 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 193, 12 March 2007 |
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Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Twenty news announcements on the main page of DistroWatch turned last week into the busiest one so far this year, but things are unlikely to slow down much in the coming days either. The new GNOME 2.18, whose bits and pieces are slowly starting to appear on some mirrors, will be followed by the much awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 later this week, while new development releases from Mandriva Linux (2007.1 RC1) and openSUSE (10.3 alpha 2) are also expected shortly. In other news: How OpenBSD and an old IBM laptop saved a construction project in a Central American jungle, an introduction to Conary - a package management system done right, and a brief comparison between Linux Mint and Freespire - two distributions with similar goals and identical base systems. The feature story of this week's issue looks at the deepening management crisis at Gentoo Linux. Happy reading!
Content:
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Commentary |
Gentoo in crisis
 Last week, the Gentoo project entered the lowest point of its 7-year old existence. The single most telling statement attesting to this fact is this brief excerpt from the current issue of Gentoo Weekly News:
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:
* Daniel Robbins (drobbins) AMD64 team
The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:
* Daniel Robbins (drobbins)
Yes, this is the same Daniel Robbins who founded Gentoo Linux back in the year 2000 and who left the project in 2004 for personal reasons. He officially re-joined the Gentoo development team two weeks ago - only to resign a few days later. The reason? Strong personal attacks by some of the current developers of the project.
Take this mailing list post by Ciaran McCreesh. Replying to another developer's request to treat Daniel Robbins with respect, he resorted to the following tirade:
What kind of response do you think anyone else would have received had they started repeatedly attacking a project when they didn't even know what that project was, repeatedly tried to interfere with the management of a project when they don't know who is involved with or managing said project, repeatedly posted all kinds of outright lies after having been told that something was untrue and repeatedly resorted to ad hominem attacks in a technical discussion? I'd say that, all things considered, people are showing Daniel an awful lot of respect...
Now, let's review the credentials of Daniel Robbins. After working as a Stampede Linux and FreeBSD developer, he eventually founded his own distribution - Gentoo Linux. By the time he resigned from the project some four years later, Gentoo had become the fastest growing Linux distribution of all times - a much-loved project with a wealth of original ideas, truly comprehensive documentation and excellent package management system. At the same time, Daniel Robbins, an expert kernel and Python hacker, contributed nearly a hundred well-written Linux articles to the IBM developerWorks, including various topics covering the Linux Professional Institute certification exams. Although certainly not without his faults, Daniel Robbins has become one of the best-known personalities the Linux world has ever seen.
Contrast that to the credentials of some of the current Gentoo developers who are so quick to attack the former Chief Architect at every opportunity. Even if they have written useful code that has improved the distribution, they have a very long way to go before they reach the same status as their former benevolent dictator. Furthermore, one has to wonder: with the amount of time some of them spend flaming other people on the various mailing lists and planet blogs, do they actually have any time for coding?
This highlights the complete ineffectiveness of the current power structures at Gentoo Linux. If a person who repeatedly engages in personal attacks against other developers is permitted to remain with the project, then there is something wrong with the way the distribution is managed. Yes, disagreeing with other developers on organisational and technical matters is perfectly fine; launching personal attacks against anybody who has a different idea is not. We see an awful lot of disagreements on the Debian developers' mailing lists as well, but rarely, if ever, we see such staunch personal attacks as we've been seeing on the Gentoo developers' mailing lists.
Talking about Debian, it's worth noting another interesting point. While the Gentoo social contract was loosely modelled on the one written by Debian, the more observant among the readers will notice the lack of any outward statements that would define the goals and priorities of the Gentoo distribution. As an example, the point 4 of the Debian Social Contract clearly states that: "We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities." In contrast, Gentoo has no such clause anywhere in its Gentoo Social Contract and the word "user" is hardly ever mentioned.
Conflicts and disagreements are a natural part of any large and democratic organisation. Ironically, it was Daniel Robbins who first pointed out the dangers of working with "freaks", as he called them, in his article Making the distribution, where he described some of the events that eventually lead to the collapse of Stampede Linux. Many other open source software projects also suffer from large scale flame wars from time to time. However, what distinguishes Gentoo from other such projects is the fact that it doesn't have a mechanism to deal with poisonous individuals. Or to be more precise, the existing mechanism do not work, since the present structures don't have the necessary powers to be effective in solving conflicts. As a result, over the last few years Gentoo Linux has degenerated into a loose structure that is increasingly run by a small, power-hungry clique that resents any attempt to change the current status quo.
As such, Gentoo has become a distribution without any clear goals, without the drive to implement new ideas, and without the ability to deliver products that its users want. Quite a sharp contrast to a few years ago when one couldn't take part in an online distro discussion without somebody coming out with a strong recommendation for Gentoo!
Can anything be done to reverse the situation and to return Gentoo on the path of its former glory? Without the radical overhaul of the Gentoo power structures, it's highly unlikely that anything positive will be done to Gentoo in the near future. With the developer turnover at an all-time high, there is little chance that even the minimum of release and bug-fixing goals will be met. But since the current project leaders are unable to see the rapid downfall of the distribution and unwilling to take any radical measures to reverse the trend, there is little hope for the project. Unless they wake up soon, Gentoo Linux, once the most innovative and refreshing of all distributions, will become nothing more than an average, buggy operating system characterised by endless bickering among the few developers that will bother to remain with it.
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| Miscellaneous News |
New features in openSUSE 10.3, OpenBSD in a Guatemalan jungle, Conary package management, Ark Linux, Linux Mint vs Freespire
 While most of the major Linux distributions are in advanced stages of preparations for their upcoming releases, the openSUSE project has barely started its own development cycle (the second alpha release of openSUSE 10.3 is scheduled for release later this week). What can we expect at the end of the long road? Andreas Jaeger, the openSUSE release coordinator, has published a series of slides (in PDF format) highlighting new functionality in the upcoming version. Some of the features that many openSUSE users will appreciate include the ability to integrate external software repositories into the system installer, a new YaST CD-Creator with the ability to build custom add-on CD images, a minimal, single-CD installation system, and improved boot times. Also in the pipeline are various security enhancements, several new YaST modules, and better laptop support. The current plan for openSUSE 10.3 is to ship both KDE 4 (for early adopters) and KDE 3.5.x as an alternative KDE desktop. There is much more, so download the slides to see what you can look forward to in the coming months.
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 Where do you use your favourite operating system? If you are like most people then the answer is "at home" or "in the office", but would you consider taking it to a jungle? That's exactly what Philip Munts did: "I recently spent two weeks using OpenBSD in a jungle village in Guatemala. I came with a group of 52 to help finish building a new Church of the Nazarene in La Esperanza Chilatz, few miles outside of Coban. We also planned to operate medical and dental clinics, and teach a number of workshops on various topics ranging from small engine repair to puppetry. I didn't have any specific assignment before our arrival, other than to help our group leader with projection equipment." Read more about how one guy's ingenuity and an old ThinkPad running OpenBSD helped make the mission a success.
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 The Linux distribution world has seen an emergence of a fair number of packaging formats over the years. A relative newcomer among them is Conary by rPath Linux. The interesting part about Conary is the fact that it was created by a number of high-profile developers with many years of experience building RPM packages at Red Hat, Inc. But how does Conary compare to RPM or other popular package managers? Bruce Byfield has all the answers in his article entitled Conary: An innovative second-generation package manager: "rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around -- nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command."
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 Last week we received an interesting email from Jonathan Brickman, an avid Linux user, who has been trying to find a fast, KDE-based distribution for his older computers. The result? "I have been testing multiple distros on eight- and nine-year old PCs, PII/K6-class machines with 256 MB of RAM, and I have found something startling: out of several, only one runs KDE and other big applications as fast as Windows XP on my standard 850 MHz Duron with 512 MB RAM. This one is Ark Linux. I don't know if this datum should appear anywhere on your site, but I thought you might find it interesting. I am looking forward to Ark on modern hardware, whenever I can afford some!" Are there other readers who have had a positive experience with Ark Linux? And if you have an old box lying around the house, what is your preferred distribution to run on it? Please discuss below.
* * * * *
 Finally, one more item for discussion in this week's forum. Over the past few weeks we have seen a number of positive reviews and comments about Linux Mint, one of the unexpected distro surprises of this year. Although Linux Mint is really just a re-packaged Ubuntu with out-of-the box support for proprietary file formats and some usability enhancements, it seems that this is exactly what many new users look for in a Linux distribution. It also seems that Linux Mint shares its philosophy with Freespire, another distribution with a strong vocal support for convenient Linux computing even if it means taking a few shortcuts on the issue of Free Software. However, unlike Freespire, which has been working on its upcoming version 2.0 since September 2006 just to reach another alpha stage last week, the developers of Linux Mint have already delivered three successful releases.
Linux Mint 2.2 - one of the unexpected surprises of this year
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So here are a few questions for the DistroWatch Weekly readers: Have you tried Freespire and Linux Mint? If so, how do you rate them? What do you think makes Linux Mint such a successful project despite its very young age? Is there anything that Linux Mint could improve? Please comment below.
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| Released Last Week |
Musix GNU+Linux 0.99
Marcos Guglielmetti has announced the release of Musix GNU+Linux 0.99: "The Musix Project is proud to announce the release of Musix GNU+Linux 0.99, a new version of the 100% Free Software multimedia operating system for artists and general users. This is the most stable and user-friendly version until now. Since version 0.79, Musix GNU+Linux is focused on multimedia content creation and especially on music, that is: music production, audio and video editing, 3D animation, graphic design, image editing and web design. Hundreds of software packages have been updated to the Debian Etch versions. New additions include the midi sequencer Muse and the sequencer and synthesizer SpiralSynthModular." Read the comprehensive release announcement for more information.
Bluewhite64 Linux 11.0-r1 Live CD
The Bluewhite64 project, which produces an unofficial 64-bit edition of Slackware Linux, has released a revised live CD, version 11.0-r1: "I am pleased to announce the first revision for the Bluewhite64 11.0 live CD. This release uses the AuFS (another Unionfs - great stability and features) along the Linux kernel version 2.6.20.1. Also, includes NTFS read/write support (ntfs-3g), Digikam 0.9.0 for digital photo management, slackpkg 2.09 and qtswaret 0.1.5.3 for package management, Amarok 1.4.5, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2 and much more. Also, with this release, the Lipstik style and theme will become the live CD default theme along with the nuvoX icons theme and Moodin (Engine) boot splash." Read the release announcement and changelog for further details.
EnGarde Secure Linux 3.0.13
EnGarde Secure Linux has been updated to version 3.0.13: "Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.13. This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes, some feature enhancements to Guardian Digital WebTool and the EnGarde Secure Linux Installer, and a few new features. What's New? A new document, 'A Guided Tour of EnGarde Secure Linux', which takes through installing and configuring some of EnGarde's essential services; there is now a link to the SELinux Audit Monitor directly from the main WebTool Auditing menu; there were several improvements made to the hardware detection subsystem of einstall...." Read the rest of the release announcement for more details.
Trustix Secure Linux 3.0.5
Trustix Secure Linux 3.0.5 has been released: "The Comodo Trustix team is proud to announce the release of Trustix Secure Linux 3.0.5, an update to the previous 'Tikka Masala'. The new release is named 'Mirch Masala' to describe the new interesting changes associated. This release has its major change from the previous release of 3.0 with the re-introduction of Anaconda as the preferred choice of installer. In addition, most packages have been upgraded to their latest versions upon customer requests. The core updates available are: kernel 2.6.19.7, PostgreSQL 8.2.3, MySQL 5.0.27, CP+ 3.3, Samba 3.0.24." Read the rest of the press release for further details.
BackTrack 2.0
Remote-Exploit has announced the release of BackTrack 2.0, SLAX-based live CD with a comprehensive collection of security and forensics tools: "After many months of work, we're finally happy enough with BackTrack to call it v.2.0 Final. New exciting features in BackTrack 2: updated kernel 2.6.20 with several patches; Broadcom-based wireless card support; most wireless drivers are built to support raw packet injection; Metasploit2 and Metasploit3 framework integration; alignment to open standards and frameworks like ISSAF and OSSTMM; re-designed menu structure to assist the novice as well as the professional; Japanese input support - reading and writing in Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji." Read this brief release announcement and visit the distribution's product page for further information.
AUSTRUMI 1.4.0
A new version of AUSTRUMI, a lightning-fast, business card-size live CD featuring the Metacity window manager, has been released. What's new? "Austrumi now booting from USB drive; added MySQL client and server; added Transmission - a BitTorrent client; added iso, mdf, nrg and sshfs support; updated Atomix, Bash, Dnsmasq, Firefox, FUSE, glib, GTK+, Linux DC++, ntfs-3g, Partimage, QEMU and X.Org; removed Enlightenment and added Metacity + LXPanel; removed GImageView and added GQview; removed Downloader for X and added aria2; updated kernel to 2.6.20.1." Visit the project's home page to read the brief changelog.
AUSTRUMI 1.4.0 is the project's first release featuring the Metacity window manager
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Berry Linux 0.79
Yuichiro Nakada has announced the release of Berry Linux 0.79, a Fedora-based, desktop-oriented live CD with support for English and Japanese. What's new? The new Berry is built of top of the Linux kernel 2.6.20 with Symmetric multiprocessing support, ndev/udev and bootsplash patches. The live CD technology is provided by Squashfs 3.2, Unionfs 2.0 and FUSE 2.6.3 with read and write support for SSHFS and NTFS file systems. Among package updates, the distribution's default desktop has been upgraded to KDE 3.5.6, while Firefox now comes in version 1.5.0.10 and Thunderbird is at 1.5.0.9. 3D desktop effects are provided through AIGLX and Beryl 0.2rc1. Also updated were xine-lib (1.1.4), Samba (3.0.24), WINE (0.9.31) and NdisWrapper (1.38). For more information please read the full changelog.
StartCom Enterprise Linux 4.0.4
StartCom Enterprise Linux, a distribution built from source RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has been updated to version 4.0.4: "Ahead of a busy spring season and in anticipation of new StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-5 and StartCom MultiMedia Edition ML-6 comes an updated release of the Advanced Server 4 series. The fifth release of this enterprise class operating system is the natural combined continuation of the previously released AS-4 distribution, which includes security updates and minor adjustments. Notable are an updated kernel, security updates for PHP, Firefox and Thunderbird, but also some additions and improvements for smart cards and hardware tokens." Read the complete release announcement for more information.
dyne:bolic 2.4.1 and 2.4.2
Denis "Jaromil" Rojo has announced the release of an updated version of the dyne:bolic multimedia live CD: "2.4.1 'Dhoruba' is out. This release fixes various bugs present in 2.4, including docking functionality when booting from CD and running from hard disk. It also features new software, such as DVDStyler to craft DVDs, StreamTuner to browse thousands of Internet radio stations and Bluetooth support. AbiWord has been re-introduced in its latest version, Cinelerra has been updated with graphical interface enhancements and Firefox has been upgraded to 2.0.0.2. Documentation is also expanded: the new dyne:II manual is almost complete and ready for print." Read the full release announcement for more details. A bug-fix dyne:bolic 2.4.2 has been released.
m0n0wall 1.23
An updated version of the FreeBSD-based m0n0wall firewall has been released: "m0n0wall 1.23 released. m0n0wall 1.23 adds new features to the captive portal, updates all components to the latest versions and contains many fixes and other small improvements. It marks the last general release in the FreeBSD 4.x-based branch of m0n0wall." From the changelog: "Added support for hardware button on WRAP (if pressed during boot, it will trigger a reset to factory defaults); updated PHP to 4.4.6; updated default webGUI SSL certificate." Visit the project's home page to read the release announcement and to learn more about m0n0wall.
* * * * *
Development and unannounced releases
- Wolvix 1.1.0-alpha2, the release announcement
- VectorLinux 5.8-rc1 (live), the release announcement
- Damn Small Linux 3.3-rc2, the changelog
- SaxenOS 2.0-rc2, the release announcement
- SimplyMEPIS 6.5-rc1, the release announcement
- Frugalware Linux 0.6-rc2, the release notes
- Foresight Linux 2.17.92 (live), the release announcement
- Freespire 2.0-alpha1, the release announcement
- Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4-beta, the press release
- Elive 0.6.5, the release announcement
- Pardus Linux 2007-rc
- GParted LiveCD 0.3.4-1
- B2D Linux 20070307
- Guadalinex 4.0-rc1
- RIPLinuX 2.0
- ClarkConnect 4.1-beta2
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
Feedback on "The future of DistroWatch Weekly"
Many thanks to all who took their time to post feedback to last week's The future of DistroWatch Weekly. Although I haven't had the time yet to evaluate your opinions and turn them into some sort of a statistical wish list, one thing is clear: there are much more satisfied readers of DistroWatch Weekly than I ever dared to imagine. Perhaps I was misled by a few lone voices of discontent to believe that the publication needed some restructuring, but after reading through your comments, I think it's safe to leave things as they are. I will comment on some of the suggestions in the next issue of DistroWatch Weekly.
There is one thing I want to mention today, however. After publishing last week's issue, it didn't take long before your comments started pouring in from all corners of the word. As you know, the vast majority of them were highly complimentary. And although I suspected that many of you appreciated the work that goes into this web site, I still sat here, reading the comments and feeling completely amazed at the sheer volume of praise and encouragement. Thank you so much for all the kind words! It is a pleasure to have such an appreciative readership!
* * * * *
New distributions added to database
- Karoshi. Karoshi is a free and open source school server operating system based on PCLinuxOS. Karoshi provides a simple graphical interface that allows for quick installation, setup and maintenance of a network.
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New distributions added to waiting list
- Epidemic GNU/Linux. Epidemic GNU/Linux is a new Brazilian distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. It is aimed at novice users with the main goals being easy to obtain, install, use and personalise.
- Jedo Linux. Jedo Linux (pronounced jed-o), is a simple, clean Linux distribution that aims to provide a reliable operating system for power users. It's best described as a cross between Linux From Scratch (LFS), Red Hat Linux and Gentoo Linux. It's an original distribution (not built on any existing one), although it tends to lean towards LFS and feels a bit like Red Hat Linux when using it.
- Media Exchange. Media Exchange is an MP3 jukebox appliance that allows users to merge music collections, play music and control the player with a browser, organise music, automatically tag music, remove double tracks automatically, download music directly from the artists, share music with friends safely and easily.
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DistroWatch database summary
And this concludes our latest issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 19 March 2007. Until then,
Ladislav Bodnar
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Keep uo good work (by johncoom on 2007-03-12 11:12:25 GMT from Australia)
Last weeks "The future of DistroWatch Weekly" - my suggestion is "Do your own thing"
2 • Yet another disappointing example of "reporting" (by nightmorph on 2007-03-12 11:13:01 GMT from United States)
I've rightly taken you up on this in the past, Ladislav, and I'll do it again. (http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/nightmorph/2006/08/29/reflections_inspired_by_yet_another_wear)
Yes, I'm a Gentoo developer. And yes, I do think it's disheartening that Gentoo has been having a rocky time lately. But I wouldn't call us at our lowest point.
Looks like you conveniently overlooked to gather all the facts, Ladislav. Like our Council Meeting Summary: http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_143312.xml
Let me clarify a few things. First, Daniel's departure: he wasn't entirely in the right either, and I say this as a supporter and defender of him. He even admitted that he was very vocal to the point of annoying other developers; he strongly defended his views. He departed because he felt that he didn't want to be associated with an organization that permitted personal attacks on developers, such as what happened to Diego (flameeyes) -- at least the Council and Developer Relations are working to see what they can do to change this, so that they're more proactive instead of reactive.
Point 2: Ciaran is not a developer; he has been kicked out of Gentoo twice, banned from forums and various IRC channels for his personality. Your article makes it sound like he is, or else the bit about "current developers who are so quick to attack him" makes it sound like it, and should probably be backed up with proper references. I participated in that thread in realtime, and no one was actually very quick to attack Daniel, save one or two people.
Point 3: Your tirade against the organizational structure is complete BS, to put it frankly. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3921418.html#3921418 -- it's not an organizational thing; changing our structure will not help, as it has no real bearing. What developers need to see and feel and *know* is that bodies like DevRel and Conflict Resolution have their back when something happens, and even more, we need to be in an environment where the personal attacks don't happen in the first place. That's about creating a different kind of culture, and it'll take the willing effort of every single developer to make that happen. See the rest of my posts in that forum thread I linked.
To quote, "It's an internal issue. It's a people issue. We (the developers) need to be able to trust devrel, because none of us particularly enjoy working in an environment in which anything said or done to you is permitted. What the hell kind of culture is that? Who wants to work in an abusive environment? We don't, and we want to know that the governing bodies won't stand for it either."
Point 4: Social contracts -- well, thankfully DevRel are looking at this very issue; we do have policies and guidelines in place, but they need to be re-examined and improved. More to the point, developers need to be aware that we have them and that they will be enforced.
Point 5: 'As such, Gentoo has become a distribution without any clear goals, without the drive to implement new ideas, and without the ability to deliver products that its users want"
-- Bull_shit_. FUD in its purest, most vitriolic form, whether you intended it or not. "Without the drive to implement new ideas" -- do me the courtesy of asking the project heads (if not each developer personally) themselves what they've been doing lately, before making such a statement. There's never a moment when the developers are *not* innovating, when they're not creating something new and amazing, even if it's in subtle small ways that end up shaping the future of the distribution. We have the drive -- when developers have lost the drive, they retire. Fresh developers eager to implement their own ideas are brought in. It's a constant cycle. "Without the ability to deliver products..." Bull. We deliver all the flexibility you can ask for, and everything you don't ask for. That's our goal -- flexibility. (http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/nightmorph/2007/02/27/it_s_not_about_choice)
I'd suggest that you find out what *you* *want* before petulantly declaring that you don't get it.
Point 6: "developer turnover" is *not* at an all time high, it's just more visible in the departures of 4 or 5 higher profile developers in a period of a month or so. kloeri, the devrel leader, repeatedly emphasizes this on the mailing lists and IRC every time one of us developers mistakenly gripes about "developer turnover", as he's the one who handles departures & welcomes the many, many new developers to Gentoo. You've simply no idea what the numbers are for departures and new recruits; even I don't -- but I've a better idea since I at least look at bugzilla to get an idea. Developers join, developers leave. I'm sad when guys like drobbins, metalgod, and flameeyes leave citing the "environment is the problem", but this is in no way connected to an imaginary "higher rate of retiring developers". To me, that's a challenge to preserve this distro that I love to work for -- what can *I* do to make it better, who's *with* me and will join me in this task; who do I have to talk to to create the best possible professional and personal relationships?
I've written about the state of Gentoo before, and I'm disappointed that to some extent, the situation is in some ways exactly how it was back then: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/nightmorph/2006/12/01/the_fubar_is_killing_me
All that being said, I'm replying to the article because I'd like to see you do a better job of reporting, Ladislav. If you can't talk to our Public Relations or Developer relations teams (http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/), then please don't bother reporting about Gentoo at all. Because you've yet to get anything right, and this is frankly another example of shoddy reporting on the state of Gentoo. Try emailing the points of contact first to get a better picture -- yeah, I know I'm on the inside, so I have a much different perspective. But perspective is one thing; misinformed, factless, unchecked, lurid tabloid-style "articles" are another. Your articles weren't always so disappointing.
Signed, an unhappy DistroWatch regular reader.
3 • mint (by rjm on 2007-03-12 11:18:27 GMT from United States)
i used mint 2.2 for about two weeks. i just couldn't get used to the new menu "slab". it has been replaced with ubuntu 6.10. i'd rather go through a few hoops to get all of my hardware to work properly than to live with another re-package.
4 • Mint & Gentoo (by eodchop@ on 2007-03-12 11:19:34 GMT from United States)
Mint is a great distro. Using Ubuntu under the hood, they really got it right this time. Its amazing how fast it shot up the hit list. My favorite part is the artwork. Ubuntu default brown is old and wearing. You can only polish brown so much. Its still brown. Bianca's default blueish-green was very pleasing on the eye. Maybe a little too Winbloze Vista like for some, but i liked it.
I can remember not too long ago when Gentoo was in the top 5! These days its 12 and falling like a rock. I was hoping Daniel Robbins could breathe some new life into this dying distro, but i guess not. Its sad to see his departure.
5 • Freespite & Linux Mint (by jcsoh on 2007-03-12 11:25:00 GMT from Malaysia)
I have use linux for slightly more than 1 year. I started off with Mepis before switching to Freespire, mainly because at that time as a totaly new user it has a more "window like" feel (it was important then but not now.) I haven't really used Mint but I had check out their their last few releases including Bianca. Before Bianca, I felt that Mint was just a remastered Ubuntu. However,Bianca is a worth while effort.Mainly what I dislike about Ubuntu & Kubuntu is that they dont auto mount my hard disk partitions (running from a live cd) and there doesnt seems to be any icons or easy commands to do so. I never tried to install because of this. However , if I recalled correctly , Bianca auto mounts all my hard disk partitions. I am waiting for Mint KDE editions.
6 • RE: 2 Yet another disappointing example of "reporting" (by ladislav on 2007-03-12 11:26:46 GMT from Taiwan)
Your post merely confirms what I said in my story: you guys spend far too much time flaming and abusing other people than doing any serious work. The only way you can change my mind is if you get back to coding and bug-fixing - not by mindless attacks on everybody who dares to criticise your beloved project. Gentoo is rapidly descending into an irrelevant distribution, but if you still prefer not to see it, then it's not my fault. I only wanted to get you guys to open your eyes before it's too late.
7 • Future of DW (by Ninad on 2007-03-12 11:29:59 GMT from United States)
I read the arguments that there are many linux sites giving daily news of happenings in the linux world. DW weekly does the same but presents a synopsis of the weekly events and happenings.
As such it becomes much easier to read rather than wading to various sites and keeping track of any new distro released or which has become popular or an old distro which goes down in the rankings.
And you know what! every Monday when I read DW weekly it is an inspiration in itself to try out new distros and learn more about linux.
In short no changes are needed to DW weekly. Keep it going as it is.
8 • gentoo (by rubberduck on 2007-03-12 11:32:13 GMT from Sweden)
Its sad whats going on with my former favorite distro. Something went bad after Daniel left and since i have had problem using it. And finally left it behind. The fun of going through the hole installation from scratch was a big thing taking a weekend to fiddle around and get it the way i wanted it. Time after another, i stumbled around things when learning to program Gnu/Linux apps saying i been there! I done that! because i have been figgin around in gentoo. Then something happened, suddenly i came across a hole lot of installation probs (same putah) and it has been a buggy business taking the real fun out of it from around that point when he left. It has gone from bad to worse with the installer. No dirty hands there. I really hope they can get their act together because it was a wonderful way of putting your distro together, leaving all the choices to you!
9 • Gentoo (by Phlosten on 2007-03-12 11:33:31 GMT from Australia)
Gentoo is one of the few distributions I have not run at some point to test it out so I don't have any first hand experience with it to really rate it. But I have run into a lot of people in the last few weeks who are abandoning it in favour of alternatives.
It certainly sounds like Gentoo is on a downward trend in the popularity stakes. I certainly don't look too well on pointless bickering.
10 • Great Article! (by Phlosten on 2007-03-12 11:35:05 GMT from Australia)
Forgot to mention....Great article ladislav, keep up the good work!
11 • RE: 6 (by nightmorph on 2007-03-12 11:35:45 GMT from United States)
I don't mind if you criticize Gentoo, even if that's not apparent from what I wrote. :)
What I *do* mind is when you don't bother to properly research your stuff. There's a very clear difference between a well-researched criticism of something and one that's not, and yours failed to show any evidence that you'd really done any checking. By all means, prove me wrong on this account.
I appreciate the spirit in which you wrote the article though ("I only wanted to get you guys to open your eyes before it's too late"). There are plenty of devs who have been following the current rocky situation quite closely, and who've been offering ideas to devrel and offering to help carry out those ideas....really, we're in no danger of shutting down.
It's hardly a mindless attack either -- I discovered that I actually could write an intelligent, in-depth response to this article while also writing up the new 2007.0 release handbooks. I'm not one to flame and abuse people -- however, this story does need to be taken to task; it's not what anyone would truly consider good journalism. I'm at peace anyway; I continue to plug away at the docs despite the inter-dev squabbles and the half-baked stories in the press. I addressed you because I cared enough to see that you get a clearer picture of what's going on. If this doesn't change your perspective, well, that's fine enough. I'll continue *to work from the inside* to make Gentoo a better place; eventually, that *will* shine through to the outside. If your perspective still doesn't change after finding out the facts, then so be it -- I care that you at least properly investigate the matter. Draw your own conclusions, be they positive or negative, but do the Gentoo project the courtesy of *well-written and researched* press, whether bad press or good press.
12 • KDE on old hardware (by Marius on 2007-03-12 11:51:30 GMT from Romania)
Many Linux distros are pretty slow. Kubuntu is one example of this. Debian has always been slow and it's speed never compared to Slackware or Gentoo for instance. I'm not an expert but maybe it's because of them being i386 compiled or maybe it's because of the decision they take when building the distro.
For old hardware while still running KDE ( or Gnome ) I strongly recomend Frugalware which is i686 compiled and very light in general. Ark might also be a good choice , I haven't tried it. Slackware based distros like Vector Linux are also pretty fast. What I'd stay away from on older hardware because they lack the speed IMO are Debian based distros , Suse and Fedora.
This is just my personal opinion , yours might be different.
13 • RE:2,6,11 - Gentoo and the "press" (by Daniel on 2007-03-12 11:52:59 GMT from France)
I read DWW because of articles like this ("Gentoo in crisis"). I don't want to get the opinions of one or another side of the conflict. Ladislav describes a general feeling about problems in Gentoo. I don't want to know who's wrong or right, the information is that something's not OK with this distro and I really appreciate that Ladislav tries to alert the community (in or out of the project) about the problems.
And nightmorph please don't try to judge if article is good or not first of all it's commentary not an article, and you shoud get it like this. I remember the same reaction from Mandriva when a critic commentary about their management was written in DWW, but Mandriva has reacted differently by changing their attitude towards the community of their free products.
Thank You Ladislav for another great DWW !
14 • Linux Mint (by Jordi on 2007-03-12 11:59:32 GMT from Spain)
I've been using Linux Mint (Bianca) for a couple of weeks now and I must say I am impressed. First thing, because it works: I had tried to install Ubuntu 6.10 in my HP but it didn't detect my screen resolution properly, so I changed to Kubuntu which to my surprise it did (¿?). But then, after using it for some days, I noticed several bugs in the system that were quite annoying, the worst of all being that my computer was unable to shut down. So I decided to give Mint a try: excellent. I could access my Windows partition since the beginning (one wonders why that is so hard in Ubuntu), the multimedia codecs were there (therefore no need for Automatix) and the whole design concept is simply wonderful. I also like the menu structure and, quite frankly, it's like installing Ubuntu but with all the post-install configuration issues solved from moment zero. Worth a try.
The only distro that could top it (if you're into Ubuntu, of course) could be Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, but I wonder why it is not listed here in Distrowatch. Too unofficial to be included, perhaps? Anyone tried it? If so, is it really better than Mint?
15 • Gentoo (by John T on 2007-03-12 12:13:24 GMT from United States)
Its almost painful to watch the gentoo distro ripping itself apart. its such a unique and powerful system.
16 • Mandriva has changed. (by Michael scb on 2007-03-12 12:18:38 GMT from Malaysia)
I have started to see a change in Mandriva's attitude. I hope Mandriva will get better. By the way, may be Mandriva shouldn't
be so direct.
I think the 'Free' can be changed to 'Complimentary'.
As for Gentoo. I've never tried it; it's too complicated and time
consuming. However, i did notice the anaemia.
I think superficial critics are sometimes intentional in order to
cause 'virtual' awakening rather than 'rude' awakening !
17 • KDE on older hardware (by Russell Kowald at 2007-03-12 12:20:43 GMT from Australia)
My machine is a Celeron 533mhz with 320meg of ram and is happily and smoothly running PCLinux OS 0.93a. Im looking forward to the final release of 2007 to see how it goes on it
18 • Linux Mint as MSreplacement (by skg on 2007-03-12 12:22:29 GMT from United States)
I switched over a friends brand new Toshiba laptop to Linux Mint (he was rightly concerned about viruses and malware - they ate his MS desktop PC). Linux Mint works great for laptops because of the built in wireless support - and it just looks great to boot. IMO, this is THE perfect distribution to replace MS for non-gamer users. It's one CD and you can skip Automatix (for the most part).
My inlaws, parents, etc, don't use any real functionality besides web, email, or photo management. They flip when they see that they can use their broadband to listen to clessical music streams from some station in Geneva.
My advice is to carve out a partition on your parents home PC and put Mint on it, making it the default boot. No more tech support calls!
19 • Gentoo/Mint (by dthacker on 2007-03-12 12:23:49 GMT from United States)
This is one of the points of Ubuntu's Code of Conduct:
"Be respectful. The Ubuntu community and its members treat one another with respect. Everyone can make a valuable contribution to Ubuntu. We may not always agree, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behaviour and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It's important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one. We expect members of the Ubuntu community to be respectful when dealing with other contributors as well as with people outside the Ubuntu project, and with users of Ubuntu."
The CoC is one of the biggest reasons that I am willing to work with and advocate Ubuntu. IMO, it means that the people who volunteer as developers, documentors, marketers and bug triagers will be treated with respect. So far it's worked. I hope Gentoo will consider adopting a similar code. Gentoo is a fantastic body of work, and I would hate to see it falter.
Mint Linux looks very tasty, but as an Ubuntu Nebraska Local Community Team member, I'm committed to using the Ubuntu family of distros, and helping make them better. I'm not likely to use or install Mint, except to review it. I congratulate the Mint folks on helping to spread Linux, though.
Thanks for another nice wrap-up, Ladislav
Dave
20 • Gentoo (by Eric on 2007-03-12 12:29:51 GMT from Canada)
I like Gentoo for one reason only, and thats because it was created in the footsteps of FreeBSD but using the Linux kernel, and I believe that Daniel Robbins should completely take out ALL developers he does not consider worthy and use HIS trusted people that hes worked closely with during his development. Why is he being such a wuss and letting other people take his creation away!??!!!?? If he created the distrobution because none other fit what he wanted, then why let others change his vision, its HIS creation, if they want a different path, let all the other stupid power hungry dumbass developers that arent worthy of being a Gentoo dev or arent a useful dev with respect for their own adopted distro, and FORK and start their own damn distro, let them destroy their OWN, not yours, since ultimately you SHOULD be deciding its direction and output. Also some VERY NICE distros do depend on the NORMAL function of gentoo, ala Sabayon, so Daniel if your reading this I suggest you....
TAKE GENTOO BACK AND KEEP GENTOO ON YOUR OWN *ORIGIONAL* PATH AND DUMP THE ONES WHO ARE ONLY WHINING LITTLE POWER HUNGRY SCRIPT KIDDIES WHO BRAG ABOUT BEING A GENTOO USER THAT NEVER HELP ANYONE SINCE THEIR EGO IS SO HUGE ITS IMPLODING UP THEIR OWN ASS
*sorry for all those caps but I yell when I'm pissed and wondering why the projects founders are being overruled
Also on a lighter note, I REALLY hope a new release (or beta or RC) of DesktopBSD will come out soon. It would rock PC-BSD I believe, as they have the best FreeBSD ports manager GUI ever!! ;)
And thank you Ladislav for not changing your schedule for our beloved Distrowatch Weekly!! :D It _does_ matter to your avid and weekly readers that you managed to influence on helping see the beautiful FOSS light, and all of us you helped jump ship to either BSD or GNU/Linux. I was one of those of who I speak, who first used Arch Linux and now I use FreeBSD and the former dual boot.... yes just because of the assistance of this site, the greatest gathering of Release and package tracking ever :)
Thanks Ladislav!! And enjoy fellow DW readers, peace
21 • Old Hardware distro and regarding Gentoo (by Juan Camilo Rozo on 2007-03-12 12:31:17 GMT from Colombia)
Personally, I think Zenwalk is the best distro out there for old hardware. It's i386 based (which is good if the idea is to run it in old harware), Slackware based (thus surprisingly fast), and has just enough eye candy to make it easy to use even for novice users. It's package system is still compatible with classic Slackware (unlike Frugalware or KateOS), but it also checks dependencies. It's XFCE based, but it has a KDE package and a GNOME package in its repos and both work absolutely great!
Also, wanted to add my personal view on the Gentoo stuff... I'm not a Gentoo users, never will be... Gentoo is a distro for people who actually need to work under the hood, and it obviously has a right to exist under that category. I'm just a common desktop user and thus it's not for me. However, each time I've approached it I always get the impression that it is run by a bunch of programmers who don't accept criticism, and think too much of themselves (that's just my impression; I mean, I even read in some kind of FAQ something like "Are you going to make things easier at some point? Answer: go to /dev/null"). And I do think the proof is what happened here; Ladislav reports, gives his opinion, and immediately he gets a long reply from a Gentoo developer actually saying it's alse false... according to them they don't have problems and their distro is perfect...I suppose that's why they've been loosing popularity...
22 • Linux Mint (by Rich on 2007-03-12 12:37:21 GMT from United States)
I've been using Linux Mint since I first saw 2.0 Bea announced here on DW. I remember that the website crashed shortly after, but I was able to get the download link through DW. I was an Ubuntu user who thought that Mint would just be an easier way for me to install Linux on "switcher" computers. There would be no need to install basic codecs and don't have to deal with the "Eww, brown" stuff. After reading the forums for awhile I saw the extra stuff that Clem was putting into it, mintWifi, mintDisk, etc. and was very impressed. I downloaded 2.2 Bianca the day it came out and have been using it ever since. To sum up, Linux Mint may have started out as a repackaged Ubuntu, but I believe it has become a whole lot more.
23 • Linux Mint 2.2 (by AllenTang on 2007-03-12 12:38:15 GMT from Malaysia)
I have used Linux Mint since 2.1 which I like very much with out of the box support for my M-Life laptop. With Linux Mint 2.2 Bianca the team have improve on it further with the same out of the box support with wireless, sound, flashplayer and java not to mention the wonderful softwares on their repositories. It's a breeze to use, I have run PCLinux OS and SimplyMEPIS and to me Linux Mint beat them.
Thank you guys! Keep up the terrific work !
24 • Linux Mint (by lefty.crupps at 2007-03-12 12:39:05 GMT from United States)
When first showing someone Linux via a LiveCD, I am torn if it should include the multimedia functionality out of the box, as does Linux Mint, or if it should include the beauty of a KDE Desktop such as Kubuntu (although, not the most beautiful default KDE, whats with the purple?).
Coming from Windows, I suppose that Mint's default grey/blue GNOME would be acceptable for most users, but to me it seems so clunky and... well, GNOME-ish. But other people seem to be impressed with the LiveCD *concept* and Linux's existence more than being impressed with the preinstalled multimedia codecs (maybe they just expect this functionality after having a home box collect software for a few years?). Often we never get around to discussing these codecs, but I do like knowing that if they try anything at home they won't be immediately discouraged. I do get a GNOME startup error though...
Thanks, as always, for a great read!
25 • Gentoo (by Fergy on 2007-03-12 12:46:53 GMT from Netherlands)
Thanks for writing such an informative rebuttal to Ladislav nightmorph. I really appreciate the time you took to write this and it really adds to Distrowatch Weekly. I think that Ladislav's point of view really is what most outsiders(from Gentoo) think about Gentoo.
26 • Distros for old PC's (by Gordon Latimer on 2007-03-12 12:55:16 GMT from United States)
I have found PCLinuxOS MiniMe to run on PC's with PII 166 Mhz processor quite easily and recommend this for old PC'S
27 • Linux Mint (by kansihka on 2007-03-12 12:57:29 GMT from Italy)
Hey, Mint it's not just Ubuntu with codecs! ;-)
No, really, it's not just that. At least, since version 2.1, and 2.2 (Bianca) is SOOOOO much better.
It has style. It works from the start like no other distro (except PCLOS). As someone just said, you don't need no afterwork. I used Bianca in my laptop, and now I'm using it on a brand new PC with SCSI hd and stuff, and there was NO hassle. It has a rapid release cycle. The community is very nice, and it's growing (and not so slowly).
Most of all... It's GREEN! ;)
(Yep, there are 2 themes, blue and green, but blue is sooooo overused...)
I can't help but say: do yourself a favor and try it!
P.S.: LinuxMint KDE- and XFCE- editions are underway!
28 • LinuxMint 2.2 [Bianca]: why? (by capricornus on 2007-03-12 12:58:01 GMT from Netherlands)
Around X-mas I tried about 15 distro's on several pc's: and old ViaC3, Athlon M 2000, and several Sempron 2600. I wanted FF and OOo, preferably the latest versions, and I wanted Videolan to play somafm/groovesalad24.pls without problems. I preferred to be treated neither like a child with dummy icons, nor like a nerd who knows it all, but like a plain visitor ready to try what is offered.
I will and want not to initiate a flame, just to testifie what's left after 3 months of trial and error and some forbidden exclamations.
I started with Ubuntu, but then, no internetradio, and ugly colours that make me think of something else than computers. Kubuntu the same thing, I felt like a one-legged athlete, but I liked the blue. Freespire and VectorLinux I liked, but Freespire is not stable yet and Vector gives me problems finding and installing software, and the same counts for all Mandriva-based and other DSL's.
On the ViaC3 only Xubuntu does the thing without much slowing down, the internet radio works and FF shows me the world. No Ubuntu-based distro will install itself on this machine...
On all other pc's LinuxMint 2.1 was quickly accepted, installed and later on replaced by the much easier to handle 2.2 version, and in the mean time, (WinXP) NTFS-partitions are easy to read and write on. Software is easily found and installed, and removed too. Much less energy is used, I can tell: the ventilator of the Athlon hardly works, while with the same programs running onder WInXP, it is always blowing heat.
Next chapter now is introducing Bianca to my family in dual-boot: it's intuitiveness and design is inviting. It's ease is soothing. It's completeness is convincing. OOo is still unknown but has to be discovered. FF is the same under WInXP and Linux. Thunderbird also, pity that MozBackup is lacking under Linux.
Problems left: a printer served by an older PIII under WinXP is adressed but not linked. A NDAS-disk (Ximeta) is not adressable since the (Ubuntu-)driver is not installable. Strange. The PcakardBell-SD-card-reader is not recognized: I have to link my SD-cards through a seperate USB-reader. And last but not least: how to edit film, recorded under the .VOB-format?
But that's it. Everyone in the family is making the switch the easy lasy way, but at the end of the year, I'm sure that Bianca will have won the hearts.
29 • LinSpire/Mint/Gentoo Flame Edition (by Sam Avery-Quinn on 2007-03-12 12:58:19 GMT from United States)
Good to see another great issue of DWW. I think it remains to be seen if Linux Mint and Freespire can peacefully and productively coexist in the 'Buntuverse. Considering Mint is a built-from-the-ground-up derivative of Ubuntu while Freespire is yet another transformation of Linspire, I have to wonder at what point does Kevin Carmony's creation start to look like a Linux Mint doppleganger?
Gentoo: If one of the great things about Linux distributions are their ability to change and adapt to circumstances, and we users have been witness to a number of developers creating "distro forks" or unhappy developers creating new distros based on their work with a project that became a hostile environment in recent years (Kanotix, Ulteo)... If you're Daniel Robbins, why not re-create Gentoo? Certainly there has been a lot of development surrounding the Gentoo base while the original project sputters (hello Sabayon, Slax, et al). Drawing on the original Gentoo work and the contributions of these other great distros would, when mixed with friendly developers with a focused mission (good point about the lack of "user" in the Gentoo mission statement) make for a great distro. Perhaps call it Gentoo Linux and let the original distro call itself the Gentoo Linux "Flame Edition" ala Mandriva's edition titlings...
30 • Re: 13 (by Christian on 2007-03-12 13:06:04 GMT from Germany)
"I read DWW because of articles like this ("Gentoo in crisis"). I don't want to get the opinions of one or another side of the conflict. Ladislav describes a general feeling about problems in Gentoo. I don't want to know who's wrong or right, the information is that something's not OK with this distro and I really appreciate that Ladislav tries to alert the community (in or out of the project) about the problems.
And nightmorph please don't try to judge if article is good or not first of all it's commentary not an article, and you shoud get it like this. I remember the same reaction from Mandriva when a critic commentary about their management was written in DWW, but Mandriva has reacted differently by changing their attitude towards the community of their free products."
Nightmorph just addressed wrong facts that form up a even more negative image of the situation. There are problems yes, but we (yes, I am a dev, too) don't just sit around flaming each other. The majority does their job and fixes bugs, improves the tree. Don't expect revolutions every release, most development is evolution which improves over time.
31 • Linux Mint 2.2 (by Tony on 2007-03-12 13:15:43 GMT from Italy)
I've tried mint a couple of times. I think as a distro it's wonderful, the only thing missing in my mind is being able to configure raid and lvm at install time. If this was included I would probably switch tomorrow.
32 • Linux Mint and wireless WPA (by Rachelle on 2007-03-12 13:24:46 GMT from United Kingdom)
Most of mint bianca is wondefulbut support for USB wireless is not as good as advertised. I am trying to get a Belkin usb wireless that works fine in Windows but not in Mint. I asked for help in setting up WPA but my post went unanswered on the Mint forum. I will admit it did not work on ubuntu or mepis either. It hasn't worked on suse since 9.0. This is on a laptop I want wireless but can't seem to get it working with Mint Wifi, NDIS wrapper or built in drivers. Sigh I want a simple easy wireless connection.
33 • Gentoo woes (by starbuck on 2007-03-12 13:25:46 GMT from Finland)
Hopefully Ladislav is wrong in his evaluation of Gentoo's current state. Public disputes on the mailing lists can't usually stop developers from coding but continuing quarrels can decrease their motivation in the long run. Volunteer developers often contribute to their projects because this allows them to "scratch their itch" and if the fun disappears, they tend to leave and start scratching some other itch instead.
I'm not a Gentoo user but I respect what they have achieved. I know that Gentoo is the most popular source-based distro; it has a large and knowledgeable developer and user community, first-rate documentation and helpful forums; it has a huge package collection and it supports many architectures; it is known for its technical excellence and flexibility that gives users unusual power and control over their installed system. To put it short, Gentoo is GNU/Linux at its best.
While I wish all the best for Gentoo in the future, I'd also like to remind people that Gentoo is not the only source-based distro out there. There are, at least, Source Mage GNU/Linux (my personal favourite), Lunar Linux and CRUX, which all have merits of their own. In general, source-based distros can be great fun if you want full control over your system and if you've got the patience to compile your packages and to dig out information on how GNU/Linux systems work.
34 • Old PCs (by Luciano Vernaschi on 2007-03-12 13:29:00 GMT from Italy)
Rather than an old PC, my need was to find a good distro for a VirtualBox-based virtual machine with 256MB of RAM and 3.5GB of HD. I tried Fedora Core 6 with XFCE and the result is very good and usable: see http://www.cromoteca.com/my/virtualdev.png where I'm using NetBeans and Firefox 2 on it. I just installed Fedora and disabled some services I never need.
35 • No subject (by Freespire & Mint on 2007-03-12 13:31:10 GMT from Brazil)
I run Freespire since the first official release and I'm running 2.0 Alpha1. Although some annoying features (the real menu.lst is menu-local.lst!!!, fstab is built by a thing they call jiffymount, account management is rather eccentric, edited KMenu to make it Windows-like, and a few others), as soon as you get used to it (or edit whatever is possible!!!), you start loving it. Great graphics work, great community, truly desktop-oriented. Everything just works, isn't that wonderful?
I'm running Mint Bianca for about 02 weeks. All in all, it's a damn of a distro. The only thing I dislike is this confusing "widescreen" menu. Editing the menus doesn't work for me, maybe because my installations defaults do Brazilian Portuguese. The graphics are great, you get good support from the forums. Good.
36 • Freespire & Mint (by ceti on 2007-03-12 13:39:41 GMT from Brazil)
#35:
Subject : Freespire & Mint
Submitted by : ceti
Sorry, boys...
37 • Distrowatch Weekly (by Scott Robbins on 2007-03-12 13:41:54 GMT from United States)
I just wanted to add my voice to those who are supporting Distrowatch Weekly. Please leave it in place. As has been said, it's extremely useful in getting a quick summary of what's going on in the OSS world.
I think the majority of your readers realize how much time it takes, and do appreciate all your hard work on our behalf.
38 • RE34 Virtual GNU/linuxes (by dbrion on 2007-03-12 13:43:14 GMT from France)
I could VMplay a Mandriva 2007 with KDE, 190 M virtaual RAM. though slow, it could compile (added g95 + some sources headers) and run R (at least toy problems, R is memory greedy) and Scilab, NCAR utilities and some propriatary Linux binaries (source is not avalaible , but I have the executables). One could start Konqueror while monting 2 USB keys (it was a mistake)... I had 4 G disk, with ~64M swap...
Of course, I did not install what I did not need (Mandriva 's installer is good or I'm accustomd) as I have no infinite disks...
The only trouble I saw was with Mandrivas "policy", who does not ship vim with syntax coloring by default (it was in 2006, where is the progress?) (a virus under Windows can cause a one day loss of time, in the worst case; I saw applications being debugged for 3 months because of a misspeeling).... I know it is difficult with transparency, but what's the use of transparency???
39 • LinuxMint,Gentoo,etc (by RammsteinAddict on 2007-03-12 13:46:03 GMT from United States)
Since Gentoo is an uber-geek distro, i doubt 95% of the linux community cares whether it lives or dies,me included.
LinuxMint,along with PCLinuxOS and Mepis, are the only distros that
a newbie coming over from Gatesville should be looking to install.
That way there is a pretty good chance they will stay with linux.
Given the excellence of Mepis and LinuxMint,both based on Ubuntu,
what is the relevance of Freespire with it's annoying,blinking CNR icon.?
40 • Toy desktop nirvana in the box! (by berlin on 2007-03-12 13:47:42 GMT from United States)
I've been using Linux for about a year now, ever since I saw Mepis running on a friend's wife's laptop (another example of a Linux junkie keeping in touch with Linux developments vicariosly through an unsuspecting spouse). Years previously, I tried Debian out, but having been accustomed to Windows, the Linux experience never grabbed me (X was still in diapers). I saw Mepis running and wow was I impressed. The Linux desktop experience had really come a long way! For a couple of days, I even thought the fishies in the taskbar were cool. Slowly, I started getting back into Linux. I've tried a number of distros on an old hand-built 400MHz PII over the course of the year. I heard about Ubuntu and its siblings but none were comfortable with my old Voodoo 3 video card (remember when this card was the cat's meow??). Sure, I figured out how to make it work. But somehow Mepis (which is based on Ubuntu) had no problems with the Voodoo 3!! I thought, how could this be? I tried out many distros after that. I got annoyed by having to edit config files manually. I just wanted a distro to work out-of-the-box. I've been reading reviews of distros as much as I can, and have noticed that there are tons of people out there who want the same thing: Out of the box. They want a Windows-ish desktop experience that just works. By this, I mean that (1) a lot of people want something like Windows (with a similar out-of-the-box experience) but don't want to use Windows itself, because (2) they know that their desktop experience could and should be better than it is using Windows. Out-of-the-box... honestly, I am getting tired of seeing this expression. When I see it, I think, oh look, another exasperated Windows user (like me), longing to find desktop nirvana. Ug. So, you see, there is a giant heard of us Windabeasts coming through Linuxland, hungry for a desktop that is robust and innovative, yet fast and simple to use. I tried Gentoo. If nothing else, it was handsome. It looked professional. I felt important just staring at the logo on my wallpaper. But damn was it a pain to maintain! Sometimes I'm in the mood to learn and tinker with an OS, but mostly I just want to use it to actually do desktop kinds of things!! Besides, my little putt-putt PC just couldn't hack it. Actually, I have given up bothering to install any more Linux distros on the ol' PII. Not only because I'm finding very few that distros that will run on it well, but because running modern distros on ancient hardware is not a forward-looking mindset when it comes to future development of the Linuix desktop experience. That said, I'm not saying that Gentoo or wobbly windows are the future of Linux, because I honestly do not think that the types of innovations they represent are what me and my fellow Windabeasts want from a Linux desktop experience. As much as I enjoy installing a new distro once or twice a week, I would like to know that there will come a time in the near future when I will only want to install a new distro once or twice *a year*!!
41 • Freespire/Mint (by Arpad Gered on 2007-03-12 13:48:56 GMT from Austria)
I don't think that Freespire and Linux Mint are comparable. Nor do I think that their goals are the same.
Where Freespire is a "regular" distribution with longer release cycles, upstream version freezes etc, Linux Mint forgoes stabilizing the core and instead focuses on 1) adding certain features and functionalities by default and 2) adding newer versions of certain applications while having very short release cycles. And point 2) is why I so love Linux Mint.
It remains to be seen, where Linux Mint 3.x (based on Feisty, there won't be a 2.3) will lead us and whether the teams focus will once again change (or rather expand). We mustn't forget that the project originally started out as a "non-free-stuff-enabled" version of Ubuntu.
And as for KDE: one can always install kubuntu-desktop from the ubuntu-repositories or one can wait for the Bianca KDE Edition (no release date set, yet).
By the way: I'm using Kubuntu 6.10 but I have the Bianca repository enabled for some updates application, most notably OpenOffice 2.1.
42 • Gentoo (by fatcop on 2007-03-12 14:01:57 GMT from Australia)
Well I think it is very rash indeed to go crying the demise of Gentoo cause of a bit of infighting. Like the last commenter said, evolution not revolution every release. I personally am very grateful they have been concentrating on that, and I'd say they have been coding a plenty, rather than allegedly spending all their time flaming.
Gentoo is a good distro and will continue to be. Other distro's are getting a bit more of the star treatment for desktop use, and deservedly so. But it has nothing to do with what Gentoo offers many users (eg. meta-distro and mega-customising). We use them for most of our servers at work and the Ops guys run it for the desktops (dual boot with Windows of course ;)
Nightmorph was as much humanly defensive as Ladislav was sensationalist, but I think Nightmorph had a point that some more objective facts rather than some seemingly subjective conjecture would have been more appropriate.
Statements like "...without the ability to deliver products that its users want" are just flame-bait. Users want it all !!!. Gentoo is sticking to its goal as an excellent meta-distro.
43 • Re: 28 (by Philip Nilsson on 2007-03-12 14:19:44 GMT from Sweden)
"Much less energy is used, I can tell: the ventilator of the Athlon hardly works, while with the same programs running onder WInXP, it is always blowing heat."
I'd interpret it this way: You fan is not being controlled, and your processor (which is defective as it comes with a fan, real hardware does not need cooling) is about to burst into flames.
44 • Debian Etch making progress (by BlueEyes on 2007-03-12 14:20:19 GMT from Germany)
Release-critical bug count ('number concerning the next release') for Debian Etch is now down to 65. It used to be over 100 just a few weeks ago. If this trend continues, Etch will be released sooner than most people realize. :)
45 • Gentoo / Daniel Robbins (by Epaminondas on 2007-03-12 14:25:00 GMT from United States)
Ladislav,
In your otherwise thorough biographical sketch of Daniel Robbins, you neglect to mention that Daniel quit Gentoo to go to work for Microsoft.
For many in the Linux community, that was quite a shocker at the time. For those who are anti-Microsoft, it may have seemed like inconsistent behaviour. Erratic.
Even as a betrayal.
For others - it was no big deal. A man has to eat.
For me - as someone who did not use Gentoo - it just seemed kinda odd.
I felt that it was an unfortunate career move. That he was burning his bridges to the Linux community behind him. And that he would never be trusted in the Linux community, again.
For good reason.
As to his recent attempt to return to Gentoo, well -
You know - it's as if the founder of the FBI quit andwent to work for the KGB. Then being surprised when he is not welcomed back later to the FBI with open arms.
Hey - those bridges have already long been burned.
You might want to include that part of Daniel Robbins' life in your biographical sketch. As is, this looks like a pretty big - intentional - ommision on your part.
Oh – as to the future of Distrowatch - I like Distrowatch just as it is.
Please don't change a thing - unless you choose to.
Best regards,
Epaminondas
46 • linux mint (by Jason at 2007-03-12 14:33:56 GMT from United States)
I tried out Linux mint and I really liked it. I thought they did good design. It's the distro I'd probably tell a new users to use so they could get stuff working out of the box. Although I really dislike the new "minty" interface, I think it's completely awful. There original interface, a blue version of Unbuntu was really good and quite an improvement over Unbuntu's brown. Now it looks like a copy of SuSE and I don't find it appealing at all. Either way it didn't move me off of using BLAG.
47 • Gentoo, Mint (by Pepik on 2007-03-12 14:35:44 GMT from United Kingdom)
First, without taking sides, let me say that Distrowatch is one of the few Linux news sources that have taken strong editorial stances towards Linux distros. Ladislav has been right about Mandriva, for example. Too often there is the feeling that you can't criticise a free distro or volunteer developers. You can. Even free products need to compete, and some are going to fail (again, not saying Gentoo is failing or will fail). Linux needs survival of the fittest, just like commercial software.
As for Mint, I tried it due to supposedly good wireless tools and quickly abandoned it. Aside from the fact that a) it is just a Ubuntu rip off, and b) It cuts corners on the GPL, it isn't really any better than getting Ubuntu and running easyubuntu or automatix. There is no useful support in the forums and ultimately you will end up going to Ubuntu forums anyway. Why bother, just get Ubuntu.
48 • Ark Linux on old machines (by Osman Breskens on 2007-03-12 14:52:20 GMT from Germany)
I, too, have found Ark Linux through its reputation for working great on older machines. I initially installed it on a K6 500 MHz with 128 MB RAM that no other Linux distro I tried could handle well (Ark outperforms even Xubuntu, which is supposed to target older machines).
By now, I'm running Ark on both the old box (which is primarily my son's) and my faster box (Athlon64 3400+, 2 GB RAM), and I don't think I'm going to try anything else for a while - Ark really does deliver all I need, and is REALLY fast.
49 • 12 (by Anonymous on 2007-03-12 15:04:00 GMT from United States)
I don't think Debian is too slow for old hardware, at least compared to Vector. I've used Sarge and Etch on old machines and, with the exception of OOo, there is no speed problem. In my experience, Debian was probably a little faster than Vector.
I can't say much about Gentoo or Slackware, but those are solutions for only a small percentage of even experienced Linux users. Debian gives you the most packages, stability, no difficulty with dependencies or speed of repositories, and more hardware support.
Debian-based distros such as Ubuntu are definitely slower than Debian, but Debian itself is not slow. You can also change the kernel if you wish.
50 • linux mint (by j1111c on 2007-03-12 15:31:30 GMT from United States)
It just works without hardly any problems for a newbie. Also questions are answered promptly.
Jim
51 • No subject (by dbrion on 2007-03-12 15:46:27 GMT from France)
"Much less energy is used" :
How do you measure energy : with
1)a wattmeter,
2)a data-logger
or
3)the time your unplugged laptop took to starve (it cannot do much harm to {alph order} ext3 or NTFS file systems)?
BTW it depends much on the versions of Linux (and perhaps of Windows, if you want to compare). I read (sorry, I do not remember the link) there were some progresses with Suze and UBUntus. Mandriva did great support int GNU/linux Magazine (in France, mars 2006 which led to spectacular improvements for one of my laptops -the other did not need -). They _announce_ further progresses....
If these "measures " had been taken 2 yrs ago, they would have favored MICROSOFT WINDOWS... even (ça, c'est pour le politiquement correct!!!!) if they had been led in a rigorous, not misleading way...
Anyway, Bianca is not for dichromats....
52 • Freespire & Linux Mint (by Jon Reagan on 2007-03-12 15:49:07 GMT from United States)
I have used both Freespire and Linux Mint, and I must say that I like both. for one, I like what the freespire project has done to personalize KDE, and also the CNR feature. I am guessing that CNR will be included in the next release of Linux Mint, but either way I enjoy the fact that their a proprietaary drivers included in both. Linux Mint has also done a fine job of personalizing GNOME to make it easier to use. I give both distro's a 10 (on a scale of 1 to 10).
53 • Gentoo (by Pinguinus on 2007-03-12 15:50:24 GMT from Finland)
Things in the Gentoo project start strangely to look much like what happened to one of its source-based predecessors predecessor, Sorcerer GNU/Linux, some years ago. Perhaps there's no other way out from the current Gentoo problems than what already happened to Sorcerer? That project was simply forked. Now there are actually three derivatives of it: SourceMage, Lunar & the new Sorcerer. Also, the flame wars between those three groups of developers seem to have mostly settled down now, to the point that the developers of those 3 projects even change ideas again, in a positive manner, as far as I know.
Distributed open source development model has its pros and cons like any other thing in the world. Flame wars between developers is one of the potential problems. It is sure essential for such big scale projects like Gentoo to form some sort of official means, boards and structures to solve those sort of problems, without things ending into endless frustrating flame wars.
If you feel too tired of problems in Gentoo, well, I suggest that you just switch and try the alternatives. It could also give a hint to the current Gentoo leaders that something truly needs to be done.
At least personally I've always found especially Source Mage a very good and interesting source-based distro (Sorcerer and Lunar are not bad either) where also the atmosphere between developers seems quite postive. Too bad that SMGL has relatively litte users and developers. Time to switch? Decide for yourselves.
54 • @ Comm. + #1 (by Synergy6 on 2007-03-12 15:51:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
1) A commentary is like an editorial in any broadsheet, it contains the views of the writer. It doesn't have to be "nice" or "positive", it just has to be thought-provoking. From the vitriolic responses, it looks to have done just that.
2) "If you can't talk to our Public Relations or Developer relations teams, then please don't bother reporting about Gentoo at all."
I found that absolutely hilarious. This is Linux, not a government. Linux doesn't have centralised PR departments through which all statement must be run before printing; people can say what they want. Since when did the free software community start advocating censorship?
3) I like the way we have an article attacking Gentoo's "bitchiness", essentially, and it's replied to by a Gentoo dev... bitching. Is all of Gentoo so sensitive to criticism, or just a few?
4) "tirade" "complete BS" "Bull_shit_. FUD in its purest, most vitriolic form," "petulantly declaring" "shoddy reporting" "misinformed, factless, unchecked, lurid tabloid-style"
Yeah, paragon of balanced reporting yourself :rollseyes:
55 • Cor 51 (by dbrion on 2007-03-12 15:57:40 GMT from France)
51's Subject was Questions 28 ("comparative 'measures'") of a green UBUntu......
56 • Mint & freespire (by EriktheUnready on 2007-03-12 16:00:33 GMT from South Africa)
We installed freespire and was not impressed. Lindows (old linspire would install in 15min- great!) we are still waiting for freespire.... (shame actually, we were hoping)
We test on a range of OEM PC's we build & always look at an easy & quick install, however freesprire had compatibilty issues.
Mint oin the other hand installed reasonably, worked nicely, NICE support, good forums, however it is BUTT ugly!!! (wasn't pretty going to be a feature in ubuntu distro's??)
End users like to be WOW-ed, if I think back to someting like linare..... current distro's dont compare.
Mint has created a president with solid & speedy releases. Really looking forward to the next release.
my 2 cents...
Erik
57 • RE: #32 • Linux Mint and wireless WPA (by lefty.crupps on 2007-03-12 16:02:50 GMT from United States)
WPA support in Linux is really poor. I've yet to see a working tool to connect to a WPA hotspot. I have read about some distros that have their own tool, but none seem to want to work for me. I get the feeling that, generally among wifi/network developers, "wifi is inherently insecure, so if WEP isn't good enough, nothing is." For a geek, I'll buy that, but most people want "more secure" than WEP gives.
I have an old P2/128MB laptop from my parents that I'd love to give back to them, running Linux (KDE please?). But my pops locks down his wireless connection and without WPA support the system just won't work for them. No to mention the fact that Linux takes too long to boot, in their eyes, when Win98 does pretty well on this machine, and can be powered up/down often and quickly. After this, I'll have to take a look at Ark and see if that solves anything. Anyone know if there is a live version?
58 • #54 (by eodchop on 2007-03-12 16:05:59 GMT from United States)
Synergy6 has done a great job in summing up nightmorph's reply. Is it really constructive to respond to an article by completely bitching about it. Perhaps he is part of the problem (nightmorph)
I do wish this distro well, but it is on the ropes.
59 • RE: 57 (by h3rman on 2007-03-12 16:17:27 GMT from Europe)
@lefty.crupps
Zenwalk might be what you need.
It's very fast, and as easy to use as KDE.
60 • Gentoo (by John G. on 2007-03-12 16:22:59 GMT from United States)
Gentoo would be better if some amount of "innovation" were put into making it useable for someone other than your above average computer nerd.
Gentoo has a lot of good things attached to it; things that will probably never see any widespread use because the only users it has... are its developers. Not that there's nothing wrong with that, and yes.. that is probably an extreme exageration, but I rarely know any Gentoo "users" so much as I know Gentoo "devs" or "hackers."
Compared to the vast majority of distros out there, Gentoo's social contract seems to be aimed at doing whatever the developers want to do, and to hell with the end-user.
Thats just my opinion, but honestly Gentoo has only ever frustrated and annoyed me; so I can admit bias.
61 • What do you define as "old hardware" (by Daniel G on 2007-03-12 16:26:03 GMT from Canada)
When I read your comments, I noticed that most users of "old hardware" are using machines with 256 Mb of RAM but tiny HD.
I have an old machine to test distributions: K6-2 500 MHz, 128 MB RAM, two 12.6 Gb HD. Currently, I use Debian Etch and it work very well. It is not as responsive as my laptop (a Toshiba with a Pentium M 1.8 GHz and 512 Mb RAM, 72 Gb HD) but functionnal. I notice that on the same connection I download files much faster with my Linux box than my Win 2K machine (a AMD 2.4 GHz with 256 Mb RAM and a 100 Gb HD).
Naturally, I do not run KDE but Gnome or XFCE 4.2
62 • PII Distro. (by Anonymous on 2007-03-12 16:26:45 GMT from United States)
I say get it going with DSl/Puppy then try others. I have 4 PIIs and DSL/Puppy are the only ones that will run them on all. Some Live CDs run too slow on a 24X CD to get to the install routine or are too slow after the install. Some will not dual boot if you need it to. Some just black screen with Ubuntu based distros. Some will like Xubuntu. Some boot loop on Slack based distros (video?). Slax some times loads with a odd GUI error and says that some functions will not work. If you spend the time you usually can get Fedora/Freespire up if you do a custom install and do not install KDE.
63 • Gentoo (by user1100100 on 2007-03-12 16:37:09 GMT from United States)
I appreciated fatcop's brief comments regarding the Ladislav's Gentoo article. Gentoo is a meta-distribution, not a pure desktop distro. By most standards, I would probably fall under the classification of a weak, unskilled user-type. I have not found time to learn a single programming language in any depth. I know a little bash and a little html; yet, even for a person at my level of understanding, I have found many things to cherish and value the Gentoo distro., and I continue to use it and appreciate it every day.
1. I continue to find the community in the forums and on irc to be energized, industrious, and helpful.
2. I continue to see many new ebuilds, bug-fixing, and updated documentation to assist and address many problems or unique aspects of installing/using/administering applications on a Gentoo system.
3. I continue to find that the Gentoo portage system helps me save time and diminish my confusion when installing software, libraries, and other OS components that I need to accomplish to meet the needs of my environment.
4. I also know that Gentoo operates as a not-for-profit foundation and many concerns and issues were handled in a thoughtful, careful manner in making the transition from an organization led by Daniel Robbins to one led by a Board of Trustees.
As far as I understand it, Gentoo has always stayed clear to its initial goal of providing a framework to build a Linux OS that provides ultimate customization to its users. Users are given the ability to build exactly what they want from step 1, and onward. This remains true today.
I have very little awareness about the amount of contentiousness between developers. As well, I have no intelligent measurement or judgment of Ladislav's reporting and/or editorializing regarding the state of communications among its developers.
All I can say from my own personal knowledge is that Gentoo provides a valuable set of tools to accomplish many things well for beginners and advanced users alike. As well, the Gentoo community is full of many thoughtful, creative, and intelligent individuals who have much to offer.
With all the aforesaid, I see very few weaknesses; yet, so many strengths to be found as a Gentoo user.
64 • Mint etc (by pp on 2007-03-12 16:43:33 GMT from United Kingdom)
The future of Linux belongs to those distros that deliver full media support. Mint delivers - that's it.
65 • linux mint (by ghostborg on 2007-03-12 16:55:13 GMT from United States)
Integrate an Easy install of Nvidia/ATI drivers like PCLinux and Beryl.
66 • Linux Mint vs Freespire (by Hans Simmons on 2007-03-12 16:58:26 GMT from United States)
I've tried both and prefer Freespire. I say this for a few reasons:
1. Linspire has legal licenses for the codecs they distribute. I'm not sure Linux Mint does. Some of these, like MP3 and Windows Media, are quite expensive, so I really doubt Linux Mint has purchased legal licensing for all countries.
2. CNR. I can't imagine not having CNR. I know CNR is coming to other distros, including Ubuntu, so one day it might be there for Linux Mint, but for now, it's a big plus for me with Freespire.
3. I've used Linspire and Freespire for some time. They pay attention to details, which could explain why they take a little longer. It's just a better product. They make a lot more refinements to things, which I'm seeing happening with their new Ubuntu Alpha releases.
Hans
67 • Mint and Freespire (by Tazix on 2007-03-12 17:12:01 GMT from United States)
When Ladislav mentioned suggestions for donations... I stated that I agreed with others voting for Mint, though I don't personally use it.
Obviously I have tried it, and think it's great for a new user. It pretty much works out of the box, and you don't have to jump through near as many hoops, as you do with most other distros. I hand out copies of Mint to my IT colleagues to get them to even try Linux. First impressions of things "just working" is very important... even to tech savvy individuals. (Something I don't think the purists understand.)
As for Freespire, I've never tried it. Something about the presentation of Linspire just turns me off. I don't know what it is, or why... but I get the impression that the leadership there are shysters. Perhaps that is unfair of me, but that is the impression I get from the battle with MS over the "Lindows" name. Don't get me wrong... I don't think MS was right... but the public debacle responses were just unprofessional, IMO. I guess I just get the feeling that Linspire (before using an Ubuntu base) is a cheap rip-off attempt of a Xandros clone... and I don't think that highly of Xandros either, mainly because of the lenghty development cycles that still produce non-up-to-date packages upon release. At least with the Ubuntu base for Mint, and now Fresspire, one can actually see the huge advantage over Xandros. Maybe I'll give Freespire a try... just to check out the "CnR". If it's better than Mint... I'll be the first to admit my prejudice was wrong.
68 • Linux Mint (by Rod Greenwood on 2007-03-12 17:14:05 GMT from United Kingdom)
I load and attempt to use the various linux distros that arrive via Distrowatch with varying degrees of success. Ubuntu became a very strong favourite of mine with Xandros in tow as my second system. Then Mint linux appeared and what greatly pleased me was the fact that at long last here was a system that I could take straight from the box and use immediately without having to go through the various performances required in Ubuntu to have an effective up and running system. Xandros was getting very dated so now I just use Mint Linux. I recommend this system to new and experienced alike. The only blip was the lack of Open Office Database software which I have now obtained by downloading on the internet. The only other improvement I would like is to have an automatic upgrade when a new version is produced, as Ubuntu currently does. Thus not having to "start again" when a new stable release is made.
69 • Distros and such (by CEVO on 2007-03-12 17:16:21 GMT from Spain)
Reading the comments in lots of DWW time and again, I cannot help but wonder if it is true that a whole new generation of Linux users is on its way. It looks like that, since an alarmingly increasing numer of people solely refer to the Ubuntu pool of distros and find it so very good. In itself, there is no problem with that, but I get the idea that the centrifugal force of Ubuntu is eclipsing the rest.
For newcomers, there is more to Linux than Ubuntu. My all time favourite is MEPIS. In my experience, MEPIS does a better job at hardware detection and configuration than virtually all of the others. It was the first distro to combine a live CD and an easy installer. And it was also the first in including plugins and codecs for out-of-the-box multimedia experience. The new version offers WEP AND roaming WPA!!, Beryl, installation to USB key and a new, pretty face..... Both in 32 and 64 bit. Reviews are raving. So what's up? Have we reached a point where a couple of big money machines are getting the lion's share? That would be bad.....
70 • The arrogance of Gentoo (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-12 17:23:52 GMT from Italy)
Well, I feel finally vindicated, somebody much more respected than myself is talking about the arrogance of the Gentoo (community?).
Note the question mark, because of course most users are OK.
As a former member of the forum I felt totally outraged by the arrogance of the moderators. No wonder, what could you expect from people who called themselves "bastards from hell" (or something to that effect).
And then the way derivative projects have always been treated, as if they were nothing but parasites. Why Debian has always respected and appreciated their derivative projects, feeling that they were an asset rather than competitors?
In the meantime Sabayon Linux is doing much better and is much more respected than its parent distro.
71 • KDE on older hardware. (by Don Crowder on 2007-03-12 17:24:21 GMT from United States)
At the risk of being swatted down one more time by disdainful youngsters I've got to point out that I've loaded Debian Sarge into several 500 MHz AMD K6-2 and Celeron systems which all run KDE beautifully. Serious Linux users are disdainful of Sarge, the stable version of Debian, because it uses older, tried and true, software which has survived the test of time but I think they're missing a bet. Debian Sarge is exactly the Operating System I'd put in the hands of a Senior Citizen who wanted to surf the web and exchange email with the grandchildren. Debian Sarge is also the Operating System I installed, and loaded up with games, on the 500 MHz computer I set up for my nine year old grandson. Linux needs mainstream credibility and while OpenSUSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS or any distribution in the Ubuntu family are terrific on newer hardware I'm not worried about consumers who can afford newer hardware, I worry about Senior Citizens who live on fixed incomes and young parents who want computers for their children but have little or no expendable income.
My wife and I dislike Gnome and prefer XFce on systems slower than 500 MHz but if the computer's up to it, where we're concerned, KDE rocks and rules.
72 • Freespire vs. Mint (by Doobster on 2007-03-12 17:25:20 GMT from United States)
Freespire which has been working on its upcoming version 2.0 since September 2006 just to reach another alpha stage last week, the developers of Linux Mint have already delivered three successful releases. As if the Mint developers are so much more competent? It's no secret that Freespire has switched from Debian to Ubuntu as a base, thus the new alpha. It has nothing to do with who is more competent.
I haven't used Mint, but I gather that Freespire is a much more ambitious project. Mint is really just a re-packaged Ubuntu with out-of-the box support for proprietary file formats and some usability enhancements.
73 • Gentoo (by Luke on 2007-03-12 17:34:42 GMT from United States)
I've been reading through the gentoo-dev archives, and it's no wonder Daniel Robbins left. It's a shame he left to begin with, as they pretty much trashed most of the policy that he put in place. The argument seems to have stemmed from Daniel trying to figure out how certain things were being considered an official part of Gentoo when they weren't being controlled at all by the Gentoo Foundation.
Very important parts of Gentoo - portage, namely - are being partially developed by people with absolutely no loyalty to Gentoo. They don't (they won't) allow their work to be owned by the Gentoo Foundation. Daniel saw this and criticized the fact that they were given the responsibility, because that is clearly not how he decided Gentoo was supposed to be run. The only justification they seemed to have was that devmanual - a document - is considered an official project and it's contributed to by developers outside of Gentoo.
Yeah, Ladislav doesn't seem too far off in his assessment. This seems to me like the sort of political garbage that would make a distro implode on itself. I've seen it happen with smaller, completely unrelated projects, but it's the same story. This whole thing is just disgusting.
74 • miscellaneous distros (by ray carter at 2007-03-12 17:45:45 GMT from United States)
Several comments: I certainly hope that Gentoo will continue to be a viable distro. I've not tried anything else on my mini-itx box for a couple of years because Gentoo runs KDE quite well - I never found anything to touch it two years ago.
As far as older equipment, there is a point at which it becomes painful to run KDE. I've installed Elive on a P166 with 64mb ram and it runs fine - on stuff that old, KDE and Gnome are simply not options.
I look forward to trying Mint after I get some other items out of the way - I think it will be interesting. BTW I recently took a subscription to 'Linux Pro' magazine - it comes monthly with a DVD of a recent distro - hopefully that will prod me to try things out more than I've done recently. They do a trial subscription for three months for $10, and there is a lot of good information - it comes to the newsstand of our local Fred Meyer store about a month late - I suspect they may be taking someone else's no sells - e.gl the Feb issue states it goes on sale Feb 1 - showed here Mar 1.
75 • RE: 69 (by Tazix on 2007-03-12 17:47:33 GMT from United States)
"Money machines getting the lion's share"
I don't think that is what is going on. One of the larger problems associated with "freedom" of distros, is a lack of standardization. Ubuntu's influence is actually producing that somewhat, if you look at all the *buntu based distros. K, X, Mint, and probably Frespire all work perfectly with Ubuntu's repositories, and basically have the same packages installed (not counting the desktop specific ones).
Between Canonical spreading the word of Linux to new users (more successfully than others), the decent community support (though not the best), and the choice of desktop derivatives that all have separate teams... It's kind of obvious why it's popular.
The "money machines" as you put it, are the ones that are making more people aware of Linux. So I don't see that as a bad thing.
76 • distrowatch website (by A. Mani on 2007-03-12 17:53:37 GMT from India)
Hello,
I checked the design of your website. Overall usability-wise it is good, but it gave over 873 validation errors (plenty of wrong doctype). There are problems for users with disabilities too. It should be made more web-2.0 compliant (whatever that is). The site background and fonts should be more customisable.
Best
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc
77 • linux mint (by nd's on 2007-03-12 17:58:10 GMT from France)
I was looking for an easy way to try linux so I tried several well known live-cds (mandriva,opensuse,kaella Knoppix live Azur)...
The only one that worked on my 2 computers at the first time was an ubuntu dapper! So i decide to find an ubuntu-based distro (with dirty but friendly proprietary codecs) and found the Linux Mint Barbara!
This is not a revolution but it does what we expect: it works RIGHT NOW.
And with the 2.2"bianca" version, my hp printer also recognised!
A win xp user (im one of them) would laugh at this but for a new linux user it's just GREAT.
78 • old computers (by dbrion on 2007-03-12 18:00:44 GMT from France)
I was very impressed by
DSL :
from VMplaying, it has a memory print of less than 20 M (I did not RAM starve her any further). I could not achieve this with Puppy... The web page of DSL can, if needed, teach me how to customize DSL "myDSL": it seemed clear ...
On a real 7years _real_ computer (it was one a friend of mine built, with 256 M, sorry I do not remember the CP) I installed
Mandriva2006, with KDE:
he uses her regularly since july 2006 to compile and test progs he writes {under Windows : he just wants if they can be Unix/linux ported} (so he needs Konsoles) and to recognize and browse USB disks {with Konqueror}.
He is a more patient guy than me, and he remains satisfied, and as far as I tested for less limited needs(one nite), it was not that slow (but I fear the liking of a desktop is somewhat subjective)...
79 • Mint and Freespire (by Tazix on 2007-03-12 18:03:22 GMT from United States)
When Ladislav mentioned suggestions for donations... I stated that I agreed with others voting for Mint, though I don't personally use it.
Obviously I have tried it, and think it's great for a new user. It pretty much works out of the box, and you don't have to jump through near as many hoops, as you do with most other distros. I hand out copies of Mint to my IT colleagues to get them to even try Linux. First impressions of things "just working" is very important... even to tech savvy individuals. (Something I don't think the purists understand.)
As for Freespire, I've never tried it. Something about the presentation of Linspire just turns me off. I don't know what it is, or why... but I get the impression that the leadership there are shysters. Perhaps that is unfair of me, but that is the impression I get from the battle with MS
80 • Daniel Robbins: definitely a mastermind (by Cirano on 2007-03-12 18:08:14 GMT from Canada)
Daniel Robbins might have some defaults just as anybody, but he's definitely a mastermind. His articles at IBM are cristal clear and you'll love them whether you use Gentoo or not. (I don't use Gentoo.)
If he ever decides to start a new distro, all that is really producing anything will move with him. All that will be left at Gentoo will be dead wood.
81 • older hardware (by Fred Mertz on 2007-03-12 18:09:01 GMT from United States)
You can't beat Vector Linux for a fast and stable distro that features KDE. The upcoming 5.8 SOHO release should be a standard-setter.
82 • linux mint & freespire (by Septimius on 2007-03-12 18:09:11 GMT from United States)
I tryed linux mint 2.2 and Freespire 1.0 in dual booting with windows XP on my laptop, Gateway MX6440 (cpu AMD Turion 64,1024 Mb DDRAM,100 Gb HDD,graphics by ATI Radeon Xpress 200M).
with linux mint i could go wireless,i had the sound working perfectly,i had ntfs read write support in just a few clicks.Overall i was satisfyed.However my personal preference is for KDE rather then Gnome so i decided to try Freespire 1.0
With freespire 1.0 i had NO sound at all,no wireless and no read and write support.Maybe my laptotp it's too demanding? i don't know, but linux Mint didn't had any problems.
Now i'm using Kubuntu 6.10 and the wireless it's going ok,i have ntfs read&write support,but i have to mention that in kubuntu 6.10 i had to manually configure the wireless and the ntfs read&write support whereas in Mintlinux everything was very simple and automatically done and of course it has all the extracodecs already installed.
I tryed beryl too, on PClinuxOS beta 2 on the same laptop the visual efects are amasing,however i find it very distracting from my work.On PClinuxOS i had to mount my windows partitons manually everytime i was booting so in the end i was tired of doing that over and over again so i'm finally using Kubuntu 6.10.
83 • Secure Wireless Access (by J Lynch on 2007-03-12 18:19:03 GMT from United States)
Any Linux distribution that would have BUILT-IN WPA2 security that sees the signature of at least the largest chip manufacturers (I have Atheros AR5005g) used on laptops and would automatically configure itself would get my vote, and at least some financial support.
Mepis, for one distribution, was the first distro I encountered that easily saw my wireless setup and configured itself upon bootup to use wireless, at least an unsecured connection.
From the beginning, Microsoft installations and the discussion of them remind me of U.S. Military manuals that must have been written by people who were unable to compete for jobs in the open market.
They must have been paid piecework, by the word.
The best discussion I have found on WPA is on WPA-PSK by Jeremy deVries, 9-30-05 at the WIFI Planet location, now 1 1/2 years old.
Every time I try to read Microsoft and Toshiba documentation for WPA2 activation I get a run-around, and in the case of Microsoft I have to learn the technical aspects of WPA installation. I DO NOT want to become an engineer, it is not my job.
Other discussions by laymen are like, "Well I tried this and this, and finally this worked on MY machine, but I don't know why."
Toshiba, as do other Manufacturers, refers us to discussion groups to help us with our problems. This is a viable path for a free Linux distribution, but not for something we purchased. In their defense, I have not called for technical support, as I am hard of hearing.
I want a wireless LINUX (or Windows) distribution that will keep up with the latest technology for LAPTOPS regarding SECURE installations.
While I would not expect a vast number of signatures to be accommodated, the Atheros chipsets have been available with WPA since 2003 and still the laptop and software developers do not have easily configurable setups for this major manufacturer.
Instead, we are referred to White Papers by the the independent standards organization. If I wanted to learn a musical instrument, my first goal would not be to spend time learning how to manufacture that instrument, nor to manufacture the tools for manufacture.
I have a Toshiba Satellite A105, which is a marvelous laptop for the money, with a 15 inch screen, perfect for spreadsheets I think, but I will never buy another Toshiba with the present run-around one gets when trying to install WPA security using Wireless.
To me mobile computing and laptops, with a SECURE wireless connection should be a given.
I hope this helps your software development direction and wish you all success.
84 • Mint 2.2 (by Louw on 2007-03-12 18:20:35 GMT from South Africa)
I found Mint an excellent distro to get up-and-running in a hurry with minimal configurations needed to become productive. Although my favourite distro is openSuSE Mint is creeping up on me there.
Why does ppl like Mint? Because theres less of the fuss to get you going. Normally I have to spend quite some time getting everything just-right but with Mint, most of the work is already done. I'm not a Free Software purist, I just want my distro to just-work !!
To me its a workbench not a philosophical soapbox, I USE my linux.
This distro will DEFINITELY see me again and although Ubuntu is great Mint has put just the right amount of polish on an already polished distro.
Cheers
Louw
85 • old (and partially broken) hardware (by Anonymous on 2007-03-12 18:21:54 GMT from New Zealand)
The oldest machine that I am still running has a P-133 processor and 32MB of RAM with a small 120MB HDD. The mobo won't detect CD-ROMs any more so I can't boot a live distro, and the HDD is too small for a normal install. I use DSL in ISO format copied to the HDD by temporarily installing it in another PC. I don't use it for much, but it has web server that's useful for internal network duties.
I find older systems are better used without a GUI in a headless server configuration. Dumping them is such a waste.
86 • Minty (by PCLinuxOS User on 2007-03-12 18:25:18 GMT from United States)
I was initially interested in Winspire ... Linspire... Freespire because of promised superior Windows support via Windows. That didn't happen, and it left me with a bad impression. CnR being offered as a commercial feature with free software also didn't go over well. So there's a bit of resistance to playing with Freespire, because - being an ex-Mandrake user who eventually moved to PCLinuxOS - I'm still worried about what sort of hidden cost it might contain.
I've tried to install Ubuntu on various occasions, and had mixed results. Installation is much better these days (ie: I can actually install it), but not having codecs, Flash, and so on off the shelf is a bit of a pain. My last attempt a month ago failed once I put KMail on the machine and things started breaking. Feh.
I just installed the Bleeding Edge Kubuntu this weekend with mixed results - the installer is pretty broken. That's OK, because it *is* bleeding edge. I'll see if I can get the stable version installed this week.
Mint got my attention because it promised to "just work". I downloaded it and played around with it, and was pretty impressed. I brought in the latest LiveCD for a co-worker who's been looking for a distro that supports his wireless hardware. It failed to find my hard drives on my WinXP work machine, and the wireless connectivity didn't work for my co-worker.
So the scorecard:
* Freespire's burnt too many bridges.
* Mint's cool features don't work for me.
* Kubuntu is a possible contender.
If the PCLinuxOS people could get a solid final release out, I probably wouldn't be looking around for a replacement. But it's been months since the old version's been supported, and I'm now running on a machine that's pretty broken - my wife can play Flash, but my kids can't, automount sometimes works, blah blah blah.
I want a distro that "Just Works"
87 • In the defense of Gentoo (by areuareu on 2007-03-12 18:48:54 GMT from France)
I am not a Gentoo dev, but I have read with some surprise Ladislav' chronicle. I have run Gentoo for 4 years and I don't have the impression that it is the distribution in complete decay which is described here
A buggy distro: Gentoo is an experimental distro without any stable branch. That is the deal. It has never been (and it will problably never be) a 'user' distribution. When you run Gentoo, the biggest risk is self inflicted bugs, which are 90% of the bugs. It _is_ stable, reliable, fast on slow computers, and fun. True, the new installer is buggy, the old way is actually less dangerous for your data, its experimental state should have been documented.
A declining distribution? Let's take the facts from... Distrowatch:
08/09/2003 Gentoo was number 3 on page hit ranking (30 days)
15/11/2003 nr 5
05/15/2003 nr 6
07/09/2004 nr 8
19/08/2005 nr 9
14/10/2005 nr 11
27/10/2006 nr 12
08/12/2006 nr 13
well, Gentoo was already declining while D.Robbins was in command. It has always been, from the very beginning. But in the same period of time, the number of distributions based on Gentoo in the top 100 increased from 2 to 9. Not bad for a dying distro.
An elitist distribution: yes on the Gentoo forums there is far too much abuse, scorn and 'love it or leave it' talk but it represents a tiny part of all the help, friendliness you can find there.
In his unfortunate Dunc-tank mess, Debian has never been described as dying, Why that kind of double standard? Debian Weekly news has been virtually interrupted, What? a project of such importance without a newsletter?
Debian and Gentoo are my distributions of choice, but I do not see Debian in any better shape than Gentoo, socially speaking. Technically speaking, they are both wonderful distros. They are both unique concepts. They are, well, necessary. No distribution can replace Gentoo so far, for the complete freedom it gives upon your system.
I want to thank Ladislav for all his wonderful work, but, whith due respect, I want to thank all the Gentoo developpers fot the work they have done.
88 • Nightmorph, Christian (by Misty on 2007-03-12 18:50:57 GMT from United States)
Ladislav is exactly right that you're proving his point -- you're over wasting time arguing on a internet forum instead of working on those well-known bugs. Can it and get back to work.
89 • Older hardware. (by nightflier on 2007-03-12 18:52:25 GMT from United States)
I use Vector Linux mainly because of it's speed, especially on older boxes.
90 • Poster #86 I want a distro that "Just Works" (by CEVO on 2007-03-12 19:07:57 GMT from Spain)
That's what I meant in a comment. A potential user that wants a Linux that 'Just Works' and she / he has not even TRIED MEPIS.....
So, what is going on???
91 • Mint (by beerbunny on 2007-03-12 19:14:24 GMT from United Kingdom)
I've been a Ubuntu user for a little over a year now, and I recently switched over to Mint because I prefer the way it looks out of the box. It gives the impression of being crisp and vibrant, probably just because of the colouring. And, frankly, I hate Ubuntu's "baby-cack" brown theme (even the start-up and shut-down sounds are brown!).
Also, I like Mint's menu system.
One small thing that could be improved; I'd installed the NVidia drivers by hand by the time I figured out where to find Envy. Mint make a point of mentioning Envy as a feature, then hide it away so you have to use the terminal to use it. Other than that, it's fine as is.
92 • Mint Linux vs Ubuntu vs Debian etc etc..... (by Keith on 2007-03-12 19:18:06 GMT from Canada)
I downloaded and installed Mint 2.2 Bianca for my IBM T41 just this weekend - I have to tell you at this point I'm very impressed.
Say what you will about Ubuntu, but the project has opened doors to the Linux world for the average MS Windows User. Mint takes this a step further by adding in elements that every MS user just expects to work, wmv, quicktime, mp3, streaming video/flash/pdf/real player/java etc. integrated into your browser, easy *AUTO* updates, wireless that makes sense...... And much to my amazement DVD playing out of the box!!
I have installed Linux dozens of times in the last 6 years and I have seen massive enhancements in desktop linux over this time. I would have to say the Mint Project has made - imho - the best linux desktop/laptop distro I have seen thus far.
Down you Linux FSF and GNU purest's! Put your flame throwers away - personally I don't really care if my ATI driver is closed source - I just want it to work - same with all the media I enjoy on the internet, things like mp3, dvd, xvid and divx etc etc.... And I love the fact it's all installed and I don't have to mess with it - here's a thought, Linux that just "Works" wow!
Debian brought us apt - Ubuntu packaged it and made it friendly and easy to use and an integrated part of my GUI - I don't ever want to see a CLI unless I choose to. I hope we see more distributions like Mint in the future - this distro is deffinitly headed in the right direction.
93 • Distro for Old Hardware Recommendation.... Elive!!! (by Eric on 2007-03-12 19:19:48 GMT from Canada)
OK, well for older hardware, and having a decently up to date distro to fit your bill, I believe I have one word for you
_*Elive*_
Elive should be considered since it minimal hardware requirement is rediculous, I'll quote the Requirements in the About section on the site for interest sparking sake:
"Minimum Requeriments: The minimum hardware for running Elive is a 100 Mhz CPU and 64 MB of RAM, but the minimum recommended hardware is 300 Mhz and 128 Mb of RAM. You don't need any special graphic card or 3D acceleration to run Elive."
And there you have it!! :P
Heres the link http://elivecd.org/
So give it a try and read some reviews, it was developed to SCREAM on anything modern, and be very usable on old hardware, so try that out and I hope I helped you out (I hope you read this far) ;)
94 • Gentoo/Mint/Ubuntu (by Jordan on 2007-03-12 19:23:19 GMT from United States)
I don't understand Gentoo. I could have said I don't understand the
popularity of it, but I decided to be honest instead. :) Being in the top
25 or so of Distrowatch's hits list must mean something, although I
am not exactly sure what it means.
I did download the 35 pages of installation instructions for Gentoo
once a while back. I'm still laughing about that. I never downloaded
Gentoo and never will.
Is it part of Gentoo's "social contract" to remain extremely difficult
to install? Whatever, it's useless to me; there are just too many
distributions out there that are highly configurable while being very
stable. This brings me to Ubuntu; it's not stable on my machine
or the other two I installed it on about a year ago. Between that
and their pretentious gab about "humanity" on their site while they
cheat the Distrowatch page hits stats, I'm staying away from
that distro.
Vectorlinux, Zenwalk, PCLinuxOS. Those are the top three
in terms of all that's written about in this weeks Weekly, imo:
great developers who seem to respect one another as well as
those of us who use their products (we lowly "users" Gentoo
seems to hold in disdain), ease of installation! Stability and
plain old reliability. Hoo-haa.. grab one of those three and
enjoy Linux for what it's meant to be.
Imo. :)
-- Jordan
95 • Mint Linux (by Ricardo Rothfeld on 2007-03-12 19:26:47 GMT from Brazil)
I'm a very happy user of Mint linux. I started to try Mint after some crashes of my Ubuntu 6.10 regarding Nvidia drivers. Since I started Mint(about a month)no more crashes after all. I know that Mint is a fork of Ubuntu, but seems to me that Mint is more polished to work with proprietary drivers, in Ubuntu, every crash I needed to reconfigure X and edit xorg.conf. Until now I do not know why, but I'm building another machine, identical to mine, to see what happen and why.
Anyway, Mint is rock solid and very pleasant to be used.
My congratulations to the Chef !
Many hugs to all
96 • How does Mint do it? (by James Hernandez on 2007-03-12 19:42:22 GMT from United States)
So, I have a question about Linux Mint that I'm sure that many here don't care about but, I'll ask anyway. Linux Mint contains: "support for proprietary file formats". What does this mean? I live in the United States. Can I use Linux Mint to LEGALLY play back my mp3s, quicktime movies, windows media files, DVD's etc? If so -- how do they do it? Is Linux Mint paying to license these codecs the same way that Freespire is? It's great that Linux Mint provides "support" for these things. But, no company in their right mind is going to EVER switch to something like Linux Mint if their licensing is murky or unclear. Freespire is not only providing the codecs to people they are providing some level of assurance that these are LEGAL in the United States. My guess would be that if Linux Mint does support these proprietary file formats -- it is being done illegally and with no licensing in place. They are just saying: "Yes, you can play back MP3 files". But, when Fraunhofer comes and sues you for using or distributing unlicensed MP3 codecs.... Linux Mint will not be around to help.
97 • Old box and favorite distro (by steve on 2007-03-12 19:45:16 GMT from United States)
I have an IBM Thinkpad 600e (P2 not sure how much RAM) I'm running Puppy Linux 2.12. It runs great. Totally revived this machine. It does everything. Wirleless networking, surfing internet via Opera and Seamonkey. Email. Word processing.
Puppy Linux for me is the best distro out there.
My thanks to it's develper ( Barry Kauler) and the rest of the development team.
Steve
98 • gentoo and distrowatch (by a debian user at 2007-03-12 20:07:33 GMT from Portugal)
May be gentoo dev should spend time on fixing bugs rather than posting long comments. May be every one else posting comments here and writing boring blogs should spend more time helping the open source community as well?
May be Ladislav should also spend more time on his articles to put more depth to it. I read the entire gentoo problem, and I can say Ladislav review was highly opiniated, and instead of insightful thoughts, we have a tribute to Daniel Robbins, who was not entirely in his right in the thread. Someone else than him throwing these comments would have much more bashed, I'm sure.
I do think Gentoo has a goal: provide a flexible distribution that fits your needs with available free software, and your needs only in an optimized way. Make it easy with various tools such as portage. It is very ambitious to allow flexibility from source, given all the possible configurations there is out there. It has a much clearer goal and brings more to the community than the plethora of binary distributions copying each others that we see Distrowatch raving about.
It is true that the gentoo-dev mailing list has been at tense. Only one or two sensitive devs really quit the distrib for the bad behaviour of others. Now remember meanwhile a few trolls pollute the gentoo lists and forums, hundreds of others fix bugs and help the community meanwhile. Tensions happen in all large open-source community based projects. Being young and having grown fast, gentoo got a few of them lately.
These days only a few linux distros make original and useful work, gentoo is among them. Being a debian user I would switch to gentoo if only I had the patience to wait for a package to install. Next time I buy a faster computer.
No matter how much trolling there was in the gentoo-dev mailing list during that incident, it was still a more interesting reading that most of distrib reviews we see having publicity in distrowatch. May be distribution reviewers should spend their time helping their favorite distro instead...
99 • Linux Mint etc (by Copper on 2007-03-12 20:25:03 GMT from Finland)
RammsteinAddict wrote about LinuxMint,Gentoo :
>LinuxMint,along with PCLinuxOS and Mepis, are the only distros that
>a newbie coming over from Gatesville should be looking to install.
My words exactly! The newbies like you and me need a distro that "works from the box". Even if I don't know where Gatesville is... somewhere on the other side of the world, as seen from Finland. Not "that Gates" ?.
My experience from Mint in a 400MHz/512Mb system was mixed: mostly good, but no luck with an old network card and a still older 16bit sound card. With a newer system everything ran OK. Still, I installed my old favorite MEPIS again (it's still blue...)
I also tried Elive, but it's "still too beta" for me.
100 • ark (by capricornus on 2007-03-12 20:32:04 GMT from Belgium)
Yuk, I spent the whole evening downloading and installing and running Ark, untill now I never saw such a disgusting OS, blocking my mouse and doing exactly what I didn want, and running programs I dislike +++++. What kind of a geek did dare to advice it?
101 • RE 96 Mint, Law and Memoryleaks (by dbrion on 2007-03-12 20:33:35 GMT from France)
For the legal aspects of Mint : Mint is built in Ireland, and I downloaded from a German server. I suppose the law is not the same than in the States (in 1919, the law regarding whisky or shnaps was not the same...).
I suppose pple who download/use Mint in the States are either :
adults who know their country's laws (they elected congress(wo)men for)
Rotten enfants gatés/pourris who want to replace their parents 'OS (it was bought, with whose money?) by Mint (see pest 18) without caring wether it is legall or not (ah, the great UBUntu deontological blabla, see post 19 to laugh)...
Last week, there was an interesting post, which reported a memory leak (de par ma chandelle verte!). It is consistent with advice I sought one year ago from a colleague of mine who tested 6 distrs with valgrind, looking for memory leaks: he told me to _forget_ UBUntu derived: it might SCREAM, but might may me scream (cornegidouille!), too... The advantage of having nice hardware support (it is a kind of hardware which is expensive and will be, within 3 years, more outfashioned than my grand-grandma'crinolines) is nothing compared with the problems linked with buggy OSs..
Anyway, I am sure it is green.... and I remain deaf to irrelevant arguments , even multimedia oriented....
By the way, I feel , as far as now, very satisfied with Zenwalk 4.4.1 : I recompiled every app I needed, under VMplayer _QT4, GRASS,GMT, R_ and she remained stable. I ll try elive next month (sometimes, I want to _use_ what I had to compile: Linux is meant for users?)-
102 • Jordan's Gentoo Comments (by Fortnight on 2007-03-12 20:36:37 GMT from United States)
Jordan,
Your comments are stupid and useless.
You have never used Gentoo.
You have never read the installation Docs.
You have never installed Gentoo but crack jokes about how ridiculously difficult it is to install.
You say you don't understand Gentoo.
So what are you talking about?
You've got nothing to offer on the subject.
Good for you, you use another distro. that you like.
Now stop making fart noises with your mouth and do something productive.
103 • Good Work! (by itsthemedication on 2007-03-12 20:37:06 GMT from United States)
Great read. After seeing nightmorph's rant about your Gentoo comments, I'd say you were right on target. They have some growing up to do...
I'm a Mandriva user, and you're remarks on that distro hurt sometimes, but again, they need the criticism and it's obvious they watch the site -- and regardless of what they say -- the site's Mandriva numbers.
Well, this is the great shake out period in Linux. A few distros will succeed, and there will always be a number of hobby distros without much support or package management. Time will tell. I really like Mandriva, but I'd be less than honest if I didn't say I have some long term doubts. Adam Williamson has helped alot on the user side, and the return to a 6 month cycle should help. I tried to install 2007 on a new machine yesterday, and it didn't pick up half the hardware.
104 • Gentoo (by vipernicus on 2007-03-12 20:39:07 GMT from United States)
Don't point fingers at poor nightmorph, he's a hard working Documentation Developer, who actually sees things first hand. The real problem with the decline of Gentoo, and everyones opinion that there is an issue, lies with the media (ie, DistroWatch). Developers come and go all of the time with any distribution. Sometimes developers don't see eye-to-eye, but that doesn't mean that they will allow a project to completely go downhill. If you read some of the threads on gentoo-dev, you realize that Daniel Robbins actually started the whole arguement, purposefully trying to get an ex-developer (Ciaranm) off of the gentoo-dev mailinglist. Ciaranm was on this mailinglist, because he was working with another developer (spb) with some Documentation, since he had in the past already written alot of technical documentation for Gentoo. Daniel Robbins couldn't understand why Ciaranm should be able to post to the mailinglist since he was not a developer, so he called for him to be removed from the list. He then proceded to give reasons why. Several of these reasons were false. Since very few developers agreed with him on the subject, he decided he was going to quit as a developer.
Gentoo isn't comprised of only a few developers. Here is a list of active developers: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/roll-call/userinfo.xml
My count is ~350 developers. Ladislav is focused on an argument between 2 developers, and only a few departures, and believes from this that Gentoo is in a crisis.
About bugs, every Gentoo Weekly Newsletter includes Closed Bugs and New Bugs. http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20070305-newsletter.xml
This weekly newsletter you can read a little bit about nightmorph.
I am a Gentoo user, and I can say that I have more instability with most other distributions than I do with Gentoo. I get annoyed having to wait for a package manager from X distribution to fix a package, when I can so easily create an overlay for myself with the patch that fixes my issue.
105 • gentoo on the decline? (by corwin on 2007-03-12 21:11:12 GMT from France)
i doubt it: always on top of commits at http://cia.navi.cx, probably a better estimator of distribution health than distrowatch "number of clicks".
106 • Gentoo (by energyman on 2007-03-12 21:22:03 GMT from Germany)
I am using gentoo since 1.0
I have been there in the 'good old times'. I have been there in the time of the 1.4 chaos. I have seen devs come and go.
Are people ditching gentoo? Yes. But that was more or less expected. When gentoo was new, a lot of people flocked to it, because it was the 'hot new kid in town'. It matured, and that people left. One for one. Is that a sad development? No. Because the people who are the 'right users', stayed. Gentoo is not for everyone. And so people are leaving. Nothing wrong. For others, their priorities changed. But hey, every day new users join the forums and mailing lists, so what? Other distries also use old users and get new ones without going away. Ask debian.
I had three reinstalls in that time - all hardware related. I had more reinstalls with Suse in one year than with gentoo in all the times.
About Daniel Robbins. All his great (or not so great) work does not change the fact, that he entered the gentoo-dev mailing list and started to flame. He did not recognized or was not able to understand, that things changed in the time of his absence. So he wrote a lot of stuff that only can be described as 'mindless, stupid flaming'. He even admitted, that he tried to get people banned.
So it was a GOOD THING he left. Not a 'sad state of gentoo'. No! The opposite is true! It was a nice example of self-cleaning.
Someone joined, made a lot of fuss and flamed around, and when that backfired, left.
About the 'no development'. Only persons who do not read -dev can come to that conclusion. There is a lot happening in gentoo-land. It is not very clear for 'outsiders', but if you spent some time to inform yourself, or spent some time with gentoo, you would have seen the developments.
So, your article... sucks. Because it is badly researched and does no catch the things that really happened. Instead it speculates about stuff and comes to negative conclusions which are completly off base.
107 • RE: # 94, 102, 104 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-12 21:25:05 GMT from Italy)
@ Jordan: even if my choice of distros is different (Debian and some derivatives, SUSE, possibly Mandriva) I share many of your points of view.
@ Fortnight: your post proves once again the arrogance of (a large?) part of the Gentoo community.
@ vipernicus: I don't believe the "media" have anything to do with the Gentoo decline. It is more because people are beginning to realize that it is not worth compiling for days, for which benefit? And that Portage will sooner or later destroy your system. Put on top of that the arrogance and the difficulty to install and configure Gentoo and you have the perfect recipe for disaster. In fact I am very surprised that Gentoo is still doing so well.
108 • "Fortnight" (by Jordan on 2007-03-12 21:31:34 GMT from United States)
You're a disgusting person, "Fortnight."
109 • Old kit (by Soga on 2007-03-12 21:41:12 GMT from United Kingdom)
Just too new, but there's a picture of it above, Austrumi 1.4 is a breeze, fast and forgiving, good-looking, seems to run on a wide range of stuff, even scsi installation works. DSL and Puppy not bad either. Ark gives me 'GRUB, GRUB.....GRUB' at reboot, so can't give an opinion yet. Mepis and PCLinOS are good for users. Gentoo is for the guys who like to talk?argue? amongst themselves - not a real distro; real people would never get that dinosaur installed. Waste of space, regardless of who sits on the throne.
110 • ARK (by dadme on 2007-03-12 21:43:24 GMT from Romania)
Try Kurumin 7. Is better.
111 • #3, #35 Mint "Slab" "Widescreen Menu" (by Welkiner on 2007-03-12 21:56:48 GMT from United States)
If you don't like the default menu, (which I initially did not like and still have mixed feelings about);
Right-Click on "Bianca" on the Panel and select "Remove from Panel".
Bingo! It's gone.
Right-Click on an open spot on the panel and select "Add to Panel", scroll down and double-click on "Main Menu" or "Menu Bar"(which ever you like best), and Bingo! you have a new menu.
If you ever want the "slab" back, choose "Linux Mint Menu".
It's that simple. You have 3 choices.
I personally keep the "Linux Mint Menu" and "Main Menu" on my panel, so I can go either way I like.
The "Menu Bar" is identical to Ubuntu and most standard Gnome default menus.
Hope this helped,
WB
112 • Freespire vs Linux Mint (by mikeawebb on 2007-03-12 21:59:17 GMT from United States)
Both systems have their pros and cons however I was able to get Freespire to work on my Laptop with its centrino 2200 and on my Emachines T6420 64bit machine, the wireless took a bit of effort but i was able to get it working using my windows drivers and Ndiswrapper, it worked somewhat with the Freespire drivers but it did a lot of disconnects.
I could not get Linux Mint to boot on the laptop, i tried everything I know, I disconnected the Internet, shutdown the wireless, it just would not boot, it did however after a time boot and install on the Desktop t6420 however when it did
it recognized both internal and pci sound cards assigning the same IRQ to them.
Sound worked but I was puzzled by that discovery. Later I reinstalled through Vmplayer and a VMconfiguration and it had only one sound card but I could not get sound to work, I suspect something with the VMplayer settings.
113 • Ark Linux (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-12 22:14:09 GMT from Italy)
Well, Ark Linux had an enormous potential about 4 years ago. Despite its alpha status was very stable, always bleeding edge...
So what caused its decline? Arrogance and arguing between developers. Sounds familiar?
Ark Linux never had a proper installer. People were begging the developers to "borrow" an installer, ideally Anaconda. They wouldn't listen.
The last time I tried Ark Linux, it was only the ghost of what it used to be.
In 2007, when there are so many excellent distros to choose from, Ark Linux is pretty pointless, IMO, unless they can prove me wrong (with facts).
114 • Ark > Than the rest as far as I know (by ArkRocks on 2007-03-12 22:16:28 GMT from United States)
I've been using Ark since December. I haven't used Mint or Gentoo. I'm sure they're fine as there just isn't that much difference in quality distros. I will say there's nothing Gnome distributions can do do really compete with a product like Ark. Ubuntu was very disappointing to me, and Ark is better in every single category. I have tried PCBSD and maybe that should have been Gentoo, but it was too involved. Ark is a much nicer, much more elegant user experience. Mint was okay, but it isn't as polished. ArkLinux isn't very popular, but Mr. Brickman who started this conversation seems to share my experience. Once you use ArkLinux, you don't think about changing anymore. It is THAT satisfying. I have been showing off how fast my 933 256 mb PIII runs on Ark. It is almost stunning to people who own more powerful hardware. Obviously, I am mostly showing this OS to MS users, and they tell me Linux is a hassle, complicated. I walk them into my kid's room and let her show them how easy it is. Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (Bero) is the leader of the ArkLinux project and it's a shame there are so many distros that one with such superior quality is sort of lost in the mix.
115 • Clarifying (by ArkRocks on 2007-03-12 22:19:16 GMT from United States)
I said I haven't used Mint and then Mint was very polished. It is the Freespire/Linspire distros that I have not tried. I have tried Mint. I recommend all Mint users to give ArkLinux a shot with an open mind.
116 • Gentoo (by voislav on 2007-03-12 22:21:50 GMT from Canada)
I don't think that the problem with Gentoo is that the distribution is declining, it that the Linux user base is expanding. There is a large influx of new users who are changing the focus from advanced level distros like Gentoo or Slackware to begginer level distos like Mint or Freespire (or PCLOS, Mepis etc). There is always going to be issues with clashing personalities, it's just that these days it's much easier for everything to go public. Debian had it's problems last year, Mandriva had it's issues, but they all seem to survive just fine.
What's probably going to happen over the next few years is that Ubuntu and the derivatives will be increasing in popularity because of all the new users and original distros, like Gentoo, stagnating as far as their userbase goes. There's nothing bad with that, to each user his own distro.
117 • Courtesy (by Videoguy on 2007-03-12 22:23:31 GMT from United States)
A small amount of courtesy goes a long way. I realize that reading an unflattering commentary about one's favorite distribution is unpleasant to say the least. (Especially if you believe it was in error.) I have had that experience.
Flaming and name-calling do not serve a useful purpose. Rather, it has been precisely that kind of behavior that led some regular readers of this site to express how they no longer enjoyed reading DWW and the resulting comments.
Regards
118 • Gentoo nerds (by RedBoar on 2007-03-12 22:56:38 GMT from United States)
Just click on the article link and look at the pictures posted of all these Gentoo developers. Wow. Is it a wonder they would treat the founder of Gentoo like crap and mishandled the whole thing of him rejoining? They probably have social skills which are very similar to their sense of modern fashion and grooming.
119 • Gentoo, Drobbins: Argumentum ad verecundiam Fallacy (by Norbert on 2007-03-12 23:04:39 GMT from United States)
Argumentum ad verecundiam aka Appeal to Authority.
Claiming that Drobbings had the high ground on an argument on the sole base of it's past achievements and expertise, expertise that is not relevant - in this case - to the argument itself, is a fallacy.
The flamefest was not about Drobbins CV, it became about Drobbin's libelous characterization of some specific facts, and even that came about only after is insisted Ad Nauseam on them. He was either uninformed or motivated by an agenda that had nothing to do with the thread at hand. He got a nose bleed for it, like anyone would have.
120 • Linux mint is better than freespire at the moment. (by Jon Germany on 2007-03-12 23:07:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
Linux mint is better than the current version of freespire. However freespire is a lot more polished but is painfully slow to boot and operate. This may change in the future seeing as freespire are also going to be using a Ubuntu core. I'll be watching this with interest.
On the subject of "convenient Linux computing". It is important that a distro has all the media players & codecs for online media, even i it means using proprietary software like flash players, JRE & other codecs. Unfortunately, not all these such things are open source, but using this as a reason for not including them will ultimately put people off using that distro. For proof you only have to look at how quick people are to download a distro that is anounced on distrowatch as having all these features.
People are starting to look for a replacement for microsoft software and linux is the best alternative. If the Linux comunity accept this situation with propriotry software like flash etc and start providing more distro's like Linux Mint & Mepis etc, It will attract these new users. Then the word will soon spread as to how great & "user friendly" this Linux alternative is.
121 • RE:101 Mint Legalities (by Anonymous on 2007-03-12 23:08:08 GMT from United States)
----------
I suppose pple who download/use Mint in the States are either :
adults who know their country's laws (they elected congress(wo)men for); Rotten enfants gatés/pourris who want to replace their parents 'OS (it was bought, with whose money?) by Mint (see pest 18) without caring wether it is legall or not (ah, the great UBUntu deontological blabla, see post 19 to laugh)...
-----------
I'd have to guess that most fall into the category of "without caring".
Just because our country makes some stupid laws (all counties have their dumb ones) doesn't mean they all get followed or enforced.
It's almost like the warning tag on a matress. I remove it... (oooh such a rebel)... now come arrest me. LOL
122 • Re: 121 (by Anonymous on 2007-03-12 23:19:02 GMT from United States)
If I am not mistaken, it's only illegal for the distributor to remove the tag, it is perfectly fine for you to do so. Perhaps you should have read the EULA a little more closely...
:)
123 • KDE on old hardware (by Anonymous on 2007-03-12 23:22:12 GMT from United States)
I use Slax even though it's intended for live CD use. Works on a 300Mhz Celeron.
124 • Whoops (by Anonymous on 2007-03-12 23:25:12 GMT from United States)
Yeah, your probably right about the matress tag thing.
The point was, that it's insignificant, and fairly unenforceable.
Also... there's the "fair use" aspect. I've paid for use of these things through other products like Winblows, MP3 players, other devices. If they want me to pay again, they can kiss my hairy behind! What's next? Taxing Air? "Fair Use" is something our country's government just doesn't get, and idiots in the legislature get "bought off" by the RIAA and MPAA lobbyiests, that want to crush "Fair Use".
So, yeah... I fall in the "don't care if it's illegal" category.
/shrug
125 • Linux Mint vs. Freespire (by Simoncyrene on 2007-03-12 23:41:30 GMT from United States)
Both distributions work very well out-of-the box. Both seem to make the MS Windows followers "WOW." I think the Linux Mint is more "Ubuntish" than Freespire, but has it's own flare and familiar look to Windows GUI, location of icons, etc. However, I feel both are very solid and highly useful distributions. My wife and daughter (newbies to Linux), could not really tell a difference, other than with the look and appearance. Linux Mint gets my vote as the best of the two behind Ubuntu. I find freespire's free software warehouse a "bumpy" experience as compared to Linux Mint synaptic installs.
Nevertheless, both distros a still better than MS Windows. Keep up the great work on Linux!
simoncyrene
126 • Freespire & Mint (by ceti on 2007-03-12 23:42:04 GMT from Brazil)
#111:
Thanks.
#120:
Freespire 2.0 Alpha1 boots faster than ever.
Cheers
127 • @Jordan - Why Gentoo? (by gnobuddy on 2007-03-13 00:10:54 GMT from United States)
Jordan wrote:
I don't understand Gentoo. I could have said I don't understand the
popularity of it, but I decided to be honest instead. :)
------------------------------------------------------------
I don't claim to understand Gentoo either (a distro is a very complex thing!), but I can tell you why I switched to it years ago and have been using it ever since, despite many attempts to find a better replacement.
For me, Gentoo still works better on my desktop than any other distro in three ways: one, I can get just about *ANY* weird piece of free software to run on it, from qcad to CRRCSIM. And two, when something goes wrong, Gentoo has better documentation than I can find for any other distro, and if that doesn't do the trick, the Gentoo forums are filled with more incredibly knowledgable Linux gurus than any other distro's forum I have found. And three, Gentoo runs noticeably faster on my hardware than any other distro with the same software load (sure, Astrumi or Puppy is blazingly fast, but too lightweight).
In short, I used to put up with the tedious and long drawn out install, for the benefits of portage, the Gentoo handbook and other docs, and the Gentoo forums. Lately Sabayon Linux (based on Gentoo) has spared me the painful install, while keeping the rest of the Gentoo goodness.
I really hope Gentoo recovers from its current slump. I think the Sabayon Linux project has already pointed the way to a successful Gentoo - make it easy to install and highly preconfigured, while preserving the power of portage and the extreme configuration flexibility for those users who want it.
I do not use Gentoo on my laptop, by the way. The laptop is for work, so I don't install oddball software on it. And Kubuntu managed to get the wireless networking, power managemen, and sleep and suspend modes
working out of the box. For this machine and use, I found Kubuntu better than Gentoo. But for my desktop, I have yet to find any Linux distro I like better than Gentoo.
-Gnobuddy
128 • Great Gentoo Article! (by john frey on 2007-03-13 00:11:07 GMT from Canada)
I did not comment last week but if I had I would have asked for more of just this sort of article. I really enjoy opinion pieces and I like to know what you, Ladislav are thinking and talking about with others in the Linux comunity.
re:#2nightmorph
"Yes, I'm a Gentoo developer. And yes, I do think it's disheartening that Gentoo has been having a rocky time lately. But I wouldn't call us at our lowest point."
So when was the lowest point if this is not it?
Point 4: Social contracts -- well, thankfully DevRel are looking at this very issue; we do have policies and guidelines in place, but they need to be re-examined and improved. More to the point, developers need to be aware that we have them and that they will be enforced.
Great, so you agree with Ladislav on this. Why does he then need to do more research?
"-- Bull_shit_. FUD in its purest, most vitriolic form,"
Well I can tell you my entirely subjective experience and that is that Gentoo used to be named all the time in forums and posts as a great distro. That has certainly changed a lot. I hardly ever hear it mentioned anymore. Some others have posted here that they were experiencing the same. So the "buzz" is not happening for Gentoo.
"Point 6: "developer turnover" is *not* at an all time high"
so when was the all time high?
I've written about the state of Gentoo before, and I'm disappointed that to some extent, the situation is in some ways exactly how it was back then: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/nightmorph/2006/12/01/the_fubar_is_killing_me
again you seem to be agreeing with Ladislav here so why attack him for pointing it out?
Things are not all peaceful in Larry's field. I think that is the gist of what Ladislav said and your comments and others seem to bear that out.
129 • Gentoo (by fstephens on 2007-03-13 00:20:00 GMT from United States)
I have used Gentoo for 3 1/2 years and have great respect for what they have done. I find it very stable, ultimately configurable and, well, "ultra geeky". I know that's not what many people want and that's fine - I am presently trying Kubuntu again myself, because some things I just don't have the time or skill to get working well in Gentoo, at least right now. I do love the speed of installing software with apt-get instead of emerge too (but emerge is much prettier...).
I learned allot from running Gentoo. It was tough to install, especially given my Linux skills at the time, but I persevered and finally got it. I broke it a few times, but that same install is still running today. The website and documentation is top notch, the forums good too. Many innovations seem to come from Gentoo or at least are first implemented on Gentoo. Software is usually available in Portage sooner than in most distros I think.
I don't know if Ladislav's opinions are accurate or not (I hope not), but all the politics and bickering in the Linux community is certainly disheartening. I would much prefer to see Linus and Danial coding than arguing. I am refering here to the Linux-Gnome flame war. I for one would like to see Linux be the "benevolent dictator" and stay above the fray (at least outside kernel development). I wish Danial could assume that role for Gentoo, like in the past.
These insights into different distros and projects are one of the gems of Distrowatch in my opinion. If more research is needed to accurately present the facts, please do it. But don't stop the articles. It certainly DID provoke discussion, so thanks!
130 • typo in above (by fstephens on 2007-03-13 00:23:37 GMT from United States)
yes, "Linux" should be "Linus" in the second to last paragraph.
Thanks again Ladislav for a great DW and thought provoking opinion.
131 • Mint Linux (by Carl Smuck on 2007-03-13 01:02:16 GMT from United States)
I have tried Mint Linux on my AMD 64 desktop PC and it looks really cool. What I do not like about it is that when I downloaded the Nvidia driver for it I could not get my desktop resolution beyond say 800x600. And the 3D hardware acceleration is important for good DVD playback and for 3D games.
132 • Linux Mint vs Freespire (by Stephen on 2007-03-13 03:30:51 GMT from United States)
I have tried both Linux Mint and Freespire during the past 3 months. To be fair the new very early release of Freespire 2.0, Alpha1U, which is now Ubuntu based, is just too buggy to even be compared with Mint. What I think is very interesting is Ubuntu's integration of the Linspire/Freespire CNR into it's upcoming 7.04 release in April 2007. I guess this is Ubuntu's way of incorporating proprietary software and drivers into the OS. Based on how CNR has worked in the past I'm not crazy about the idea. If CNR has been greatly improved then it could be another story. Somehow Linux Mint has been able to offer proprietary file formats right out of the box. This along with many improvements in usability (wi-fi to name one) and the ascetic feel of the distro make it, for me, superior to Ubuntu. Mepis has shown that you can improve Ubuntu greatly in multiple areas, While Mint has not done as comprehensive a job of re-tooling, it's still very good. I think Freespire can only improve being based on Ubuntu. Especially with Ubuntu's fast development cycles. I think it's what, if anything original that Linspire/Freespire brings to the table that will decide where it ends up when judging it against other Ubuntu based distributions.
133 • Mint Linux 2.2 (by Christopher Hoyt on 2007-03-13 04:00:30 GMT from United States)
I installed Mint Linux and quickly installed Ubuntu over it.
Mint Linux won't tolerate modifications to the panel.
It crashed.
It crashed.
and It crashed again.
I want my panel to be 'unexpanded';
not go from one side of the screen to the other.
I got some panel on the left side, some on the right.
Nothing center screen.
I want it to be higher than normal;
with every pixel increase in height, Mint Linux crashed.
I want the panel on the top of the screen;
not the bottom.
Fancy menu/control system it has.
Nice.
Seems to be tied to the panel.
134 • VectorLinux for old and new rigs (by DrCR at 2007-03-13 04:08:59 GMT from United States)
Big VectorLinx fan here.
Ran Vector 5.1.1SOHO (KDE) on my 900MHz Tbird rig and still use it as my primary OS on my 3500+ A64.
Still try various distros from time to time, but I just keep coming back to Vector.
135 • The Demise of Gentoo (by James Verdon on 2007-03-13 04:14:16 GMT from United States)
Ladislav, fist off I want to say what a great job you did on the story. You were right on the money and in fact Gentoo has been in a steady slide for a few years now. If there is any doubt about the state of things then just peruse the Gentoo forum and you will find some very unhappy people on all sides. Part of the problem is that many associated with Gentoo and a fair amount of elitist users don't want to hear any type of criticism. Arrogance reigns in their forum and that is a fact! This is not the only reason for it's steady slide but it hasn't helped either. I the lowly user does not matter. Nightmorph's post is proof of that. Attack Ladislav for his criticism and refute almost everything. Instead you should take your lumps and get on with helping to fix a bad situation. Oh, and if this isn't your lowest point, then what was?
136 • Mint Linux (by Mike on 2007-03-13 04:28:57 GMT from New Zealand)
I have being looking for an alternative to Windows for my work and home laptop, as the DRM in Vista is unacceptable, as is the EULA.
Have tried a number of distros on a replacement hard drive, including SUSE 10.0, 10.1, SLED, Ubuntu, Mint 2.0 and Xubuntu. I managed to get most things working on all distro's, except wireless and printing to my Canon printer, but only after quite a bit of work. In fairness I should add that Win XP takes about 2 days to set up properly if all the required drivers are available and still has a ELUA problem.
Mint 2.2 however worked perfectly as installed, including wireless, the 1400x1050 display, music, video and everything else I tried (much better than XP), Only printing to the Canon does not work yet as I need to purchase a driver or Linux supporting printer, like my HP.
It is the first distro that I can consider as suitable for migrating to on my one work and home laptop, right now. I probably could have got quite a few other distro's working if I had the time and patience, but Mint made the decision easy. Only enhancement might be to go to an Xfce desktop, for the speed improvement (Xubuntu was very good in that regard) as eye candy is irrelevant to me.
137 • Gentoo twilight (by fatcop on 2007-03-13 04:31:42 GMT from Australia)
I'm finding it a bit ironic that many of the anti-gentoo commenters are the ones throwing some cheap personal shots (esp. RedBoar) and calling gentoo users/dev's arrogant. There is no call for that, and it just make you look like a troll and your side of the discussion look highly opinionated without substance.
All distro's have their time in the sun, and maybe Gentoo's a bit further out on the radar now, but that is normal. There are many people experimenting with the latest flash distros, it all seems pretty normal to me.
I seriously think people like Jordan (who laughed at the large install manual :) just don't really understand the aim of the meta-distro.
If you don't like something cause its not your taste, find something that is, but have some courtesy to the users and devs who help each other make something they get great value out of.
It *is* made for "the users", just not every user. Once the GUI installer and GUI package manager mature, it might just be complete for non-tech users. By that time perhaps it will have the most stable cutting edge software available (or not .. but its worth a shot no ;)
138 • Mint (by Mike on 2007-03-13 04:39:18 GMT from New Zealand)
I rate mint very highly 9/10 because of ease of install and use,The layout appeals to both kde and gnome users,Mint is Mint!
139 • Yes, 2 suggestions (by rav on 2007-03-13 04:47:00 GMT from United States)
Bring out KDE! Don't want gnome. What is it with many distro's trying to PUSH
Gnome? Many of us -if not most- want KDE. Enough said!
Make the system snappier with not-so-recent computers.
Thanks!
140 • On gentoo's fate (by Florian on 2007-03-13 04:57:50 GMT from Japan)
You are awfully harsh with the current state of gentoo, but unfortunately, I absolutely agree with you. Gentoo-the-organisation looks like a mess to me, and doesn't seem to be able to manage gentoo-the-distro, which is very unfortunate, since it is, by far, my favorite distro, on a technical point of view.
Time for a fork?
141 • RE: Linux Mint vs Freespire & Old Hardware (by Merlin on 2007-03-13 05:00:12 GMT from Canada)
Freespire & Linux Mint
Having tried both I can say tho not my cup of tea that Freespire is excellent If you wanted to migrate a Windows user. I find this along with Xandros an excellent choice. Debian Etch is also fantastic and the best Debian yet without the annoying permissions problems common to Ubuntu distors whch i have given up on and refuse to recommend until they fix it so I can print after re-booting. I get carpel tunnel typing passwords that often.
As for Linux Mint I have very common hardware and have never been able to successfully install Linux Mint on an AMD xp2200 with 1GB Ram Nvidia card and CM8778 soundcard! Being Ubuntu based I am very wary becuase of the problems noted above.
As for proprietary codecs I thought that Freedom of choice was one of the reasons for choosing Linux.
I can't live without those multimedia codecs as I work in the Entertainment Industry as a Performer and as a Show and Event Producer and without them many materials common to my Industry are unusable.
KDE & OLD Hardware
I do a lot of old hardware testing and configuring and work with Anti-Poverty groups helping them with computer & software issues. Debian is still great even on old hardware.
Without bumped up ram recent versions of KDEare highly problematic, if not impossible, so I find encouraging the report of good results using ARK.. Puppy, DSL, seem to do better.
Slckware is alos installable on any thing and seems to run faster and lighter as do their variations Vector being one notable example.
If Deli Linux were simpler to set up and configure it could be a real winner on old
hardware
Puppy Linux needs better support for Printers which is about my only complaint.
Dyne Bolic & Pure:Dyne again run very fast but no KDE per se.
Many Livr CD Distros run Desktops like KDE better on old hardware than they do when installed to Hard Drive.
My hpusehold currently runs 3 computers one a KnoppMyth Myth TV. I am running Dream Linux 2.2 Mu;ltimedia and I am playing with Corel Linux 1.0 on my small hard drive.
My girlfriend has successfully migrated to Xandros 3.0 open tho previously was on PCLinuxOS 0.92a as I have found ).93 to be problematic.
Merlin
142 • No subject (by Florian on 2007-03-13 05:23:03 GMT from Japan)
After reading a bit more carefully everyone's post, I somewhat (but not totaly) changed my opinion on gentoo. Maybe it is not in such a awfull state after all. But I still feel the organization has not scalled well enough to handle what the distro has become. Things are much more buggy than they used to be, some things (various portage improvements) which seemed just around the corner a while back just don't seem to happen...
Don't get me wrong I love gentoo, even as it is now, but I feel that it could be so much more, if it was more focused. As it is, it seems that good things happens every now and then, but there does not seem to be a comitment to anything particular.
Ok, I know, I should get involved and get things moving myself, instead of complaining. Well, I don't really have enough time, and I am not exactly complaining anyway. Wishing things were different? sure. Blaming any specific person for doing or not doing something? Nope.
Well, anyway, I hope gentoo, either as it is now, or after some kind of reorganisation, stays around, and continues to improve, because otherwise, I am not really sure what I am going to use to keep me happy.
143 • Mint's fine (by b4upoo on 2007-03-13 05:29:45 GMT from United States)
I'm running Mint right now and I have been for several weeks. It runs just fine. Since I have a huge pile of Linux distros on CD I have instant choice of what I run. Mint is worth using. If I wanted to be real picky I'd like the menu to behave a bit easier with the mouse over requiring a click to activate an area. I'd also like a bit faster boot time.
These days almost all Linux distros are great and so is FreeBsd. I'm a bit hung up on all distros derived from Debian and that is probably why I am sticking with Mint at least until Fiesty Faun previews next month.
144 • LinuxMint IS ON THE RIGHT PATH!! (by Pengue on 2007-03-13 05:42:07 GMT from Canada)
LinuxMint is certainly the user-friendliest distro i have tried over the years. I hope it will continue to be improved with each new release.
It would be especially great if adding & removing programs would be as easy as it is in MsWindows or Mac. If not, then, at least, make it the way PC-BSD does add or install programs.
Similarly, bring back RealPlayer. Because MPlayer, in many instances, fails to play Realaudio and Realvideo files . The streaming Real files (audio or video) are, especially hard for MPlayer to handle.
Also, add Limewire as a default P2P client. Because of the popularity of Limewire worldwide, it's much easier to find files that are being searched.
Perhaps, the best thing would be to just give the users a greater control over what to install or not to install on their computers. Well, ok, alright, i hear some of you protesting and saying that many distros provide you with such choices (i.e Synaptic). So, yes i acknowledge that. HOWEVER, such options are very difficult for average computer users to execute. When installing a distro with such choices, you really have to be an advanced Linux user--a true geek, in order to take advantage of choosing what to install and not install on your computer.
To make it easier; it should just mean changing the default state of dozens of tick-boxes. Just remove the check for the programs you don't want to install on your computer (remember Win98?). But of if you change your mind afterward and want OpenOffice, Mplayer, or Firefox, just go into Control Center and tick its box to install it; so it should be as simple as that. Or, of course, you could just download and install the latest version of the program(s)from the internet, which is even a better option, as you would get the latest versions of apps. However, there are and there will always be computer users who have and always will have difficulty to choose what to install or not install on their computers--regardless of how doing so might be simple. Therefore, the best thing would be to have two versions of a single distro. One with the above-described choices, and another one with everything pre-installed (like the way it is today with many distros, including MsWindows and Mac).
Anyhow, briefly speaking, below is a summary of suggestions i have detailed above. I have posted almost the same suggestions on DW before. And here i'm suggesting it once again. I hope LinuxMint coders -- or any other coders for that matter --- will implement these humble suggestions, therefore create a truly user-friendly and lite distro:
--->> Every single part of Linux that is not utterly essential for it to
function at all should be an optional install.
--->> For every accessory, every wizard, every font, wallpaper, sound
clip, every application or feature or function that can be removed, it
should be made possible to do so.
--->> Give greater democratic choices to users in terms of whether to install or use proprietary software. Accordingly, make it easier for user to install such software, as you do with open-source software.
Anyway, thank you innumerous times LinuxMint coders for bringing such a user-friendlist distro to masses so far. And PLEASE keep up the the good work!!
145 • Linux Mint 2.1 (by NAyK on 2007-03-13 06:01:13 GMT from India)
I really enjoyed Linux Mint when I used it. I had trouble downloading 2.0 but found 2.1 helpful. I was a little disappointed in the look-n-feel... because it didn't look polished enough. But the multimedia codecs were a blessing.
However, when dreamlinux 2.2 came along, Dreamlinux messed up my Linux Mint partition. I though Dreamlinux 'looked' better, while offering the same functionality. But I wasn't disappointed by the functionality of Linux Mint.
Linux Mint needed help (read further installation) to play VCDs.
My initial travails are recorded here:
http://alternativenayk.wordpress.com/2007/01/03/i-finally-enter-the-doors-of-linux-mint/
146 • I am staying with Gentoo (by M. Edward (Ed) Borasky on 2007-03-13 06:14:07 GMT from United States)
As a devoted Gentoo user, I think someone needs to point out that as far as the users are concerned, Gentoo hasn't changed. I've been running Gentoo for about four years now, and the only problem I've ever had with it is that the developers can't do *everything* they want to do.
Now they *can't* compete with distros that have corporate support. It's just not going to happen -- they aren't going to pass Fedora or Ubuntu or openSuse for this reason. And I think when push comes to shove, even huge Debian isn't going to remain a force for long without corporate support. Let's face it -- Linux is a big business now. There are real jobs on the line -- jobs in technology, marketing, sales, and system administration. There is real money on the line.
Isn't that why Daniel Robbins left Gentoo in the first place -- because he was spending his own money keeping it going, not because of any "political" reasons. Gentoo is still the best distro for my needs, and it isn't going to be internal politics that kills it -- it's going to be lack of corporate support.
147 • I'm staying with Gentoo for now (by butters on 2007-03-13 08:26:25 GMT from United States)
#146 makes a great point. But I also want to emphasize that Gentoo is not your typical distribution. It's a sophisticated system that facilitates the process of building a highly customized distribution from upstream source code. I've been a Gentoo user since nearly the beginning, and I do think that Gentoo has failed to live up to its promise. But I don't agree with some of the comments here because I don't think they understand what the true vision for Gentoo was (or could have been).
Gentoo was never supposed to be a distribution for power users, the kind that want to customize and configure but don't want to fiddle and hack. Not that there's anything wrong with this kind of user, but Gentoo was never designed to handle a user base full of these people. It's a community distribution focused on very advanced capabilities, and a lot of these users are simply in over their heads. This isn't arrogance. The project has the right to target advanced users. Not all distributions need to target the mainstream and early-adopter crowds. There are plenty of other projects with this goal in mind.
Instead, Gentoo was supposed to be a metadistribution for developers and distributors. It was supposed to revolutionize the way we build a distribution from source code. It was supposed to address the same kinds of release management and derivation issues that Debian is facing today. But it didn't. While they made it really easy to build packages onto the filesystem using a tree of powerful build scripts, they didn't make it so easy to build packages into a repository for binary distribution. The result was each user compiling the same package independently, even if they would be perfectly happy with reasonable defaults for the build configuration.
Would-be distributors didn't have an easy way to derive a binary package repository from the Portage tree, so derivatives never really appeared. I don't remember seeing anything about VLOS lately, and Sabayon has really been the first derivative that looks like it could survive. When I joined the Gentoo community in 2001, I thought that Gentoo would become the weapon of choice for a new generation of Linux distributions. It wasn't meant for users, it was meant for developers and distributors, but it was missing pieces, and ultimately it failed to fulfill its promise.
I see Gentoo slowly fading away over the next 5 years or so, but it's still a compelling distribution for developers and advanced users, so it will remain in good shape for quite a while. I continue using it because it's really clean and elegant to administer once you understand the basic tools and conventions, and I'm just so familiar with it at this point. The free software stack has progressed to the point where I don't have to be on the bleeding edge in order to be satisfied. The current stack has reached a sort of "worksforme" status where occasionally I find some new feature that's neat (Beryl, for example), but it's stuff I could easily live without.
That said, I no longer recommend Gentoo to anyone. Anyone who would really want to run Gentoo probably already knows about it and doesn't mind reading the (excellent) docs. Power users stay away, not because I'm arrogant, but because I have a good feeling you won't be happy in the long run. Maybe check out Sabayon, or else stick to the (K)Ubuntu, MEPIS, PCLOS, Mandriva, Mint, and Freespire kind of distributions. I've checked most of these out, and they all seem to offer a really impressive experience if you're looking for the usual kinds of desktop functionality.
148 • Elive as a live CD (by dbrion on 2007-03-13 08:27:36 GMT from France)
starts very bad. Arabic and (AFAIK) farsi are written the wrong way (one is given the choice of languages at the very beginning).... VIm has syntax coloring, however. My Freedom keyboard is recognised, but massages are written in a mixture of American engl and French.... They want to do multimedia with _that_? They should begin with proper language handling...
149 • Ladislav was irresponsible (by Anonymous on 2007-03-13 08:47:12 GMT from United States)
I must say that Ladislav's comments about Gentoo seem very irresponsible.
I've never used Gentoo, and I don't know any of the details of Gentoo's problems or not-problems. But it seems to me that Ladislav is just rumor mongering. The proof of a distro is in the pudding. Judge a distro by what they release, not by bickerings on their mailing list.
150 • Re: Linux Mint vs Freespire (by Ariszló on 2007-03-13 08:53:19 GMT from Hungary)
Hans Simmons wrote: Linspire has legal licenses for the codecs they distribute. I'm not sure Linux Mint does.
That's a US-specific issue. You don't need licenses to use codecs outside the US.
151 • RE: 110 (by Béranger on 2007-03-13 09:27:10 GMT from Romania)
> Try Kurumin 7. Is better.
Does Kurumin support English?! I can see all their screenshots with config dialogs are in Portuguese!
152 • Reply to # 113 (by ArkFan on 2007-03-13 09:39:44 GMT from Germany)
Do you have any details to back up your claims? I've been hanging around Ark's irc channel forever, and I've seen no quarreling between developers and certainly no arrogance (the only problem I have seen there is lack of manpower that occasionally leads to stuff not being replied to because those guys are overloaded -- maybe you're mistaking that for arrogance?).
I've seen one developer (saint) leaving, and that was not because he was in conflict with the others, but because he had taken up a new job with a company that wouldn't let him work on Ark.
In terms of technology (just not marketing), Ark is doing better than ever and the 2007.1 release will be great. I for one am glad that Ark uses its own installer, which may not do what you need, but which is perfect for people who just want to use an OS that works.
anaconda sucks - It may be powerful, but it's way too complicated for a fresh Windows convert to handle, and it is technically junk - it's written in the memory eater known as Python (try running anaconda on a 64 MB RAM box -- the Ark installer will work just fine), and it uses GTK, which just doesn't fit in with everything else Ark is doing.
153 • RE 150, 121 Mint legalties (by dbrion on 2007-03-13 09:40:08 GMT from France)
The best way not to be bothered with all this legal stuff, in the US, has been suggested by POST 18 ":My advice is to carve out a partition on your parents home PC and put Mint on it, making it the default boot. No more tech support calls!
"
The advantage is two-fold :
o* ne installs it on a PC one did not pay, without too much respecting an OS one did not pay.
*one remains free; legal issues/troubles are for pple who paid the PC
=>
That gives all its intellectual value to the responsible defence of free software....
RE 144 : I have the impression you want to have a copy of Cygwin's installer for Mint (which is at least 5 years old).... This gives an idea of the technological state of that GREEN distr.0...
154 • Gentoo: a choice (by KimTjik on 2007-03-13 09:47:05 GMT from Sweden)
My own impression is that both parties are right from their perspective: developers and devoted users of Gentoo see things from their perspective and an outsider from another.
Personally I'm in favour of Gentoo, but I haven't had the necessary time to really go down to serious business with it yet. Nevertheless there are some areas which lack clarity:
- It's not true to say that there aren't any developers who seriously are making code and improving the system. On the contrary there're a whole lot of them. However, many busy individuals doesn't necessary sum up to a cohesive improvement.
- Next, but it should probably be the first point, is to define the goal of Gentoo; not just as a developer, but as well as an outsider. In this aspect I could argue that Ladislav expect too much, referring to previous popularity of the distro, because I have never got the impression that Gentoo was designed for the masses and I'm certain that neither does Ladislav. What have then changed? Even if Gentoo might have an internal struggle going on, we also have to admit that the user base of Linux is changing quite rapidly. When Gentoo was on top of success the Linux user base consisted of a larger part of "geeks"; those "geeks" are still there, but a big number of more causal computer users have been added. Naturally Gentoo won't keep on attracting the same number of people.
- Is it a catastrophe if Gentoo will be like the 20th most popular distro? No. It still has its niche and as long as they - with some improvements - take care of its niche the distro could be doing fine. At least that what I hope, because Linux could become terribly boring if it all was narrowed down to some "user-friendly" (damn, what I hate that expression, because it's so misleading) selection of distros with corporate backing.
…
Mint and *ubuntu: I can understand the popularity of Mint, but on the other hand I can’t understand why for example the Fedora based BLAG hasn’t achieved the same popularity. BLAG has been here for years and does out of the box support multimedia. BLAG has worked excellent on all computers I’ve tested it on (I’ve installed it to relatives and friends as well), except my main machine, but that’s because the graphic card is a tricky one on most Linux distros. With Ubuntu and it’s derivates I’ve on the contrary encountered a whole lot of bugs, or shall we say incompatibility with even standard hardware; at the moment I’m trying to establish the cause of a strange boot problem with the weirdest workaround in Ubuntu on a IBM NetVista and why it refuses to accept any changes (read: adjustments according to monitor specification) of the parameters for the screen (a typical LCD 1280x1024). These problems I’ve encountered in Minst as well. So even if there was a lot of fuss about Fedora last week, I can’t say anything else than from my experience it’s still one of the few really stable and compatible systems around… if we’re not going down the road of compiling from source.
155 • linux on older hardware and mint vs. freespire (by micha on 2007-03-13 10:20:11 GMT from Germany)
The fastest distro i have ever seen (except all the 50 MB little one like DSL, puppy) is zenwalk. It is based on slackware and uses xfce. It is even faster than vector linux. To my mind, if you want to work on a KDE Desktop - buy newer hardware. KDE is never fast, using old hardware.
To go on; my experience on hardware like 1 GHz CPU and about 500 MB memory: slackware derivates are always the fastest (the one i use is frugalware), very close up is PCLinux OS 2007, then following all the debian styles (whereas Xubuntu is the fastest and Mepis, Kubuntu the slowest) and at the very end fedora (fedora 6 is much slower then fedora 5 - dont know why).
Some weeks ago installed mint 2.2 and i was very very impressed. Very clean, fast and easy install. After that, nothing to do, but update and doin whatever you expect to do with your desktop - out of the box.
Accept PCLinuxOS impressed me that way too, but is has the KDE as default (which i dont like) and much smaller software-repositories.
Once i tried out freespire 1.x, but it never works such flawless like mint.
Just one thing to add: linux/GNU is such great, because its open source and thatswhy are debian, fedora, ... (as pure open source distros) very much important.
thanks for your work at DW Ladislav
156 • gentoo (by energyman on 2007-03-13 10:41:26 GMT from Germany)
Some people here really need a reality check.
There is a very... controversial article - and when someone who was there (a dev!), tries to correct some of the mistakes in that article (and there were several), he is attacked by a bunch of rabit gentoo-haters.
The next time you make yourself look like assholes, inform yourselves!
Nightmorph did not attack Ladislav for his criticisms. Gentoo has been critized a lot in the past. He tried to correct errors made by Ladislav. And some of you have nothing better to do than attack him?
How low. I am disgusted.
The 'arrogance' in the gentoo forums (is there any? Gentooers even help fedora and ubuntu folks - try to ask a gentoo question in an ubuntu or fedora forum for a change), is nothing compared with the arrogance and hatred shown HERE.
That is just sickening.
forums.gentoo.org has 104687 registered users - with such a high amount, it is naturally that there is a vitriolic 'I am leaving' thread every day. So what? How many people are leavin g ubuntu, fedora, opensuse, debian every single day?
Oh and if we talk about numbers: over 23000 posts to the gentoo-user mailing list in the last 12 month doesn't look so bad, don't you think? Which is, also almost the same amount of mails from 2003 or 2004..
Btw, if you have a look at the GWN's, you all will see that the dev turnover is pretty low - and if you have a look at the packages - it is amazing how many new packages are added every day to the tree. With every sync ebuilds for new apps, libs and tools are available. Plus timely updates for the ones already there. If that is 'decline', I would like more of it. The devs are doing a great job. And some non-gentoo-users here dare to attack them? Have you completly lost it? Has your hatred removed any form of decency?
Just because the funder came back for some hours, flamed around, insulted people and was not able to comprehend that gentoo changed in his absence, people construct some madly, insulting stuff out of it.
That is so low, I can't find the right words for it.
157 • DistroWatch (by Chuck Foreman on 2007-03-13 10:57:47 GMT from Germany)
Hi,
Keep up the excellent work! Any "naysayer" is probably only
narrowminded and only wants to feed their own mojo
or distro etc...
I tune in aleast once a month and I like the news and the
release info! I've been visiting least two years now.
I like to search the articles from time to time. I remember
once reading something and it was nice to be able to find it again.
It was that one about the demise of rpm and not looking back.
It kind of sums up my experience!
Anyway, like the idea of performance on old hardware.
There are a lot of minimalist distros floating around could be an
idea for another article. I personally use CRUX on an old 166mhz
Pentium laptop. I can comfortably do most things. I've certainly
long forgone Gnome/KDE and use Blackbox. I'd like a friendlier
Spreadsheet than SC (ncurses/ vi type) but you may as well install the complete Gnome to get Gnumeric!
I have DesktopBSD on the same 166 box. It came with KDE and is quite slow, but it's a credit that it can run at all.
I find the distro "Kate" also easy on resources, I installed it on my
old Pentium III dual-boot w/Win2000 that I gave my daughter (Katharina) but she/I never really use it much.
I'm grateful that you've maintained this site all these years and I
really like it the way it is... I have no great wish to see it change
and it's my first stop when I want to see what's new in the world
of 'Nix.
Thanks
158 • Mint (by wCarkido on 2007-03-13 11:13:51 GMT from United States)
Can't say that I found anything better in it. I do not have any windows installed anywhere to access or wireless, so the only benefit is gettting a couple of codecs??? And the tradeoff is an unattractive, non-user friendly interface... hmmm, back to Ubuntu for me.
Why does everyone make a big deal about wallpaper and window colors? The first thing I always do is replace the default wallpaper and color scheme to my preferences. Green, brown, what's the difference? it all gets changed anyway...
159 • Distro for old hardware (by kanishka on 2007-03-13 11:36:33 GMT from Italy)
I have an old box with a Celeron 800MHz, 256Mb RAM and a GeForce4 MX that I use to try out some distros. Ubuntu worked quite well with some afterwork (nvidia drivers, new modelines to xorg.conf), as Xubuntu (I didn't notice a difference in speed, though) and Mint 2.0. Dreamlinux (2.0, 2.1, 2.2) was very fast but I uninstalled it due some rough edges it has. Zenwalk 4.2 was very fast too and I recommend it. Then I installed Elive 0.62, and it was the fastest of all! Very impressive (and beautiful). It stayed there for quite a while, but in the end it is unfortunately still not completely mature; I can't wait for the moment it will be.
Now the box has MEPIS 6.5 (don't remember which beta) and it seems very happy ;).
Thus, if you have similar hardware, I recommend trying the latest Zenwalk, MEPIS and Mint; if you can cope with some minor problem here and there and want to try something original, try Elive or Dreamlinux.
160 • Sidux Sidux VLOS PCLOS (by Lycan on 2007-03-13 11:53:44 GMT from United States)
Well this is my story.
I started this job in january, I have a p4 2.4ghz 1.5gb ddr400 cas 3 / 80gb ide linux mint 2.1 upgraded to 2.2 then turned into kubuntu edgy / mx 4000 agp nv18 upgraded yesterday to kubuntu feisty without touching the repository.
second box p4 2.4ghz 1.5gb ddr400 cas 3 / 80gb ide / fedora core 6 geforce3 nv20 card its a asus v8200 deluxe card actually gets 2000FPS with 3d desktops enabled and even without it over 1000FPS vs my mx 4000 which is geforce4 gets 600FPS max in glxgears anywho /
was running yesterday livecd Sidux on amd 64 3000+ / 2gb ddr333 cas 2.5 / 120gb SATA integrated SiS card and wow this thing was faster than both of my p4's in livecd mode. I installed and shut it down since I gotta finish with these 2 p4 first.. well 1 of them is going since i only have internet for 2 pcs.
So yea it seems Sidux is damn good and amd is good .
PCLOS is another on the goodie list and last but least VLOS.
Sidux
Pclos
Vlos
161 • I tried Ark - why did nobody mention it before? (by Frank Meier on 2007-03-13 12:14:41 GMT from Germany)
I tried out Ark Linux after seeing it mentioned in this week's DWW - I'm amazed, and I wonder why I've never heard about it before.
Like many other Linux "newbs", I started using Ubuntu last year and was not very satisfied - so I tried Kubuntu and found it a lot better, that's what I used until now.
Since my hardware isn't the newest (1.2 GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM), I decided to give Ark a try - and I was impressed. It "just worked", no tweaking required, and it came with all the things I had to install manually in Kubuntu (and without some things I removed there), and it was FAST.
How come Ark isn't getting any attention in the press? Ark should be where Ubuntu is!
162 • Linux Mint (Bianca) Usage (by varaahan on 2007-03-13 12:37:33 GMT from India)
It's a nice distro based on Ubuntu with eye-candy desktop.
One problem I have is the wavy movement of window scrolling.
I am discussing this in the Linux Mint forum but so far I have not been successful in getting over the problem.
163 • No subject (by 156 on 2007-03-13 12:45:21 GMT from United States)
ROFL, that was great. Thanks for the funny stuff.
164 • RE: # 152 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-13 13:14:30 GMT from Italy)
I was a member of the mailing list back in 2003, so I can't prove very much to you.
What really pissed off a lot of people back then was that Ark Linux was advertised as being newbie friendly and: "in alpha status", but "working quite OK"
That was true until people didn't have their Windows partition destroyed and possibly their partition table fubar. When they complained with the developers they were told: "which part of alpha don't you understand?" Sure a great thing to tell a newbie who is trying Linux for the first time. Ark Linux back then should have come with a death warning!
As to Anaconda sucking and being too complicated, it has been adopted by all sort of distributions, not just by rpm based ones.
Among them was the "truly" newbie friendly J.A.M.D. Linux, and I never heard one complaint, nobody had any problems of any kind, ever.
In any case you don't even start a Linux distro without a proper installer.
If now Ark Linux is really improving I can be only pleased, but maybe it is a bit too late.
165 • No subject (by serge on 2007-03-13 13:37:13 GMT from Russian Federation)
>> 156:
>>
>> That is so low, I can't find the right words for it.
I completely agree with you.
166 • RE:#156 by energyman (by john frey on 2007-03-13 13:47:54 GMT from Canada)
Well now I feel ashamed. Oh, I feel so bad. How could I possibly voice my opinion when the rebuttal by nightmorph was so reasoned and reasonable?:-P I must be a Gentoo hater.
167 • Mint vs Freespire (by Matt on 2007-03-13 13:51:42 GMT from Denmark)
Linux Mint is really very similar to Ubuntu (it adds a few applications, different art-work, and codecs, but nothing revolutionary). Freespire on the other hand is an independent distro although now based on Ubuntu. Both are fine distros (I am not going to say which is “better”), but it is clear to me that the Freespire developers have put more effort and creativity into their distro.
168 • Re: Linux Mint vs Freespire (by Hoover on 2007-03-13 14:01:36 GMT from United States)
150 • Re: Linux Mint vs Freespire (by Ariszló on 2007-03-13 08:53:19 GMT from Hungary)
That's a US-specific issue. You don't need licenses to use codecs outside the US.
Hans Simmons originally wrote: Linspire has legal licenses for the codecs they distribute. I'm not sure Linux Mint does.
But that's not the entire issue. Bundling many commercial/proprietary packages requires a license agreement for redistribution (read the EULAs you agree to). Can't just decide to reuse someones product w/o permission, for example try to include Pepsi in your on-line Fun Pack and see how quickly you get a cease and desist :)...
169 • Gentoo (by Jordan on 2007-03-13 14:14:33 GMT from United States)
From post 156: "rabit gentoo-haters.."
LOL.., well, maybe semi-literacy is one of the problems with the
supporters and perhaps the developers of that partlicular distribution.
I have nothing against Gentoo, myself. But it is useless to me (and
apparently many others) in the same way that several crates of
nuts, bolts, pinions, body panels, uncut windshield glass and upholstery
are useless to me when I can simply purchase an assembled
automobile instead (which I'm likely to customze a bit once I get it
home :)).
-- Jordan
170 • CentOS 5 Beta (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-13 14:21:24 GMT from Italy)
I am very pleased. CentOS is a really fine distribution.
It is not exactly ideal as a desktop OS, but many people do use it for that purpose (some well known developers among them).
171 • Re: Does Kurumin support English? (by Ariszló on 2007-03-13 14:40:11 GMT from Hungary)
Béranger asks: Does Kurumin support English?! I can see all their screenshots with config dialogs are in Portuguese!
Yes, it mostly does:
1. Right-click on the Clock applet and left-click on Formato da Data & Hora (Date & Time Format).
2. Select Padrão (Default) in the drop-down list of País ou região (Country or Region) and click OK.
3. Log out and log in again.
Most KDE apps will have English menus but the K Menu will remain Portuguese. The menus of non-KDE apps like Firefox will remain Portuguese, too.
172 • Re: 169 - Gentoo & an assembled automobile (by Ariszló on 2007-03-13 14:49:38 GMT from Hungary)
Dominic Humphries has an excellent article about toy cars and lego cars:
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm
173 • RE: # 127 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-13 14:52:50 GMT from Italy)
"I think the Sabayon Linux project has already pointed the way to a successful Gentoo - make it easy to install and highly preconfigured, while preserving the power of portage and the extreme configuration flexibility for those users who want it."
That sounds almost exactly as what I suggested in the Gentoo forum about 4 years ago, and I was abused beyond belief for doing so: "we don't need a Gentoo like that", was the overall reply (+ the abuses, of course).
I am extremely pleased that a unpretentious 18 years old (when he started) has proven an entire community of would-be demi-gods how things could be done right.
I am still grateful to Ladislav who supported Sabayon with a generous donation.
Keep it up, Ladislav. You might make enemies, but you have plenty of insight.
174 • RE 151 :"Does Kurumin support English?! I" (by dbrion on 2007-03-13 15:35:58 GMT from France)
Does it really harm if she does not?
The main advantage of having rare localised Linuxes is to remind that countries exist where American english is not natively spoken.
I think of Guatemalas "jungle d'operette' (a "jungle" with power supply and cyber cafés!!! -it was not such usual south of Sahara, at least for power supply -even on big axes-, last century).
The article DWW recommands is superb : I could not imagine a OS specialist going in a cybercafé and not being able to speak Spanish (Bush and Swhwarzennegger do, AFAIK)..
BTW it gives all its value on relying on IT connection to fix any problem....
175 • Gentoo (by Ohnonymous on 2007-03-13 16:17:55 GMT from United States)
It is true that Gentoo is in decline, but Sabayon is providing precisely the kind of user experience that Gentoo lacks. That doesn't hurt Gentoo any more than Ubuntu hurts Debian.
The thing that hurts Gentoo is when people argue about who "owns" what. For that reason, maybe Daniel leaving is a good thing.
176 • Teaching the Dharma and the angry coder (by Bill Savoie on 2007-03-13 17:10:39 GMT from United States)
Many things can motivate us. Anger and Fear is strong in this culture. They can keep us active, but without joy and inner peace. That is a hard state to hold for long periods of time. It causes high blood pressure and early heart attacks. Brilliant but short lives. There is another approach and that is to meditate on a regular basis, and clear the lens between us and others. Foster gentle guidance and tolerance of others. Bringing about cooperation and community. Great things then happen without much effort, like a field of flowers, each is beautiful.
177 • old computer (by Filippo on 2007-03-13 17:28:30 GMT from Italy)
I have my home Server Pentium 200 mhz , 64 MB RAM ,running Slackware 10.1 very well, in text mode I use it for samba server, router , firewall , dhcp server, etc...
Sometimes I use it with a small Graphical Interface like fluxbox jwith Dillo web browser ! It's fast enough.
Otherwise for old Desktop system's I can run Puppy or Dsl .
178 • Re: 172 (by RedBoar on 2007-03-13 17:36:04 GMT from United States)
That lego-toy car link is an EXCELLENT analogy, me being in the mid-level "toy car" camp can definitely gain understanding from past struggles I've had online to get support. That's also why I really like Sabayon even though I haven't decided to install it on my hard drive yet, and Mini CD ver. 3.2 once installed wouldn't boot on my multi-boot PC (it doesn't "like" logical partitions).
This is also why Linux will never beat Windows and never be a commercially viable solution on the desktop or server, at least in a primary role, which is a shame.
179 • re 76,85,93,94,96,111,162 (by Fractalguy on 2007-03-13 17:50:29 GMT from United States)
76 . distrowatch website 78 . old computers (by dbrion
I use a bookmarklet http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/pagedata.html#view_selection to see the DWW text in a new separate window where I can make the text 240% larger withyout the side columns overlaping. Many web sites have the font too small or ugly. This alows for some relief.
85 . old (and partially broken) hardware -
He needs Smart BootManager http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/ - works very nice for tyhose without a CD bios setting. But be very careful creating this floppy for use. It makes a special binary program in the floppies boot record. In Windows, the installer can destroy your hard disk boot record instead of putting the product on the floppy. One must follow the directions very carefully. I recommend changing the focus (in DOS window) to the floppy and running the install program (which you stored on C:) from A:. I have a friend I set up with SBM so he could install Ubuntu over Win98. So, do this, put in blank floppy then
type A:
type
C:sbminst.exe [options here, I forget exactly the details]
Best would be run a Linux liveCD and create the floppy in a safe environment using the linux floppy SBM installer, btmgr-3.7-1.tar.gz .
93 . Distro for Old Hardware Recommendation.... Elive!!!
Elive is very nice to look at - love their night themes.
94 . Gentoo/Mint/Ubuntu (by Jordan
Vectorlinux, Zenwalk, PCLinuxOS. I'll have to take another look at Vectorlinux and Zenwalk. Already got PCLinuxOS.
96 . How does Mint do it?
"Fraunhofer comes and sues you"
Well that may be but it would be about patents, not copyright. And they won't bother with an non-commercial user since there is no money in it and there is way too much risk. Example, the recording industry went too far with a women whose late husband (may have) downloaded music. The judge ruled they had to pay her lawyer fees. (Ouch! Sets a precedent, you know.)
111 . #3, #35 Mint "Slab" "Widescreen Menu"
Good tips! Thanks.
162 . Linux Mint (Bianca) Usage (by varaahan
"wavy movement of window scrolling"
What driver is that? I saw that happen with framebuffer.
180 • RE: Teaching the Dharma and the angry coder (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-13 18:11:29 GMT from Italy)
Beautiful things you are saying.
For about 15 years, before getting seriously involved with computers, spiritual achievement had been the main aim of my life.
After I started using computers I began to lose my inner peace.
Does it mean that computers are bad for you? Maybe, I honestly don't know the answer.
181 • RE 179 elives fate (by dbrion on 2007-03-13 18:48:58 GMT from France)
Thank you for your tests and tricks. They will sooner or later be useful.
Elive has so nice aspects one can pardon her many things : a syntax coloring vim, a gcc, an innovative look.
The fact that Arabic is not written the right yaw on the CD ROM starting menu leads me to install her on a VM disk, for "lego" playing (verifying scripts I had written under Zenwalk for{ R, gdal, GRASS etc} installing by traditional compilation can be ported).
BTW, Zenwalk's saving screens (demos from GLx) were found wonderful by my mother (lego installs are long and lead to saving screens...) The policy of Zenwalk of making only non redundant softs accessible is clever, but can make pple unhappy ("I can not get what I was accustomed to"). I found her without flaws, as far as I VMplayed with her.
182 • Bianca (by jtibau on 2007-03-13 19:06:09 GMT from Ecuador)
I've used ubuntu since breezy and found incredibly easy to work with. I think that if you have a (fast) Internet connection (and some know-how) it is unnecessary to use a distro like Mint.
However that doesn't fit most of the cases I've seen. When I converted my cousin to linux about a year ago, it took me about three hours to download all the restricted codecs, NVIDIA drivers and blabla. The machine dual booted Windows, but I didn't bother to install codecs on it ;) barely the necessary. So he was happy with his linux and eventually has become fond of it rather than annoyed by common initial problems such as not being able to reproduce and mp3 or dvd.
Furthermore, I usually hand out ubuntu cds to friends who wanna try linux. Most of the times I can't do what I did with my cousin. And so they grow tired of ubuntu, wonderful as it is, because they can't even play a song or watch a movie in it.
So I decided to try Bianca. I'm overjoyed of this decision, I might be keeping as my main OS. They have done a wonderful job at keeping it simple, uncluttered and everything works.
I know it strays far away from being free software, which I would much rather have than binary blobs. However, at least on my part, I've decided that step number one is to get as many people using any kind GNU/Linux distro. I think in the end the number of linux users will affect the perspective companies have in respect to free software as well.
We'll see how it all works out in the near future. In the meanwhile I'm quite alright using some non-free packages.
183 • RE: 174 • RE 151 (by Béranger on 2007-03-13 19:27:53 GMT from Romania)
>>174 • RE 151 :"Does Kurumin support English?! I" (by dbrion on 2007-03-13 15:35:58 GMT from France)
>> Does it really harm if she does not?
Ecoutez, Monsieur : je m'en fous de ce que vous croyez, mais le but de ma question était de savoir si ça vaut la peine de le télécharger pour l'essayer, étant donné que je ne connais pas le portugais, sauf qques mots que je pourrais comprendre. Il ne s'agit pas d'une sorte d'extremisme ou exclusivisme que votre message suggère d'une manière pas très subtile.
OTOH, thanks go to Ariszló for the kind answer.
184 • Mint Fast (by Enjoymint on 2007-03-13 20:13:34 GMT from United States)
Why is Mint so much faster than Ubuntu?
I've installed all flavors of Ubuntu on dozens of machines and Mint on about 6 machines. I liked the way that Ubuntu is layed out, but I get very frustrated with the speed. I'm not talking about the LiveCD. I'm talking about after it is installed on the hard drive. It takes forever for applications to open (mid range 2 year old machines and new ones).
Everyone is saying that Mint is just a repackaged Unbuntu. How does simple repackaging make Mint 10 to 20 times faster at opening apps.
Given the speed difference and the codecs, I'm using Mint on my personal machines.
185 • RE: 171 • Re: Does Kurumin support English? (by Ariszló (by Béranger on 2007-03-13 20:22:58 GMT from Romania)
> Most KDE apps will have English menus but the K Menu will remain Portuguese.
> The menus of non-KDE apps like Firefox will remain Portuguese, too.
Oh my. It's tempting, but after having visited their mirror, I noticed that they don't seem to have any updates! Only ISOs.
This is not what I'm expecting from a distro. WITHOUT the need for security updates, one could use ANY commercial distro, like RHEL WS/Desktop, SLED, MCD.
186 • RE: # 185 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-13 20:37:23 GMT from Italy)
Kurumin is based on Debian Etch, AFAIK.
So you''ll get your updates from Debian. Plus about 19,000 packages.
187 • Linux mint (by flumpy7 on 2007-03-13 22:33:11 GMT from United Kingdom)
Linux mint is sooooo good. I am a fairly new linux user but have tried about 10 different distros. I think its a bit unfair to say mint is just ubuntu with media cause each release gets more and more unique. The next release is due to have 3D graphics which ubuntu isnt doing (as far as i know). I think Mint tries to give users what they need and want and it s the only distro ive used that doesnt really require any tweaking. All those wasted hours of typing an unknown language into a command bar just to get streaming video , DVD playback or wireless connection are over! I hope im not offending any linux supremos here...but with linux mint linux is finally completely usable to the complete beginner. To anybody who wants to ditch windows linux mint is the distro for you. And it looks so sexy. And requests for help on the forums are really quick and the replies make sense. Download it you know you want to.
188 • Zenwalk 4.2 live (by Fractalguy on 2007-03-14 00:17:50 GMT from United States)
Last I looked at ZenLive was 2.8.1 last September. I just burned the current ZenLive 4.2 - sorry, not impressed yet. While just one best application per use is a good idea, the apps better cover the functions/files I have.
For example, *.sxc didn't know how to open but Gnumeric could manually open it. But *.xls did open in Gnumeric on clicking from the file manager. That is minor compared to my screen coming up in 800x600 (with no obvious way to get my 1280x1024). And there was no sound for mp3 (Audacious). Not even *.avi in mplayer and streamtuner that seemed to otherwise be working. And I couldn't open *swf. Oh well. :/
Program editing in vim and Geany does show color coding, that was good. Firefox and Python looked current. Evince was OK for pdf, and Bluefish for editing html. Finally the Xarchiver opened zip OK.
Bottom line for me, I'll wait. Only got 800x600, an ugly killer issue to me. I've seen plain xvga drivers give me full screen resolution. And what is with the sound? Some alsa issue? :/
Downloading Vector now to see if it is any better than 5.8-beta2. :)
189 • SUSE development cycle (by Donald Arseneau on 2007-03-14 01:23:59 GMT from Canada)
You have it backwards when you claim that open SUSE is behind other distributions' development cycle. Open SUSE is ahead. I just spent a tiresome week getting Linux installed on new computers with Intel 965 chipsets, trying numerous distros with many incantations. What worked was Open SUSE 10.2 because it comes with xorg X11R7.2, plus i810beta
graphics driver.
190 • Vectorlinux 5.8-beryl B4 (by Fractalguy on 2007-03-14 03:31:39 GMT from United States)
No luck with Vector. I have nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 440] (rev a3) graphics board, not all that new and should be easy to have drivers for. With Vector, I could not get much passed login. On typing startx, I get "fatal server error - no screens found". For all the praise about Zenwalk and Vector here, I'm dissapointed. I don't recall this trouble with gNewSense 1.1. I'll check. :/
191 • Linux Mint (by Vincent Bost on 2007-03-14 04:23:42 GMT from United States)
I've been using Linux Mint 2.1 (i.e Bea) for a few months now, and all I can say is: IT KICKS BUTT! I haven't tried the newest 2.2 version, but I suspect it packs a lot of punch, as well.
I heartily recommend it for the Linux newbie who wants a system that "just works". Lemme tell ya, it definitely works!
192 • Gentoo (by Thomas Goldstein on 2007-03-14 05:31:34 GMT from United States)
Post 156. Now there in a nutshell is an honest to goodness Gentoo fanboy. No room for criticism because any criticism is inaccurate, or if not inaccurate, then uncalled for. There is no way to win because it's all seen as a personal attack. Ladislav, you did a fine job on the Gentoo article whether the truth hurts some or not, well that's another story. I do know this for a fact. There are many people associated with Gentoo who agree with what you wrote and hope this creates some change. If not, then all you can say is "What a pity"
193 • re 179 re 85 (partially broken) (by Anonymous on 2007-03-14 06:41:07 GMT from New Zealand)
Thanks, but Smart Boot Manager was one of the first things I tried. The CD drive just doesn't show up any more. The PC is also getting fussy about which HDD I can install, so I'm basically stuck with the original one. But it works with DSL they way I have it configured, so no problems.
194 • Linux Mint (by John on 2007-03-14 08:17:39 GMT from Australia)
My $0.02 worth,
I moved from Ubuntu 6.10 to Linux Mint. Mint does everything that I need - out of the box. I am a touch cynical about the motives of Canonical and their ideological agenda; warm and fuzzy to be sure, but it never made me feel good.
I like the Mint approach of "lets do it". There have been questions and invitations for comments and suggestions from the developers. The Mint community feel valued (perhaps this was once so with Ubuntu too), and people constructivey contribute. No put-downs from the Linux elite is great bonus for newbies. There is also a regular newsletter that keeps you hooked.
The Mint community makes you feel you are there for the journey.
The distro itself? Well it does what I want. I don't live in the US so the codec stuff is not such an issue for me. Things which people have liked is the wireless connection gui and the slab menus, the way XP partitions are loaded with read/write accessibilty and all those other little things one has to do with Ubuntu to get it "right" are already there in Mint. Yes I know that Automatix can get you there as well, but why not do it from the start?
Yep, come on board. It is a great distro with a great community. It is not drifting; it has a plan and philosophy that I like.
Regards
John
195 • Distro for old computers (by michael on 2007-03-14 10:14:50 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have been trying out the very latest alpha edition of Puppylinux 2.15CE and I am really impressed, It is the first Puppylinux that (for me)has looked beautiful on first boot, and was able to connect with my wireless card(I plugged in the card after booting up and it found the card automatically). It seems to have come a long way in a very short time.
I plan to install it on several old thinkpads when the official release is out. I really think it is a great distro for old windows 98 boxes, and a perfect simple computer to give to people who just want basic web/communication use with no worries.
196 • Old computers and Austrumi (by dbrion on 2007-03-14 11:00:02 GMT from France)
From VMplaying, I think that Austrumi has a less than 96 M memory print (I test without disk (-no potential swap- with little screens, without sound nor IT, and just for basic functions; trying to have as little a mem print as possible is somewhat meaninglessas apps use memory, too).
I could notice :
it was fast (VM player is not for timing, as it makes things _slower_),
USB was well recognised ,
pictures could be looked at (it was Mint's green substance...)
vim was missing (perhaps it is better than downgraded).
so was gcc (it may be too memory greedy)
Though their window manager is not usual, it is intuitive enough to launch apps (the language was not English (I think/hope I missed a step in the start), but the names of the apps are classical)...
There remain 2 problems with old computers:
all of those I was interested in died _before_ I even saw them => one cannot spend too much time for them...
the use of liveCDs relies on a fragile medium (too many mecanical strains and movements)...
197 • Linux Mint and Sidux (by dutchy on 2007-03-14 11:01:49 GMT from Netherlands)
Linux Mint might be a good distro for new users, but eventually they will be sued for distributing things that are on the "questionable to distribute without a license" list.
It would be far better for their developers to not enable all of the proprietary codecs on install, but have a button that installs them after the fact, or perhaps asks during install if one wishes to use them. That was it places the responsibility on the user rather than the developers.
Since I am not a big fan of Gnome and Ubuntu, I have chosen Sidux. It is very fast for a KDE system. The only downside that I see to Sidux is that I don't speak German fluent enough to follow their official IRC channel, but if anyone asks a question in English, it is promptly answered.
One thing to note about Sidux, it IS Debian Sid, not based on it like Ubuntu and their derivatives.
I'm also curious how the Vector 5.8 Soho is in comparison to the above mentioned.
198 • Mint is good but maybe still premature (by Rocky on 2007-03-14 11:20:25 GMT from India)
Hi,
After all the good reviews given for Mint, I decided to try it on my Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop. I have installed a lot of distros on my laptop and none of them have ever given me any trouble while installing.
Mint was another story however, the installation (or boot up from live CD) hung up in the middle, I tried a lot of options given in the help file but of no avail. Also, no error message was given. From the few screens i saw, i see a lot of potential in the distro but would advise to maybe wait for a couple of more releases for Mint to mature. I am back to openSuse for now.
Thanks,
Rocky
199 • Ubuntu and offline udpates (by hobbitland on 2007-03-14 12:41:18 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi, I use Ubuntu-6.10 and I make a 2nd disk conrtaining extra stuff I download and things like w32codecs/libdvdcss etc.
I use offline updates by DLing from a SuSE 8.2 connected to the internet using some scripts I wrote. On a new machine I can get Ubutnu-6.10 and all the xtras bits liek Firefox-2.0.0.2 installed without accessing the internet.
200 • Sidux Pclos Vlos PCBSD (by Lycan on 2007-03-14 12:50:07 GMT from United States)
This is what keeps me going
201 • Debian Etch release update (by timon on 2007-03-14 13:10:11 GMT from Finland)
A new release schedule and a target release day has been set for Debian 4.0 "etch".
The release team estimates that the main obstacles that caused Etch to slip from the original release target have now been successfully resolved and all that is left to do before the final Debian 4.0 release is to first release the RC2 version of the Debian-Installer and then fixing all the remaining release-critical bugs (or, alternatively, remove the affected packages from Etch).
Ladislav, please add Debian 4.0 to the list of expected upcoming releases in the next week's DistroWatch Weekly. The current target release day for Etch is 2 Apr 2007.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/03/msg00012.html
202 • Gentoo (by Osgood Fop on 2007-03-14 15:11:15 GMT from United States)
Gentoo seems to be for 1. true geeks who have fun perpetually figuring out how to get an OS to work from scratch, which they manage to do not as often as they'd like to, 2. people who are pretending to be one of those true geeks, 3. masochists.
203 • RED HAT (by Scott WIlson on 2007-03-14 15:13:20 GMT from United States)
Looks like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is going to be released today
Web meeting @12:00PM
204 • RHEL 5??? (by hobbitland on 2007-03-14 15:33:15 GMT from United Kingdom)
Many people call Redhat Enterprise Linux RHEL.
205 • re #202 - Gentoo is for . . . (by ray carter at 2007-03-14 15:47:53 GMT from United States)
I can think of one other category. Folks who want/need to get the best from sub-optimal (not necessarily 'old') equipment. Having run Gentoo on my VIA C3 based mini-itx for over two years I can unequivically state that nothing else comes close in terms of performance. I like the mini-itx for it's small footprint, low energy use and quiet operation - Gentoo is the only thing I've found that runs decently on it.
206 • RE: # 202 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-14 17:23:40 GMT from Italy)
Generally speaking I agree. and what you say isn't just true for Gentoo, but for every distro/*nix which requires a lot of work/configuration.
After so many years of fiddling with virtually all known Linux distributions, I have come to the conclusion that my favorite distro is....: Mac OS X!!!
I know I am going to upset a lot of people, especially because OS X is proprietary, but OS X is almost exactly everything I always wanted Linux to be.
When you use OS X you almost forget which OS you are using, which isn't the case with any other OS, especially with Windows. I believe all operating systems should work like that one day.
Sorry if I offended anybody.
207 • Austrumi (by rglk on 2007-03-14 19:59:33 GMT from United States)
The next time Ladislav hands out a couple of hundred dollars for outstanding efforts expended on behalf of Linux, perhaps that money should go to the first person who figures out how to run Austrumi with English localization. The distro starts up in Latvian, and one has to probe three layers deep into the Start menu (all in Latvian) to find the switch for English localization.
With all due admiration for the brilliant job the developers have done in packaging an attractive, feature-packed and eminently usable distro into the space of only 50 MB and also have it run nicely in RAM, they've got to be nuts to bury the localization option this deep.
It took me more than half an hour of rummaging around in the menus and blindly trying out incomprehensible options before I finally stumbled upon the solution. What are these guys thinking?
What'š worse, it'š been like this ever since the first release of Austrumi, years ago! But in earlier versions I'd found it a little easier to stumble upon the solution (by now I had forgotten how to get there).
Nowhere on their website (in its English language version!) can I find a note explaining how to change the localization from the default Latvian. Also, even after the localization has been changed to English, it looks as though the keyboard layout still is Latvian.
208 • @Dharma and the angry coder (by gnobuddy on 2007-03-14 22:06:35 GMT from United States)
For about 15 years, before getting seriously involved with computers, spiritual achievement had been the main aim of my life.
After I started using computers I began to lose my inner peace.
Does it mean that computers are bad for you? Maybe, I honestly don't know the answer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think you are right. I too have spent many years searching for routes to inner peace, and I too find that it is easy to be turned away from the path if I spend too much time on a computer.
I think it is because computers are so abstracted from reality and sense perception. While using computers it is easy to get disconnected from your body, your being, your essential "you-ness", leaving only your eyes and your fingers as the focus of your consciousness. On the computer, we "chat" with people we do not see or hear, we play games in artificial worlds that have no wind, no sunshine, no smell, no texture beneath your feet, we make "friends" who never know us and whom we never know, we pretend that little flashes of light from a fleeting electron beam are words that are important and meaningful.
But even a kitten knows better than to be taken in by this artificial world behind the computer screen - it will pay no attention, once it realizes the images on the screen have no reality to them. Only we humans, who think ourselves so smart, are taken in by the cold empty light of the computer screen.
Computers are fun and a vital part of the fabric of modern society, but a walk in the park or even just sitting on the grass and looking at the world around you for a few minutes is far more likely to bring you nearer to inner peace than any amount of time spent with a computer.
-Gnobuddy
209 • RE: # 208 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-14 22:41:10 GMT from Italy)
Beautiful. Nothing to add. Only meditating your words.
210 • Linux-Mint & Freespire (by Ian Blackney on 2007-03-14 23:10:51 GMT from United States)
In regards to the use of Mint and Freespire, i havn't used Freespire, I am currently running Mint. And of all the free Linux distros available Mint is... I'll refrain from excessive flattery and just say that Mint is very good.
I look forward to Freespire 2, knowing that if all else fails, I can always go back to min and be satisfied.
211 • No subject (by Jordan on 2007-03-15 00:56:59 GMT from United States)
Mac OS? LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Good luck!
212 • RE: 207 • Austrumi (by IMQ on 2007-03-15 03:09:54 GMT from United States)
I am in agreement with you here. The web site is in English yet I haven't figure out how to start the darn thing in English.
It looks nice and I can navigate slowly because some of the apps are familiar faces.
213 • RE: # 211 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-15 03:16:19 GMT from Italy)
What is so funny, Jordan?
I have been using OS X for about 9 months now and I am very happy.
OS X has already achieved virtually everything that Linux is trying to.
I find the move to OS X from Linux only natural, after such a long quest.
Of course I haven't abandoned Linux, otherwise I wouldn't be here.
214 • Re #207 & 209 Austrumi (by rglk on 2007-03-15 04:23:11 GMT from United States)
Sorry, I neglected to reveal the way to switch to the English localization:
Start Menu > Istatiejumi > Valodas > English
Latvian is spoken by 0.03% of the world population, and Austrumi in Latvian cannot possibly be used by more than a few dozen people in Latvia. The ratio of potential English-speaking users of this distro to Latvian-speaking users has got to be at least 100:1.
So far, the brand new Austrumi 1.4.0 has been downloaded close to 5000 times. My guess is that 95% of the CD's burned from these ISO's wound up in the trash bin because folks couldn't figure out how to get around the Latvian localization.
Austrumi is quite an impressive distro that does some things better than Puppy and DSL. Why are the developers shooting themselves in the foot with this absurd default Latvian localization?
215 • RE 214 (by dbrion on 2007-03-15 08:18:35 GMT from France)
Thanks for switch to the English localization.
"Why are the developers shooting themselves in the foot with this absurd default Latvian localization?"
I think they are very sharp on their language, who had no official existence 25 years ago in the USSR. Their priority woul be then to keep their mother's speech (there is a word outside of Linux). It is consistent with the fact that old computer break, Linux evolves and has many other distributions (one can find other strictly localized distrs in Spain, but they seem pure translations of existing distrs, and are far less good than Austrumi -it is the first time she worked for me-).
There might be the same way of thinking in Quebec (French students are sent to Quebec to learn French, as they sometimes think mixing French and a kind of English is efficient). I saw a funny (and straightforward) way of working this around is by GOOGLE translating official / technical reports, but it cannot work with Latvia....
216 • Suggestion (by Max on 2007-03-15 11:34:27 GMT from Australia)
I still think that a weekly DWW poll on a particular linux topic would be a nice addition, and would lead to great discussion on the chosen weekly topic...
217 • There are issues, but.. (by Steve Long on 2007-03-15 14:39:58 GMT from United Kingdom)
I've been involved with some of this mess, and I actually agreed with the whole artice except for this:
"However, what distinguishes Gentoo from other such projects is the fact that it doesn't have a mechanism to deal with poisonous individuals. Or to be more precise, the existing mechanism do not work, since the present structures don't have the necessary powers to be effective in solving conflicts. As a result, over the last few years Gentoo Linux has degenerated into a loose structure that is increasingly run by a small, power-hungry clique that resents any attempt to change the current status quo."
The last sentence is total bs. I am not a gentoo dev, just a usr, and I've been hanging out on IRC for a couple of months, and it is simply not the case. It really does sound like the author is a poisonous person himself.
As for the power structures, they are there, but there has been difficulty since devrel is *supposed* to take its time before retiring a dev. They're not set up to deal with flamewars as moderators. As a result, there is now discussion to having some sort of dev moderators across all communication channels. Personally I think it's a smart move, since the devs are the ones who flame. (And that is *not* gentoo-specific, look at lkml.org for one.)
And if that isn't changing the status quo, I don't know what is.
I joined the distrowatch irc channel, to talk to the author and was told he's been on there once about a year ago when it first started. He doesn't sound very involved with his community. It turns out the author runs mandriva and used to run kubuntu. On what basis does he therefore make such a vitriolic claim about gentoo devs, since he clearly has no knowledge of the distro?
I sincerely doubt he's been involved with the gentoo community either. What a drama queen ;)
218 • Tried Linux Mint (by Brian Lee on 2007-03-15 15:12:16 GMT from Canada)
It is rather convenient to have all codecs working at the start, and Linux Mint does that. Unlike Ubuntu, though, I can't seem to get my wireless connection working (prism 2 chipset). This seems to be the problem with distros based on Ubuntu, with the exception of Ubuntu itself. And that includes Solaris-based Nexenta OS, which I would be using now if hardware support was expanded.
It would also be nice if I didn't have to adjust my LCD every time I switched between Windows XP and Ubuntu.
219 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-03-15 15:43:36 GMT from United States)
> OS X has already achieved virtually everything that Linux is trying to.
I think you kind of missed the entire point of free software. I guess that there will always be some people who think the purpose of free software is to be "free as in beer" rather than "free as in speech".
*Sigh*
220 • RE: # 219 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-15 17:33:45 GMT from Italy)
>>I think you kind of missed the entire point of free software. I guess that there will always be some people who think the purpose of free software is to be "free as in beer" rather than "free as in speech".<<
Well, OS X isn't free in any meaning of the word. I realize that and agree.
However one might eventually choose to go proprietary, after years of struggle.
I know somebody who had been for years your greatest Debian fan and Windows enemy you could ever come across. One day he had enough of struggling in order to find Linux applications for his job (professional photographer) and went all ga-ga for Windows.
OS X is proprietary, but is not as bad as Windows: no serial numbers, no activations, no WGA...
Sometimes in life you must decided what is more important: your principles or your convenience. It is a hard choice.
221 • Austrumi (by areuareu on 2007-03-15 18:42:49 GMT from France)
a question and a warning:
Does Austrumi recognize your ethernet card? I always have to configure it by hand.
now the warning:
Austrumi mounts all of your partitions but does'nt unmount anything. It is safe to open a console and type umount /mnt/* before shudown, unless you want to get a message 'partition hda... was not cleanly unmounted' at the next reboot on hd.
this was the case with 0.9 and it's still the case with 1.4.
Not a big deal, but annoying.
222 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-03-15 19:41:04 GMT from United States)
> Sometimes in life you must decided what is more important: your principles or your convenience. It is a hard choice.
Use what you want. Just realize that what a Mac offers has nothing to do with what Linux is trying to do. You want convenience and feel Mac is best for you. Good. But the Mac does nothing for someone wanting free software.
Also, I use free software because of the convenience. Maybe you have different experiences but you are making pretty general statements. In addition to being off-base, it doesn't apply to everyone. You think people use free software only out of principle. That's false, so please don't post that nonsense. At least clarify that it's your case only.
223 • Why people leave Gentoo ... (by ArchimedianSpiral on 2007-03-15 19:58:38 GMT from Germany)
Am I wrong to think that most people who leave Gentoo after a while do it for plain pragmatic reasons?
I have never been a Gentoo user myself, even though I did try to install it two years ago after reading the whole documentation. (Some bugs and annoying details stopped me, but this is irrelevant here.) I have been using Arch Linux for more than a year now, and I am totally happy. For me as a "moderately advanced" user with demanding expectations but little time to waste, Arch is just the best of all worlds (you can compile packages from source if needs be, thanks to ABS; the package manager pacman is just superb and the community is impressive). It turns out that many Arch users were previously Gentoo aficionados, but AFAIK their decision to leave it behind had nothing to do with their being dissatisfied with the Gentoo developers: No! they were simply tired of the compilation orgy and thought it was time to move forward to something simpler which was still fast, efficient, and that gives advanced users the freedom they need.
224 • Linux mint (by Dr Guy A Chouinard on 2007-03-15 20:01:59 GMT from United States)
Linux mint has EVERYTHING I want in a dssktop,"right out of the box"
Coming soon .xgl?
225 • Re #221 Austrumi (by rglk on 2007-03-15 20:44:33 GMT from United States)
Re Question:
Does Austrumi recognize your ethernet card? I always have to configure it by hand. --- Same here.
Austrumi also doesn't support my wireless card (BCM4311) natively, and ndiswrapper is not provided. I don't even know what wireless chipsets are supported - can't find any kernel driver modules in the usual place (/lib/modules/...), and lsmod is not present.
Re Warning:
Austrumi mounts all of your partitions but does'nt unmount anything. --- Same here ... I'd been wondering why Arch was telling me that the filesystems of my non-Arch partitions were not clean. Thanks for the notice.
226 • RE: # 222 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-15 21:08:07 GMT from Italy)
"Also, I use free software because of the convenience. Maybe you have different experiences but you are making pretty general statements. In addition to being off-base, it doesn't apply to everyone. You think people use free software only out of principle. That's false, so please don't post that nonsense. At least clarify that it's your case only."
Look, I don't know who you are. I know who I am: I have been a Linux activist for longer than I care to remember, and I still am. Only, I have become a pragmatist (in fact I have always been) and I have chosen that my main OS is OS X now. I haven't abandoned Linux. There are literally thousands of people out there who have been helped with Linux by me, and I keep doing it.
Thus: you should be be more careful with your choice of words (also because you owe respect to our host and to all the other readers)
227 • 224 • Linux mint - glad you like it but... (by Fractalguy on 2007-03-15 21:09:56 GMT from United States)
Mint may not be everything for every one. :)
I spent yesterday afternoon showing it off to a neighbor who's looking at upgrading his very out of date Ubuntu. I think he'll go with Mint.
That said, I was showing off Mint as a liveCD and that is in fact how it is "right out of the box". But the Mint liveCD does not recognize or use an existing swap partition while most liveCDs do. I think Ubuntu does. Anyways, I have been ticked about this for a while and so got some aid about it on the Mint chat. So here is the result... In the consol CLI identify the swap partition and then turn it on. If the swap is on hda, type:
sudo fdisk -l /dev/hda
The out put will indicate which partition, mine turned out to be hda5. Of course if you already know for sure, then do this right off:
sudo swapon /dev/hda5
Even if you don't like Mint's GNOME, I recommended installing Mint since one can later add KDE and even iceWM window managers and then take your pick when login on. That said, time to swapon, logon and rockon. :) *ducks*
228 • Re #227 No swap partition? (by rglk on 2007-03-15 22:45:13 GMT from United States)
While putting close to a dozen different Linux distros through their paces recently, I stumbled upon one or two other instances aside from Linux Mint (e.g. Xandros4?), of a distro that doesn't set up a swap partition by default during HDD install or which, if run as a live CD, doesn't use a swap partition by default even when it is present. I just don't remember what these distros were.
It's debatable whether a swap partition is really needed when 1-2 GB of RAM is available, a situation that's becoming more and more commonplace. You can ascertain whether you need a swap partition by checking swap space utilization under various usage conditions, e.g. by running top or htop. I have 1 GB of RAM, and my swap space seems to be unused every time I check it.
If during the initial HDD install you decided not to create a separate swap partition and it later turns out that you ought to have one, that's not a disaster requiring repartitioning. You can just as well set up a swap file in one of your preexisting partitions, e.g. of 0.5-1 GB size.
229 • Mint v. Freespire (by Josh Edwardds on 2007-03-16 00:09:27 GMT from United States)
Linux Mint just works, even on my laptop. Linspire/Freespire can't restart the screen after the lib switch is triggered. It may be petty- but that's one requirement I have and I'm not going to use a distro that doesn't do it.
230 • Freespire (by scubanator87 on 2007-03-16 01:25:50 GMT from United States)
Im an Ubuntu user of over a year now and i tried free spire in response to my girlfriend's opening up to trying linux but as she put it, "I really like my start menu." Free spire is appealing for this but i felt it was still lacking in the "just works" field. I will be looking forward to testing mint and i hope it fills that small but apparent void freespire left.
Some more important thing though, is the current freespire stable relsese comes with firefoxt 1.5.* and when i went to upgrade it using the "CNR" it actually just installed a second copy of FF 2.0. Also some of the programs i installed though the CNR crashed when i tried to run them making me frustraited since i had no way of easily doing wifi not to mention no way to access a wpa. However the CNR wharehouse is nice because the default ranking is whats popular. I liked this because it brought to my attenton how many good programs i was missing out on. Either way i belive freespire moving to the ubuntu code base will only be a good thing as to improve on its usability.
231 • Well well Look at that... (by Neopath on 2007-03-16 02:12:52 GMT from Canada)
Triggered by recent examples of bad behavior and dissatisfaction among developers and users alike, the Gentoo Council has drafted a new Code of Conduct that will be enforced for both developers and users.
http://dev.gentoo.org/~christel/coc.xml
Maybe Distrowatch has more influence than we think... way to go Ladislav!
keep up the good work! We need you around here...
232 • RE 214 & 221 (by IMQ on 2007-03-16 03:03:30 GMT from United States)
Thanks for the tip!
233 • Ark (by Ken on 2007-03-16 07:43:22 GMT from United States)
Ark is great! I'm running it on a couple of 5-7 year old machines next to my current notebook and it performs great on 256mb of memory. KDE has very snappy responsive, only comparable experience I have had is with Vector. There are 3 Add-on CD disks which respectively contain Server, Development and Extra sets software -- so installation is very customizable. I went through about 30 distributions of Linux before Ark and the only competitor that I've liked is Vector.
234 • LinuxMint (by Waino Pekkanen on 2007-03-16 09:30:18 GMT from United States)
This Distro is my current favorite. Very easy install.
235 • Linux Mint (by JLangston on 2007-03-16 09:49:09 GMT from Australia)
I love the short install of Ubuntu and the simplicity of apt but rarely find the time to sit down for an hour to install all the missing java, codecs etc. Linux Mint fits this criteria well - so I use it.
236 • RE 217 (partial/naive answ about DWW Gentoo loyalty) (by dbrion on 2007-03-16 09:49:13 GMT from France)
" It turns out the author runs mandriva and used to run kubuntu".
The object of DWW is to inform, as fairly as possible, of many Linuxes news: in order to remain fair, changing his working distribution every 6 month -AFAI remember - is not a bad idea -methinks-.
These efforts to remain fair should not be used to claim he is biased. Thet is not that consistent...
BTW :
I saw a very interesting tip about Gentoo builduing sharing time with normal operation in -DWW may 2005 -it is any way smarter than fully emulating....
237 • Mint Linux is a winner (by Bert Heymans on 2007-03-16 13:23:21 GMT from Belgium)
The last time I wanted to install Ubuntu for myself I decided to try Mint instead, because in effect it _is_ Ubuntu and all my familiar packages would work like I was used to. I must say I'm very impressed with what comes with Mint, it's a real time saver. The apt repository file is filled in like I would have done myself on Ubuntu, Flash and Java have been set up nicely. Good stuff, this is what I install for people who would like to try Linux now. It's got Windows Media support set up out of the box too and that's a real blessing, a lot of first time users give a negative verdict to Linux the moment they can't view the movies on their favorite pr0nsite right away. It's true.
238 • Ciaran McCreesh is not a developer (by Sneaky Pete on 2007-03-16 15:22:12 GMT from United States)
"The reason? Strong personal attacks by some of the current developers of the project. Take this mailing list post by Ciaran McCreesh. Replying to another developer's request to treat Daniel Robbins with respect"
I hate to break it to Distrowatch's crack team of investigative journalists, but he is not a developer at all. He is however a poisonous personality within the user community.
239 • Apple and Open Source (by Fred Mertz on 2007-03-16 16:16:25 GMT from United States)
"Use what you want. Just realize that what a Mac offers has nothing to do with what Linux is trying to do. You want convenience and feel Mac is best for you. Good. But the Mac does nothing for someone wanting free software."
Um, could you take a look at the top of the page? The slogan for DW is "Put the fun back in computing. Use Linux, BSD." The guts of Mac OS X is BSD. And Apple, while not completely exempt from evil corporation syndrome, has given back to the open source community in the form of code for Safari/Konqueror. Check out the issue of Linux Format magazine that covers KDE 4 for the details.
Apple isn't perfect, but they're trying to be a good-faith partner with the open source community; their relationship may even become a model for how for-profit corporations can co-exist in harmony with the open source crowd. It was a tremendous boost for the Konqueror project when Apple announced that the built-in browser in Mac OS X would be based on their code.
Apple has been and will continue to be relevant to open source, and to say otherwise flies in the face of the facts.
240 • RE: # 239 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-03-16 21:22:08 GMT from Italy)
Great post, Fred. You have proven from another point of view that it is pretty natural to move from Linux to OS X: it is a *nix, it is open source friendly, very safe, easy to use, great multimedia support... With other words it has nothing to do with M$.
But again: I am still a great Linux fan and my signature in a Mac forum links to one of my favorite distros.
241 • linux Mint (by Brian on 2007-03-17 08:59:57 GMT from Canada)
I have tried both Mint and freespire,both worked well,I couldn't get my dsl to work in Mint,I also found freespire's install very hard to read,as it was very blurry or something,the partion was very hard to get to work.
242 • 241 • linux Mint (by Brian -- video, flash and printers (by Fractalguy on 2007-03-17 18:25:03 GMT from United States)
Brian, your setup reminds me of some issues I had with elive liveCD when I selected the wrong video driver at bootup. I forget the exact selection, but if I chose the wrong one to show 1280x1024, the display was washed out and hard to read. But when I tried another it was OK. The same thing happened on another distro also. However, so far the Ubuntu/Mint family always gets my video right, at least viewable. My 3 year old nVidia won't handle the latest 3D stuff.
I'm playing in Mint liveCD again, since the markets closed yesterday. Mint has a way to go in setting things up for "out of the box" on a few things. I find totum, the default player for flash, won't play *.swf while Firefox and Opera will. So its codec is in there somewhere.
I'm trying to set up my neighbor with Mint. It fails to work with his HP2210xi and also with my Canon iP1600. I know there are drivers out there for these old printers, but it is not clear for noobs what to do from here.
But Mint should look great next month. :)
243 • Re 228 No swap partition?? (by dbrion on 2007-03-18 16:45:53 GMT from France)
"
If during the initial HDD install you decided not to create a separate swap partition and it later turns out that you ought to have one, that's not a disaster requiring repartitioning.
"
This I thought, until I learnt that modern Linuxes can (or will be able to ??) suspend to disk, which requires HD swap.
It was even an advantage not having swap, as one could detect as fast as possible memory leaks, without monitoring (by top..) programs one wrote..
However, I am not that sure of that if disks become bigger and bigger ("wasting" some Go is then not that terrible) and "suspend to disk" becomes effective (it may be useful when compiling or running slow programs, especially under an emulator..). The advantage of "fast" and bruteforcish detection of big memory leaks can then be achieved anyway by "swapoff?".=> on a modern computer -with big H-D, with a modern Linux, I would perhaps have a swap partition (which would be inactivated during debugging )...
I am not that sure that a swap file on a file in a preexisting partition (which can be achieved to fix a lack of swap partition) could work and _restart_ for the function "suspend to disk"...
244 • page hit ranking (by bob trumpie on 2007-03-19 03:28:24 GMT from United States)
I think instead of page hit ratings you should have every one register their version
of linux that love to use to reall get a honest hold of who is no.1 I know that the page hit ranking is not a perfect science,but you could get a better idea of how many use linux,along wit a better idea of who is no 1 or rather who is building the better windows replacement, he,he just a thought
Bob Trumpie
245 • RE: 244 page hit ranking (by ladislav on 2007-03-19 03:46:29 GMT from Taiwan)
What's the point of duplicating what somebody else is doing already?
http://www.linuxcounter.org/
Number of Comments: 245
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Eagle Linux
Eagle Linux was a Linux distribution that boots and runs from a floppy or a CD-ROM, saving you the trouble of having to install Linux on your system - and you build it yourself! There was no longer a need to repartition your hard drive or uninstall your current operating system. This was a great feature for academic sectors who may have had systems donated by companies who don't allow the format of the hard drive to be changed (repartitioning). Eagle Linux was also a great embedded systems learning tool, and since you build it yourself, it can easily be created to run on any processor family. What's unique about Eagle Linux? It does not use a compressed file system for standard files, making file access faster. It detects and mounts your IDE and SCSI hard drives in write mode, allowing read/write media access. It also offers an easier way for less experienced Linux users to create their own bootable floppy or CD from scratch using the HOW-TOs available on the downloads page.
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