and will immediately rush, one by one, to Digg.com to share the excitement with the rest of us.
Yes, I see your point. Yeah, release notes and release announcements are a complete waste of time. Who reads them anyway?
96 • 93 But, mind you, I did not criticise DW, just the author. (by welkiner on 2007-02-07 13:29:17 GMT from United States)
Who the hell do you think the author is?
Or is that like "Please don't take this professionally, I only meant it personally".
Ladislav, thank you so much for all you do, and most of us do value your opinion.
97 • RE 94 Mandriva will call one of her releases Phenix (by wobo on 2007-02-07 13:31:28 GMT from Germany)
I've been with Mandrake/Mandriva from the start, I'd vote for Phoenix, Phoenix Reloaded, Phoenix II, etc. :)
(yes I understand the implications)
98 • RE 96 (by wobo on 2007-02-07 14:08:27 GMT from Germany)
welkiner, I don't have to "think who the author is", he has given his name! Authors who write for DWW are not DW or Ladislav.
I regard DW as an important instrument to get a general impression of a distribution before I go to the distribution's website to get more detailed information. I appreciate Ladoslav's efforts, and assuming that only the author is responsible for his work I made a point to explain in which direction I aimed the criticism in my comment.
If the bus goes to fast I curse the driver, not the bus company. Something writers of comments should think about.
99 • Re: Making Linux - Oracle compatable (by Troy W. Banther on 2007-02-07 14:18:19 GMT from United States)
I would like to toss out a challenge. Would Linux distros make an Oracle `ready` Linux distro. * Cough * Mandriva, Fedora, etc.
I waste a lot of my time just preparing and it would be nice if the developers would step up and make it easier for us.
It would also hep the Linux community.
100 • Alternative to Vista (by Anonymous on 2007-02-07 14:20:07 GMT from United States)
for all of those who have friend that want to move to Vista and give money to Bill, Here is free option to have looks of Vista.
http://www.download.com/Vista-Transformation-Pack/3000-2086_4-10631175.html?tag=bubble
I still believe LINUX is the Best!.
101 • 80 (by Tom on 2007-02-07 14:20:29 GMT from United States)
Re: No Appreciation?? (by WindsOfChange)
I would like to point out that the best things about Linux are that it is open source and secure. Open source gives both the freedom to customize/modify/adapt/and improve the OS. Open source also makes the OS transparent. On closed source OS who knows what it in it ?
I would also like to point out that Linux is NOT FREE.
All these distro's are the product of hard working individuals.
[b]If you use Linux consider contributing back to the cause. This could be anything from development to bug reports to working on documentation/wiki to cash donations to your favorite and most used applications.[/b]
ladislav : Great site. I agree with your observations on Fedora and agree there are some features that could be improved.
For those that support Fedora, never forget that free and honest feedback is invaluable to an organization. Take it as an opportunity to improve Fedora rather then "kill the messenger".
While on the issue of Feedback, IMO this site has become a place where people rant on off topic issues. There was a time when the site was more positive, supportive, and informative.
Ladislav : I know it takes time and effort to police, but perhaps a small effort to remove off-subject/obnoxious posts ? I trust your opinion re : taste and hopefully the effort would be short lived.
102 • Re: 89 Linux for Newbies (by octathlon on 2007-02-07 15:00:59 GMT from United States)
Thanks for posting your results. This shows that 1) a lot depends on your hardware; what works great for one can be unusable for another, but this is improving. 2) Your friend just doesn't have the skills to handle any computer; the only thing left to suggest he try is a Mac.
It's true I had to spend a little time tweaking the Mepis desktop before handing it over, but one reason I chose it over PCLOS is that it's Debian based and I'm more familiar with that (though it turns out not to matter, since I haven't had to provide any further support so far!)
Linux Mint - Happy to hear your results with this one. Has anyone tried installing the KDE environment on it? Sounds like I will probably be going with either Mint or PCLOS on my laptop.
103 • RE 82 Belinix'state (by dbrion on 2007-02-07 15:01:24 GMT from France)
I am not that surprised it worked not that good for you: it seems to be in the same state that Linux's live CDs 2/3 years ago, somtimes they worked, and mostly they did not. I noticed this version of Belenix could be kept alife to further boot stage than last vesion's under VMplayer, so it seems to improve (it is known not to work under VMplayer)....
Any way, it still is very young and one might be indulgent: perhaps, within 1/2 yrs, will she be in what pple call 'a half broken state' for Linuxes: one needs to fix things, often by bash scripting..
That is why I indicated you cygwin (it is almost a full Linux distribution, without the kernel, of course), a great FOS application which will never be Linux ported.
RE 77 : Solutions based on unxutills (or MinGw) are faster, but have no manuals (under Cygwin, you can cust and pat within a window, if you have installed X). Besides, cygwins installation is like Mandriva/ Fedora installation; thus cygwin is a good training tool.
As far as solutions based on COPY are concerned, pls notice :
a) I love Windows, and Microsoft big work agains paludism I am proud to contribute.
b) For big files manipulations, some insight of the algorithms should be necessary. Can someone *prove* (not from experience, but from analysis) that MS COPY can work in any case for big files? I never dared...
104 • RE: 89 • Linux distros for complete newbies (by IMQ on 2007-02-07 15:15:58 GMT from United States)
Thanks for sharing your story!
I wanted to have my dad running Linux and he is not as old as your friend. Still, he was so accustomed to Windows that he didn't like the Xandros I installed on his machine. But that was a few years ago.
I am going to try to install one of these on his machine when they are released: PCLinuxOS 2007, SimplyMEPIS 6.0-4, or Linux Mint 2.2. At least I get him to use Firefox. I believe most of the time. Some sites are not Firefox friendly so he has to use IE.
105 • linux for complete newbies (by ray carter at 2007-02-07 16:14:59 GMT from United States)
Excuse me, but I think you folks are missing the main point. If you're helping them set up their machines (which indeed seems to be the case) then how it installs is irrelevant. How difficult it is to properly set up is irrelevant. What matters is EASE OF USE. Over two years ago I installed Mandrake on the public access internet computers at the local library. This spring we added a four seat Userful station - running RHEL. This fall I converted the first set to Kubuntu. I did my homework. I set things up properly - needed browser plugins, office suite, networked laser printer. To date there have been zero complaints from any of the patrons. The all adjusted to the new environment with no difficulty.
My point is: Linux is no harder to USE than MS, it is just a little different. You would not make those folks you're aiding install MS from scratch - they would not be able to handle it. Once it's set up properly for them, it's a piece of cake. - and I don't think which distro you use really matters much.
106 • Re: #89, complete newbies (by vukota on 2007-02-07 16:43:50 GMT from United States)
Thanks for sharing your story!
I think there are two types of people:
1) One that is willing to learn and use something new if there is a benefit for them
2) One that will resist with all their power to anything new and different.
I am afraid your friend belongs to the second group or you didn't prepare him well.
There are at least couple strategies for getting people used to Linux:
1) Switch them to Thunderbird, FireFox, and OpenOffice (and other apps if needed like Dia...) and when they get use to it, switch them to Linux.
2) Explain them reasons why they should switch and if you see that they are not buying it right away bring them new and new reasons why they should switch. Explain them how easy is to get locked OS (with Crap OS) and throw away lot of money.
3) Give THEM live CD or even better USB stick to use for the first time.
4) Find out for what they are using computer (don't assume) and show them good corresponding applications under Linux for work they are doing on PC and help them using them.
5) Buy them good Linux book(s) to reed in their free time so they feel more confident with Linux or suggest them taking Linux training.
6) Force them (if you are the boss)
7) Set them/show them wine, dosbox... other applications that may help them in transition
8) Anything else
Also there are cases when there is just no good solution under Linux (yet). In such cases don't try to convert them if they have valid use case or try to get them Crossover office (if either of you is willing to pay for it) or leave them dual boot option.
107 • Slackware (by werner, cayenne at 2007-02-07 16:47:18 GMT from France)
Like in the church where they pray waterand drink wine, i install Mandrake, Fedora and things like this only on computer of others, but for my own, i use Slackware, with what Im very satisfied, and where everything runs nice, incl. my sites like www.copaya.yi.org , my nameserver, chat, etc etc . And also the SAGEM modem is for others, only. Here in Guyana, wanadoo is the only provider which sells these SAGEM modems, too
With Slackware, alias, everybody is waiting that the man updates the C compiler and library, and several other essential sistem tools.
108 • Re: Fedora (by vukota on 2007-02-07 16:53:57 GMT from United States)
"Yes, I see your point. Yeah, release notes and release announcements are a complete waste of time. Who reads them anyway? "
I read them for any new release (which I am testing) and sometimes even if I am looking first time at a distro. I would guess anyone who cares and has a brain (and understand the language they are written in) does the same.
Fedora just missed to tell testers what new features they should test. Is this a BIG problem? It reminds me of sending e-mail about attached file without attachment.
109 • 89 (by Anonymous on 2007-02-07 16:55:30 GMT from United States)
Thanks for keeping us updated. The only problem is that you didn't tell us what he didn't like about the Linux distros. He didn't like that it was different from Windows? He thought it was ugly? He thought it was too complicated? It didn't do what he wanted it to do? You used KDE and he thought it looked like a Fisher-Price GUI? The fonts were ugly? Did he want programs not available for Linux? Or did he just not like you messing with his computer and telling him what to do?
I find it very confusing as you have written. I do not understand how he could possibly not like the distros you gave him. From your earlier posts, I could understand fully the problems with Windows. If you set up everything correctly with Linux, all he'd have to do is click on the appropriate icons, no security problems, no software conflicts, nothing, so there's not much to hate.
I'd be interested in some more details on top of your very long post.
110 • 99 (by Anonymous on 2007-02-07 16:58:18 GMT from United States)
Why would the Linux community concern itself with a special distro just to support a proprietary piece of software? Better yet, why doesn't *Oracle* put together such a distro? After all, they supposedly already have a Linux distribution of there own.
Having a hard time understanding your comment.
111 • Slackware (by werner, cayenne at 2007-02-07 17:00:16 GMT from France)
Like in the church where they pray waterand drink wine, i install Mandrake, Fedora and things like this only on computer of others, but for my own, i use Slackware, with what Im very satisfied, and where everything runs nice, incl. my sites like www.copaya.yi.org , my nameserver, chat, etc etc . And also the SAGEM modem is for others, only. Here in Guyana, wanadoo is the only provider which sells these SAGEM modems, too
With Slackware, alias, everybody is waiting that the man updates the C compiler and library, and several other essential sistem tools.
112 • RE 89 (by wobo on 2007-02-07 17:05:03 GMT from Germany)
First of all: Thanks a lot for your observations. I like seeing a report like that without any prejudices (except the pre-selection of the combatants).
From this whole thread I derived some true statements:
1. I acknowledge the posting where the writer comments: TANSTAAFL!
All people who work on distributions have deserved my respect. There is no reason to call any developer/packager names.
2. It is wrong to spread pre-selected information and build an opinion on it. It is also wrong to blindly believe such articles without checking for yourself.
3. It is wrong to say "This distribution is better" or "My mom is better than yours"
(although as a kid I used to say that when it came to cooking and my grandma!)
4. The vast variety of distributions is a treasure, let's not fight over which nugget is larger or shines brighter than the other.
5. It is good, though, to remark on things that could be DONE better or could be improved.
Sorry to repeat such common rules.
wobo
113 • PCLOS and ipw2200 -- Robert and post #89 (by davecs on 2007-02-07 17:11:10 GMT from United Kingdom)
Just to say that I have a laptop with ipw2200 Wireless internet which works well. As you correctly say, PCLOS2007TR1 is a Testing Release, and a few Wireless scripts aren't quite there yet. However, simply putting the line ipw2200 in the file /etc/modprobe.preload did it for me. On my desktop there is a similar problem with wireless rt61, and the solution is similar, too, but it's not actually used for anything!
I appreciate that a total newbie may not have made that connections, though it did come up on the forum and was solved very quickly. If that's the only problem, it's easily surmountable, and I expect it won't even exist by the time the full version comes out.
114 • PCLOS and ipw2200 (by Anonymous on 2007-02-07 19:57:34 GMT from United Kingdom)
A work-around was posted for this in the PCLOS forums:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=15125.0
Worked perfectly for me!
115 • Re #109 - Linux distros for complete newbies (by rglk on 2007-02-07 20:11:05 GMT from United States)
Anonymous wrote:
"Thanks for keeping us updated. The only problem is that you didn't tell us what he didn't like about the Linux distros. He didn't like that it was different from Windows? He thought it was ugly? He thought it was too complicated? It didn't do what he wanted it to do? You used KDE and he thought it looked like a Fisher-Price GUI? The fonts were ugly? Did he want programs not available for Linux? Or did he just not like you messing with his computer and telling him what to do?"
Essentially none of the above. After the debacle of his hosing his WinXP installation several times in a row, which required fixes or reinstalls that cost him a total of $700, my friend in fact welcomed my offer to set him up with Linux. The problem was that he was just totally overtaxed by Linux.
He seemed to have gotten on all right with one of the older versions of Windows (95 or 98) but he was already beginning to feel overtaxed when he upgraded his older desktop to Windows XP. Too complicated, too difficult to understand and too much incomprehensible stuff going on all the time.
Among other things, I guess, he was referring to the Windows "light show", i.e. the perennial stream of pop-up windows telling him that critical security updates are ready and need to be installed, new virus definitions are ready, Dell wants you to dispatch a performance report after some minor malfunction, a firewall window pops up demanding that he decide whether an app that wants access to the Internet is malicious or legit - on and on it goes, there's never a quiet minute when you work within Windows. This kind of nonsense paralyzes him; he doesn't know what to do with it all. He doesn't understand any of this, and he just doesn't want to be bothered.
I think when you're 83 years old you don't want to waste your precious life having to deal with technotrivia, having to become knowledgeable about the detailed workings of what should just be an appliance. He just wants a turnkey appliance that does what he wants to do without any fuss and without demanding anything of him. If it pesters him or confuses him or is cumbersome and less than intuitive, he'd rather throw the laptop in the nearest river (that's what he actually said to me!).
Now, this is an intelligent man, a retired professor of physics who decades ago taught Computer Science 101. He looks much younger than his 83 years and is physically in good shape. He simply hates it when gadgets make demands on him. As I said, he's befuddled even by his new dishwasher. So am I, I have to say, by the new Maytag dishwasher that we just got installed here yesterday. Do I really have to learn this complicated programming crap on the front panel of that machine? I kind of sympathize with him.
In any case, I think he found Linux to be even more complicated than Win XP. Not so much the light show (there is hardly any of that in Linux) but its general usability. For example, he didn't take to the concept that you have to go through menus to get to run applications, and that you have to know the names of applications (what, Amarok is what plays my music?) and that you have to know the difference between a web browser and an email client and a text editor, and so on.
When I pointed out to him that I'd put 8 or 9 application icons in the top panel of Linux Mint's Gnome desktop from which he could launch his most commonly used apps, just as he did in Win XP, he didn't see that these small icons without titles were the equivalent of the bigger titled icons residing in a column on the left side of his Windows desktop, i.e. the look that he was accustomed to.
I could go on and on just how clueless he proved to be in trying to work with Linux. Not that he was much less clueless in Windows, but I think he was hoping for an escape from the madness and the complications of Windows, and he didn't really find it in Linux. Perhaps he should have gotten himself a new Mac laptop. He does have an older Mac with Mac OSX, and I don't recall him complaining about that.
Irrespective of the failure of Linux to fulfill the requirements of this particular person, the results of the tests that I've run stand ready to be taken or left alone by anyone. The surprise to me was that I've actually gained a sense of confidence that distros like PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint, Mandriva et al. in their current incarnations would work quite well for many folks with fairly rudimentary computer skills who want to escape from the Windows horror show, even if that may require a bit of initial setup help from a more knowlegeable Linux user. That's good news, isn't it?
Robert
116 • re 89,115 "Linux distros for complete newbies " (by Anonymous on 2007-02-07 21:29:21 GMT from United States)
Thank you for sharing your experiences. Perhaps this could be written up and published in a future DWW? Please, contact ladislav and see if he'd be willing....
117 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-02-07 22:09:00 GMT from United States)
One place that would publish this, if DWW doesn't, is LXer.
118 • PCLinuxOS Can it get any better? (by Tim on 2007-02-07 22:56:33 GMT from Canada)
I've been trying Linux Operating Systems on and off for a few years now and always ended up back on windows after a day or two, but a while back bought a copy of Linspire 5.0 and was amazed at just how good the Linux Distros had become, and loved the "Live CD" option so you could see if it was what you wanted before installing to your hard drive. Since then I have downloaded and tried Freespire, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva One, DSL, Slax, Kanotix, PCLinuxOS 093a "Big Daddy", and the latest Test Version PCLinuxOS 2007 Test 1, as well as having tried Fedora Core 5. Every last one was fun to try and a treat to explore on my various systems, but the one that really stood out as the most functional, stable, and versatile was PCLinuxOS 093a "Big Daddy". Not only is it excellent in every way but also extreamly fast, no matter what icon you click on. I have it loaded on two systems at home as dual operating systems along with my Xp, and as the only operating system on my IBM Thinkpad, as well as an older AMD - K6/2-500 desktop with only 192 megs of Ram I decided to experiment on last night. Again it was flawless, though somewhat slower than on my Pentium IV and Athlon systems. I seldom use Xp any more, though will log back into that for such things as doing my taxes this spring. Needless to say I love PCLinuxOS and though I can't picture it being even better, can't wait to see the finished new version. The test version was nice, and will be awsome when it's finished, but for now I'll continue on with my 093a and be thankful there are such dedicated and skilled software engineers developing operating systems like this for those who want to try something new.
119 • Linux distros for complete newbies - Table of results (by rglk on 2007-02-08 00:29:32 GMT from United States)
FWIW, I'd like to post some of the results of my suitability tests of 5 different Linux distros for relatively unskilled computer users and Linux newbies that I referred to in posts #89 and #115 and earlier posts during the last two weeks. I apologize in advance in case this table gets hopelessly scrambled when it's posted on DW.
Specs of the test machine: Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop (Intel Core Duo 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB SATA HDD, Intel 945 Graphics Adapter, BCM4311 wireless card). All distros are the most recent versions available on live CD, except for Mandriva which is from 10/06.
PCLinuxOS MEPIS Linux Mandriva Freespire
2007 Test 1 6.0.4b4 Mint 2.1 One 2007 2.0a3
Desktop KDE 3.5.6 KDE 3.5.3 Gnome 2.16.1 KDE 3.5.4 KDE 3.5.5
Looks of ***** *** ***** *** *****
default desktop
General polish ***** **** ***** ***** *** (alpha!)
of distro
Quality of fonts:
General v.good good v.good v.good v.good
Firefox/Distrowatch v.good good good v.good lousy
Variety & choice of ***** ***** *** *** ****
default apps
HARDWARE
SUPPORT
Video (Intel 915/945):
(1280x800) - + + - +
easy install of + +
patch (915res.)?
WiFi card:
BCM4311 + (ndis) - + (ndis) + (ndis) -
IPW 2200 - ? + (native) + (native) ?
Synaptic
Touchpad
normal use --------------------------------- + for all ---------------------------------
vert. scroll. + - + + +
Sound --------------------------------- + for all ----------------------------------
Automount + - + + +
USB mem. stick
USB mem stick + + + + -
Plug&Play
Automount + - - - +
other HDD
partitions
NON-FREE
SOFTWARE
PREINSTALLED?
Adobe Reader --------------- - for all; but easy install for all -------------------
RealPlayer 10 - + - - +
Adobe Flash 9 + + + - +
Sun Java JRE + + + - +
Media codecs
mpg + + + + +
wmv + - + - +
avi + + + ? +
Handling of **** ***** ***** ***** ***
audio streams
from 7 diff. test URL's
120 • Re #119 Scrambled Table (by rglk on 2007-02-08 00:39:17 GMT from United States)
Well, the table didn't post correctly - all the spaces between columns were collapsed into a single space. I doubt it would have worked if I'd used tabs. Sorry about that!
You can still figure out the info in the table if you keep in mind the order of the entries in each row, from left to right:
1. PCLinuxOS, 2. MEPIS, 3. Linux Mint, 4. Mandriva, 5. Freespire
Robert
121 • *Ahem* (by 1c3d0g on 2007-02-08 00:56:52 GMT from Aruba)
#76: it appears you don't know what you're talking about. If you read #5's other posts in older DistroWatch Weekly Issues, you'll see what I mean. So what I'm saying is he's got a choice to leave this site and make his own if he doesn't like what he reads. Of course you'll defend your romanian buddy, but that's human nature I guess.
122 • "Linux distros for complete newbies" (by Fractalguy on 2007-02-08 01:39:16 GMT from United States)
Thanks for your followup! Your "spreadsheet" approach is similar to mine three years ago when I settled in on almost the same set of distros: PCLinuxOS, Mepis, Mandrake, Lindows, SuSE, with the final being PCLinuxOS which I still use. I'm so pleased you mentioned the "light show" and goofy program names. Even today, when I play a media file, I wonder which app to launch. That, even though a list of possible programs comes up in a menu when I right click. Some work better than others and some not at all at times (xmms is capable but has an awful UI). But in the end, I really do want to know the program name.
Part of the problem lies beyond the distro assembler and Linux. It is the applications. Example, I'm browsing on a financial site that says there is a new report for me and has a like looking like to a pdf file (checking the url at the screen bottom). So I right click to save it to disk. Then click for launching it there only to find the viewer crashes. Why? I open a consol and type "head filename.pdf" and see html code!! The web site indicated a pdf but then sent me to a login page first (based on cookies, duh) which I saved to disk. Well I go through it again and the pdf pops up in the browser this time, so I have to do it yet again to get it to the disk. I say "bovine biological dejections" to that! But it is not the distro's fault, not even Firefox's fault.
When you mentioned "light show" I wondered, there is no "light show" here. Oh, then it hit me. I have a browser window running on a site updating every minute. Sure, I don't look every minute but when the data is not available, a popup shows up telling me that useless info, taking me from the virtual workspace I'm on and making me click "OK". Then I have to find my way back to what I was doing. I can see why things like that would drive an 80+ guy nuts, and I'm used to it so that I almost don't notice at all. (Maybe someone near me might beg to differ, recalling a few explitives...)
And I have KDiskfree running in workspace #1 so I can see if I'm running low on disk space. Well, I do all the time on one partition so of course it pops me over to workspace #1 to tell me. Each of these is OK by itself, but all together, I'm not so sure. And the warning I really need to know about is that of running out of RAM and SWAP space leading to a total jammup. I've had my share of these that come with no warning (except slight app slowing and increasing disk clicking), not even in the "user friendly" Ubuntu.
I'm sure the list could be almost infinite and the distro and app writers would never catch up with perfection for some users (grin). I've shown Linux to eight potential users, switched 3 to it (one is 78!). I guess that is not too bad, now that I think of it. We think Linux is such a way cool OS but we don't know what is irking others when they look at it. It might even be that clippy is missing, for all we know.
123 • RE: 89 + 109 (by wobo on 2007-02-08 04:01:02 GMT from Germany)
RE 89: With your permission, Robert, I will compile an article from 89+109 for the upcoming issue of MagDriva, the online magazine of the German Mandriva user community (with your credits, of course!). Pls contact me via mail if there's a problem with that (you didn't give a mailto, so I have to ask you here).
RE 109: This reminds me of an interview I had with Gaël Duval in last November. I asked him about the user-friendliness of modern Linux desktops:
GD: "The real thing to think about is: what do users need? I mean: not specialists like you or me, or certainly *you* the reader. I mean: what does my mother need? Your brother, etc.? If he can use Windows or Mac, which is already pre-installed on his machine, if this experience is good for him, then there is no way for Linux or any other OS.
Now if you look at this user, and try to understand why he doesn't feel confortable with this and that, which problems he has in the daily use of his computer system, then maybe you can try to think about what to put in GNU-Linux-X11-KDE-GNOME-etc. to catch his attention and make his computing experience more confortable."
wobo
124 • RE: # 51 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-02-08 06:47:03 GMT from Italy)
Finally some news about the Debian-Installer RC2.
I was beginning to fear it would never materialize.
I have tested one of the latest daily builds of the Debian installer and finally it has proper PPPoE support. About time!
125 • fedora bashing (by cornel panceac on 2007-02-08 07:20:46 GMT from Romania)
i believe ladislav intentions were not to disqulify fedora but instead to show some points where it can and, in its opinion, must improve.
also i suppose someone elese said this before :)
126 • Author made some valid points re: Fedora 7 Test 1 (by John on 2007-02-08 10:33:04 GMT from Kuwait)
Although harsh-sounding, the author made some valid points concerning Fedora 7 Test 1.
First of all, I am a recent volunteer with the Fedora Docs Project. I am not an employee of Redhat, I do this in my free time, and these are my personal opinions.
The Fedora Project, in my opinion, is working hard to produce a quality community release of a leading-edge linux distribution.
Any explanation I give may sound like an excuse to some people, but here it is anyway.
1. FUDCon Boston was a few days away when the announcement was made. Many volunteers were preparing for this event and some were en route.
2. IMHO, the final release notes for the final version are of a very high quality. (BTW, I started volunteering too late to contribute to the Fedora Core 6 release notes.) The quality of the test release notes should try to match that high standard, but will always be rough compared to the final release. And, yes, there should test release notes, even if brief by comparison.
3. The merger of Core and Extras is certainly a big undertaking. I know it will keep the Docs Project busy over the next couple months, let alone the developers and package maintainers.
Constructive feedback, like this article, is always a good thing. For those who would like more detailed information on Fedora 7 Test 1, check out this link:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/7/Test1TreeTesting
Anyone wishing to help make Fedora an even better community-developed linux distribution can submit bug reports and join any of the Fedora Project teams where his or her contribution will be very welcome.
John
127 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-02-08 14:02:15 GMT from United States)
Linux is all about choice and that's why I use it. All distributions have their pluses and minuses. Some people like the way one runs over the other. Doesn't mean the one you don't choose it's crap. I think the biggest drawback to distributions is their user base. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great to be a fan of your distribution but bashing other distributions or even windows is beyond stupid. As long as you enjoy your computer experience, who cares what you use. Just use it and be happy. Obviously, this is just my opinion and that's why I've been turned off by distros like PCLOS and gentoo. These two are just examples and they are not the only ones that exhibit these type of "elitist" (or at least they think they are elite) user base. I believe that's why so many people are turned off by Apple Mac's, so many of the users are plain jerks. All linux users, no matter which flavor you use, are part of the linux community. Why not just get along?
128 • New users (by tom on 2007-02-08 14:37:10 GMT from United States)
With all this talk about new users ....
Here is my most recent experience. I have a friend who comes to me for help. In the last 12 months I have re-installed Windows XP twice after malware had rendered the box unusable. The second time I made sure it had the appropriate firewall/spyware/antivirus configured and installed.
Yet it happened a third time in December. I was willing to re-install windows again, but insisted I install Linux as well (one of the more newbie friendly distro's of course).
This is not as "harsh" as it may seem. My friend is 100 % computer illiterate and can not afford to have the computer professionally maintained. In addition it was starting to cost me a lot of time in data recovery, wiping hard drive, install windows, install drivers, configure security. I can maintain Linux much faster and obviously the security is higher.
In the first 2 weeks, well my friend was intimidated,but because of the security issues stuck with it. The main intimidation was :
1. New names of programs.
2. Fear something would 'break" if the wrong button was pressed.
Now it has been 2 months and my friend no longer boots to windows.
When asked, "if your computer came with Linux pre-installed, would you pay $ 200 to purchase windows, microsoft office, and all the spyware/antiviral software re-installed".
Answer "No way"
129 • Re: 115 Linux for complete newbies (by octathlon on 2007-02-08 15:10:47 GMT from United States)
As I said in a previous post, I think there are some simple steps to making the transition successful for newbies
Before I switched my mother to Linux I had her show me what all she was doing with Windows (98SE). I made sure she had a launcher for each application she needed. I had her show me what all she did on her system and tell me what she liked and didn't like about it. Then I did the best I could to set up Mepis in a way she would like (not necessarily trying to make it act the same as Windows - for example, she likes the single-click launching better than the double-click of Win98). Finally, on the new system we spent an hour going through her routine uses of the system together - getting on the internet, getting and sending email, and launching each application or game.
I also think making a "cheat sheet" listing the apps they will be using, with [function: name - picture of launcher icon - brief instructions] would be helpful for when you aren't there - Ex: Email/Calendar: Kontact [icon]
It sounds like you might not have gone through all these steps with your friend. It also sounds like he doesn't want to try at all. There should really be no difference at all for him to click an icon on a Linux desktop compared to one on a Windows desktop!? Anyway, if he doesn't complain about the Mac, by all means, set him up with a Mac! :-)
130 • linux fo newbies (by ray carter at 2007-02-08 16:03:15 GMT from United States)
Once again, I have to mention my experience at the local library. Over two years ago the library director asked me to install Linux on some 'new' used machines coming in - four 800mhz Compaq's she purchase with no OS. I spent some time and did a proper setup of Mandrake - the most used browser plugins, OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, printing on the networked HP laser, etc. The users had very little choice. There was one MS internet computer and four Linux machines - and most of them were busy nearly all the time. The patrons adjusted very quickly, and without complaint - mostly without comment. After a few months we did a customer satisfaction survey - a questionairre for every user for a few weeks. Again, no complaints, and a few responses indicating the were not aware they weren't using MS. This spring we added a four seat Userful station running RHEL. Then this fall I switched from Mandrake to Ubuntu (my assessment that it would be easier to keep them up to date). Still no complaints from anyone - universal acceptance because the machines do what the patrons need, and it is not that different from MS. The director is VERY happy with the switch. Before Linux, when they were using MS for the internet computers she was called to the floor at least three times a day to help patrons with internet problems. Since, she has not been called. It just works. I drop by every couple of months for an hour or so and do updates - that's it.
131 • RE 130 There is a difference between installing a Lx for a library (by dbrion on 2007-02-08 16:28:02 GMT from France)
and installing a Linux for a *home* computer. When an old person goes to a library (or when I go to a cybercafé), (s)he is accepting the fact that (s)he will find things she is not accustomed to and a service suboptimal (for her/him). At home, (s)he may have other needs, which demand other skills, more oriented towards his/her personnal likings...
I do not mean that libraries are a wrong place to spend Linux (though I think tax collecting offices would be even better) : pple who, professionnally, use a WhiteBox (developped by the Beauregard Parish librarians...) never want to change, even to upgrade. However, they use Windows at home (with the GIMP).
132 • Re #123 Linux for complete newbies (by rglk on 2007-02-08 18:48:17 GMT from United States)
wobo wrote:
"RE 89: With your permission, Robert, I will compile an article from 89+109 for the upcoming issue of MagDriva, the online magazine of the German Mandriva user community (with your credits, of course!). Pls contact me via mail if there's a problem with that (you didn't give a mailto, so I have to ask you here)."
Go ahead, that's fine with me. You may also want to take a look at comments #52, 71 and 123 of DWW #186 from two weeks ago where I set up this project and described the intitial stages, in particular the somewhat idiosyncratic rationale why some perfectly good candidates (e.g. SUSE, Kubuntu, Xandros - e.g. the latter is not available in live CD) were not considered in this roundup.
Robert
133 • Newbie-friendly Linux (by rglk on 2007-02-08 19:56:24 GMT from United States)
Just to correct a possible misconception, the fact that my 83-year old friend didn't take to Linux (or not as yet) doesn't reflect on the usability of current Linux desktop distros for inexperienced computer users, it reflects more on him. He basically hates computers and has zero patience when they demand more knowledge of him than he is willing to acquire. I simply can't imagine him sitting down with a 300 page book for computer newbies (e.g. "Point and Click Linux").
If his email client requires some configuration (as it obviously does, e.g. entering account names, passwords, the pop and smtp server names for his three email accounts, etc.), he already gets impatient and seems to think that this technology is simply too complex to be of any good to him. He even hates the phone and keeps it in a closed drawer.
I naturally assumed that he would simply explore all the menus, icons, click on all and sundry and that way get to figure out their functions. But as someone here mentioned perhaps he thinks that he might wreck his system with a single wrong click. Perhaps I should get across to him that Linux is virtually indestructable, and just about nothing he might do could possibly wreck it or even corrupt it beyond repair. E.g. I've used Linux (Mandrakelinux, Debian, Xandros, Slackware, Arch) for thousands of hours and have never wrecked an install or lost any data. I've run into instances of a hung system less than a few dozen times, and none of these have ever seriously corrupted the system (perhaps a few files lost).
If he sticks with Windows, he'll wind up with a hosed OS again sooner or later which would set him back $200 for the Geeksquad. At that point he may want to try Linux again.
-----
Re #130
Ray,
I remember your posts here on DWW about your installs of Linux on library computers through the years, and I have always applauded you for that. But the requirements for success with such installs are perhaps lesser than what I was aiming for. I'd guess that more than 90% of the use that library computers see is for web browsing. That doesn't require much to work just fine.
What I was aiming for in my tests was to find a Linux distro that would ideally be completely idiotproof and work easily and without a single flaw and need for support for web browsing, sending and receiving email, viewing and possibly manipulating images and photos, listening to and recording streaming audio, viewing video clips, watching movies, playing and burning CD's and DVD's, writing letters, backing up data, installing security upgrades without problems, and implementing a decent firewall.
I think some Linux distros come close to delivering that for many people but perhaps not for my friend who may be an extreme case.
Robert
134 • Re: 133 (by octathlon on 2007-02-08 20:07:14 GMT from United States)
I'm really surprised that after all the time and effort you spent evaluating distros and so forth, that you didn't bother spending a few minutes configuring his email settings and setting up a few icons for him, which in my opinion would be much more important than worrying about which one of those distros to install.
135 • Re: 133, 134 (by vukota on 2007-02-08 20:28:24 GMT from United States)
"I naturally assumed that he would simply explore all the menus, icons, click on all and sundry and that way get to figure out their functions"
I'll second that I am surprised too that you didn't configure all his settings as they are under Windows and that you probably didn't migrate his e-mails, address book(s), account(s) settings, ISP settings, browser bookmarks, My Documents folder to appropriate under Linux, other settings or application data...
I would not let anyone relocate me from my home to a better home without my personal stuff either!
136 • Ubuntu + Linspire (by linbetwin on 2007-02-08 20:40:04 GMT from Romania)
What do you think about the newly announced Ubuntu/Linspire agreement? Linspire will be based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu users will be able to use CNR (in addition to apt-get, aptitude, Synaptic, gnome-app-install etc.)
137 • 133 (by Anonymous on 2007-02-08 21:32:01 GMT from United States)
I don't know if your story will have any impact on how distros are put together, but...
This tells us what the tougher cases are like. It's good information, whether you say he would never go with Linux, or whether in hindsight you might wish to try something else. I think most Linux types would find the story interesting.
138 • Re 134 & 135 Newbie-friendly Linux (by rglk on 2007-02-08 22:58:01 GMT from United States)
octathlon wrote:
"I'm really surprised that after all the time and effort you spent evaluating distros and so forth, that you didn't bother spending a few minutes configuring his email settings and setting up a few icons for him, which in my opinion would be much more important than worrying about which one of those distros to install."
Well, I did set up nine icons on the upper panel of Linux Mint Gnome for all the apps he might use. I also configured Thunderbird for two of his three email accounts for both Linux Mint and Mandriva. He was looking over my shoulder while I was doing this and expressed his impatience that one would have to go through all that rigmarole to get email working. In Windows, the Geeksquad had done that for him, without him noticing.
---------
vukota wrote:
"I'll second that I am surprised too that you didn't configure all his settings as they are under Windows and that you probably didn't migrate his e-mails, address book(s), account(s) settings, ISP settings, browser bookmarks, My Documents folder to appropriate under Linux, other settings or application data..."
He had a two week old fresh install of Win XP that had been done by the Geeksquad after his previous Win XP install had been hosed. They hadn't migrated anything, presumably because it was all gone, and he had no backups. There was hardly anything new on the new Windows install aside from two weeks worth of deleted emails in Outlook Express (which cannot be migrated to Thunderbird in Linux anyway), so there wasn't much to migrate.
But the whole point was just to give him a trial run of two carefully picked Linux distros to see whether he would take to any of them. I'd already put out many, many hours of work sorting through distros to maximize the chances of success and didn't want to spend all the additional time needed to configure two entire Linux hard disk installs down to the tiniest detail when it wasn't even certain that he'd be using them. If he liked one of them and planned to use it, I then would have done the final bit of fine tuning for that distro, if needed.
I'd also given him a run down on how to use Linux and any passwords that might be needed, although I'd set up both distros to boot directly to the desktop, without login. In particular, I'd given him a run down on how to use Firefox and Thunderbird, and written out for him what the names of the various web browsers and email clients were for each distro. Unfortunately that came after more than an hour of problems with getting the SMTP (outgoing) mail going in Thunderbird in Linux Mint at my location, something that irritated both of us. Altogether, we spent almost three hours together at my house.
It turned out that my ISP (RCN) was blocking all outgoing traffic using the SMTP protocol on port 110 that was addressed to any outgoing mail server other than the outgoing mail server at RCN (smtp.rcn.com). I was using the email client config setting that he was using in Windows which were appropriate for his DSL connection with Verizon at his house (outgoing.verizon.net). At my house, this setting didn't work because RCN choked this traffic. We couldn't connect to any outgoing mail server and hence couldn't send out email. ISP's do this in order to cut down on outgoing spam from their customers that might be putting a burden on their servers.
I could have used the SMTP address from RCN for his machine while he was at my house but then Thunderbird would need to have been reconfigured for Verizon again once he was back at his house. I decided against this and sent him off with the Verizon config setting that didn't work at my house but then as expected did work at his house. In any case, I don't think that my friend understood that the problems we were having had nothing to do with Linux and everything with the policies of ISP's. He may have gotten a bad start with a new Linux.
I have to apologize for the length of my posts which always gets to be so excessive. Sorry!
Robert
139 • Re #137 Newbie-friendly Linux (by rglk on 2007-02-09 00:18:18 GMT from United States)
Anonymous wrote:
"I don't know if your story will have any impact on how distros are put together, but...
This tells us what the tougher cases are like. It's good information, whether you say he would never go with Linux, or whether in hindsight you might wish to try something else. I think most Linux types would find the story interesting."
I haven't given up on my friend, and will try again to win him over to Linux. I've found the feedback valuable that I've gotten here. With hindsight, there are a number of things that I could have done differently. E.g. it might be very important, right from the beginning, to get across the idea that it's very difficult to completely wreck a Linux install, especially if you're not logged in as root. Really, the principal or almost only thing that may corrupt a Linux install is unresolved or poorly managed dependencies that come from installing programs from unauthorized repositories.
Otherwise, you can do almost anything as an ordinary user using the GUI's, clicking on and launching just about everything, and it won't really do any harm. At worst, you can always bail out with CTRL-ALT-ESC to kill a frozen program, or CTRL-ALT-Backspace to kill the X server, or CTRL-ALT-Delete to reboot or, as a last resort, push the power button, and you won't harm anything.
A few days ago, my friend called me. It looked as though he had accidentally clicked on the Shutdown icon I'd installed for him on the upper Gnome panel in Linux Mint. Up came the shutdown screen with its options for shutdown, restart, hibernate, sleeping, etc. After I'd figured out what he was looking at and what might have happened, I asked him to look for a cancel button and click on that. Well, that cleared his mistake. But he'd been paralyzed with fear that any action he might take to get him out of this stuck situation without knowing what he was doing might damage the OS.
Re "how Linux distros are put together": one of the greatest things about Linux desktop distros is the astonishing diversity of offerings. There is something there for anyone. At one end of the spectrum you have something like Arch, a superb distro for people who really want to learn Linux, get under the hood, get to know the thing inside out. At the other end you have the many popular distros that put a premium on user-friendliness, polish, good looks and doing everything out of the box. Much of the greatest recent progress in Linux development has been at the latter end of the spectrum. To push development further at that end of the spectrum, Linux developers (in particular the folks from the KDE and Gnome projects) should take a look at the champion of friendly, intuitive, graphical interfaces for potentially computer-phobic or computer-indifferent users, i.e. MacOSX, and emulate some of its best features.
Perhaps my friend would be best off with MacOSX. Unfortunately, he's already put out the money for a Toshiba laptop PC, and PC's don't run MacOSX. Also, the problem with Apple is that their stuff is so pricey. You can get something equivalent performance-wise to Apple hardware for half the money in the PC market.
Robert
140 • RE: 139 (by IMQ on 2007-02-09 02:09:36 GMT from United States)
Robert,
Appreciate your continued feedback on your effort to help your friend adjust and adapt to using Linux desktop. I think in due time he will be better off and glad he no longer has the problem he once faced with Windows.
141 • Re: 138 (by vukota on 2007-02-09 03:53:05 GMT from United States)
"aside from two weeks worth of deleted emails in Outlook Express (which cannot be migrated to Thunderbird in Linux anyway),"
Well, this is not true. There are at least two ways to migrate e-mails from Outlook Express to Thunderbird.
1) To import them first to TB under the windows (along with all other settings) and then copy everything under Linux.
2) To import them with KMail (if you can't deal with Windows)
"and didn't want to spend all the additional time needed to configure two entire Linux hard disk installs down to the tiniest detail when it wasn't even certain that he'd be using them"
From my experience that tiniest detail is most important for smooth transition and as someone mentioned if you went with any of the distros (you tested) with the tiniest detail it would be much better than this.
If you are planning to migrate someone from Windows to Linux don't underestimate how long this task may take and communicate to your "friends" this upfront. I was there in the past too.
I usually try to setup VNC/ssh as soon as all "on site" configurations are done, so I can use later remote desktop/ssh to help "friends" if I missed something or they need something extra.
On the end, thank you for sharing your experience with us. I am sure it will be a good lesson for less experienced folks.
142 • RE 139 : You showed how you configured IT (by dbrion on 2007-02-09 10:29:59 GMT from France)
And it took you between 1 and 3 hours: that was IMHO a long and painful time for your friend, who seems not to like configuring. It is unfair to tell after facts that one shouldn't show the configuring phase, but only the results. However, when I install Linux for friends, I install them as alone as possible, because I can make mistakes and be nervous : I only show the results (icons, starting), but the details can frighten pple, even if they are regular users of Unixes and Windows. I thus keep the painful part for me, and the final users are not biased against a system ("if it is annoyous to install, it will be annoyous to use for me" is their (wrong) way of thinking).
143 • Buntu/Spire (by Caraibes on 2007-02-09 10:48:59 GMT from Dominican Republic)
I think the Buntu/Spire deal is a big news ! I think it is a very smart move from both companies, and it will benefit the Linux world at large... We'll see how it goes, but it seems to be a good move...
144 • RE: 103 && RE: 126 (by Béranger on 2007-02-09 14:09:48 GMT from Romania)
RE: 103 > Can someone *prove* (not from experience, but from analysis) that MS COPY can work in any case for big files? I never dared...
You can't actually prove "from analysis" unless you have the sources! And since Microsoft and open source... you know the rest.
RE: 126 > Constructive feedback, like this article, is always a good thing.
Nice. From now on, I will know what is considered "constructive feedback". Quote: "there are really no excuses" ; "This fiasco raises serious questions".
Yep. If this is not bashing, this means I'm a nice guy. When I am bashing a thing or another on my own blog, it seems that I am not bashing actually, I am bringing "constructive feedback"! Great.
145 • Re 133 Linspire, CNR (by frank on 2007-02-09 14:16:52 GMT from United States)
They are in for the $$$$$ some one in the future has to be the one selling software for linux, Linux is going to be very, very big in the future, so there is the money, there main intention is to provide the comertial software!
Good for them, and I guess good for linux.And great for the new users.
some competition will be fantastic for the new users -$.
146 • RE 144 Thanks for the methodology of proof.... (by dbrion on 2007-02-09 14:32:16 GMT from France)
Now, when I read : "it woooorks fine" , I am glad to know that :
a) Linux loooovers have a broken keyboard.
b) Linux looovers are ready to MICROSOFT Vista
c) They will proudly contribute to fights against tropical deseases (is not that constructive?): XP was for paludism, Vista is more expensive....
By the way, I was too harsh to Belenix, it can fully start on *my* laptop (without expensive 3D cards). The only remaining problem, under KDE (as root...?..) was that I could not stop her with a button, as I am now accustomed with Linuxes and live CDs... I know that they cannot be intelligent full-time...
Anyway, it was a good surprise, d'autant plus que there was no BIG install me button... (you have to follow a written procedure to install her if you think she is mature enough...)
Remaining annoying things are USB keys recognition and VMplayer/VirtualBox/Qemu emulation (the starting phase goes very far with Qemu, but she remains, when emulated, in a state where it is not possible to try to fix)... Better luck next time?
147 • Ubuntu/Linspire deal (by octathlon on 2007-02-09 15:00:12 GMT from United States)
I think it's a good move that will benefit both and also benefit Linux as a whole. I'd like to see more companies working together to make desktop Linux a good alternative for computer users. I'm starting to think that the CNR thing will be really big, attracting new users by providing a consistent user experience of software installation/maintenance in Linux, while still allowing complete choice of distro and package management system.
148 • newbies (by ray carter at 2007-02-09 17:27:11 GMT from United States)
IMHO - there are three distinct phases to deploying a computer for anyone - library, friend, customer, etc. First is installation. IMHO Linux is probably no more difficult to install from scratch than MS - you certainly don't have to hunt for all the driver CDs. Second is setup. It can be more difficult to set up a Linux computer, primarily because if you go looking for help at the local computer store or whatever - everyone only knows MS. In many ways this is the most crucial part - if you do a proper job of setup, anticipating what the user will need and making sure it is all there and working before you turn the user loose, then chances of success are very great. This phase is use. IMHO a properly installed and set up Linux machine is no more difficult to use than MS - it's just a little different, and the differences are probably smaller than when MS releases a new version.
The one thing you can't control is mentality. This past summer my sister and brother-in-law (BIL from now on) were here for long periods due to my mother's health problems. My sister is no tech person. She works in the personnel field. She views computers as just a tool to do what she wants/needs. She told me that when someting happens with her office computer she does not fiddle - she just calls the IT people and tells them to fix it. My BIL, on the other hand, likes to tinker. He and his brother spent the best part of a day trying to get the power windows on my mother's old Chevy station wagon to work reliably. He installed XP over Win98 on my mothers computer.
At several points during the summer they were at our house and wanted to do some computer stuff. We have five running Linux computers set up on the internet via broadband. I sat my sister down at one and logged her in. She started up a browser, checked her web mail, went to a genaeology page and did some work, printed some stuff out, even used OpenOffice - pretty much without assistance. My BIL didn't even want to try it. His reply - 'I don't have time to learn a new system'. I should have, but didn't, at that point replied that he didn't have time not to learn a new system - it would free all the time he spends normally doing virus protection updates, etc.
149 • Re #142 Newbie-friendly Linux (by rglk on 2007-02-09 17:56:17 GMT from United States)
dbrion wrote:
"You showed how you configured IT .... And it took you between 1 and 3 hours: that was IMHO a long and painful time for your friend, who seems not to like configuring. It is unfair to tell after facts that one shouldn't show the configuring phase, but only the results."
Actually, knowing how important it would be for my friend to be presented with a smoothly functioning, spanking new Linux OS, I had done all configuring beforehand, at my leisure. When he arrived at my house to pick up his laptop, among other things I wanted to show him how to send an email with Thunderbird, and that's when we ran into the problem of my ISP (RCN) blocking outgoing mail addressed to the SMTP server of his ISP (Verizon).
I hadn't expected a problem there. All of my email accounts are webmail accounts (i.e. I don't use a local email client on my machine), and I had never run into this problem. This may be a common problem for people who use local email clients on roaming laptops that connect to many different access points served by multiple ISP's but it was news to me.
It took me an hour and a phone call to an ISP to figure this out, with my friend looking over my shoulder and getting aggravated. BTW, as you would expect, on that occasion the same problem was also present when we ran MS Outlook Express from his Win XP install, with the Verizon SMTP setting, using my RCN line. The rest of our time together, i.e. an extra hour or two, was taken up with my showing him the ropes for the two new Linux installs.
Frankly, I don't think it's useful to analyze and dwell on this particular case excessively and draw sweeping conclusions from it. My friend may well be an extreme case. I certainly have never run into someone who was more helpless with computers than he appears to be.
I'll give another example. Two days ago my friend called me again. He was in Outlook Express in Windows and was puzzled that his mail was displayed with the oldest mail at the top, requiring him to scroll down to get to the most recent mail. This was different from what he was accustomed to. I'd never used Outlook Express but I asked him whether there was a "View" option on the OE menu that may provide us with further options. Sure enough, there was a "Sort Order" option, for ascending or descending order. That fixed it. Inadvertently, he had changed the sort order and had gotten stuck. He also said that he'd run into this before and had forgotten the fix for it.
The bottom line is that my friend is pretty helpless with Windows, and he proved to be equally helpless with Linux. If he hadn't run into problems with Linux, I'd say that would be grounds for expecting Linux to replace Windows as the dominant desktop OS by the end of this year. Conversely, from the fact that he did run into problems with Linux it doesn't follow that EVERY rank Linux newbie or computer-phobic user WILL run into problems with Linux.
I should also say that I embarked on this project out of friendship and driven by my enthusiasm for Linux, not for pay. I don't do this for a living, and I haven't been paid for it, nor do I expect to. In addition, I got involved in this because I thought this would be an interesting exercise that might prove useful for other people as well, including the readership of DWW.
Robert
150 • Mandriva and freedom (by AdamW on 2007-02-10 03:22:14 GMT from Canada)
It really frustrates me to still see people still hanging out the old "Mandriva is too commercial sign" here. I really just don't get where the idea comes from.
We have been providing regular releases of a complete Linux distribution, suitable for desktop, workstation and server use, consisting entirely of free software, built on an open development process, for free download, since 1998.
How many other distributors can say that? I can count...er...Debian and Slackware off the top of my head. That's really it. SUSE had a closed development process and a very limited free release (no ISOs, only FTP install) for much of that time. Fedora Core only popped up a few years ago. Ubuntu wasn't even a gleam in Mark Shuttleworth's eye when we started.
It's particularly sad to see the comment suggesting that Mandriva's value-added stuff can only be got through payment, when in fact _all_ the stuff we actually develop in house is free software and is included in Mandriva Free. The only _software_ differences between the paid and free versions of Mandriva are third party proprietary packages. The commercial versions also include more free software packages than Free, but you can get these packages right from our official mirrors for Free, just as you get packages from the Ubuntu or Fedora or SUSE repositories. Exact same system. No payment required. The entire range of free / open source packages that we build is available for free from our public mirrors.
151 • Mandriva Linux 2007.1 (by Anonymous on 2007-02-10 03:32:27 GMT from United States)
Mandriva Linux 2007.1 is now available for download and testing: "Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Beta1. Main changes: ... new suspend and hibernate infrastructure (with bootsplash support);
Does anyone have more details about the hiberation support mentioned above? There's so few distros that will hibernate decently.
152 • 151 - suspend stuff (by AdamW on 2007-02-10 04:54:45 GMT from Canada)
We're moving to pm-utils. Fedora and SUSE are also moving to this (I believe SUSE 10.2 uses it already). Richard Hughes blogged about pm-utils here:
http://hughsient.livejournal.com/764.html
This should be fairly common across distros with the next wave (MDV 2007.1, FC 7, SUSE 10.2). Of course, we may still have different kernel patches which may make some systems work and others not on different distros.
153 • Mandriva and Gnome 2.17 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-02-10 15:32:44 GMT from Italy)
AdamW
If you are still around, maybe you can help me understand the mystery of an odd numbered GNOME which, as far as I have always known, means development state.
154 • RE 148 : May be I donot understand US English, but what is a library? (by dbrion on 2007-02-10 15:33:58 GMT from France)
For me, it is a place where books are kept; those books are mainly made of paper => they are not virtual books, and can be classified among electronically referenced books (that come some way of registering , or that have been manually registered) and older ones, which are not *yet* known from computers.
A third kind of books are books which are in an another libraries, and can be shared.
The IT part of such a library is very marginal in this context, and can be very limited (some aspects can be even suppressed for legal/regulatory reasons if "readers" do unauthorised downloads).
The management / (book keeping?) of the first aspects (in a crude way: finding books from their title/author/subject, registering old books [ or putting them into PDF] without too many efforts, registering new books from different formats and sharing books) is very difficult, has nothing to do with classical users'needs and can occupy full time 2 programmers and 2 typists for a 1 kilometer (if you put 30 books one above the other, it (t/m)akes ~1 meter) library.
I really do not understand why you *seem* to think it is the same kind of job/skills.
155 • RE: 150 • Mandriva and freedom (by IMQ on 2007-02-10 15:37:49 GMT from United States)
The impression that Mandriva is too commercial comes from the fact, IMHO, that they tried to entice people to join the Club. And to further that impression there are different levels of membership as well.
To be honest, I do not like that idea of membership at all. I prefer to pay as I go which is exactly what I did in the past 5 year I have been using Linux as my desktop. I either bought a copy of the distro or gave donation. In fact, I spent more money on Linux distros than I ever did on Windows (Windows 3.1, 95, NT, 2000 and XP).
Mandriva is no different than Linspire or Xandros as they are also viewed as commercial Linux distros. The fact that Mandriva has free editions for download does not change how people view them as commercial company.
Like it or not, most people do not like the idea to pay for something they can get for free. (And when they do, it's because they like what they see and want to support it.) Especially the propaganda has been going on since day one that Linux is free. Everyone can get it free, from downloading to getting a copy from a friend or local user group or whatever. And I am not talking strictly of Linux as the kernel but as the entire distribution of both the kernel and many useful applications.
There is nothing of making money selling Linux or services but the services a company want sell must be very good to exceptional so that people want it and don't mind paying for it. It must be better than what people usually get as part of free.
I don't use Mandrake/Mandriva except for testing here and there. I was never a member of the Club although when it first started, I was thinking about joining. Then I read the feedbacks in the forums and that was the end of it.
156 • Corrrecting myself about Mandriva and GNOME (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-02-10 15:38:14 GMT from Italy)
I can see that:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/Releases/Mandriva/2007.1/Development#Desktop
has now GNOME 2.18
157 • Re: 156 (GNOME 2.18) (by linbetwin on 2007-02-10 15:56:23 GMT from Romania)
No, they do not have GNOME 2.18 because that isn't released yet. They have GNOME 2.17.90 (or .92?), but by the time MDV 2007.1 will be released they will have 2.18. It's the same with Ubuntu, Fedora and other GNOME distros. The development versions of these distros use the development branch of GNOME (unstable, with odd version numbers).
158 • RE: # 156 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-02-10 16:03:57 GMT from Italy)
That is what you can see now.
But only a couple of weeks ago the Mandriva 2007.1 road map mentioned GNOME 2.17 as going to be in their final release.
159 • RE: #150 (by stepchat on 2007-02-10 18:07:03 GMT from United States)
I have been using Linux since 1999 and have not attached myself to one specific distro, I know this is a long time of using Linux to have not picked a favorite. As a casual outsider, viewing Distrowatch and numerous other forums, I agree with Adam. The following is a list of distros that I have used in the past 3 months. Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Slackware, OpenSuse, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, Linspire, Xandros, Sabayon, Foresight, Pardus, Elive, Fedora Core, Zenwalk and BLAG. Back in the days when Mandrake received their unfair labeling as being to commercial, they were offering their product under guidelines similar to Red Hat. You could download their software for free but if you wanted the added 3rd party non-free (as in beer) software you needed to buy the boxed version. Suse was similar but made it more difficult to get their free version as it was only available as a FTP install until 2004 with version 9.1. I never read about anyone claiming that Fedora Core or OpenSuse are to commercial. I see Fedore Core and OpenSuse as the free versions of RHEL and SLED respectively. I know there are those who will say that you can also get RHEL and SLED for free and yes you can configure them for free updates but you are still not receiving 3rd party non-free (as in beer) software. If by to commercial people are referring to the fact that Mandriva, Linspire and Xandros provide these 3rd party non-free (as in beer) software, my answer is that these distros provide this extra value for their customers. This provides a convenience for those who would normally purchase the 3rd party software even if it was not provided in the distro. Why people insist that the only method of getting a working Mandriva operating system is with the boxed versions of Powerpack and Discovery or by joining the club I will never understand.
160 • GNOME 2.17 / 2.18 @ 158 (by AdamW on 2007-02-10 20:06:40 GMT from Canada)
2.18 will be in the final release. Someone wrote the initial version of that page based on what was currently in Cooker. I have updated it to reflect what will actually be in 2007.1 final.
161 • Hey AdamW ! (by Caraibes on 2007-02-10 20:57:11 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Just to let you know that I am the living proof (as an end-user) the Mandriva is as free as, let's say, Ubuntu...
Mandriva is my main OS on my desktop, and Dapper on my laptop... I have both configured the same way, except that I use Gnome on Dapper, and KDE in MDV...
I have all necessary codecs, Skype, Realplayer, TVtime, Opera, Picasa, GoogleEarthLinux... All the goodies that I also have in Ubuntu... And they are all Free as in BEER (fine with me...) on my Free as in Speech (well, I guess...) MDV Free 2007...
I happily run 3d on outdated hardware... I am a happy camper...
I'll be downloading the Spring ed. !
162 • RE: # 160 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-02-10 22:04:16 GMT from Italy)
Thanks Adam for finally clarifying the matter.
163 • #154 (by ray carter at 2007-02-10 22:54:28 GMT from United States)
I've not addressed the running of the library at all. My concern has been the deployment of 'public access internet computers' at our local library. Currently there are nine seats available (eight Linux - four KUbuntu and four RHEL - and one MS). My involvement has been in setting up and maintaining the four KUbuntu seats - four 800mhz Compaq computers - the four RHEL seats are a Userful (a turnkey company in Canada) four head station - it is remotely administered by Userful. These nine seats are available for folks to come in and use - for whatever reason. They may have no home computer (imagine!), or it may be temporarily not working, or they may be visiting from out of town, or they may be Mormon 'missionaries'. Open to all, pretty much for whatever - we do run Dan's Guardian on them to filter internet content - and that can be suspended upon request for adults.
164 • Novell ... (by Satyr on 2007-02-11 12:40:54 GMT from Italy)
Hi all
I do understand that pecunia non olet.....
but every time I open the main page
having NOVELL advice just in front of me
make me feel sick.
Same as selling Corano in a christian site!
Sacrilegio!!!!!!!!!!!
165 • 164 (by Eudoxus on 2007-02-11 13:05:26 GMT from Latvia)
Man, what is your problem?
I must admit that there is something about linux community that make me really sick. I am sick of the way some people use to think about certain matters - basically it is a style of thinking that all things are divided either in those which are that good, that everybody must adore them, and those, that are so bad, that everybody must damn them. And in addition - all those who do not follow this restrictive classification are put in the latter category.
OK. Novell and Microsoft deal is disputable, but that does not make Novell evil monsters. Consider those goods, that linux has received from them, for that matter. I would even say that to say that MS is a kind of evil power is childish. This is is a company that produces average softwear and has adopted quite a nasty policy. And thats all.
Do not appy your simplistic way of thinking (ala - muslims agaist christians) to anything. Stupid people start with stupid arguents (like yours) and end with fighting each other.
However - if you really hate Novell (everybody has rights to be a little irrational at his own expense) then do not youse their software. Ban open suse, beagle, evolution mail and so on.
166 • Misc : thanks 154 and RE 164/165 (by dbrion on 2007-02-11 13:47:15 GMT from France)
Thanks for clarifying the definition of a library: it is interesting in itself ( I thought of libraries visited by students/researchers where IT is likely to be very restricted : what you built is more like a french cybercafé, which is expensive and can be visited by pple who do not want IT cf pôints 84 of this DWW comments).
RE 164 : Religious missionaries have translated the Coran.. and some catholical/anglicans have more insight in The Coran than me (and you, I deeply suppose). This point does not imply anything about *my*religion, if I have one.
RE 165 : I mostly agree with your point, however
a) you should take care of your health, as critical / lucid Linux users seem a disappearing species...Perhaps, instead of getting sick, you should laugh...
b) you said "This is is a company that produces average softwear and has adopted quite a nasty policy."
even if their software is average, one can find under Windows gorgeous things like Cygwin who never be Linux - ported (see pest 77 of this DWW for using solutions which have not even a man file).
c) MS policy is not so nasty, unless you think as nasty fighting against paludism and marrying a Linux distributor (which means lots of money they give to the Linux distributor). I hope Microsoft will make other big useful policies with Vista (as it is more expensive than XP)...
167 • No subject (by Satyr on 2007-02-11 14:01:31 GMT from Italy)
No problems at all,man!
just a point....corano and bible are for me ...just books!!
It's my opinion....do not intend to offend anyone!
I just come here to............breath fresh air.....and that banner ,novell banner just remember me what i wrote before.....
pecunia non olet.....
Just would like to see less Novell where we speak about ....linux!
No Crociate...please....it was more than enough....
Cheers from Vatican City!!!
;)))
168 • to 167 (by Eudoxus on 2007-02-11 18:59:57 GMT from Latvia)
Well, like it or not, Novell is one of the leading soft corporations that develops linux solutions and as you know perfectly well there are other corporations too. That is obvious. And that is why there is this advertisement, which is not that bad to my taste (they got a good artist).
So the air is quite fresh here.
Number of Comments: 168
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
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