 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 209, 2 July 2007 |
|
Welcome to this year's 27th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The release of the General Public Licence version 3 and the new Linux edition of Google Desktop were the primary generators of headlines on most Linux news sites during the past week. In contrast, all was quiet on the distribution development front, with only Dreamlinux, Scientific Linux and a few minor projects announcing new stable releases. But don't despair; this week's DistroWatch Weekly is still packed with interesting topics, including an interview with Clement Lefebvre from Linux Mint, a rebuttal by John Murga from the Puppy Linux forums, and information about some other interesting news of the week, such as the new PC-BSD LiveCD and the latest version of the GNU/Linux distro timeline. And if you are looking for something to test and play with during the slow months of July and August, don't miss the new distributions section which presents no fewer than 6 (six!) new distro projects that were submitted to DistroWatch last week. Happy reading!
Content:
- Interview: Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint
- Feedback: One year with Puppy Linux
- News: GPL 3, Google Desktop, GNU/Linux distro timeline, YaSTRS for openSUSE, PC-BSD LiveCD, Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.2
- Released last week: Dreamlinux 2.2 "Multimedia GL", SoL 25.00
- Upcoming releases: Fluxbuntu "Gutsy Gibbon"
- Donations: KTorrent receives US$400
- New distributions: Baltix GNU/Linux, Draco GNU/Linux, FrogLinux, pclosBE, TinyME, UW-Linux
- Reader comments
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
|
| Featured Story |
Interview with Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint
  Linux Mint is one of the surprise packages of the past year. Originally launched as a variant of Ubuntu with integrated media codecs, it has now developed into one of the most user-friendly distributions on the market - complete with a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, a web-based package installation interface, and a number of different editions. Perhaps most importantly, this is one project where the developers and users are in constant interaction, resulting in dramatic, user-driven improvements with every new release.
DistroWatch has spoken to the founder and lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, about the history of the distribution, new features in the upcoming release, and other topics of interest.
* * * * *
DW: Clement, thank you very much for your time. All I know about you is that you are French, that you live in Ireland, and that you maintain Linux Mint. Anything else you'd like to add as an introduction? How old are you? What do you do for living?
CL: Hi Ladislav, thanks for having me on DistroWatch Weekly. I'm 29 years old, born in France and living in Ireland. I work as a Java developer for a telecommunication company.
DW: Linux Mint has been a resounding success. According to the DistroWatch web logs, 3.3% of Linux-using visitors browse this site with Mint, which makes it the 6th most popular Linux distribution among the DistroWatch visitors (behind Ubuntu, Debian, PCLinuxOS, Fedora and openSUSE). What do you think is the main reason for this huge success?
CL: In its early stages I would say the fact that it was based on Ubuntu and came with multimedia codecs. The "Barbara" release is a perfect example of that: it was basically Edgy with added codecs. In Bea we changed a lot of things and made huge improvements to the base system. In Bianca and Cassandra we started to develop our own tools and bring our own innovations. But the thing is: Barbara was successful, long before we did that. In a way it is sad because the people who came towards Linux Mint first were no other than Ubuntu users looking for codecs. Adding codecs to Fedora, Ubuntu or any other distribution is actually not that hard and Ubuntu users even have Automatix to do that for them. It took some time for us to differentiate us from Ubuntu and a lot of communication to show that our purpose wasn't to add codecs to Ubuntu but to go towards our own idea of what a desktop Linux distribution should be. The presence of codecs is just a small part of the equation and unfortunately something a lot of people are obsessed about.
Since we released Bianca the difference with Ubuntu became clearer to the users and we started to get our own identity. I believe some of the reasons for the success of Linux Mint are:
- It's one of the most community driven distributions. You could literally post an idea in the forums today and see it implemented the week after in the "current" release. Of course this has pros and cons and compared to distributions with roadmaps, feature boards and fixed release cycles we miss a lot of structure and potentially a lot of quality, but it allows us to react quickly, implement more innovations and make the whole experience for us and for the users extremely exciting.
- It is a Debian-based distribution and as such it is very solid and it comes with one of the greatest package managers.
- It is compatible with and uses Ubuntu repositories. This gives Linux Mint users access to a huge collection of packages and software.
- It comes with a lot of desktop improvements which make it easier for the user to do common things.
- There is a strong focus on making things work out of the box (WiFi cards drivers in the file system, multimedia support, screen resolution, etc).
DW: How did you come up with the idea to launch Linux Mint?
CL: I started using Linux in 1996. It was Slackware and I was quite happy with it. I learnt a lot about the internals of the system thanks to that distribution. A few years later more and more distributions became available and at the same time people started to get fast Internet at home with faster and faster download speeds. So I started distro-hopping... a lot :) I enjoyed many different distributions and for different reasons. As I became more experienced with Linux I started asking myself how I could contribute back. I spent a lot of time helping out on different IRC channels and writing tutorials and reviews on the web. Eventually I even got paid for it and started writing for LinuxForums.com (you can still read some of my contributions here). I specialized more and more on distribution reviews and after a while I became expert (or so I thought anyway :)) at seeing pros and cons in each one of them.
Looking at all the other distributions, I got a very precise idea of how I would make the perfect desktop if I was to do it myself. And because everything is easy when you're having fun, it wasn't long until I was producing my first ISO files.
DW: Every Linux Mint review I've read concluded that Linux Mint is more user-friendly than most distributions. How do you define the world "user-friendly"? How do you get and test your ideas for any "user-friendly" features that you introduce into the distro?
CL: Most feedback comes from the community; all we need to do is listening to what they say. They've been asking for some features for years and some of the answers we've given them simply aren't acceptable to them. Tweaking fstab to mount their Windows partition, tweaking sources.list to install Skype... My wife uses Linux Mint and there is no way she'd go editing these files. If we want to make a system user-friendly, we need to make it intuitive and easy-to-use. You shouldn't have to ask for help to achieve common things and you should definitely not have to tweak system configuration files manually for this to work. It's great to be able to tweak things but you shouldn't have to for it to work out-of-the-box the way most people want it to work.
DW: Please name three features of Linux Mint that you are the most proud of.
CL: MintInstall is my favourite innovation. You browse a software portal containing .mint files, you choose your software and one click later it's there in your menu. Before mintInstall you had to browse the Web to find that software, eventually edit your sources.list with a new repository, add a security key for that repository to work, update your cache and eventually find the name of the package(s) you wanted to install. This was a repetitive task and an obstacle for novice users to install third party software on their systems. We've automated this with mintInstall. The .mint file contains all the instructions for the installation of the software (names of the packages, URL for the repositories, their keys, instructions to run before and after the installation) so the user doesn't need to worry about things that do not matter to him. The portal also acts as a central place where users can search for software packages and browse them by category. Finally, mintInstall doesn't use your own sources.list and it doesn't alter it so your system is safe and your sources remain unchanged. It replaces the need for both Gnome-App-Install and the upcoming Click'N'Run.
I'm also very proud of mintMenu, although credits go to S. Chanderbally who developed USP (Ubuntu System Panel) which mintMenu forked from and Lars-Peter Clausen who is now the main developer of mintMenu since the release of Bianca. USP already was the best GNOME menu in my opinion. It had more features and brought a lot of improvements to the default GNOME menu. It was also inspired by SUSE's SLAB but implemented in a much better way and made much more responsive and faster. We forked USP2 before it became stable and started by cutting some of its features and fixing existing ones. Eventually Lars took over and, as users asked for new features, he considerably improved it.
In the third position I would hesitate between mintDesktop and mintDisk. Users prefer mintDisk as it acts as a replacement for fstab and gives them more features to deal with FAT/NTFS partitions. For instance they can give aliases to their partitions and define shortcuts to them. I personally prefer mintDesktop, one of the least visible innovations in Linux Mint, because as a developer it makes my life way simpler. Whether it is to add home folders and GNOME templates, to ease GNOME configuration, or to allow auto-mounting of Windows Network Neighbourhoods in ~/Network, it provides a way to do things faster and simpler.
DW: In one of Linux Mint's recent newsletter you mention the upcoming Mint 3.1. What can we expect in the new version? Is there still anything that can be improved on? How do you decide which new features will be added and which won't make it?
CL: There's a constant flow of great ideas and a lot of them end up in our forums. We look at each one of them, discuss them with the community, we review their ideas, they review ours and we take notes of interesting ones within our Wiki. Eventually we start implementing them and when we're happy with the result and have made a significant step forward, we release it and it becomes 3.1 :)
We don't follow any quality process and we don't freeze anything until the release of the BETA. At the moment, we're implementing a first-run wizard called mintAssistant. Among other things, it asks the users a series of questions to fine-tune the installation. Some of the questions are: whether they want to enable kernel updates, the root account and fortunes in terminal, which theme they prefer, whether they want fstab or mintDisk to manage their Windows partitions, whether they prefer a GNOME or a Mint desktop layout, etc.
We're also having a brainstorm at the moment and some very interesting ideas are coming up which we would like to implement for Celena (Linux Mint 3.1). One of them is the ability to share files over the Internet. When a file is bigger than a few megabytes, it becomes really hard to send it by email and most novice users don't know how to share it or how to send it to their friends. The idea is to make the whole process of finding web space and transferring the file via FTP transparent to the user. The users should just right-click the file and select "Share on the Internet", then see a dialog appear with a progress bar and eventually a label telling them the link to the file. They can then send that link to their friends by email. Online storage and file transfer should be taken care of by the system and made transparent to the user.
We're also thinking of something called mintSpace which would consist of an extra home folder. That folder would be mounted on the system but its physical storage would be remote so you could access it from your live CD no matter where you are, provided you're connected to the Internet. This is more of a long term idea though and it won't make it into Celena. Ulteo mentioned some ideas about something similar and I wouldn't mind seeing what they're working on before reinventing the wheel :)
DW: How many developers work on Linux Mint?
CL: Well, it's a community driven project and it's constantly changing as people take on new tasks and finish or give them up. At the moment, we've got three distribution maintainers, one for the Xfce Community edition, one for the E17 Community edition and myself for all other editions (Main, KDE and Light). I also mentioned Lars who has taken lead development on mintMenu. Carlos is also our main artist and leads a community driven sub-project called mintArt which focuses on making the distribution better looking. We also have a lot of people devoting time to other aspects of the distribution such as server maintenance, support, etc... This thread gives an idea of who's working on what.
DW: Are there any plans to introduce a native 64-bit edition of Linux Mint?
CL: There have been a lot of talks and a sub-project dedicated to it. A study was made by that sub-project and they came to the conclusion that the 64-bit Ubuntu Edgy base wasn't appropriate and didn't offer enough to be maintained for Bianca. Things might have changed with Feisty but the sub-project didn't follow on that. There is no official plan to maintain a 64-bit edition of Linux Mint. Of course the community can take responsibility over this and we might see community editions of 64-bit architectures in the future. The community is currently releasing an Xfce edition and they've proved they could take over entire sub-projects.
A community-developed Xfce edition of Linux Mint 3.0 was released for testing last week.
(full image size: 181kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
DW: Canonical has been on the lookout for talented developers and community leaders. Have you ever thought about joining the company? Has anybody from Canonical ever contacted you to discuss the possibility of working on Ubuntu full-time?
CL: I was recently listening to Jono Bacon on LugRadio and his interview in the Linux Action Show. I've also heard a lot of interviews from Mark Shuttleworth but never got the opportunity to talk directly to either of them. They seem like really nice guys and I'm sure Canonical is a wonderful company to work for.
Linux Mint is funded by its community. The money I'm getting out of it represents more or less a quarter of my salary. It's not enough for me to work full time on it but I get enough flexibility and freedom from my current employer to be able to do both my daytime Java development work and my evening-time Linux Mint project :)
If Canonical wanted me to work for them I would be delighted, of course. The question would be how much freedom they would give me and Linux Mint. The default presence of codecs and proprietary technologies in Mint wouldn't be an obstacle for Canonical to actually sponsor the distribution (as "Multimedia Support 1.0" shows in Cassandra Light Edition, we can easily distribute an edition with no codecs and no commercial components and just have all that installed by clicking an icon on the desktop. mintInstall makes the whole process seamless now). The real obstacle would probably be the nature of Linux Mint itself, its organization, and its approach to technology. Both distributions are technologically similar but they're heading in two different directions.
DW: How serious are you about Linux Mint? Do you see yourself still developing and releasing new versions in 5 years time? Or is it something of a hobby that you enjoy doing now, but who knows what will happen in the future?
CL: I never had so much fun, I never had so many people around me telling me how much fun they're having. I'm loving every bit of it :) I don't know if I'll still be working for that telecommunication company in 5 years time, I don't know if the community will still be funding Mint or if a company we created was to sell support worldwide to finance it or even if it merged with another distribution or got bought by some other company. I really don't know what the financial landscape will be and how this distribution and its structure are going to grow, but as far as development goes, you can be sure I'll be there working on the latest tools and trying to impress the crowd in the forums with the latest improvements and the latest release notes :)
Linux is all about fun, and as far as fun goes I'm right where I want to be :) We're here to stay. This is what we love doing, this is what people want and whether the name changes, this or that happens, we'll still be doing the same as long as its fun for us and for our users.
DW: What are the most exciting and most frustrating parts of being a developer of a Linux distro?
CL: The most frustrating part is FUD and pre-conceived ideas. I read here and there people talking about Linux Mint as if it was Automatix 3. They have no idea about what we do and how we do things, some of them even think we ship ATI/NVIDIA drivers. Distro bashing is quite irritating as well. Last week's DistroWatch Weekly got its fair share of PCLinuxOS bashing and to be honest I don't look forward to getting bashed myself.
The most exciting parts of it are community feedback, innovation and development. Most of my time is spent on the forums. People are passionate about the latest release, that gratifies us and it also allows us to see what can be improved. While talking with the community about ideas for the next release, we sometimes get fantastic ideas. Development is a lot of fun too and particularly when we involve the community with the progress we make. A little screenshot, some news here and there and people get really excited :)
The Linux sphere is also very interesting. It has its own press, its own news, things happen, new software and libraries get released, there's something new everyday. You're probably very excited about this as a Linux user and as the maintainer of DistroWatch. When it comes to a distribution, it adds even more excitement as some of these events can directly affect you, your plans and what you're working on at the moment. I can't wait to reject a patent deal with MS (although I doubt they're interested in community-driven distros), I can't wait to include Compiz Fusion in Celena, I can't wait to see what Novell is putting in SUSE 10.3. Every day gets more and more exciting, and we're part of it and we're working hard at making the whole Linux show even more impressive.
I wish people could stop ranting about this and that and realise they're actually part of something which is extremely exciting. It's important to give credit where credit is due, it's important to understand the advantage of open-source and the freedom of free software, but if we're not having fun we may as well leave everything behind. Technology is all about fun, and Linux more than anything else.
We've got the best operating system in the world, with new versions released every day and in more than 300 different flavours. This is fun at its best and I hope passion doesn't prevent people from enjoying it.
DW: Clement, thank you very much and all the best with your project!
|
| Feedback |
Feedback on "One year with Puppy Linux"
 Last week's feature story -- One year with Puppy Linux -- was probably one of the most controversial articles DistroWatch has published for some time. While a number of people agreed with the sentiment expressed in the story, others saw it as a needless attack on an excellent Linux distribution. John Murga, the founder and moderator of the official Puppy Linux forum, also responded to the article by emailing us his rebuttal. Although he admitted that he was upset when he wrote the email, he gave DistroWatch permission to publish it in this issue of DistroWatch Weekly.
Hi,
I have received a fair amount of feedback about the piece you published about Puppy Linux on DistroWatch and the comments you posted afterwards.
I have been running the board at a loss for a few years and have always tried to ensure it is the most diverse environment, creating many areas for anything from political discourse to just general bitching and even multi-language help.
In the over two years I have running it I have only ever banned ONE member, and I have managed to bring together many conflicting views and demographics ( an example).
I do believe my board is different. However, early this year a group did form, pushing their own web sites and trying to fork the project. They where never banned or censored on the forum, although they were from other sites after they successfully used your site to try to fragment the community. It is out of this group that this FUD comes from.
But these people are still posting freely to my forum, because: 1) FUD is fine, as long as people get to weigh it up against the real world and can judge it at face value. 2) As the facts tend to become apparent.
However, what you have done is give this particular piece of FUD a platform to transcend this, as the contrast is NOT immediately available. And you state you did this due to the fact that the story stuck a chord with you because of your own experiences with ANOTHER board. I hope you see the obvious problem with this reasoning (!). And it is specially ironic considering it was YOU who censored my releases of Mean Puppy (eventually causing me to abandon the project - thanks).
I would like to think you'd do some due diligence, have a look at the forum and what I have tried to do, and maybe even issue an apology. But somehow I suspect that'll never happen. So I'll just leave you with the knowledge of what you have done and hope you feel in some way accountable.
FYI...
John Murga
|
| Miscellaneous News |
GPL 3, Google Desktop, GNU/Linux distro timeline, YaSTRS for openSUSE, PC-BSD LiveCD, Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.2
Headlines of many Linux news sites were dominated by two events during the past week: the final release of the General Public License (GPL) version 3 and the availability of the Linux edition of Google Desktop. The former was preceded by heated debates, especially after Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, openly dismissed the idea that his famous product would switch to the new license. But others, such as the GNU software developers and other proponents of free software, are likely to start re-licensing their own products in the next few months. On the Google Desktop front, the name of the product is actually somewhat misleading; as reported in this review by Linux.com, Google Desktop is really just a desktop search engine similar to Beagle. Good perhaps for those who depend heavily on other Google products and services, but not particularly unique or useful for the rest of us. Or do you have a different opinion? If so, tell us in the forum below.
* * * * *
Andreas Lundqvist, the maintainer of the Distro timeline chart, has emailed DistroWatch with the details about the latest updates on the project's front: "The timeline has evolved into a rather big project - the latest version lists 179 distributions (including name changes, hence a few less unique distributions) and has been renamed 'GNU/Linux distro timeline', licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL). It is now distributed both in vector (thanks to the help of Aleksandar Urošević who helped me with the transition) and bitmap form. Recently I have been focusing on adding old-time distributions rather than the ever increasing amount of tiny-mod-of-popular-distro distros." The latest version of GNU/Linux distro timeline chart is 7.6 and its PNG edition is available for viewing here.
* * * * *
 Many Mandriva users are probably familiar with EasyURPMI, a web-based tool for generating a list of popular package repositories for Mandriva Linux. Now the openSUSE users can enjoy a similar utility: "YaSTRS is a simple tool that generates a shell script to add a number of popular YaST repositories to your openSUSE installation. In order to provide a high-quality database, all mirrors are automatically validated on a regular basis. The system is currently in beta testing, so bug reports are welcome." The product, available for all supported processor architectures, includes the popular openSUSE repositories of Packman and Guru. If you are an openSUSE user, check out the new YaST Repositories Script generator (YaSTRS) by visiting this page.
On a related note, a brand new web site dedicated to openSUSE themes, icons, wallpapers and other desktop art was launched at SUSE-Art.org.
* * * * *
 If you are interested in BSD live CDs, here is another interesting option: PC-BSD LiveCD. Although it's not clear whether this is an official sub-project of PC-BSD or just an independent initiative of a PC-BSD developer, this CD is probably one of the best live desktop BSD products built to-date. Based on FreeBSD 6.2, it includes KDE 3.5.6, X.Org 7.2, Kaffeine media player with support for MP3, OGG, DIVX and MPEG formats, Konversation IRC cleint, Smb4k samba client, Fusefs file system, Midnight Commander, and a total of 503 pre-compiled FreeBSD ports. The PC-BSD live CD is not fully automatic though; it boots into a terminal and it requires running "X -configure" before launching the KDE desktop with "startx". Download it from here: pcbsdlive240607.iso (637MB, MD5).
PC-BSD Live - a live CD edition of PC-BSD
(full image size: 263kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
* * * * *
 The updated Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.2 DVD is now available for free download. Originally released on 14 June, the new version offers a number of improvements and package updates over the previous release, most notably: "Linux kernel 2.6.22-rc4; Software Development Kit v2.0 for Cell Broadband Engine; more than 70 bug fixes and updates; continued support for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems; beta IBM 'System p' support." The new DVD of this specialist, Fedora-based distribution for PowerPC processors can be downloaded from one of these mirrors or directly from this FTP server: yellowdog-5.0.2-20070629.iso (3,765MB, MD5).
|
| Released Last Week |
SoL 25.00
Martin Willner has announced the release of Server optimized Linux (SoL) version 25.00: "SoL - Server optimized Linux 25.00. Features: Fast and easy installation system with RAID wizard; supports network (over PXE) and DVD installation; optimized for modern CPU architectures; ready to use as XEN dom0 or domU; features QEMU mode to boot right from Windows; integrated server development workbench tools; full-featured diskless training; software: Nagios monitoring tools, IPVS, Heartbeat, DRBD, keppalived cluster tools, Xen 3.1.0 and QEMU 0.9.0, X.Org 7.2, Zope 2.10.3 application server, Apache 2.2.4 with PHP 5.2.1 extension, Enlightenment E17 desktop; MySQL 5.0.x and MySQL GUI Tools, PostgreSQL, Firebird and SQLite database backends...." Please visit the project's home page to read the complete list of features.
Scientific Linux 4.5
Connie Sieh and Troy Dawson have announced the release of Scientific Linux 4.5, a distribution rebuilt from source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4: "Scientific Linux 4.5 has been officially released. This release took a little longer because of changes in the installer. Although you cannot use Scientific Linux 4.5 as a Xen virtual host, it can now be installed as a Xen paravirtual guest. This gives a significant speed increase over fully virtualized guests. We want to thank all those tested, retested, contributed, and worked with the developers. We think the Scientific Linux community is one of the best to work with. We hope you enjoy the release." Here is the brief release announcement.
Dreamlinux 2.2 "Multimedia GL"
The Multimedia GL (MMGL) edition of Dreamlinux 2.2 has been released: "If you are searching for an operating system that allows you to: be free, communicate with the whole world, read, write and produce art, music, drawings, images, etc, you now have no excuses not to give Dreamlinux 2.2 Multimedia GL Edition a try. Packaging the best office, electronic publishing, image, design and digital painting open source software, Dreamlinux 2.2 MMGL Edition allows you to produce professional quality contents. Joining the proven Linux OS base and a well organized and clean desktop you will experience a new way to deal with your computer." Read the release announcement and release notes for more details.
Evinux 200701
Evinux is a French live CD featuring the Xfce desktop. The project announced a new major release earlier this week; the new Evinux 200701 is based on Debian Etch and KNOPPIX 5.1.1, it comes with Linux kernel 2.6.19, Xfce 4, Iceweasel, Icedove with Enigmail, AbiWord, Gnumeric, Grisbi, GParted... It is designed to work in French but should accept other languages. The particularity of this release is that it's the first one which is not made as a remastered build of KNOPPIX, but with a "debootstraped" Debian Etch with all the necessary KNOPPIX packages to let it work as a live CD. For more details please read the full release announcement (in French).
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
|
| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
Fluxbuntu "Gutsy Gibbon"
The Fluxbuntu project, which develops a light-weight Ubuntu variant designed for older computers, has published a release update and a schedule for its upcoming release "Gutsy Gibbon": "We are maintaining a strict schedule for Gutsy Gibbon in order to release the final versions of Fluxbuntu on time. We will start building Gutsy CD images on the Tribe 3 deadline which is July 19th (so you all will have something to test). Tribe 1 and Tribe 2 are broken since Ubuntu Gutsy itself is in an extreme state of change." For more information please see the release update and release schedule.
* * * * *
Summary of expected upcoming releases
|
| DistroWatch.com News |
June 2007 donation: KTorrent receives US$400
We are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com June 2007 donation is the KTorrent project. It receives US$400.00 in cash.
KTorrent is a graphical BitTorrent client for KDE. With the increasing number of distributions using the BitTorrent protocol to distribute their files, KTorrent has become an indispensable tool for any serious distro hopper. Its graphical interface has improved dramatically over the last few versions and the amount of information and configuration options is simply astonishing. It's undoubtedly one of the best graphical BitTorrent clients available today!
As always, the monthly donations programme is a joint initiative between DistroWatch and two online shops selling low-cost CDs and DVDs with Linux, BSD and other open source software - LinuxCD.org and OSDisc.com. These vendors contributed US$50.00 each towards this month's donation to KTorrent.
Here is the list of projects that received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme (figures in US dollars):
- 2004: GnuCash ($250), Quanta Plus ($200), PCLinuxOS ($300), The GIMP ($300), Vidalinux ($200), Fluxbox ($200), K3b ($350), Arch Linux ($300), Kile KDE LaTeX Editor ($100) and UNICEF - Tsunami Relief Operation ($340)
- 2005: Vim ($250), AbiWord ($220), BitTorrent ($300), NdisWrapper ($250), Audacity ($250), Debian GNU/Linux ($420), GNOME ($425), Enlightenment ($250), MPlayer ($400), Amarok ($300), KANOTIX ($250) and Cacti ($375)
- 2006: Gambas ($250), Krusader ($250), FreeBSD Foundation ($450), GParted ($360), Doxygen ($260), LilyPond ($250), Lua ($250), Gentoo Linux ($500), Blender ($500), Puppy Linux ($350), Inkscape ($350), Cape Linux Users Group ($130), Mandriva Linux ($405, a PowerPack competition), digiKam ($408) and SabayonLinux ($450)
- 2007: GQview ($250), Kaffeine ($250), sidux ($350), CentOS ($400), LyX ($350), VectorLinux ($350), KTorrent ($400)
Since the launch of the Donations Programme in March 2004, DistroWatch has donated a total of US$13,740 to various open source software projects.
* * * * *
Translations of Top Ten Distributions page
Many thanks to Jose Tadeu Barros who have translated the Top Ten Distributions page into Portuguese (Brazilian). The story is now available in 11 languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Swedish. Translations to other languages are most welcome - if you'd like to help, please email your work to distro at distrowatch dot com (preferably in plain text format using UTF-8 encoding).
* * * * *
New distributions added to waiting list
- Baltix GNU/Linux. Baltix GNU/Linux is an Ubuntu-based live CD localised into Latvian and Lithuanian languages. Besides standard packages normally present in Ubuntu, Baltix also includes extra educational software and the light-weight IceWM window manager.
Baltix GNU/Linux 2.7 - an Ubuntu-based distribution optimised for Lithuanian and Latvian users
(full image size: 371kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
- Draco GNU/Linux. Draco GNU/Linux is a distribution based on Slackware Linux and pkgsrc. Inspired by NetBSD, Draco separates the base system and "third-party" packages, which makes it a very clean, small and stable distribution. The pkgsrc utility gives Draco access to over 8,000 packages and selected binary packages from the pkgsrc tree are available for every release.
- FrogLinux. FrogLinux is an Ubuntu-based, easy-to-use desktop Linux distribution developed in Quebec (Canada). Among its most interesting features are support for French, automatic network, printing and graphics card configuration and optimised software packages. FrogLinux is available in the form of an installation CD/DVD, live CD/DVD, and bootable medium for USB storage devices.
FrogLinux 1.6 - a French Canadian distribution based on Ubuntu
(full image size: 371kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
- pclosBE. pclosBE (or PCLinuxOS Business Edition) is a PCLinuxOS-based distribution optimised for small and home offices. Two editions are being developed: the pclosBE Desktop edition, which will include a variety of business oriented software, and the pclosBE Server edition, which will provide a simple way of setting up most kinds of servers.
- TinyME. TinyME is a PCLinuxOS-based mini distribution. The project's main purpose is to deliver a light-weight operating system (with Openbox as its desktop) for older computers, while preserving the same levels of functionality and configurability as found in most heavy-weight Linux distributions available on the market. Here is a mini review with screenshots.
- UW-Linux. UW-Linux is a Polish, general-purpose mini distribution based on Slackware Linux.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
And this concludes the latest issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 9 July 2007. Until then,
Ladislav Bodnar
|
|
| Tip Jar |
If you've enjoyed this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, please consider sending us a tip.
(Tips this week: 0, value: US$0.00) |
|
|
|
 bc1qxes3k2wq3uqzr074tkwwjmwfe63z70gwzfu4lx  lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhhxarpw3jkc7tzw4ex6cfexyfua2nr  86fA3qPTeQtNb2k1vLwEQaAp3XxkvvvXt69gSG5LGunXXikK9koPWZaRQgfFPBPWhMgXjPjccy9LA9xRFchPWQAnPvxh5Le paypal.me/distrowatchweekly • patreon.com/distrowatch |
|
| Extended Lifecycle Support by TuxCare |
|
|
| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Yey! I'm the first!! (by parkash on 2007-07-02 09:47:12 GMT from Germany)
YeY!!!
Well... Anyway, when I first saw GoogleDesktop on the web, I thought "Wow, a desktop by Google?"... Naturally, it was a little dissapointing to see that it's just a search tool.
2 • PCBSD Live (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 09:49:47 GMT from New Zealand)
Check out the PC-BSD forum announcements section for more on the PC-BSD Live CD. Highly recommended.
3 • Opinion on Google Desktop for Linux (by Eddy Nigg on 2007-07-02 10:35:46 GMT from Israel)
As it happened I also wrote a small opinion piece about the released Google desktop on my newly started Blog: https://blog.startcom.org/?p=14
Cheers!
4 • Google desktop, Clem, Puppy... (by Caraibes on 2007-07-02 11:11:26 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Ok, it's a new week... good.
As much as I think the Google desktop is completely useless (at least for me...), I am happy that it is ported to Linux, because it shows that the Google people are aware of us. I use Picasa, because it automatically resizes photos when you email them.
Great interview of Clem ! This gentleman definitly is a good constructive guy ! I don't use Mint at all, but I enjoy Clem's spirit.
Now as of Puppy's last week problem : We are starting a new week, let's just get along once again ! Bad press happens, it's part of life for a public project. But most users have a Puppy cd in their toolbox. It is a good project.
As of me, still thinking Fedora is the "distro numer uno" !!! Better than the others !!! (for my main box, i686)
I told you last week about my PowerPC Mac project : I instlled Ubuntu 7.04, everything worked fine, except that Gnash doesn't really rock ! I hope they can improve a bit, because it is said Flash will never exist for PPC Linux ! I am having issues with my usb wireless adapter (DLink DWL-G122), as it almost "freezes" the system whenever I plug it in, and Ubuntu doesn't really boot when the dongle is plugged in... It uses the rt73usb driver... I am wondering what will my next be...
5 • Re: "one year of Puppy" (by Joey on 2007-07-02 11:16:20 GMT from United States)
Well, congratulations, Ladislav, you're now a tabloid.
6 • One Year with Puppy Linux (by worsel on 2007-07-02 11:19:10 GMT from United States)
Have Linux distros become Holy Cows and no negative comments are allowed about them? What purpose does it serve to have only warm-fuzzy statements made about them? If a distro has warts, I would like to know about them. Sometimes the emperor does not have clothes.
As for John Murga, methinks he protests too much. His indignant, self-serving letter does not address the complaints. Are we supposed to forgive the arbitrary manner in which he runs his forum just because he runs it at a loss?
7 • Great interview with Clem (by Larry Cafiero on 2007-07-02 11:19:40 GMT from United States)
Hey, Ladislav --
Excellent interview with Clem Lefebvre -- having just inherited a couple of Intel boxes, I may try Linux Mint on one of them.
Keep up the great work. DistroWatch Weekly makes Mondays bearable.
Larry Cafiero
Editor/Publisher
Open Source Reporter
http://www.opensourcereporter.net
8 • Clem & Mint are great! (by ceti on 2007-07-02 11:49:51 GMT from Brazil)
Thanks. Ladislav, for the great interview with Clem Lefebvre. I run Mint (GNOME) since Bianca and my wife runs the KDE edition. Clem is a gentleman, his distro is great, the forums are funny and informative all the time.
Cheers
9 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 11:53:07 GMT from United States)
"Distro Enquirer"???
10 • Mint-y fresh for PPC? (by just john on 2007-07-02 11:57:43 GMT from United States)
Since Ubuntu dropped PPC support a short while back, if the Mint folks are ever bored and in search of a new challenge, a PPC release might be fun.
(My PPCs currently run pre-OSX stuff normally, but it's fun to insert a Linux liveCD in order to use recent FireFox and similar stuff. And thanks to those distros who still do PPC LiveCDs.)
11 • Puppy (by Ohnonymous on 2007-07-02 12:04:42 GMT from United States)
Notice how John Murga blathers vaguely about things he disagrees with but can't be bothered to explain why he disagrees.
12 • re: one year with puppy (by paddy on 2007-07-02 12:14:58 GMT from Australia)
Sheesh man, spats like these highlight the worst aspects of the distro scene!
Talk about a storm in a teacup - some users get p.o'ed, some don't; these are journeys any one using a distro will most likely experience - talking about these problems does nothing to impact the valuable resource that is Distrowatch, nor the valuable distro that is puppy.
God, the way people go on you'd think Ladislav was condoning baby-eating, when in reality, it's just a forum fight.
13 • Have you looked at DW fundings in 2006? (by dbrion on 2007-07-02 12:37:58 GMT from France)
I am terribly upset vim got less fundings that Puppy linux, but perhaps I will survive: I use vim with great pleasure almost every day, but I am not tempted to use puppy within 1[0(0)] years because:
my laptops are not that old;
there never was a comparison of starting times (this is one of Puppys great claims) in a reproducible way (I saw one in DWW in january 2007, which seemed fair -same hardware- but there were "only" #8 distrs intercompared). Puppy's lovers seem to be allergic to such comparisons, I do not know why).
Stories of fora censure cannot be proven: they are thus full of mysteries, and almost as interesting as the breeding habits of Martian.
Quelle vie de chien...
14 • Linux mint XFCE edition (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 12:39:31 GMT from Belgium)
Nice interview with Mr Lefebvre who seems to be as interesting as the distro he's leading. I have switched from Mint "regular" to Mint "light" and this is superb for my hardware's specifications (ECSK7A motherboard, 512 Mo PC-266 RAM, Athlon XP-2200+, Nvidia GeForce 4).
15 • Google Desktop (by wayne040576 on 2007-07-02 12:53:11 GMT from Ireland)
I'm glad to finally see Google desktop for linux. Going to spend the next week or so comparing it to beagle. Beagle has been a disappointment for me. Only have google desktop installed for 2 hours and it is still indexing but it's already giving better results to my searches compared to beagle.
I'll admit that these tools don't get used that much but I like them to work properly when they do.
16 • clem interview (by mark on 2007-07-02 12:55:43 GMT from United States)
Another great weekly, the clem interview was excellent
got several tabs to read on mint, tried it awhile back
maybe time to give it another go, last weeks puppy
reminded me of the blog about the ms and google
from someone who said they worked for both it was
a good read but the comments were over the top
I didnt see what the excitment was about. Same here
puppy was and is a great distro. I will continue to use
it. My opinion of the forum took a hit but I will also
use it in the future. For me I dont see the problem
maybe Iam just not involved with either of these.
Great stuff a hit out of the park two week running
in my book. just my 2 cents
17 • re: Mint-y fresh for PPC? (by sam on 2007-07-02 12:56:51 GMT from United Kingdom)
ubuntu does still work on powerpc. there is still an ubuntu powerpc live cd.
see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPC
18 • Minty fresh! (by Richard on 2007-07-02 13:07:25 GMT from United States)
Great interview with Clem! I've been using Linux Mint since Barbara and I love it. I've been curious about what makes some dedicate so much time, effort, and love into a distro. Now I know!
19 • Ubuntu PPC (by just john on 2007-07-02 13:18:24 GMT from United States)
sam, Thanks for that link.
20 • mintNICE! (by TwoDogS on 2007-07-02 14:34:43 GMT from United States)
excellent interview with Clem! i started using Mint about a month ago and i really like it alot. before, i was using Ubuntu. when i get home from work today, my wife wants me to install Mint on HER computer. lol, now we will be MS free :) keep up the great work! Distrowatch/Mint=good stuff!
21 • Go Ladislav (by burdicda on 2007-07-02 14:48:42 GMT from United States)
Tons more respect for posting both sides of the story on Puppy
Really appreciate the link to TinyMe ...didn't know it existed
Mint wow completely opened my eyes on this one..
Mint feels as exciting as Mandrake did back in the Gael days...
Back when the users didn't mind a bit sending cash to keep
their new found love breathing....
ciao
Keep up the good work
22 • LiveBSD's, Google Desktop (by Antonio on 2007-07-02 14:51:23 GMT from United States)
Great to hear that PCBSD is creating a liveCD !
FreeSBIE is good, but no KDE :( and no installer.
What is happening with RoFreeSBIE?
They create LiveCD/LiveDVD with KDE and it works beautifully :).
They have packages that are not present in FreeSBIE and PCBSD, like k3b, and tetex, hopefully now they will have ports for texlive.
They are still at 1.2 version and have not made one based on FreeBSD 6.2 :(.
I agree with you Ladislav on Google Desktop :)
Good perhaps for those who depend heavily on other Google products and services, but not particularly unique or useful for the rest of us. Or do you have a different opinion? If so, tell us in the forum below.
It is great that they care to make it for linux, but I can do fine without it. It is just like PIcasa for Linux. With the GIMP, and ImageMagick we can do ok.
23 • Linux for PowerPC... (by Caraibes on 2007-07-02 14:59:01 GMT from Dominican Republic)
While reading other readers posts on PPC, I can tell you I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on my PPC Mac (iBook G3), from the live-cd. Works great, except for the obvious lack of Flash & Skype...
Tough luck ! (no Skype really sucks !!!)
I heard Gnash for Gutsy is much better...
I am wondering if the Yellow Dog freely available would work on a G3 ???
24 • Mint (by Jeff on 2007-07-02 15:00:17 GMT from United States)
Clement is a credit to the LInux community. Let's hope his attitude is infectious.
Great interview!
25 • puppy (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 15:11:40 GMT from United States)
I can't believe one of the posters here have asserted that John Murga did not address any of the accusations-- the whole point of his article was that he doesn't go around banning people, he only banned one person, a direct reply to the strongest accusation in the review last week.
Mods can abuse their power, but it's usually more common for people to have their egos bruised when a mod puts them in line. Many people don't even realize that they have crossed a line from sensible poster to troll. If you jump on a forum just to express outrage at something you don't like, and the mods slap you, the problem is with you, not the forum.
The "review" from last week was factually wrong about the licensing, the reviewer's view on what happened on the forum was distorted, and he lied about being banned.
DW did the right thing about posting the letter in this issue, shit it should have even published an apology. That might not happen, but at least Ladislav did the right thing by letting an opposing voice be heard.
26 • Mint (by octathlon on 2007-07-02 15:14:27 GMT from United States)
Thanks for that interview with Clement Lefebvre! I must admit that I am one of those who took a look at an early edition of Mint and wondered why? if it's just a prettier Ubuntu with codecs?
Now I see they are implementing a lot of innovative ideas, some of which strike a chord with me. I will definitely take another look at Mint! For example, I want to see what this MintInstall is all about, sounds very interesting. I wonder how automatic updates are done if it doesn't alter your sources.list. I guess it uses its own .list file.
27 • mint (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 15:26:44 GMT from United States)
Until Mint creates and maintains their own *full* repos and not just leach off of Ubuntu I won't consider it a real repo. I'll just consider it Ubuntu remastered. Clemente calls that FUD. I say learn what an acronym means. There is no spread of fear, uncertainty or doubt in saying Mint is Ubuntu remastered. He is simply oversensitive to the comment because he recognizes that there is truth in saying it.
Still Mint has come along way in a short time, perhaps if it keeps picking up momentum and community it can become a real fork in the future, just as Mandrake/Mandriva from Red Hat, Ubuntu from Debian, PCLOS from Mandriva etc etc But at this time I don't see anything wrong with saying that adding a few convenience apps doesn't impress me.
Most of the work is being done by Ubuntu and they are dependent on them.
28 • re 4: DWL-G122 and rt73usb (by Alf on 2007-07-02 15:53:04 GMT from Italy)
I had the same problems on Ubuntu and found this solution:
If your access point works on WEP or is open, you can download the latest snapshot from the rt2x00 project on sourceforge and compile them
If you use WPA, you can choose:
you can download the latest ralink driver source from www.ralink.com.tw and build both the module and the patched wpa_supplicant
or
install ndiswrapper and use the windows drivers (dr71wu.inf), as the current rt2x00 snapshot dows not support wpa yet
You have to blacklist rt73usb and rt2x00lib to avoid them taking over
29 • The Open Forum - the rants and a way to middle ground (by Bill Savoie on 2007-07-02 16:01:39 GMT from United States)
I enjoyed Distrowatch Weekly. I can relate with Clement Lefebvre and his concern about the general public discourse and those people who rant. Coders get clear by coding. They attain an inner peace, and get excited about sharing their code with others. We love them for their work, and we might also look for a place to do some of our own coding and a way for us to share our code with others. This is the path to creating a better future. Good stuff. Nice family photo too, a real person like you or me. For all that good and the high sensitivity needed to intuit software improvements, it seems most daunting those many dysfunctional ranters.
It might help to recognize, it isn't about the coders. The ranters are drowning and at the same time doing the best they can. It is just how they are stuck in a rant, projecting anger out at others. They feel slightly better after a long rant. They see the world as needing perfection and they see themselves as providing the needed judgment. Internal to them, to the rantors, it is a God like simulation. They feel good. To the end receiver, it seems like a put down and disrespectful and not very useful in the long run. Fortunately there is a middle ground, an attitude that allows inner peace while the chaos on the surface continues! Use logic to strip out the projection, the anger, the negative zingers used only to get your attention. Use logic to find useful information contained in the message about possible code improvements. Listen with a Teflon covered heart. The anger you sense is not about you. You are innocent.
30 • Puppy Spat (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 16:16:52 GMT from United States)
People think they can jump back and forth from Troll to constructive critisim and only they should get away with it on the net. These people don't contribute much to the community but think they should be the head troll and take over.
I liked it much better when that line was never crossed. It was almost like a rules of the road, you just didn't do it. There should be more bannings of this sort. I see the same people get banned from cats sites to tech sites. These people need to find something better to do or do it themselves. Then they will find out who is right or who really didn't know what they were talking about.
Behind many failed one wolf projects (not just in linux) is a wimpering dog that got its nose rightly slapped.
31 • GPLv3? (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 16:21:23 GMT from United States)
Can anyone educate me, or point to a good review/discussion site, about what the big issue it is with GPLv3? Why does Linus Torvalds not like it?
32 • Qu 27 : where is the boundary? (by dbrion on 2007-07-02 16:27:04 GMT from France)
Any GNU/linux distr. depends on SourceForge, CPAn, etc.
Else, she could not be trusted (i.e, if it is a commercial distr, she could not be bought, as, in case of the buyer getting broke, the seller getting bankrupt, any developpment relying on the distr would be lost [else, one chooses another distr and manages, this is ennoying enough] ).
Where do you put the boundary (0.01% of code?).
Monsieur Lefevre idea of sharing files seemed very useful and innovating to me (installation and HW recognition are not that frequent, and , meseems they are linked to (arbitrary order) :(a) a quasi monopole of Windows, (b) a distrust (based on too many versions) from the HW manufacturers against Linux.)
Sharing big files is a common practice, and really time consuming.
I really do not know the boundary which makes a distribution
Qu 29: I am in good health: how can I ?listen with a Teflon covered heart?
33 • John Murga's Letter to Distrowatch (by Mark South on 2007-07-02 16:32:36 GMT from Switzerland)
My article last week clearly aroused strong emotions in the hearts of many readers, including Mr Murga, and I am pleased to see that Ladislav has, quite fairly, published his letter.
I notice that some here have criticised Mr Murga quote harshly for his expressed views. I do not condone this, especially since I quite understand how it feels to be the subject of sustained ad hominem attack and FUD, particularly by the participants (in some cases, the term "fanbois" would apparently be justified) from his forum.
Those who read my article last week will notice that at no time did I make personal accusations or hurtful allegations, and I encourage everyone else to exercise restraint.
Turning to matters of fact, I disagree with much of the content of Mr Murga's letter. However, a specific point cannot be allowed to pass, and I quote:
"...early this year a group did form, pushing their own web sites and trying to fork the project. (....) It is out of this group that this FUD comes from."
There may be such a group or groups, but I am not a member of any of them, did not write the article as part of a group effort, and the article is entirely mine. Nor does any evidence exist to support Mr Murga's contention. Mr Murga's efforts to portray my writing as part of some campaign of "FUD" is either FUD on his own part or a genuine misunderstanding of the situation. From here, I can't tell which.
In better times, I once invited Mr Murga to share a drink by the lakeside with me the next time he was in Switzerland. That offer still stands, and if he has any remaining personal issues with me, I can't believe that they can't be dealt with in a civilised setting between two civilised people.
34 • Re: Feedback (by roadie on 2007-07-02 16:39:10 GMT from Canada)
ladislav,
I'm somewhat disheartened (tho not surprised) to see that the main focus of last week's featured article has been moved to focus on the Puppy Linux forums.
The main problem with the article was and remains this:
"However, what you have done is give this particular piece of FUD a platform to transcend this, as the contrast is NOT immediately available."
The featured article last week was based on pettiness and allusions to Puppy Linux being proprietary. It was an open attack on the part of the author and it took place in a venue that offered no real opportunity for rebuttal.
"And you state you did this due to the fact that the story stuck a chord with you because of your own experiences with ANOTHER board."
What does licencing issues have to do with your bad experience with another board? Really, that should never have been in the article.
This has nothing to do with the Puppy Linux forums, nothing at all.
I had hoped to see something more from you then a published e-mail.
I have no doubt that Puppy Linux is experiencing (or did) an increase in downloads caused by this bit of fluff but I also think that the credibility of Distrowatch has fallen somewhat.
By the by, I learned the definition of FUD. It's not even close to what I thot it was.
( Fu..ing Useless Drivel ) which is what I considered last week's article. No doubt my post will be considered the same by some, but hey, thats Linux.
Have a great day ladislav,
roadie
35 • Re: #33 (by roadie on 2007-07-02 17:02:04 GMT from Canada)
Mark South,
You continue to evade the issue.
"Those who read my article last week will notice that at no time did I make personal accusations or hurtful allegations, and I encourage everyone else to exercise restraint."
I believe that your statement of Puppy Linux being "purely proprietary" could be considered a "hurtful allegation"
Would you agree with that observation?
By the by, I'm not one of the Puppy "fanbois" (tried it again)
roadie
36 • 33 (by Glenn on 2007-07-02 17:02:40 GMT from Canada)
Hi Mark..
Quote
"In better times, I once invited Mr Murga to share a drink by the lakeside with me the next time he was in Switzerland. That offer still stands, and if he has any remaining personal issues with me, I can't believe that they can't be dealt with in a civilised setting between two civilised people."
Whatever the right or wrong of it all, I think this is what should have been done (or some form of it) rather than drag in the whole world. My view of it is that everybody lost. Even DW got muddied from it.
Isn't hindsight great? :-)
A friend of mine once said "Least said, soonest mended"
That was/is good advice...
I follow this one. When upset, wait 72 hours after entering text before hitting the ENTER key. People cannot read body language through text and all too often statements can be taken out of context and misinterpreted. Pretty hard to rework once it is gone out :-)
This is a personal opinion... Flames go here (_____________).. I'll use them to roast coffee with..
Glenn
37 • Some interst on Linux Mint (by Luis Medina on 2007-07-02 17:03:47 GMT from Mexico)
well linux mint show what opensource could do fast and quick axperiment of new features.
38 • Puppy "fanboys": loud reaction by otherwise quiet members (by Raffy Mananghaya on 2007-07-02 17:41:53 GMT from Philippines)
[First a reply to dbrion (13 above), who said "Puppy's lovers seem to be allergic to .. comparisons [of starting times]" - Puppy loads files to RAM at startup, and this causes some delay, but when ready, programs execute very fast. Puppy's program files are compressed to 60-70 MB.]
I hope people will understand that the "fanboys" of Puppy Linux reacted en masse to Mark South's article because they perceived an injustice. Mark South was treated fairly by the community yet he complained of being a "victim". If Mark had an issue with John, it was simply because Mark wanted to be moderator and John turned him down.
Otherwise the "fanboys" do as most Linux fans do: just keep coding and helping users. Visit the forum at http://murga-linux.com/puppy
39 • Where can one find Anonymous distribution reviews? (by dbrion on 2007-07-02 17:42:58 GMT from France)
That might be a game :
guess which distribution was reviewed and you will get [ a XP licence/ looove/ a Linux (the serious one) book/ an acronym dictionary]
40 • Allergies (by dbrion on 2007-07-02 17:48:52 GMT from France)
<< dbrion (13 above), who said "Puppy's lovers seem to be allergic to .. comparisons [of starting times]" - Puppy loads files to RAM at startup, and this causes some delay, but when ready, programs execute very fast. >>
Combien de secondes?
Puppy's program files are compressed to 60-70 MB.]
Tout serveur de fichiers peut me le dire...
point 13 should be corrected (now I am sure):
s/seem/_are_/
41 • Re: #38 by Raffy Mananghaya (by Mark South on 2007-07-02 17:59:19 GMT from Switzerland)
Mr Mananghaya demonstrates the ad hominem attack with virtuosity:
"If Mark had an issue with John, it was simply because Mark wanted to be moderator and John turned him down."
I am replying to this because you have made this allegation repeatedly during the last week.
I have no particular issue with John Murga. I never asked to be a moderator. (There is a post where I jokingly remarked that I would accept the job so as to be able to remove Lobster's numerous cheerleading posts, but anyone with half a sense of humour can recognise that for a joke.)
The fact is, as reading your own forum will show, that others nominated me (without asking my permission, incidentally) and that Mr Murga overreacted somewhat badly to the suggestion. My impression was always that Mr Murga was listening to bad advice from certain of the Puppy community, and that he has committed certain ill-omened actions on that basis.
If you want the issue to settle, please stop spreading your own FUD about me. It tends to demonstrate more effectively the negative aspect of the Puppy community than anything that I wrote in the article itself.
42 • post 41 (by Oiving on 2007-07-02 18:10:44 GMT from United States)
"Mr Mananghaya demonstrates the ad hominem attack with virtuosity"
I thought Raffy was a girl.
But what the heck, either way the GOD DAMNED PUPPY LINUX ARGUMENTS CONTINUE IN DISTROWATCH.
Boys and/or girls, please stop!!!! No point is being made anymore
except for who is on whose side. Go to Puppy forums and thrash.
43 • Please stop it, we don't care! (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 18:18:24 GMT from United States)
You 3 or 4 yipping puppies should take your fight elsewhere. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's sick of it. You make yourselves look like bigger and bigger fools the more you continue. Grow up, for the love of Dog.
44 • Distro Timeline (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 18:34:49 GMT from United States)
Andreas Lundqvist did a great job with the distro timeline. When people say Slackware is one of the oldest distros, they aren't kidding!
45 • RE: 27 - becoming a real fork (by ezsit on 2007-07-02 18:37:41 GMT from United States)
"Still Mint has come along way in a short time, perhaps if it keeps picking up momentum and community it can become a real fork in the future, just as Mandrake/Mandriva from Red Hat, Ubuntu from Debian, PCLOS from Mandriva etc etc But at this time I don't see anything wrong with saying that adding a few convenience apps doesn't impress me."
I have run Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, PCLOS, and RedHat. The onlt true fork that has become an independent, self-sustaining distribution is the Mandrake/Mandriva split from RedHat. Ubuntu would be NOTHING without Debian. Mint would be NOTHING without Debian and Ubuntu. PCLOS would be NOTHING without Mandriva.
Ubuntu, Mint and PCLOS are respins with some customizations. None of these projects would continue to exist in the form they do without their parent distribution. This is not to say that these projects do not contribute something very real and beneficial to the Linux community. However, to over exaggerate their independence and ability to survive in the face of Debian and Mandriva's demise is ridiculous.
46 • Qu 45 What would happen (by dbrion on 2007-07-02 18:51:20 GMT from France)
if , anywhere in the distr, "pclinuxos","debian", "mint", "fedora", "Mandriva" and "ubuntu" were removed, if screens were given an uniform color (or the same photo)? Could you maintain your classification? Could another one (or many other ones) than you reproduce your classification?
I really do not know...
47 • Re: #42 (by roadie on 2007-07-02 18:57:54 GMT from Canada)
"But what the heck, either way the GOD DAMNED PUPPY LINUX ARGUMENTS CONTINUE IN DISTROWATCH.
Boys and/or girls, please stop!!!! No point is being made anymore
except for who is on whose side. Go to Puppy forums and thrash."
I totally agree, the issue that Mark South and the Puppy crew have chosen to debate belongs in the Puppy forums, not here.
However, the licencing issue that Mark South has tried to cover with a "Murga forum" smokescreen should be debated here because it happened here.
Re: #43
You better care, cause if crap like last week's article is allowed to continue, you won't have any Linux to play with.
roadie
48 • dbrion (by RE 47 La fin du monde approche on 2007-07-02 19:07:11 GMT from France)
"Re: #43
You better care, cause if crap like last week's article is allowed to continue, you won't have any Linux to play with.
"
On peut même en acheter, et travailler avec, si ça a de la valeur (sinon, restent Cygwin, xxBSDs).
Pour jouer, un hochet suffit (et les enfants sont plus sages que les "adultes")
Etes vous sûr d'avoir _lu_ ce contre quoi vous ferraillez?(@34, @35)
"Moi mon colon, celle que je préfère, c'est la guerre de 14-18" Brassens.
49 • Ladislav justified posting the article based on the "forum experience" (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 19:07:43 GMT from Philippines)
that is why the forum matters...
50 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-02 19:19:29 GMT from United States)
Great DWW! I might give Mint a try (if there is a "free" version).
The Puppy fiasco is worth reporting (dirty laundry for other distros is also reported here).
Keep up the good work and ignore the thin-skinned. They are ready to criticize others but cry when the tables are turned.
51 • RE: 46 - Classification (by ezsit on 2007-07-02 20:32:51 GMT from United States)
A simple 'uname -a' in a terminal window would quickly clarify the situation. A quick trip through the / filesystem would also reveal some differences. However, I am at a loss to understand why this matters.
My classification is simple, would a distribution continue to exist if it's parent ceased to exist? Mandriva would keep on going, almost unaffected. Ubuntu, Mint, and PCLinuxOS would all lose their foundations. If each community were large enough and motivated enough to maintain their own distributions, then they would continue. Otherwise, these communities would have to find another parent distro to customize.
52 • more than one year with Puppy (by averageJoe on 2007-07-02 20:49:31 GMT from United States)
As average user download and try out Linux for fun, and following the growth of Puppy, I think it did a great job and still improving. Never heard of Mark S. before and don't care his personal bad experience with forum . Puppy simply works for me, and I have fun with it. forum or not is not of concern. Negative opinion doesn't influence me at all, but I could be deterred by that article should I never use it before. It would be more appropriate if MarkS publish his article in his blog.
For those who read Berry's Developer news, that's even more fun to learn things and new idea, I share the excitement when he made something work every couple days. and now I can understand why the author doesn't like to deal with people. he will not have time to do the productive coding.
Reading Distrowatch is also important to us ( average Joes and Janes from all over the world), please stop occupy this space to debate your personal feeling , we would rather reading you can use it do something cool. move your battle back to forum or your blog, not here.
Love the dog.
53 • Elive 1.0 (by Ohnonymous on 2007-07-02 21:51:35 GMT from United States)
What's the deal with Elive? Are they too good for us normal leeches now? Have they suddenly turned into non-free distro? Any official word on when exactly 1.0 was and what the disc image contained?
Am I wrong in thinking that Elive 1.0 is overrated crap?
54 • Linus, FSF and GPL3 (by Jarvi on 2007-07-02 21:56:29 GMT from United States)
I spent a long afternoon trying to follow this story that DWW only briefly mentioned in a line...
Apparently FSF wants to put a stop sign on Tivo's "open but not free" usage of linux in their DVR with the new GPL3. And apparently Linus strongly disagree with this whole idea. (WHY? I think it has something to do with the difference between "Free" and "Open Source", but I am pretty lost.)
Can we, maybe in the next DWW, have some reviews on this issue? maybe on the Linus/FSF disagreement, or maybe even on to the core of the debate? also, how does GPL3 going to affect the distros?
55 • re: 51 (by welkiner on 2007-07-02 22:55:20 GMT from United States)
I don't quite follow your logic. If I remember correctly Mepis was in the top 10 or 20 at DistroWatch before Ubuntu existed. If Ubuntu disappeared tomorrow (which is highly unlikely), Mepis would simply (pardon the pun) re-peg back to Debian and keep on trucking.
There are many wonderful distributions out there who simply do not want to re-invent the wheel or the engine or whatever, who still think that they can vastly improve the automobile etc., etc.
Anyone who says that Mint is just Ubuntu with codecs has obviously never installed and used Mint.
On another subject, based on my personal observations. Why is it totally acceptable to criticize Ubuntu, Debian, and their derivatives, but God forbid that anyone should criticize Puppy or PCLinuxOS (flame retardant suit required). I guess it's "P" thing, or maybe a "PC" thing (pun intended).
wb
56 • something's fishy (by rajihammr on 2007-07-02 23:30:54 GMT from United States)
Ok, now I know something's fishy...All distros in the top 10 are showing negative hit numbers except PClinuxOS, Sabayon and Mint. Whaaaaaat?
57 • PCLOS - Mandriva (by pastored at 2007-07-02 23:35:42 GMT from United States)
Just a quick clarification:
PCLOS *was* based on Mandrake 9.2.
Was.
Past tense.
Since that time, it's always been built on those foundations - but to my knowledge, PCLOS does not grab current Mandriva sources and rebuild them. The innovation of PCLOS isn't just a repackaging of Mandrava RPMs, but a continued focus on polishing an existing distro.
If Mandriva disappeared tomorrow (and I bear them no ill-will, I don't use them, but if they meet other's needs, then great), PCLOS sources would be unaffected.
If anyone knows conclusively that I am incorrect, I would appreciate being shown the error in my reasoning. Thanks for reading.
And always, thanks, Ladislav, for DistroWatch. One of the main things I look forward to on Monday mornings!
GBYLBT, PastorEd
58 • Re: #53 • Elive 1.0 (by A. Wong on 2007-07-02 23:36:12 GMT from Canada)
Here is the "latest" Elive 1.0 Gem:
ftp://mirror.pacific.net.au/linux/elive/.Fewveknyk7O2/Elive_1.0_Gem.iso
(Apparently, the earlier version didn't install Flash9 properly.)
59 • Mint (by Landor on 2007-07-02 23:43:38 GMT from Canada)
I'm not usually a huge promoter of forks of a distro, and only simply for the fact that I personally believe that when you fork, you waste time, talent, and resources, whether they are human, financial or hardware/material that could've been used on the original distro that you admired were an earlier part of.
That said and done, I really like Mint and the distro is definitely one of thee best I have tested to date. They've made some great strides in fixing a lot of the issues found in Ubuntu, and or improving drastically upon it. One of these key areas is speed IMHO. Mint is a rocket in comparison.
Great interview with Clem.
Oh, and I have to say, it is most likely the best looking desktop out of the box thus far in the community.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
60 • puppy (by BillWho? on 2007-07-03 01:45:16 GMT from Australia)
I believe that this is all the result of a major misunderstanding. At one stage not that long ago there seemed to be something screwy going on with the forum. I had a few of my own posts show up only to suddenly disappear, yet when I reposted them they stayed put. At other times they had been renamed and moved to another part of the forum (A better name and area as it turned out) As well as this Barry himself (the last person you would expect to have a post removed) made the following post when congratulating another forum member on his recent wedding (what could possibly be wrong with that?)
Quote
That's weird, I posted to this thread, but my post is not there. I waited, refreshed, nope.
Anyway, cutting it down to a few words: best wishes from me too!
End quote
These problems have not been noticed by myself lately so may have been fixed (except for moving posts to more fitting places of course)
It was said that it is time for "the yapping puppies" to "stfu" I agree and not just here on Distrowatch but on the forum as well.
61 • suggestion for donation (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 02:06:54 GMT from Canada)
I would like to suggest a donation to Quantum GIS (http://www.qgis.org). Quantum GIS (QGIS) is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. It tries to offer a free alternative to scientist to sofware of companies like ESRI Products that cost lot of money !
62 • PCLinuxOS (by OhneDich on 2007-07-03 02:58:50 GMT from United States)
Let's see. It's the easiest distro to install and use,it has it's own repository chock
full of programs that always install correctly,and it's creator Texstar has about 3000
posts on his friendly and helpful forums.
Gee, i wonder why it keeps moving up that list, that's a tough one to figure out.
63 • re: 53, 58 Elive 1.0 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 03:15:59 GMT from United States)
Post 58 has a link to a free download which you probably already saw. Elive is a nice distro, but I don't like their pay to download policy. I'm actually trying several different distros to see which one I like best to run Cinelerra. If I like Elive, then I'll send a donation, but not before I've tried it out.
64 • forks re:45 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 03:38:53 GMT from United States)
PCLOS started as a customized form of Mandriva, but is now independent, has it's own repos and everything. If Mandriva vanished, PCLOS would not.
Ubuntu uploads packages from Debian testing during certain time periods (see their schedule) *and other upstream sources* then they test them, debug them, and repackage them. If Debian were to collapse, that would make life harder for Ubuntu, but they wouldn't collapse. They would simply go further up stream.
65 • Slackware 12 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 03:46:57 GMT from Australia)
Slackware is using a later kernel nowadays, rather than using a more stable older one. Has anyone noticed an easier install than before as well? Do you still have to configure things first to get X running, or does it boot straight into the desktop?
66 • RE 51 (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 05:55:11 GMT from France)
"A simple 'uname -a' in a terminal window would quickly clarify the situation"
Under root (this is a sketch)
echo "echo Coucou" > /usr/bin/uname && chmod ....
I was asking what would happen if *every* Mint (say) word was removed (even from binaries!)...
( This is the way wines (and some funny mixtures, to test the experts... this may be funny) are tested, if irrationnal convictions are feared to interfere...
I am sure that, from a user point of view, no difference is likely to happen (perhaps results of Mandriva long lasting efforts towards emulation, or some specificities of quality assurance??).
Your point is long term based on the fate and deep originality of a distr, mine is based on the final result on a short term consumer..
67 • RE 53 (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 06:07:59 GMT from France)
"Am I wrong in thinking that Elive 1.0 is overrated crap?
"
a) From the first word (choice of a language), Arabic is "written" the European yaw...
you can verify that with a Mandriva installer, or with DW choice of language (NE corner) as did (does) edUBUlinux { that makes the claim of originality of whatever distr dubious}
b) They choose to hide what was the most amusing/original, as they could not stand some negative reactions..
c) It is forbidden (for common-sense reasons) to use credit-cards in a cybercafe (and would you dare to use credit-cards with iexplore.exe?)
Even in the serious, non free word, one can test without buying....
68 • RE 61 " Quantum GIS donation?" (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 06:20:09 GMT from France)
I would agree in a perfect world..
The problem, with GISes (or R) is that they are not poor (however, they are not as rich as Microsoft, which is very Linux friendly... from all the blunders I read).
I think that , if a Linux distr needs some expensive/flashy hardware, or a better ftp server (all this is user friendly), the money will be better used than with well-funded applications...
(try to fill the sea with a glass of water... or give it to a thirsty man)
69 • New PCLinuxOS review (by davecs on 2007-07-03 07:26:55 GMT from United Kingdom)
Just like to point out that the new review linked to on the PCLinuxOS page here is not a new review at all, it is a reprint in the PCLinuxOS magazine of the Raiden's Realm review.
As this is a very positive review and it's in the PCLOS Mag, it looks as if we're blowing our own trumpet, but, as I said, it is an existing review that we asked the author if we could use in our mag.
On a couple of other points:
PCLinuxOS does maintain its own repos, which are also used by all the PCLOS variants out there. Yes we do take good ideas from other distros, and the most obvious one is the control centre from Mandriva (which has to be reworked to work with PCLOS). As this is very much at the forefront of PCLOS, it's easy to say that PCLOS is repackaged Mandriva, but there are a lot of differences.
We recommend to users not to use RPMs from other distros. Many 3rd party packages designed for Mandriva work, but a few may not. If you installed a genuine Mandriva rpm and a number of required libraries, it could break a PCLOS system.
Remember Texstar made his name by creating unofficial RPMs for Mandriva. So the real talent in PCLOS is precisely in the packaging, and, for me, that is a very important difference.
70 • Roadie - Comment from last issue: (by Landor on 2007-07-03 07:35:13 GMT from Canada)
I have to totally agree with desktop bloat in a distro, and one of the reasons I originally said in the comments for last issue that I did not like puppy. I normally checkout screen shots prior to downloading a distribution. Bloat comes in many forms and I often relate desktop bloat to a system a novice or teen would have and right or wrong, consider the developer to be a thinker along those lines for having so many icons/shortcuts present.
At present I have 1 shortcut.
Not to mention it's also resource unfriendly the more the amount of clutter.
My son (a teen of course) is a great example, 2 thirds of his desktop is shortcuts.
(Shudders)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
71 • Question 69 Pourcentage of innovation? (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 08:05:01 GMT from France)
"We recommend to users not to use RPMs from other distros"
I installed OCR from Suze on a Mandriva with bin. rpms;
Usually, pple who are fed up with *monopolistic practices* (or who do not agree with their systyrans) recompile from source the traditional way...
"So the real talent in PCLOS is precisely in the packaging, and, for me, that is a very important difference.
"
This sums up to what percentage of modifications (lines of code)from
(a) Mandriva
(b) SourceForge, CPaN, ...?
This question can be answered with the right part of the keybord....
(when I buy cakes, I am happy if they put them in a nice box; however, I do not eat the box... and, if I ask the vendor's boss which part of the price is in boxes, he *freely* gives me the info....)
72 • geexbox (by Aximus on 2007-07-03 08:21:17 GMT from Turkey)
I've discovered it today and amazed what they've done in just 7mb! Kudos to them.
73 • @57 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 08:45:08 GMT from Canada)
Meh, I'm tired of the uncertainty, let's do a sample, shall we...
In the blue corner, we have:
http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/.../pclinuxos/2007/SRPMS.main/
In the red corner, we have:
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/.../SRPMS/main/release/
Let's grab the first package for each letter of the alphabet and diff the specs.
a2ps: result - basically the same package. PCLOS build disables the debug packages, bzips the patches, changes some BuildRequires to Requires for reasons I'm not sure of, and removes a few brackets. The PCLOS package is based on a slightly older package than the current Cooker one (it was clearly rebuilt from 11mdv, Cooker currently contains 12mdv), which may account for a couple of the differences (probably the bzipped patches, we stopped doing that a while back as RPM payloads are compressed anyway).
banshee: result - clearly the PCLOS package is originally based on an MDV package, and it must be more recent than 9.2 as banshee wasn't *in* 9.2. however, PCLOS packaging has diverged since 0.11, though there's still not a lot different.
cabextract: result - basically the same package. PCLOS copied the Mandriva package of October 2006. The Mandriva package has since been updated to 1.2, PCLOS is still at 1.1.
d80211-source: result - minus the changelog, package is identical. Note that the Cooker package was recently updated (by me, as it happens...) and renamed mac80211-source to match upstream naming. PCLOS hasn't picked up this change yet.
e2fsprogs: result - basically the same package. PCLOS copied the Mandriva package of October 2006. The Mandriva package has since been updated twice, including recently to fix a rather significant memory leak in libblkid. PCLOS package shows no sign of these updates.
faces: result - the package is identical except that patches are bzipped in PCLOS and not in Mandriva.
gail: result - package is basically the same except Mandriva's is much newer. PCLOS copied the package in October 2006 and have not updated it since, it's stuck at version 1.9.2. Mandriva package has been updated several times since, it's now at version 1.19.3.
hal: result - same as banshee, package is clearly initially based on Mandriva package but packaging has genuinely diverged since.
ia_ora: result - package is identical barring changelog. okay, bad test, it's the Mandriva theme, it's not like PCLOS would do much to customize the package. but hey, it's late, I'm tired. moving on...
jabber: result - packages are identical bar the changelog. MDV package has been rebuilt for library changes a couple of times since PCLOS cloned it (November 2006), I wonder what's happening there in PCLOS...
kasumi: result - packages are identical bar the changelog.
lads: result - packages are functionally identical. the Mandriva spec file has been cleaned up since PCLOS cloned it (October 2006) - tabs instead of spaces, use of more modern macros. but that's just style, no functional change.
m17n-db: result - packages are basically identical, except the Mandriva package has been updated to the latest stable release (1.3.4) since PCLOS cloned it in November 2006. PCLOS one is still a CVS checkout from August 2006.
Okay, honestly, I'm getting bored now. Do I need to continue? I am, of course, entirely biased (in case anyone didn't get it yet, I work for Mandriva). But it's very easy to duplicate my work, just go to the sites I linked, grab the .src.rpms, extract the specs, and compare. What this seems rather strongly to show is that the majority of the PCLOS 2007 repositories are a straight clone of the Mandriva repositories circa October / November 2006 (which means, basically, a straight clone of Mandriva Linux 2007). The majority of the packages are never updated, even to resync with Mandriva changes, after being cloned. I don't want to provoke any controversy, but I'd say that the PCLOS guys could be a bit straighter about how many of their packages are simply straight rebuilds of Mandriva work, rather than just giving out the line about 'forking from 9.2' and 'taking inspiration from many distros'.
74 • follow-up (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 08:48:20 GMT from Canada)
A follow-up - obviously you could get an even more exact correlation just by taking the .src.rpms from the Mandriva Linux 2007 repository, which would be:
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/.../2007.0/SRPMS/main/release
I just didn't know that before I started my comparison, as it was only during the course of the comparison that it became so clear which release PCLOS was based on.
75 • RE 73 Thanks, Adam (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 08:53:06 GMT from France)
for giving the way of _measuring_ a Particularly Confidential OS innovation...
76 • further follow-up (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 08:55:41 GMT from Canada)
a further follow-up (yeah, sorry, as I said, tired). it would also be nice if PCLOS would stop stripping the Mandriva changelogs when they take the packages. I know they consider it acknowledgement enough to state that PCLOS is based on Mandriva on their website, but the Mandriva packagers (who are often unpaid community members, not staff) feel that their work on each individual package is reflected and acknowledged in the changelogs, and would like that to stay that way.
77 • RE 76 "Mandriva packagers.." (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 08:59:29 GMT from France)
What about Mandrivas buyers?
78 • Good Job, AdamW. !!! (by Caraibes on 2007-07-03 11:02:07 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Hey, Adam, it is good that you take the time to clarify the fact that PCLOS is a "remaster" of Mandriva. Watch out, this is not bashing, as it is a very nice remaster, and Tex always sports a very friendly & mature attitude in the forum. But it is only fair to be completely clear about the fact that most packages are straight out of Mandriva.
-So what makes the "user-friendly" feeling in PCLOS ??? I think it is "apt-get" instead of "urpmi"... Combined with not having to do the "easy urpmi" thing of reconfiguring source.list...
Anyway, it's all fair game, now the most popular distros are "adaptation" of "real distros" : Ubuntu instead of Debian, Mint/Mepis instead of Ubuntu, PCLOS instead of Mandriva, Sabayon instead of Gentoo...
It is a good move for the newbies, I can only applaud it. We have to offer easy products !
As of me, I would say that Fedora just flies much higher than any of them...
(curious about the brand new Slackware 12... can't wait to read "real reviews"... please, Jem, please Béranger...)
79 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 12:09:11 GMT from United States)
I'm hoping for a Slackware 12 review in DWW. Everyone already knows about Fedora and PCLinuxOS and the other popular distros. Slackware doesn't get much press, so a review would be very helpful for many of us.
80 • pclos (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 13:39:55 GMT from United States)
Thanks Adam for the investigation. It looks like if Mandriva vanished then pclos would not-- it would simply be stuck on October '06 for along time! haha lol
81 • RE 80 If Red Hat vanished (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 13:49:19 GMT from France)
White Boxes Linux clones in a fair way, without adding/substracting an unnecessary character=> users could maintain their softs with fair changelogs...
The comparison(@55) of Linuxen and cars leds me to 2 remarks:
(a) XP seems a comfortable train, less swindle than some Linuxen..
(b) who would [ get into /buy/sell/ give/be given] a car where serial numbers are H2SO4 wiped out?
82 • RE: #73 (by KDulcimer on 2007-07-03 14:40:42 GMT from United States)
Mr. Williamson:
You admit a high bias towards Mandy, so I'll be fair and admit a high bias towards PCLOS. That, however, does not translate into a bias against Mandy. I really respect and really like Mandy.
I realize you were just going through and picking the first package for each letter of the alphabet, but something is notably missing: other than HAL and e2fsprogs, I don't see that you took a look at *one* critical system package (I admit my cursory glance could have missed something). How about taking a look at the kernel, KDE, Gnome, and other important system packages? How about picking some important system packages found in both Mandy and PCLOS and comparing them? Might we find out that PCLOS is a little more different from Mandy (which I highly respect as a distro) than a comparison of "faces" or "jabber" might provide?
As far as spec files, somebody may have to correct me on this. For the record, I have built 2 RPMs in my lifetime, and those were in the past 2 weeks. So I admit I'm pretty ignorant about common customs. But it seems to me that clearing out the changelog would be a matter of developer preference. As I understand it, the usual practice is to not create a spec file from scratch, so many developers might find it worthwhile to clean out other's changelogs. Otherwise, (other than to satisfy the GPL) why are the SRPMs out there except to provide something for others to look at and modify? After all, as I understand it, that's the spirit of FOSS. I build something, you make it better. Somebody else tweaks it and adds some new features. Somebody else tweaks the code on those new features and makes them stable. You take the stable code and make it better...
83 • RE 82 What I notice,it is that no numbers are given (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 14:59:56 GMT from France)
of PCLOS innovating features....(long, long poestry)...
Il n'y a pas de problème auquel une absence de réponse n'apporte de solution....
"it seems to me that clearing out the changelog would be a matter of developer preference"
What about the users?
If there is a nasty bug, or if one wants to decide wether or not to upgrade, a changelog file is a useful document....
Au lieu de parler longuement de l'esprit du FOSS, allez donc dans
"http://www.r-project.org/" -> what'new -> file "News" contient un changefile _décent_ .. depuis 6 ans...(R, comme complexité, vaut quelques rpms)
84 • More Forks Than? (by Landor on 2007-07-03 15:11:47 GMT from Canada)
Since it's break-time I thought I'd hop on and check out what's going on around DW for releases and such and low and behold what do I see, another fork (big linux, I never noticed it before since I avoid distros in uppercase unless they're abbreviated, yes a pet peeve from the old BBS days) that I basically cannot fathom the why or what for.
Who here has more forks in their home than Linux?
Anyone?
(Goes back to his bagel with tongue thoroughly in cheek)
Keep your stick on the ice..
Landor
85 • RE #83 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 15:13:57 GMT from United States)
"What about the users? If there is a nasty bug, or if one wants to decide wether or not to upgrade, a changelog file is a useful document...."
That's a very valid point. But like I said, it's a matter of developer preference... whether or not it's /wise/ in that case is a different issue.
86 • RE 85 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 15:20:49 GMT from France)
s/developper/maintainer/ (packager, to be very kind)
87 • RE #73 again (by KDulcimer on 2007-07-03 15:42:29 GMT from United States)
If you go to http://www.pclinuxos.com --> About Us (link on left side) leads you to--> http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=70
"PCLinuxOS was originally based on another distribution under the name of Mandriva and shares many features of Mandriva such as the Control Center and the Draklive Installer. Texstar and team would like to thank the developers, contributors and others associated with Mandriva who may have indirectly contributed to the PCLinuxOS distribution. In addition to Mandriva, PCLinuxOS would also like to thank the developers of the Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu as we also use patches and bugs fixes from those distributions."
88 • mandriva/pclinuxos (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 15:48:33 GMT from United States)
I am bothered by this. And I thank Mr. Willianson for taking the trouble to look into the "hidden" development of pclinuxos.
It's open source, but there is merit in giving all credit where due.
Question is, are we to be "bothered" by more of the same between, say BLAG and Fedora, etc?
I admit that this could all be seen as nitpicking in the open source world. But Texstar has said that sice .92 Mandriva was no longer necessary.
89 • Re 73, 76, 78 (by vukota on 2007-07-03 15:55:07 GMT from United States)
Thanks Adam for clarification! I was always feeling this but didn't take a time to prove it.
"Anyway, it's all fair game, now the most popular distros are "adaptation" of "real distros" : Ubuntu instead of Debian, Mint/Mepis instead of Ubuntu, PCLOS instead of Mandriva, Sabayon instead of Gentoo..."
Well I don't know about fair game, but I know that Ubuntu/Mepis/Gentoo admits on what upstream distribution they are based and they are not trying to hide this.
Also removing ChangeLogs to hide real authors, may violate copyright laws (I am not lawyer and didn't check what is in the SRPMs).
On the other hand, Madriva can learn something from PCLOS. At least in the area of UAT & Design and PR & community.
90 • @82 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 15:58:17 GMT from Canada)
Yes, indeed, that's the spirit of open source, except you missed a bit: it's not "I build something, you make it better" it's "I build something, you make it better and acknowledge my contribution".
A spec file represents work on the part of somebody. You're right that it's quite common to base specs on previously existing ones: it's also common to give credit when you do this. Usually when a Mandriva packager introduces a new package and bases the spec on, say, the Fedora one, this is acknowledged in the changelog. When PCLOS takes Mandriva packages and rebuilds them _without modification_, the changelog simply reads:
- Build for PCLinuxOS 2007
I don't agree that it would be 'fairer' to take 'critical system packages'. For a start, PCLOS developers and promoters don't tend to qualify their assertions regarding how far PCLOS is diverged from Mandriva. Let's take the comment from davecs up there:
"PCLinuxOS does maintain its own repos, which are also used by all the PCLOS variants out there. Yes we do take good ideas from other distros, and the most obvious one is the control centre from Mandriva (which has to be reworked to work with PCLOS). As this is very much at the forefront of PCLOS, it's easy to say that PCLOS is repackaged Mandriva, but there are a lot of differences."
And from PastorEd:
"PCLOS *was* based on Mandrake 9.2."
"Since that time, it's always been built on those foundations - but to my knowledge, PCLOS does not grab current Mandriva sources and rebuild them. The innovation of PCLOS isn't just a repackaging of Mandrava RPMs, but a continued focus on polishing an existing distro.
If Mandriva disappeared tomorrow (and I bear them no ill-will, I don't use them, but if they meet other's needs, then great), PCLOS sources would be unaffected."
Secondly, your idea of "critical system packages" betrays a bit of a lack of understanding. GNOME and KDE are not critical system packages. They are important user-visible components, but they are not critical to the functioning of a system.
It's my experience that what PCLOS does is modify a very thin layer on the top of Mandriva - the biggest directly user-facing applications. These are all built upon the packages that lie underneath, unsexy and apparently unimportant as they may be, and PCLOS seems to do precious little to work on the packaging of this 'plumbing' stuff: they let Mandriva do all the work on that. This, again, is fine, just so we're all clear on that. It's a perfectly okay way to build a distribution, as you said, it's one of the points of open source. But PCLOS needs to be open about it, and acknowledge it.
(Oh, and by the way, 'gail' is actually a GNOME component: the GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library).
Final point: actually, the 'spirit of open source' is not "I build something, you make it better" *or* "I build something, you make it better and acknowledge my contribution". It's "I build something, you make it better, acknowledge my contribution and we work together on the improvements in future". This is the other major area where PCLOS falls down. To my knowledge, not one PCLOS developer is at all involved in the Mandriva development process. PCLOS does not contribute its changes upstream (i.e. to Mandriva) at all.
Compare PCLOS's situation here to Ubuntu, which is always very up-front about being heavily based on Debian, and which regularly contributes its changes back to the Debian project.
91 • @89 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 15:59:56 GMT from Canada)
No, it doesn't violate any laws, as Mandriva specs are by default under the GPL, which doesn't have an attribution clause.
92 • It's open source, but there is merit in giving all credit where due. (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 16:00:07 GMT from France)
It is not a matter of *giving*, it is a matter of *not* removing...
and , besides ego / deontology problems (I am not that interested) , can led to
technical (it makes things hard to understand in nasty cases, where they should be made simple!) and surrealist problems (suppose someone is wild enough to freely *sell* a PClinuxOS based stuff....)
93 • post 92 great point! (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 16:23:32 GMT from United States)
(I wrote post 88)
I emphasised the not giving credit where due, but it's the *removal* of credit on work pointed out by Mr. Williamson, *that's* what hits me in the belly about pclinuxos now.
What is the purpose of shaving those credits out of the system, davecs? texstar?
94 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 16:47:49 GMT from United States)
Just for the record:
Through PCLOS .93a, it *was* based on Mandrake 9.2. When the Ripper Gang started on PCLOS 2007, they used Mandriva 2007.0 as the base. Texstar has *always* been quite open that PCLOS is based off Mandrake/Mandriva. So #88, I don't know what you're talking about when you say the "hidden" development of PCLOS.
Also, please note I originally said "critical" system packages (meaning the kernel/HAL/other various guts), but then I changed my wording to "important" system packages (meaning critical packages + KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc.) Sorry about my misdeunclarification. :-)
As far as an acknowledgement by Texstar, please see post #87. Tex does acknowledge Mandriva and again, he has always been open about where PCLOS forked from.
95 • @94 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 16:52:33 GMT from Canada)
Indeed. It would be nice if other PCLOS developers and community members would follow his lead when discussing PCLOS in threads such as this, then, and not muddy the waters with suggestions that PCLOS is massively forked from Mandriva and would barely notice if MDV ceased to exist, since this is clearly not the case.
96 • @94 The issue is not a general acknowlegement, (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 17:00:24 GMT from France)
but systematic removal from *any* package (whether they were contributed by (rand. order) Groucho Marx, Sourceforge or Mandriva is not that important, as long as it is *true*).
This is part of a big work?
I did not see any rational reason for this removal ...
It is likely to make things *worse* for users, some day (then, they may forget public relations and poestry)....
97 • I would appreciate an editorial about the ethics of the various Linux distributions. (by Jon on 2007-07-03 17:12:28 GMT from United States)
We all know that numerous commercial distributions entered talks with Microsoft about patents. In addition, you just published an article that talked about some questionable behaviors of the producers of Puppy Linux. Even Debian accepts financial contributions from some sources with questionable reputations. Moreover, the Free Software Foundation accepts contributions from corporations that have a history of creating proprietary software.
I personally like Debian, Puppy, and Richard Stallman. Although I would never use Windows in my home, I believe that Bill Gates is a good guy who cares deeply about others. In fact, he might be the most important philanthropist in human history.
98 • RE: 95 (by KDulcimer on 2007-07-03 17:13:01 GMT from United States)
I just follow the lead of Texstar.
Good. Now that we've got that cleared up, I want to address this:
"It's my experience that what PCLOS does is modify a very thin layer on the top of Mandriva - the biggest directly user-facing applications. These are all built upon the packages that lie underneath, unsexy and apparently unimportant as they may be, and PCLOS seems to do precious little to work on the packaging of this 'plumbing' stuff: they let Mandriva do all the work on that. This, again, is fine, just so we're all clear on that. It's a perfectly okay way to build a distribution[SNIP]"
Ah, but it is those "user-facing" applications which make the difference to the end user. Whether they like PCLOS over Mandy or Mandy over PCLOS is up to them. Frankly, your Joe Noob doesn't care about which kernel he's using or what patches were applied to it or changelogs. "Does it work?" is what he wants to know. Also, "Does X work better than Y?" It's all up to Joe Noob.
99 • "your Joe Noob doesn't care" (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 17:17:16 GMT from France)
Quel mépris pour l'utilisateur...
100 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 17:19:23 GMT from United States)
Would the writer of post 94 please read post 73 again?
Look at the credits stripped off of Mandriva's developer's works.
Why?
101 • @98 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 17:22:45 GMT from Canada)
I'm not discussing the relative merits of these approaches or how valuable PCLOS's contributions are to the end-user. All I'm talking about is the need to give credit where it is due for the substantial work of other people of which you are taking advantage, and the fact that it would be far more in keeping with the ideals of free software to contribute the changes you make back to your parent project.
102 • @98 , additional (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 17:26:30 GMT from Canada)
Further - you also need to consider the point that your work can't exist in a vacuum. You talk about underlying kernels and libraries as if they're unimportant, but they're not. You can't just ignore the foundations and keep working on the facade. If you could, there would have been no need to re-base PCLOS 2007 on Mandriva Linux 2007, would there? You could just have kept working from the 0.93 (MDK 9.2) base. The fact that Tex felt it necessary to re-base on Mandriva Linux 2007 shows that he, at least, understands that the basic components of the distro need to be kept up to date, and it also shows that the PCLOS project lacks the capacity to this itself and must rely on the work of others (the Mandriva development community).
103 • RE: 99 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 17:27:39 GMT from United States)
I don't speak French, but I think I know what you are saying.
Sir, do you know everything you *should* know about your car? Your plumbing? The steps taken to build your domesticile? Do you know what it takes to build a road? A sidewalk?
You see, it is necessary that we all remain ignorant of some things. Life is short, we can't learn everything. Thus ignorance, while undesirable, is forced upon us. A lot of people shouldn't have to learn everything about their computer. As time marches on, the general knowledge that people have about computing will increase. 100 years from now, we won't have the same issues we do today about educating Joe Noob what a kernel is, but they will still be there.
104 • I've got some land in florida or RE: 97 (by Landor on 2007-07-03 17:31:38 GMT from Canada)
Stallman is very cool. The man knows more than the majority and then some. But..
"I believe that Bill Gates is a good guy who cares deeply about others. In fact, he might be the most important philanthropist in human history"
Are you serious? A good guy who cares?
Do you know anything about MS and PC-DOS, or the origin of Windows? How about the ample use of Freeware in Windows that was freely distributed as long as in no way was it packaged with something else, leaving out credit to the author and sold?
IMHO, anything Gates does for others is for two reasons only, Taxes and Image.
I can't honestly believe I just read your post.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
105 • RE 103 (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 17:37:39 GMT from France)
"Do you know what it takes to build a road? A sidewalk?"
Oui, sinon je serais au chômage (je ne suis pas du tout informaticien, mais spécialiste ... en routes... et je relis des rapports en français, anglais pour savoir s'ils sont scientiquement/politiquement/orthographiquement corrects)
" Life is short, we can't learn everything"
On devrait...
If you think everyone is called Joe Noob, you might be surprised (even by illeterate pple).
You see, it is necessary that we all remain ignorant of some things
As far as libraries are buggy, one is obliged to have a fair record of their history; if someone is not skilled of that, he may ask friends...If they find a crappy changelig, it may be unpleasant.
106 • PCLinuxOS and Mandriva (by Tim on 2007-07-03 18:35:52 GMT from Canada)
I read so much on these forums about PCLinuxOS and it's Mandriva roots. A lot of folks like to run PCLinuxOS down for reasons that are only known to themselves, and say how it's only a Mandriva Distro with a few minor changes, or so they would like to have others believe.
I have to admit I don't know a lot about Mandriva other than the few live CD's I downloaded and tried out over the past few months, but this I do know, PCLinuxOS worked smoother, and faster with less bugs (in fact none that I could find) on my machines than I could get Mandriva to work, as well as looking much nicer.
Hey maybe PCLinuxOS roots are in Mandriva and for that I thank Mandriva, ... much the same as I would thank Henry Ford for some of the great automobiles we have today, and the groundwork he laid. That doesn't mean someone didn't step in and build on his ideas to build a much better car though does it? That's called progress. I'm not here to bash Mandriva. If you like it, then good on you mate, .. but if Texstar and his gang have used the basics to put together something many of us like better and which works better for us, then where is the harm in acknowledging the good they have done?
107 • stop it (by pclos user on 2007-07-03 18:44:05 GMT from Netherlands)
i am a proud PCLinuxOS user since a long time. why can't people let us alone?
nobody is interested in this source and credits and sharing stuff. the makers of our wonderful distro are cool people who are proud to call themselves the ripper gang!!! and they don't care about gpl and codecs and patents because it just works. thats why we are the best distro out there, and we are number one here on distrowatch.
108 • re 106 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 18:45:29 GMT from France)
" where is the harm in acknowledging the good they have done?
"
Is * removing * information useful for
software maintenance
and
truth
good?
There are about 100 Linuxen who "just work" (+XP, which works great: one pays for that):
how many have this holy way of hiding information?
What are great ideas of PCLOS? (please, facts, not credos).
109 • Post #102 (by Joey on 2007-07-03 19:01:13 GMT from United States)
That change from .93 to 2007 says more about PCLinuxOS than any other
fact posted in here, even more than the exposed "stripping" of Madriva
credit by Texstar from the software (all the while "acknowledging the
'contributions' of Mandriva, etc).
It's a great distro (I'm using it now). But I'm getting the feeling that I should
have tried Mandriva first. I'm also beginning to feel kind of crappy about
using this distro now that it's coming out that there have been efforts by
the PCLinuxOS developers to conceal Mandriva's package by package
development. Look again at Pastored's lie: "Just a quick clarification:
PCLOS *was* based on Mandrake 9.2.
Was.
Past tense."
And then look at post #102.
Shame!
110 • @109 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 19:08:54 GMT from Canada)
I wouldn't put it as strongly as that, and I don't *think* PastorEd is a PCLOS developer (which is why I wrote 'developers and supporters'). As I said, I don't want to be too adversarial here. I'm not trying to bash PCLOS, I'm just trying to ask them in a constructive way to credit the work they build upon and to work with their upstream project.
106, please look at my comparison. Much more than just PCLOS's 'roots' are Mandriva. The majority of the packages in the PCLOS 2007 repositories are unmodified rebuilds of Mandriva Linux 2007 packages. As I've already said, I am not arguing the relative merits of Mandriva and PCLOS, merely talking about appropriate attribution and methodology.
111 • RE 109 Beauregard Parish, for a change... (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 19:09:33 GMT from France)
"I should have tried Mandriva first"
Wat about WhiteBoxe? She is very stable, if your hardware likes her... There is a new one. She is RedHat derived (the price of the non free version is interesting)..
And you wonot be bashed as unamerican, unchristian or untexstarian...
112 • @106 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 19:20:03 GMT from Canada)
...and if we're going with the old car analogy chestnut, this is more a case of Nissan Skyline and Infiniti G35 than it is Ford Model T and .
113 • Re: # 107 (by Mark South on 2007-07-03 19:20:29 GMT from Switzerland)
"nobody is interested in this source and credits and sharing stuff. the makers of our wonderful distro are cool people who are proud to call themselves the ripper gang!!! and they don't care about gpl and codecs and patents because it just works. thats why we are the best distro out there, and we are number one here on distrowatch."
You are mistaken. Reading the comments on this page, it is apparent that there are many here who are interested in exactly those things that you don't care about. And most of us were hoping for an answer that was more or less the opposite of what you wrote.
Also, as dbrion has pointed out, you are somewhat behind the times. There are dozens, possibly hundreds, of distros that "just work". "Just working" is no longer enough to set a distro apart from the pack. One needs to focus on other stuff. For many of us who visit Distrowatch regularly, quite a lot of those other things count for a lot. It's not enough just to read the package lists. But I said here that already, only last week.
114 • -Pourquoi tant de haine ? (by Caraibes on 2007-07-03 19:25:06 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Bon, je pense qu'on a fait le tour de la question : Mandriva innove, et PCLOS fignole. Mandriva s'offusque de voir les lauriers et les applaudissements se diriger vers celui qui fignole (et qui se base fortement sur son travail). Mais nous évoluons dans un monde GPL. Légalement tout cela est possible.
Bien sur, la question de l'éthique dans le monde de la GPL et des distros... Bien sur... Mais dans ces cas-là, il faudrait clairement délimiter les distros "originales" comme Debian, Fedora, Slackware, et les distros "basées sur d'autres" comme Ubuntu, PCLOS, Mint, Mepis, Vector, Zenwalk, Blag... etc, etc...
J'ai toujours tendance à préférer l'original à la copie (au risque de vous rappeler le slogan d'un célèbre politicien français !)
-Devrais-je traduire mes propos pour le bénéfice du plus grand nombre, ou bien les laisser pour les yeux francophones seulement ?
115 • re 114: (by dbrion on 2007-07-03 19:34:36 GMT from France)
La question n'est pas de savoir si X copie Y, mais de savoir si X "oublie" de reconnaître qu'il a copié Y {et va jusqu'à la suppression; ceci a été prouvé de façon reproductible par comparaison [certes partielle, _ici_] de sources).
Le fait de l'oublier a peut être des conséquences éthiques, mais certainement des conséquences techniques sur la facilité de dépannage (dans des cas très ennuyeux) ou d'ajout de logiciels.
Ceci dit, sans une once de haine...
Cette suite de points découle logiquement de la question de DW de la semaine dernière (blog d'un développeur de PCLOS), sans qu'on sache s'il s'agit d'une mégagaffe ou d'une insulte révélatrice -le temps le dira-
"
-Devrais-je traduire mes propos pour le bénéfice du plus grand nombre, ou bien les laisser pour les yeux francophones seulement ?
" Un coup de google "trnslation" sera très bien...
Gardez le bâton enfoncé dans la glace...
"
116 • No subject (by Joey on 2007-07-03 19:41:41 GMT from United States)
"As I've already said, I am not arguing the relative merits of Mandriva and PCLOS, merely talking about appropriate attribution and methodology."
Point well taken.
It's making me mad, though.. or, more acurately, it's making me feel disappointed or something.
I'll cop to over-reacting right now. I am using PCLinuxOS 2007. I've
contributed money and outright purchased several distros over the years. One thing I always thought was that the various developers were giving one another credit and exchanging ideas, info and code, etc. I did not know there was what has been discribed here going on.
117 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 19:46:59 GMT from United States)
Um, you didn't know distros borrowed ideas, code, packages, patches, and bugfixes from each other?
118 • #36: big grin goes here (by Ariszló on 2007-07-03 19:49:50 GMT from Hungary)
Glenn wrote '<big grin goes here>' and it was interpreted as a <big> tag. :D
119 • @117 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 19:52:42 GMT from Canada)
No, he didn't know that PCLOS takes Mandriva packages and removes the changelogs without directly acknowledging that package came from Mandriva, and he didn't know that PCLOS does not contribute its changes back to Mandriva.
120 • No subject (by KDulcimer on 2007-07-03 19:54:58 GMT from United States)
I wanted to point out that as time progresses on and Tex builds more packages for PCLOS, the break (in terms of the technical aspects) between Mandriva and PCLOS will be greater and greater.
121 • re:115 (by Caraibes on 2007-07-03 19:58:28 GMT from Dominican Republic)
très juste...
A vrai dire, je dois avouer que j'ai toujours été agacé d'une certaine arrogance affectée par quelques utilisateurs de PCLOS. Ayant moi-même souvent utilisé et installé Mandriva 2055, 2006, 2007, ainsi que PCLOS depuis 0.91, je m'étais parfaitement rendu compte de la grande similarité qui existe entre ces 2 produits.
Le geste d'Adam est justifié : il veut "remettre les pendules à l'heure" !
Mais je pense qu'une "guerre ouverte" serait contre-productive.
Enfin, je pense qu'on peut qualifier PCLOS/Mint/Mepis/Vector/Zenwalk/Blag et autres de "produits dérivés", ce qui n'est nullement une insulte...
122 • RE 119 (by KDulcimer at 2007-07-03 20:00:10 GMT from United States)
And why might he not contribute the changes back to Mandriva?
http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?...msg207444
After all, if as you said, Tex's packages are (worthless, rubbish, etc), why would Mandriva want them anyway?
123 • NOW it comes out.. (LOL) (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 20:12:00 GMT from United States)
..there has been a rift between this texstar and Mandriva/Mandrake?
Calling each other's stuff "junk," etc.??
Ok.
Now I get it.
Also, as Mandriva sinks in the page hit rankings and PCLinuxOS rises
to the top, we get As The Linux World Turns, a genuine soap opera.
How about that.
124 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 20:31:38 GMT from United States)
Yeh, Tex trash talks Mandriva all the time. NOT!
http://tinyurl.com/2q6kvd
125 • Re: 123 (by davecs on 2007-07-03 20:34:59 GMT from United Kingdom)
Actually, no. You won't get Tex to badmouth Mandriva. What he said was "Adam once said my packages were crap". Those were the unofficial "Texstar" packages for Mandrake up to 9.2 which I for one used to use. After a spell using Gentoo I discovered PCLOS when I tried Mandrake again. No "Texstar" packages anymore, did search for Texstar and found it.
I have a lot to thank Mandrake 9.x for. It enabled me to try Linux when I could not get other distros to work and nearly gave up. But it didn't "just work" I had a lot to do, fortunately I got a lot of help on the net.
If PCLinuxOS is a clone of Mandriva, then everything that works on Mandriva would work on PCLinuxOS, and everything that doesn't would not. We all know that is not the case.
As for Texstar, he's not the sort of guy that will come here and join a slanging match, he's far too classy for that.
I'm sure most of the Mandriva team are, too. One of their number has decided to wage a one-man war against PCLinuxOS. It's sad.
126 • @125 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 20:48:57 GMT from Canada)
Sigh.
Yes, I believe I once said, several years ago, that it was the opinion of many in the Mandriva development community that Texstar's packages were bad. This is because that was true at the time. That _was_ the opinion of many in the Mandriva development community, and it was part of the reason for the initial split.
I haven't used PCLOS extensively enough recently to comment on the quality of the packaging. Given the amount of people who enjoy using PCLOS I'm sure it's fine. I have no intention of commenting on the quality of PCLOS's packaging in this discussion, nor have I.
I don't know how many times I have to say it - I've lost count of how many times I've said it in this thread already - I am NOT TRYING TO BASH PCLOS, nor am I discussing the relative merits of PCLOS and Mandriva. I'll keep saying that until you understand it. I am trying to say that _some_ PCLOS developers and community members could go further towards recognizing how extensively PCLOS is based on Mandriva, and it would also be nice for PCLOS to contribute its work upstream.
I will keep repeating this until you understand it. It's really not that complicated.
127 • knock it off (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 20:52:50 GMT from United States)
My post 123 up there isn't about anybody "badmouthing" anybody else.
It's about the aburdity of all this, as it unfolds. Yes, there's an issue
wrt the pclinuxos folks taking out the credits for various packages/software, etc. Yes there's an issue wrt the nearly complete
dependance of pclinuxos on Mandriva's spearheading development (can pclinuxos exist without Mandriva? Not in the past, not now, but
are they saying sometime in the future?)
WTF?
And now we have, "Granular." ............
"granular Anurag Bhandari has announced the release of Granular Linux 0.90, a user-friendly desktop distribution based on PCLinuxOS"
ROTFLMAO.. The Linux beat goes on.
128 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 21:02:27 GMT from United States)
Yes Adam that WAS your opinion and not shared by the users who loved his packages back in the day.
129 • @128 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 21:03:00 GMT from Canada)
Indeed, granted. And that's about all there is to say on the issue. And I don't see its relevance in the slightest to this thread.
130 • PCLOS / Mandriva (by Anonymous on 2007-07-03 21:40:27 GMT from Ireland)
The main points you are making, IIUC, are
1. No feedback upline to Mandriva from PCLOS
2. Changelogs being cleared
Tex has stated his reasons for the first - and these posts are unlikely to change his mind IMO
There have been a couple of reasons given for not doing the second, but from one who knows nothing about packaging, it seems to me that the info would only be of use to downstream packagers.
This is beginning to seem like a 'storm in a teacup' started by someone who has a 'history' with the main dev of PCLOS. There has always been plenty of acknowledgement of Mandriva from my experience.
So from another biased PCLOS user, for whom Mandriva failed to light any fires, this is beginning to look like someone is upset at PCLOS popularity.
Then again, as a happy user with no dev knowledge or experience, what do I know?
...
131 • Re #108 (by vukota on 2007-07-03 21:58:24 GMT from United States)
"What are great ideas of PCLOS? (please, facts, not credos)."
Here they are
1) Marketing, maybe better to say Multi Level Marketing. See haw many folks are blindfolded.
2) PR. See how they cross posted DW forums with their forum, and who (and what) is posting here and there. Don't forget that they'll remove your posting if it is not cheering PCLOS.
3) testing (look at the release cycle they had and when they are going to update their packages), and
4) exploitable stable old packages. Check the SRPM list Adam gave.
On the end just for the record
* I am neither Mandriva or PCLOS fun.
* I don't have anything against PCLOS except removing other's people credits, hiding the thruth, and not updating their packages (leaving people vulnerable).
132 • @130 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 22:19:49 GMT from Canada)
I have hardly any history with Tex, I never personally used his Mandrake packages (as I've always been a GNOME user) or spoke to him directly in any way. I have no personal issues with him at all and I'd hope he has none with me, he has no reason to have any. Most of what I've written here doesn't really touch on Tex personally.
Changelogs are not only interesting to packagers. I frequently refer to the changelogs of packages to see exactly how they've been customized. However, the initial issue was simply one of credit. More than one Mandriva community member has mentioned to me that they don't appreciate their packages being integrated into PCLOS without specific credit being given to them via the retention of the changelog. The general acknowledgement on the website is well and good, but they feel that removing the changelog when copying the package removes the specific credit to them for the work they did on the packages in question.
(I'm attributing things to third parties here because I wasn't packaging stuff at the time 2007 came out, I only started doing that shortly before 2007 Spring, so PCLOS has (to my knowledge) not yet integrated any of my work. I expect I'll find out how I feel about it next time PCLOS re-bases. :>)
You missed one of my major points, which is that several PCLOS backers - note *not* Tex - frequently seem to give the impression that PCLOS is already heavily forked from Mandriva and would barely notice if Mandriva ceased to exist. See the quotes already cited from davecs and PastorEd. For proof that this is indeed the impression that some people get, see the expressions of surprise from several users who read my comparison and realized for the first time how closely PCLOS is based on Mandriva. It is this that I am most worried about. Most of what I've posted has been devoted to showing that this is not, in fact, the case: PCLOS is very heavily based on Mandriva and if Mandriva were to cease to exist, PCLOS would need to either somehow find the resources to maintain a lot of packages itself which it currently doesn't, or would need to go through the hassle of re-basing off a different distro.
133 • Great ideas? (by CrashMaster on 2007-07-03 22:41:41 GMT from United States)
I've tried the latest versions of these 2 distributions on two different computers.
THERE IS NO QUESTION that PCLinuxOS is the better of the two.
It is sad that Adam & co. prefer to spend their time here instead of trying to figure out why their OS sucks in comparison.
134 • @133 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 22:51:43 GMT from Canada)
Ah, well, I'll defer to your obviously superior knowledge then.
sigh.
I do wonder why people keep commenting without having a clue what the hell we're talking about. I'm now going to say for the fifth time that this has nothing at all to do with which distro is better. Please try and understand that before commenting.
Oh, and while I'm writing here, I am also doing my daily read of the Mandriva forums (I read every post made to every forum every day and post about 30 responses), triaging bugs, and fighting with packaging mediatomb, as requested by a user at mandrivausers.org.
135 • Appeal to anyone at PCLOS forums. (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-03 23:34:44 GMT from Canada)
I'd like to respond to some of the comments in the PCLOS forum thread. I've sent in a request for a forum account but it hasn't been activated yet. Can someone please activate it so I can post over there? Thanks.
136 • @134 (by nedvis on 2007-07-04 00:55:40 GMT from United States)
I do really understand what you are talking about, dear Adam W., and I just checked
I have "only" 93 changelog.* files on my PCLinuxOS 2007 machine ( with approx. 1400 packages installed) and "only" 24 in my OpenSUSE 10.2 machine.
I did not bother to read them at all - it might be something of interest for developers ,package maintainer but for us power-users I don't think so .
Do you really think anybody would waste their time reading 2 megabytes Gimp -pre 2 plain text changelog file?
And you know what: I've just deleted them all on both PCLOS and OpenSUSE.Period.
I don't want to undermine what Mandriva people did nor I'm PCLOS advocate but do you really think "average" user or those noobs who don't really care whose work is behind their favorite applications would swallow notifications like:
"You are to thank to the people of Mandriva Linux whose packages are base for our
repackage" or something like "This crapware is made by "...." and if it does not run
as expected do not blame us" or "You now what: we just found Mandrake is great distro but we ,also, found we can do thing better with their own packages - sincerely, yours Reaper gang"
Man, I'm sick of all denunciation all over the Linux world.
Calm down people!
137 • @136 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-04 01:03:20 GMT from Canada)
You seem to be getting the wrong idea. I'm talking about the RPM changelog, not the ChangeLog file inside many packages. You can look at the RPM changelog for a package by doing:
rpm -q --changelog (packagename)
e.g. rpm -q --changelog rpm
it records all the changes made to the actual package, not to the underlying software.
I don't think it's true to say that most people don't care whose work is behind the software they run, because most people understand the basic concepts of appreciation and courtesy. You, apparently, don't.
138 • No subject (by nedvis on 2007-07-04 01:10:13 GMT from United States)
"You, apparently, don't."
That's probably why I've got GURU certification in Linux area at
http://www.experts-exchange.com
http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_1268040.html
And BTW I am all about "appreciation and curtesy" if you will
and that's why I think we all hace to calm down and find better ways
to communicate and not to blame one another. OK!?
139 • SRPMS (by Texstar on 2007-07-04 01:22:21 GMT from United States)
Changelogs were stripped to save space. Nothing more than that. No bad intentions, no malice towards anyone and not trying to hide anything. Nothing we've done hasn't been done by other distros. If this was a problem it would have been nice to have been personally contacted about it so we could make the appropriate changes. We are proud to say PCLinuxOS comes from a Mandriva base and say on our about us page where everyone can see it..
When I was made aware Adam was making an issue about this on another site a few weeks ago I started leaving credit in our spec files when possible. Just didn't think it was a big deal.
democracy
* Mon Jun 11 2007 Texstar 0.9.6-2pclos2007
- add dependency python-sqlite2 or player will not start
* Wed Jun 06 2007 Torbjorn Turpeinen 0.9.6-1
- 0.9.6
* Fri May 04 2007 Texstar 0.9.5.3-1pclos2007
- import into pclos 2007
* Wed Apr 25 2007 Götz Waschk 0.9.5.3-1mdv2008.0
+ Revision: 18190
- Import democracy
wavesurfer
* Mon Jun 18 2007 Texstar 1.8.6-1pclos2007
- import into pclos 2007
* Fri Apr 20 2007 Olivier Blin
+ Revision: 16012
wavbreaker
* Mon Jun 18 2007 Texstar 0.8.0-1pclos2007
- import into pclos 2007
* Sat May 19 2007 Austin Acton
+ Revision: 28512
john
* Sat Jun 16 2007 Texstar 1.7.2-1pclos2007
- import into plcos 2007
* Wed Dec 20 2006 Guillaume Rousse
+ Revision: 100417
lives
* Mon Jun 18 2007 Texstar 0.9.8.5-1pclos2007
- import into pclos 2007
- fix menu
- fix dependencies
* Wed Jun 13 2007 Herton Ronaldo Krzesinski
+ Revision: 38815
tse3
* Mon Jun 18 2007 Texstar 0.3.1-1pclos2007
- import into pclos 2007
* Wed Jun 06 2007 Funda Wang
+ Revision: 35964
tinyproxy
* Fri Jun 15 2007 Texstar 1.6.3-1pclos2007
- import into pclos2007
* Mon May 07 2007 David Walluck
- Revision: 24020
sweep
* Thu Jun 15 2007 Texstar 0.9.2-1pclos2007
- import into pclos 2007
* Wed Feb 07 2007 Götz Waschk
+ Revision: 116971
firebird
* Fri Jun 15 2007 Texstar 2.0.1.12855.0-1pclos2007
- import into pclos 2007
* Wed May 09 2007 Marcelo Ricardo Leitner
- Revision: 25665
140 • pclos changelogs (by hab on 2007-07-04 01:32:46 GMT from Canada)
Put the changelogs into an rpm in the repository and let the user install them at her/his convience maybe?
cheere
141 • @139 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-04 01:33:28 GMT from Canada)
Tex, thanks for the clarification, and thanks for changing policy on the changelogs; I didn't know you'd done this, if I had I would have mentioned it. As I said several times I don't have any problem with you or your statements about MDV. My main issue is statements from other PCLOS community members which give a misleading impression about the relationship between MDV and PCLOS, and I know that's not something you can really control.
If you could get my PCLOS forum membership approved I will post to the thread to try and clarify what I've said (as it's been badly misrepresented there), and to explain the ways in which PCLOS developers can submit changes to MDV.
142 • @140 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-04 01:33:57 GMT from Canada)
You can't put rpm changelogs in an rpm, it doesn't work technically speaking :) nice idea though.
143 • I posted this on the PCLOS help forums... (by KDulcimer on 2007-07-04 02:52:26 GMT from United States)
Hello,
First of all, I'm glad that even if this discussion didn't always have the right tone, it seems like we've come to a fairly calm-headed conclusion which I hope satisfies all.
As the originator of this thread, I will accept responsibility for an inaccurate title. However, I understood your phrase "PCLOS 2007 repositories are a straight clone of the Mandriva repositories circa October / November 2006 (which means, basically, a straight clone of Mandriva Linux 2007)" [emphasis mine] to mean "a straight clone of Mandriva 2007.0 One." So that's where that miscue happened. My mind was focused on LiveCD releases, you were looking at the distros as a whole. You were the more correct in this matter.
Mr. Williamson, if I did attack you, I appologize. I didn't mean to misrepresent you or Mandriva. Please accept my appologies.
As I pointed out on distrowatch, PastorEd was misinformed about the present state of PCLOS to Mandy. PCLOS 2007 is based off one of the finer products which have graced my computer, Mandriva 2007. As I work on TinyMe, I shall keep your instructions in mind, although I doubt I'll ever reach the level of packaging to submit patches to anybody upstream, whether PCLOS, Mandriva, Fedora, or where ever.
144 • The core of all mis-understandings (by Bill Savoie on 2007-07-04 03:47:18 GMT from United States)
To the neutral observer, the energy from these back and forth arguments is the false belief of the individual identity, the me, or I. It has been an error of ego. Each side feels itself to be injured and must therefore lash out with anger. It is a simulation between two simulations. Much to do that is a complete waste of time. Shadow boxing with an invented viewpoint, in the expectation of making progress! The only result is Samsara - the round and round of arguments. Seek yee freedom on this 4-th of July! Turn instead to love. Only love experiences without anger. Only love allows understanding to be non-blocking.
145 • pclos (by Texstar on 2007-07-04 04:15:29 GMT from United States)
I believe pastor ed was referring to the old code base when PCLinuxOS forked from Mandrake 9.2 and over the past 3-4 years one rpm was updated from the other when possible and extra packages added that were unique to PCLinuxOS.
Last year we did a rebase against an updated Mandriva to get an updated code base to work from mainly gcc and glibc due to time and resource limitations. We haven't reached a point where we can hire people yet. I wanted to go to a Fedora base but others wanted to stay with a Mandriva base. So we did a rebase then started removing all the old epochs, code clean up, bug fixes, our own kde desktop, kernel and various unique applications etc etc. There is still a lot of original code from Mandriva and a lot of new code from us in pclos 2007 as well as many original packages from our team. As time goes on the split between the two will be more profound than it is today.
146 • Re 112 (by Tim on 2007-07-04 04:46:00 GMT from Canada)
Adam I don't think you took my comment quite the way it was meant. I was not comparing Mandriva to a Model T, and PCLinuxOS to a Corvette there but saying that when someone brings out something good and others build on it to make improvements, that's progress and a darn good thing as far as I am concerned. There are a lot of people who believe Mandriva is terrific, so there has to be merit in that, but it didn't work well on my machines, and I am not Linux savvy enough to play around with a distro and make it work right if it doesn't do what I need right from the install. PCLinuxOS on the other hand has been "Radically Simple" just as the slogan says and ran smooth and flawless right from the word go.
If I was younger I might be more interested in how Distros work, and what to do if they won't perform the way I want, but at this stage of my life I don't care where a distro comes from, or how it was made. All that matters is that when I put the CD in my drive and like it enough that I want to do a full install, that everything goes smooth and I don't have to spend days trying to figure out how to get it working right. If I wanted that I'd just stay with Windows. ;)
147 • PCLinuxOS was originally based on another distribution (by Anonymous on 2007-07-04 05:51:49 GMT from Australia)
What about now? Is this statement misleading?
-----------------------
Other Information:
PCLinuxOS was originally based on another distribution under the name of Mandriva and shares many features of Mandriva such as the Control Center and the Draklive Installer. Texstar and team would like to thank the developers, contributors and others associated with Mandriva who may have indirectly contributed to the PCLinuxOS distribution.
In addition to Mandriva, PCLinuxOS would also like to thank the developers of the Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu as we also use patches and bugs fixes from those distributions.
http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=70
148 • I can't see any obvious acknowledgment from Ubuntu (by Anonymous on 2007-07-04 06:10:54 GMT from Australia)
about its being Debian based. Can someone point out where and how they do this?
------------------
About Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a community developed and supported project. Since its launch in October 2004, Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world.
Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.
http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus
149 • RE 147 The point *was* with PCloss policy of removing acks. (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 06:14:41 GMT from France)
in *each* package, which can lead to ego/ethics/ maintenance problems.
Texstar was quite clear , this policy was linked with storage space/ time shortages (nothing malicious*these constraint can be verified) and is beginning to change with concise changelogs (one knows whence it comes, what has been changed and when...) Else, it was a very strange policy...
Changelogs are used by users(!) to decide if they upgrade/install, or to negociate with their sysadmin if they want/need an upgrade/install...
If they are not complete, it is misleading/ unpleasant. Once I repeat that nothing malicious was done.
It is obvious that a very general _slogan_ does not meet this need.
BTW sometimes cloning is an advantage for both (the cloner and the cloned): for instance, R and Splus (two statistical apps: if one has a boss in a spending mood, one buies Splus and keep on playing with R) or WhiteBox(or Adios linux or?) / REDHAT.
150 • Re 149 Yes, that was one point but there was also the other poin too (by Anonymous on 2007-07-04 07:11:09 GMT from Australia)
Other point being that PCLOS is MND based NOW and not 'was' (meaning it is not now). The "about us" info should reflect this fact or be removed alltogether, IMHO.
151 • Thanks, Ladislav (by davecs on 2007-07-04 07:28:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
Thanks for acting on my earlier post and removing the superfluous link to the "duplicate" review of PCLinuxOS, as per post #69.
152 • Re: #70 (by roadie on 2007-07-04 07:30:09 GMT from Canada)
Landor,
I also tend to link the desktop bloat with the developers ideas on what a distro should be. And usually it proves to be true. I've never understood why a distro needs two or more text editors or media players or whatever. Coming from Slackware roots, I find Midnight Commander is all I need most of the time, in fact, I tend to install it to test any distro, if it is'nt installed already.
The bigger distros don't find their way onto my computer, I just see no need for a 700 meg download when a 200 will do the same. I see PCLinuxOS is getting trashed again, too bad it's over my meg limit, otherwise I'd see what the fuss is about. Oh well, I never did like Mandrake. Actually, I did'nt like the Mandrake attitude, paid membership clubs and the like. After 8 years of Linux, I still have'nt seen Red Hat and only glimpsed Debian (apt-get drove me nuts )
At that time, to me, Linux was free, you paid your dues by giving back.
roadie
153 • RE 150 The ennoying point was with the PCLOS policy (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 07:40:57 GMT from France)
nobody (i mean nobody, even the distr leader....) could tell in an objective way whether PCLOS was based on something...
thus leading to much
noise... (this is the other point you refer to).
As the rpmchangelog format (cf 139) seems simple, this noise could have been stopped with (more or less) straightforward counting softs....if the changelogs had been systematically kept.
It has nothing to do with a general web page :
in the real world , some people need figures, not poestry...
154 • 152 Consistency isuues (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 07:54:59 GMT from France)
"I've never understood why a distro needs two or more text editors or media players or whatever. Coming from Slackware roots, I find Midnight Commander is all I need most of the time, in fact, I tend to install it to test any distro, if it is'nt installed already.
"
Soyez cohérent....
155 • dbrion....more on clones (by Anonymous on 2007-07-04 08:11:46 GMT from Australia)
"CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free. CentOS is now accepting donations via PayPal, please click the button for more information. ..."
we have clones and clones of clones too. :-)
But I still like SAM 2007!
156 • RE 155 thanks for the recursive clones (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 08:41:36 GMT from France)
"CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) "
Are there reviews of stripped distributions : this might remove some affective and esthetic noise (artwork is the first thing which disappears, once any OS is installed)
?
RedHat is very clone friendly; BTW do you know that WhiteBoxes were chosen on the basis of DW rankings?
(our sysads looked for a RedHat, they took DW reverse alph . rankings, of course -cf this weeks DWW post 107).
Nobody wanted them to be upgraded for 4 years.
157 • Austrumi 1.5.1 (by Richard on 2007-07-04 09:54:16 GMT from United Kingdom)
Nice distro; nice wallpaper: It still amazes me that anything so tiny can offer so much.
It boots & runs happily both within VirtualBox and from cold.
158 • Multimedia Codecs (by Richard on 2007-07-04 09:58:12 GMT from United Kingdom)
Plea to all developers:
I've seen the arguments about free vs non-free, open vs proprietary etc.
However, without codecs etc. much of the multimedia on the web is denied to simple Linux users: No video clips, no MP3s, no BBC "Listen again" to missed radio programmes.
For me, this is too high a price.
159 • RE: 152 and RE: 157 (by Landor on 2007-07-04 10:12:53 GMT from Canada)
Roadie,
My roots in a NIX based system run deep too, from unix then posix way back in the day :). From that I always learned less is better. I never totally came over to Linux from Windows for various reasons until the last while where I am totally free of the blue screen of death. The only thing I need to finish up now is completing my personal build of Gentoo's base and I'll be dropping Kubuntu completely. The only thing that's slowing me down on it is age..lol :).
What will it have? Almost nothing, just how I like it :)
Richard,
Give putting your own distro together a shot. You'll see how easily something so small can be created, and if solely from source, how much better it will run.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
160 • RE: 158 - multimedia codecs (by h3rman on 2007-07-04 10:19:26 GMT from Netherlands)
"
However, without codecs etc. much of the multimedia on the web is denied to simple Linux users: No video clips, no MP3s, no BBC "Listen again" to missed radio programmes.
"
What's the problem?
There are plenty distributions that offer mp3 (a.o.) support out of the box.
The codecs may be proprietary but the hacks to run them are usually used by GPL'ed programs. Just run the right distro or use Google and forums, IRC, etc. to get the codecs.
Easiest, buy, say, Mandriva Powerpack or something.
161 • Media codecs, etc.. (by Jerry on 2007-07-04 11:29:44 GMT from United States)
"Easiest, buy, say, Mandriva Powerpack or something."
This question is out of not knowing, not out of making a point about the politics/profit or whatever in distros and in Microsoft:
When we purchase Mandriva (or Xandros or Linspire, etc) are we supporting Microsoft in some roundabout way?
162 • "When we purchase Mandriva " (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 11:41:37 GMT from France)
Part of it is used to pay debts, buy Linux companies (who would be tempted to marry with Microsoft or to disappear wit h some interesting ideas), pay/hire developpers, who share their code (like Red Hat does);
part of it is used to buy hardware, to test for linux compatibility and energy support (one cannot download freely HW, AFAIK; correct me if I am wrong):
cf Linux Identity Kit, no 1/2007 page 33 );
the difference between paied Mandrivas and free ones relies in easiness of use (better menus for virtualisation, say).
If Mandriva had an hidden accounting, risks were too huge in Europ...
The politics of Mandriva vs Microsoft can be found in his CEO blog...but you can find this,
freely,
in all good faith,
by yourself....
163 • RE: 161 • Media codecs, etc.. (by Anonymous on 2007-07-04 11:55:35 GMT from Netherlands)
"
When we purchase Mandriva (or Xandros or Linspire, etc) are we supporting Microsoft in some roundabout way?
"
Good question.
Only thing I could imagine would be some licensed w32codecs, but if you really want to avoid that, download the gratis Mandriva One which comes with mp3 support, and throw in those codecs manually. Dozens of howtos on the internet on that. I could also recommend Zenwalk (comes with mp3 support), or perhaps Pardus.
164 • codecs etc.. (by Jerry on 2007-07-04 12:19:10 GMT from United States)
"Only thing I could imagine would be some licensed w32codecs."
Well, that is at the heart of my question. "Licensed."
When we buy the commercial, license enabled codecs we're paying Microsoft then?
165 • Re. 160. Multimedia Codecs etc. (by Richard on 2007-07-04 12:29:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
"What's the problem? There are plenty distributions that offer mp3 (a.o.) support out of the box. ... Just run the right distro or use Google and forums, IRC, etc. to get the codecs."
Thanks. However, much of use of the Internet now involves multi-media files, so codecs are essential. New users need Linux just to work - without the complications & worry of "hacks."
---
People outside the UK may not know the BBC's (free) "Listen Again" feature: We're able to listen to *all* BBC radio programmes which were broadcast during the previous 7 days. It's very popular!
Unfortunately, this material is available *only* in "Real" format, so requires a "Real" or Helix type codec. (The BBC releases a very small amount in MP3 format.)
In a few days, the BBC will start offering its TV programmes via its new iPlayer service: This uses (time limiting, play limiting) DRM; It's unlikely to work with plain Linux.
The UK TV's Channel4.com "Fourdocs" service which accepts & promotes Video Documentaries (under a Creative Commons Licence) has recently stopped providing MPEG4 versions; it now provides videos only in "Windows Media" format. (Streamed only, but no DRM.)
Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck with multi-media material which is available only in proprietary formats - even when supplied "free" by public organisations.
166 • "the heart of my question". (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 12:32:08 GMT from France)
MandrivasCEO is very clear at the subject:
he is very rigorous with Linux purity.
However, since he has a lot of unpleasant work, he might die / resign (getting fed up, say, with indirectly funding parasitic Linuxes, cf @107, etc... ) and blogs are sooo volatile...
I prefer to quote cellulotic sources...
Try anyway :
http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/06/19/we-will-not-go-to-canossa/
167 • codecs etc.. (by Jerry on 2007-07-04 12:38:13 GMT from United States)
"Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck with multi-media material which is available only in proprietary formats - even when supplied "free" by public organisations."
Does "free" mean stolen or paid for and donated to the public?
I'm using a downloaded for free, burned to disc distro that accepts donations and sells their discs (my understanding is that there is no difference between what you can download for free and what you get on the disc you choose to buy.. "buying" the disc is a donation, I guess).
The codecs are there.
But Mandriva and other distros are "legally" selling the codecs then? Have they paid Microsoft for a "license?" If so, then are we paying Microsoft to use Linux with codecs?
168 • Qu 167 :Is the law the same in the States and in Europe? (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 12:51:15 GMT from France)
BTW, Mandriva claims they do not pay anything to Windows... and that can be verified.
If you make a donation, you get a CD to download, and the money is used for (cf point 162); if you buy, you have some paper book, a nice looking CD, pdf doc, better/easier menus... and the rest of the money is used for (point 162). I am sure not a cent of your money goes to MS (one must trust human sincerity, as long as it lasts)...
169 • Re. 167. Multi-media Codecs & Free etc. (by Richard on 2007-07-04 12:51:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
""Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck with multi-media material which is available only in proprietary formats - even when supplied "free" by public organisations."
Does "free" mean stolen or paid for and donated to the public?"
I was referring to multi-media material which is provided "free," ie. no actual charge is made for hearing or viewing the material. This includes the YouTube, MySpace etc. material which is supported by advertising. (And which requires JavaScript & Flash)
The BBC material is funded by our compulsory annual UK "TV Licence," so is not normally available outside the UK.
Yes, I provide some of this material, under a Creative Commons Licence; Channel4.com hosts and distributes it.
...Sadly, not to many Linux users...
170 • RE: 165 (by h3rman on 2007-07-04 13:20:36 GMT from Netherlands)
So, that crap iPlayer of the BBC's would somehow be relevant to Linux/F/OSS? Sue the wankers instead. I think the EU might even forbid this, btw., and rightfully so.
171 • re 169 (by Jerry on 2007-07-04 14:22:21 GMT from United States)
I admit to a bit of confusion on this issue, Richard.
I thought Microsoft was selling ("licensing") certain code as patented to various Linux distributions, thus it was "legal" to use that code, those codecs, as opposed to using the same code acquired via distros who include them in their free operating systems.
So, to simplify it all: are we better off, as Linux advocates, using only free versions of Linux which have none of the code we're talking about?
BLAG comes to mind.
172 • The biggest problem Linux faces (by roadie on 2007-07-04 15:16:35 GMT from Canada)
"Thanks. However, much of use of the Internet now involves multi-media files, so codecs are essential. New users need Linux just to work - without the complications & worry of "hacks."
This, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem with Linux. New users are migrating from a system which is "point and click". They expect everything to "just work". For the most part, they are somewhat lazy, they don't want to dig up info on a problem they are having. The mention of "CLI" can inflict fear into many hearts, oh no laddy, it better involve a GUI.
That fear can also prevent them from plunging headfirst into Linux and possibly causing harm to their "main OS". Live-Cd's have been great in that regard (no auto-mounting rw please).
I have seen new users however, that "click" with Linux, they actually enjoy the challenge of getting a sound card to work or (horrors) compiling a kernel to suit their system. It's from this group that the innovations in Linux come. The "Puppies", Austrumi, Linux-Live scripts and so forth. I can't comment on the bigger distros working to achieve "point and click" as I don't use them.
This is not an attack on new users, they really know not what they do. They've had everything done for them.
It's more an attack on the infighting and petty comments and hidden agendas and worst of all, distro bashing which is happening more and more. And it's happening here on DW.
Last weeks article was an excellent example, I actually thought , in the beginning, that it was written by a "newbee".
I don't know how long this has been going on, I usually avoid the DW comments section, but as I recall, it did'nt used to be like this.
It helps nobody, it certainly does'nt help Linux. It's just crap.
Really, don't you all have something better to do?
roadie
173 • @161 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-04 15:21:33 GMT from Canada)
Mandriva has never licensed anything from Microsoft. The commercial MDV editions don't include any codecs licensed from Microsoft (AFAIK the only distro with a codec licensing deal with Microsoft is Linspire...maybe Novell now, I'm not sure). The only time we give any money to Microsoft is when buying copies of Windows for testing. This is unavoidable for an OS company. Apart from that, no money spent on Mandriva goes to Microsoft.
actually, I feel honour-bound to point out that the commercial editions of Mandriva are not much different from Free so far as multimedia codecs are concerned. The only multimedia-related app in the commercial stuff is RealPlayer, which you can download free anyway. Aside from that, there aren't any licensed multimedia codecs. Please don't buy a commercial edition of MDV expecting flawless codec support, or you'll be disappointed. There are, of course, other ways to get the codecs in question...
174 • Re:172 (by Caraibes on 2007-07-04 15:25:24 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Roadie, I disagree with your statement :
"New users are migrating from a system which is "point and click". They expect everything to "just work"."
I install & fix Windows, Mac & Linux PC's for a living, and this is simply not true !
Try to read a .avi or a divx movie, or even a regular DVD on a fresh install of Windows XP : No way ! You need to install the proper codecs, or VLC, It doesn't "just work"
Same can be said for OSX, where installing VLC solves most issues...
The "out-of-the-box" experience can only be found in such Linux distros as Mint or Vector, and in a lesser extent Mepis or PCLOS (maybe Pardus.. not sure).
Please review your statements before posting them as facts.
175 • Comments (by kirios on 2007-07-04 15:38:35 GMT from Malaysia)
It's been a much better week on the DW Weekly site with the Lefebvre interview and the Mandriva-PCLOS discussion. Thank goodness the Puppies have taken their fight somewhere else.
176 • Ref: #150 - "Was" (by otoh on 2007-07-04 16:17:21 GMT from United States)
Agreed; it's not past tense. And anyone who thinks it's reasonable that a small team would be gathering up the sources for each release from all the individual applications' repositories should take a look at the Linux From Scratch documentation. A few do, but it's no small task for even a bare bones distriubution
The situation here seems to be that a number of PCLOS users are relatively new to Linux and had never used Mandrake/Mandriva prior to using PCLOS. At times,some have been inaccurate and dismissive in their comments about Mandriva. And when called on it, a few have gotten defensive and - imo, unfairly - claimed they were being flamed/bashed. Understood how irritating this is to Mandriva supporters, but some could be less grudging about acknowleding Texstar's success. Mandriva's unfotunate tendency to periodically shoot itself in the foot did leave the opening.
177 • codecs etc.. (by Jerry on 2007-07-04 16:32:56 GMT from United States)
Thanks for post 173, Adam. That clears that up about Mandriva, at least.
Especially, "..don't buy a commercial edition of MDV expecting flawless codec support.."
178 • Acknowlegements (Re 176) (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 16:36:20 GMT from France)
a) There is something which is "forgotten" by Linux users, it is Microsoft Windows success. This makes choices based on success/popularity/loove inconsistent.
b) The *systematic* removal of indications concerning SRPM origins was not due to mindless PCLOSS users, but to developpers.
c) Pointing that _systematic_ removal out (once it was proven in a reproducible way) was in fact very kind to PCLOSS:
as searchers/universities may be very sharp on quoting one's sources (and can be more than useful in Linux spreading and even funding), denying this _systematic_ removal (by developpers/ maintainers) was absurd, whichever the causes..
179 • *&^%$#! (by Jerry on 2007-07-04 16:37:50 GMT from United States)
Following an attack on new Linux users, Roadie says, "
This is not an attack on new users, they really know not what they do. They've had everything done for them."
'Scuze me, but Windows is to Linux what a stadium full of NFL fans is to the guy with the rainbow wig. He's there, too, in the same stadium.
Meditate on that.
180 • No subject (by AW on 2007-07-04 18:13:55 GMT from United States)
dbrion is a French word meaning Microsoft troll.
181 • RE 180 (by dbrion on 2007-07-04 18:18:50 GMT from France)
Microsoft est un mot américain signifiant "bonne qualité"
Linux signifiait "bêtise et aveuglement"
Depuis hier, il signifie
"VOL interne"( inthieving)
182 • Le Weenows Dorks (by Escargot on 2007-07-04 18:40:26 GMT from United States)
Forgeev my Eengleesh, but thee Weendos no workee weethout thee monee to thee Beel Gates.
Merci Booflameeng coo.
183 • RE 174 (by KimTjik on 2007-07-04 18:54:09 GMT from Sweden)
Good post!
I wonder from where the assumption comes that everything just works in for example Windows. Humorously: maybe amnesia!
I'm not making my living from building systems with for example Windows, but it's a part of my work. Just as you wrote Caraibes it takes some effort to get multimedia codecs to work. Not so long ago you wouldn't really be able to watch any decrypted DVD without commercial software (many did get some kind of software for this included with the computer, maybe that's why they forgot about it), nowadays you have some free alternatives for at least XP based on pretty much the same approach as for codecs in Linux.
Some few annoyances still exist and I miss some corresponding application to EAC, but overall I can't see any real issue to talk about. Worse of course is the situation for 64bit systems, but that is something both Windows and Linux have as common. Personally I did discover a lot of useful formats in Linux like flac.
Pardus? Yes it includes most codecs out-of-the-box.
184 • DSL 3.4 and Text only live distro please? (by Fractalguy on 2007-07-04 18:57:38 GMT from United States)
My old "trusty" P450 after 330+ days uptime has a video problem. I need help. What would be a/any good livecd to use that will be only text mode, either 80x24 or 80x50. It should have MC and as many text only apps including web browsing, etc.
It should allow signing (text only) in as normal user and some sudo like ability so i can repair or make backups, etc. It might even prove usable until I get parts replaced. Even at that, it will be far more than I had in the 80s when I used Lotus, TurboPascal, etc. I'm expecting a good CLI workout - I just can't have any GUI at any step along the way - well until the end point when I get it fixed. :/
I've been playing with text programs the last few months like links, mc, vim, etc and find these are pretty powerful and insteresting. Note, I can see grub screens just fine. Even the loww level graphics on the splash screen.
BTW, I tried DSL 3.4 in 640x480 256 colors and it actually works but with part of the view off screen top and bottom. Switching to JVM was better, actually OK. Even running Firefox. It is very good to have choice - I would not call it bloat. But I'm still interested in a text only distro. :)
Speaking of DSL...
"The initrd.iso version has the Knoppix image packed in the initial ramdisk. This means it is very easy to set up a PXE DSL server. It also means the entire system always loads into RAM. You will need 128MB RAM for this edition."
so says http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8121628070.html
I booted DSL 3.4 and found it using apps from the CD, and not using 128MB. In fact it seemed to be like any other, not preloading as in "toram" cheat codes do in KNOPPIX. I launch Freecell and DSL goes to the CD to get it. So, anyone else see this?
185 • 174 (by Joey on 2007-07-04 21:57:03 GMT from United States)
Ain't no such thing as a distro, *any* distro, or any OS that "just works the out of the box," no matter what the fan boys for that particular says.
I guarantee that in all those "just works out of the box" communities there're help forums.. to *help* users to get their installed distro/OS to work now that it's "out of the box" and on their hard drive.
The day I see an OS or Linux distribution that "just works" so well that no help forums are needed will probably by the same day that the Palestinians and the Israelis rush to the borders to meet each other and fall into each other's arms declaring all hostilites are over and all is forgiven.
186 • 172 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-04 22:40:59 GMT from United States)
ROFLMAO!!!
Why the heck would anyone be migrating if everything "just worked"?
I think what you mean is that it is easy to ignore the problems on Windows. Then when the computer stops, it's easy to buy a new computer and let it "just work" until it stops. A bicycle "just works" for transportation as well, but what happens if a car is more efficient? Use the bicycle because there is a learning curve with a car?
As an ex-Windows user, I can guarantee you that this "just works" is very limited. Yes, there are better proprietary drivers and codecs, and there is better proprietary software, and it's easy to buy a Windows computer that's already setup, but that has nothing to do with "just working". Otherwise there would be very few Linux users, not millions.
187 • Just Works ? (by davecs on 2007-07-04 23:07:43 GMT from United Kingdom)
The problem for Linux is that some hardware is awkward. But for hardware that is not, which is a hell of a lot these days, there are a number of distributions that detect and set it up automatically.
My desktop is much easier to set up in Linux than Windows. I didn't need to put a floppy disc in during install to get the SATA hard drive recognised, it "just worked". I didn't have to run motherboard driver discs before any of the hardware could be recognised, it "just worked". I didn't need to install a driver for my ethernet or even my scanner, they "just worked". So what didn't just work? Well I had to run a GUI-based applet and answer a few questions about my printer. And the GUI-based applet also allowed me to select my monitor's native resolution, and switch to it. And finally a software program enabled me to download nvidia drivers and it installed them for me.
All this whilst running a live CD. Then I was able to install with all those settings saved. So yes, you can say that not everything "just worked". But I think that booting to a workable desktop with GUI tools available to finish off the job is as near as dammit.
But compare that to windows. You need to add drivers from a floppy for certain SATA drives, whilst installing. You need to add motherboard drivers before any hardware is recognised. You need another CD for each bit of hardware. You definitely need to go into the "Desktop Properties" applet to get the optimum resolution selected. And every driver you add requires a reboot. (OK I don't know if Vista has changed all that, but frankly I don't care either).
The only reason that Windows is easier to install is because when you buy a computer, someone's already done it for you.
188 • Why the changelogs are trimmed. (by TheDarb on 2007-07-05 00:11:44 GMT from United States)
Guys, I came up with the little sed line that stripped the the changelogs in the srpms. I did it at the request of one of our other developers, and no, it wasn't Tex. No reason was given for trimming the changelogs other than he was building an rpm build bot. While the reasons were never discussed, I think we all believed it was just to clean the specs up, because we thought having a huge long list of changes in the spec file just looked a little untidy. There was nothing malicious about it, and I'm very sure none of us ever even thought it would tick off anyone. In hind site we can see now that it's upset folks, but it certainly never occurred to us we were removing due credit to people. We think of credit being in the code and patches, and that the changelog names & emails in spec files were more of revisioning method than anything else. Just simply never occurred to us it was more than that.
Sorry, but we were just trying to make the spec files look neat and tidy and thought changelogs that didn't pertain directly to our changes would just be extra untidy text no one would care about. We simply had no idea this would mean anything to anyone.
We have never denied we are standing on the shoulders of giants, such as Mandriva, SuSE, Debian and others. Nor have we ever denied Mandriva was the initial base (and in the case of 2007, our re-base). Why are many packages so much like Mandriva's? Because for the most part, Mandriva builds a darn nice OS. Where we differ is in GUI preferences, layout, design; desired packages in the repos; and our goals for our user base.
We aren't "Mandriva done right", as some have incorrectly said on the net... We simply found a good base in Mandriva, a base good enough for us to start with and then head in another direction, for a different flavor of user.
As a result, whenever we see good stuff from any distro, if we can adopt it and incorporate it, we will.
As for us not contributing upwards, what did you want from us beyond our SRPMS? Given some bumpy history in our relations with Mandriva personnel over the years, we don't really feel inclined to pro-actively inform you of our tweeks, changes, and patches. Mostly it's that we felt drummed out, so why go out of our way to help you? On the other hand, everything ends up there in the SRPMS.
Now, if our SRPMS are difficult for you to incorporate do to our stripping the changelogs, point noted. We can discuss this internally and see what we're willing to do about that. I make no commitments for the rest of the group, especially since I'm not an active RPM producer, I'm involved in other ways.
I will say this, however... Could you guys try emailing our team next time you have an issue like this with us? We're not wanting to make enemies... Lord knows I've created too many of those for Tex already.
Could we survive without Mandriva? Well... I'd say sort of. There are many other distro's out there to use as a base, and given our small number of developers, that's probably what we would do if we had to. But I'll say this, we'd rather not have to go on without Mandriva. For whatever you think of us, we find the base you provide superior to many out there. There's a reason we chose you. Despite the hard feelings between us, your product is good, and we recognize that. I really wish you'd find our willingness to use Mandriva as a base as a compliment.
Hopefully I don't get in trouble for addressing this... many really would rather have not engaged this thread at all. But then, I tend to not be nearly as mature as the rest of my team... So I had to jump in. I hope I represented them well. If not, let the negativity come at me. I'm the one who didn't hold his tongue.
Peace,
Brandon (TheDarb) Darbro
189 • @188 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 02:37:12 GMT from Canada)
Thanks for the post, Brandon. As I already mentioned on the thread on the PCLOS forums, I think it would be okay to drop the changelogs but have the first changelog message on the new package read "Import from Mandriva Linux 2007" (or wherever you're getting it from), rather than just "Build for PCLinuxOS". That'd constitute sufficient credit, I think, and it's the standard practice of other distros as far as I know.
As for the upstream thing: as I wrote on the PCLOS forum it'd be nice to think the particular disagreements of the past are water under the bridge and try again, but if you don't feel that way, that's your privilege. Sure, changes are available in SRPMs, but the thing is, it's a lot more work for us to try and follow every single change made to PCLOS - especially since as far as I know you don't use a RCS system to host your package builds, like Mandriva does ( http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/ ) - and merge the relevant ones than it would be for you guys (PCLOS packagers) just to notify us of changes, via any of the methods I outlined on the PCLOS forums. It's really not practical to devote a large chunk of time to constantly downloading SRPMs from other people's repos, extracting and diffing specs, it's obviously not the most efficient way to do things.
Yep, I'll try and make contact in a more direct way for any future issues. Just to note that this whole discussion started as a direct response by me to posts made earlier in this thread: that's why I posted here, as I was replying directly to other commenters.
Just to say again, thanks to you and Tex for your posts, and I agree with KDulcimer: I'm glad we've been able to bring things back to a constructive and productive tone. :)
190 • @188 again (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 02:47:35 GMT from Canada)
BTW, probably not the appropriate place to discuss it, but what's your buildbot like? Did you take a look at the Mandriva build system to see if it'd fit your needs? There's a rather good description of it at http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Packaging/BuildSystem/Analysis#Conectiva (yes, we adopted the system identified as 'Conectiva' on that page, the one identified as 'Mandrakelinux' is the old one we used prior to adopting the Conectiva system). In this system the build bot is called iurt ( http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Howto/Iurt ) - it builds a package in a clean chroot. You can define different chroots for different distro releases (so on the MDV build cluster you can do 'iurt package' to do a Cooker build, 'iurt20071 package' to do a 2007 Spring build, 'iurt2007' to do a 2007 build). Like I said, this probably a bit off-topic, so if you want to chat about it mail me or something :)
191 • oh, yeah.......... (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 03:13:14 GMT from United States)
.........let's just tear the credits and footnotes out of the text books and journals we are deriving information from, and especially those pesky author's names.
Oh, yeah. Untidy. Then let's rename it all and then give credit to the generic name of the originating entity/author's, "Thanks to Random House," but trim out the people who really did the building of the original work.
Right.
192 • @191 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 03:34:11 GMT from Canada)
Please, let it go, the PCLOS folks have already acted on the problem in good faith, there's nothing to be gained by attacking them.
193 • Re: #174 (by A. Wong on 2007-07-05 04:22:34 GMT from Canada)
"The "out-of-the-box" experience can only be found in such Linux distros as Mint or Vector, and in a lesser extent Mepis or PCLOS..."
...and that's a very good way you can introduce people to and start them migrating from Windoze to Linux.
194 • Lets test the 'Validity' of the "Just Works" claim of (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 05:31:47 GMT from Australia)
some PCLOS supporters/devs (?)!
I have an Acer 1644WLMi (about 20mths old) notebook and a few live cds of different distros - PCLOS, Fedora 7, Mandriva One (I had more but they went to the shredder)
I am posting this from Mandriva One and here is the summary of steps:
1. Place CD and boot up
2. Make a few interactive selections regarding to language and keyboard
3. wait a short time and you are in the desktop environment
4. My screen resolution is not auto detected and setup. So I need to run the Mandriva Control Centre, select change screen resolution and then I am automatically informed that I need to install 915 resolution + the need to logout
for changes to take effect. I logout, restart xserver, login and I have my 1280 x 1024 at 60hz resolution.
5. Kpowersave is running but I reconfigure it to how i want it to work.
6. I run MCC again (but I could have done this the first time I ran it) and
configure my firewall, a very easy and simple interactive way to do this.
7. I open firefox, set my preferences and here I am.
Now, PCLOS runs almost the same (I need to double check again)
except that the 915 resolution package needs to be downloaded from
the net (which I find annoying and not practical for a live CD!!).
Conclusion: PCLOS does NOT "Just Work" because it can NOT
setup the resolution automatically or in off line mode. IMHO, it
is silly to have to download an essential package just to run in
Live CD mode.
Fedora 7
I have to run it again but, on this machine at least, it has more claim
to "It Just Works" slogan than many others because it detects and sets up
correct screen resolution automatically. It also has cpu frequency and power control modules auto loaded (only minor adjustments are needed to suit my preferences) and if firewall is not running by default (will check again), it is as easy to set up as In Mandriva and PCLOS).
NB: Fedora 7 is a bleeding edge distro and they use a new intel module for screen resolution and that might explain the difference (?) in auto-detection.
195 • #84 Linuxen and Unixen (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 05:53:38 GMT from Australia)
"Who here has more forks in their home than Linux?"
Well, while Linux has about 500+ distros
http://futurist.se/gldt/
It would seem that its predecessor Unix has about 700+ distros
http://www.levenez.com/unix/
Ladislav - there are Minix adverts on DW. Has its functionality improved to the extent that you might add it to the database?
196 • Accelerant on the fire? (by Wahoo on 2007-07-05 06:52:54 GMT from United States)
OK, based on the discussion I went and got Mandy Spring Live. For me, Mandy Spring was a PITA. Tried it based on the previous posts as I was redoing my test box. Not cutting edge hardware, AMD 2200+, Abit board, 1 ghz RAM, etc. Yup, PCLOS and Mandriva look the same when booting. Seems to be identical if you kill the splash screen. Point being that Mandriva should have set me up as easily as PCLOS. I have a turn of the century computer. I wiped it as it was running Vista RC2 along with multiple distros and decided to remove the evil.
Every other distro - PCLOS, Mepis, Ubuntu, Puppy, Austrumi, Fedora 7 and Debian from a net install all played nice on this box today. No problems. None. Really. Only pain was Mandriva. Also the only one to flash ads both during and after install. Problems with video card (basic GeForce 4), networking and partition auto mount. Sorry Adam, but Tex and the Rippers got it right. Plus, all the other installs correctly identified my SB sound card. Mandriva was the only distro that couldn't install GeForce4 drivers at setup and forced me to edit xorg from a cli prompt at boot. Y'all still need to do some work, instead of bitching in a public forum. Sorry, I gave you a fair shot again. I'll try again in Spring 2008.
197 • Re 194...Continuing Live Cd test (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 07:11:56 GMT from Australia)
on Acer 1644WLMi (about 20mths old) notebook
Posting from Fedora 7
On this machine, as live cd, - "It Just Works"! :-)
The fonts on Firefox are not much good but that is my only complaint (as live cd only).
I insert the Cd, reboot, go for away for a few minutes and comeback to a login screen. Just press enter and its all set up - everything (correct screen resolution, default firewall and selinux, ethernet dsl connection, power and cpu frquency control and network applet running and visible).
This is the driver info for the graphics:
Intel -Experimental modesetting driver for Intel graphics chipsets
Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller rev 3
198 • RE 184 "Text only live distro" (by dbrion on 2007-07-05 07:17:43 GMT from France)
" What would be a/any good livecd to use that will be only text mode, either 80x24 or 80x50. It should have MC and as many text only apps including web browsing, etc.
Fractalguy,
"
I believe you found a solution by yourself or elsewhere; anyway
Try rescue CDs they should not hurt, meseems...
and,: as a wrong graphical screen might be horrible in hard times, they all have a pure CLI mode systemrescueCD seems almost fulfilling your needs.
Another solution would be a rescue CD for backups and some edition on your HD, (chron order) , followed by your hard disk with an installed Linux (but tweaked in a no gui mode)
):
you can then slightly modify the settings of your favorite system on disk, after having copied it of course (you are in root mode);
they can recognize USB disks => you can keep tracks of what you modify on the internal partition
to inhibit X (sorry not to go farther, but I always am in a nogui mode, on ssh connections, and on systems such different (old Linuxen, *nixes) it would be criminal going further) ...
then you can switch to the disk with RIP and test ...
I bet you found a better solution....
199 • @196 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 07:54:58 GMT from Canada)
It would help if you would give helpful details (like *any details at all*) about what actually happened, as that post is completely useless in terms of giving you any help.
Are you sure you used the live (One) edition of 2007 Spring? It includes the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, and they work (I know, I tested it on several machines, and countless MDV forum members have said the same). If you used Free, then of course it wouldn't set up the proprietary drivers, because they are...well...not Free. I can't say anything about your other problems as you've given no details of what actually happened or what hardware is involved.
200 • @194 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 07:58:31 GMT from Canada)
Yes, the difference is the new version of the Intel driver (now known as intel, previously known as i810). Fedora get last mover advantage here, as the driver wasn't out as a stable release when Mandriva and Ubuntu did our last releases, but the stable release (2.0) came out before Fedora did Fedora 7. Mandriva 2007 Spring does actually include a late release candidate of the driver as an experimental option: details on enabling it are at http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2007.1/Experimental_Intel_driver . I say 'experimental' but actually I used it myself for several weeks prior to 2007 Spring's release and it was fine. It's useful for me as the i810 driver isn't really capable of driving my 1680x1050 external panel properly even with 915resolution; the intel driver does it perfectly with no faffing about.
201 • Re 200 Thanks, Adam, for the link and feedback (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 10:19:50 GMT from Australia)
It makes sense now. I can look forward to most distros being able to
detect and setup my notebook resolution in the next 6-12 months.
I had a bit of a read at the wiki page and if I decide to install Mnd,
I will follow its instructions carefully.
Last weekend I did install Mnd One (Dvd i386) on an old P4 1.7 and
the whole process was a breeze. I also installed Fedora 7 and Debian 4
(which was a bit of a mystery to me before), and I had no problems with
either of them. They all had a few little issues and all need lots of updates,
but I didn't bother this time.
I had one issue that you might enlighten me on, both Fedora and Debian
partitions were showing up as having errors when I ran Acronis True Image
version 7. I also have a OpenSUSE 10.2 on the same machine and that
partition and Mandriva one show up as OK. But when I check with Paragon
Hard Disk Manager (ver 8), they are showing all OK.
Both utilities are freebies off of PC mags and Acronis is great for backing up
Linux and Win partitions. It makes life very easy and it would affect my choice
of distro to use on my notebook.
202 • RE...197..Continuing Live Cd test (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 10:41:21 GMT from Australia)
on Acer 1644WLMi (about 20mths old) notebook
OK, here I am with SAM 2007
It works pretty much identically to Mnd One , as
described above. And I can live with this.
Now, since SAM 2007 is based on PCLOS, I wonder
what went wrong with the "Radically Simple" and
it "Just Works" QA at PCLOS? -:)
I ran PCLOS 2007 Live CD and found out that I need
to download packages for the firewall, which is turned off
due to the missing packages mandi-ifw and shorewall,
and I also need to download package 915resolution in order
to setup correct display for my notebook. The Net Applet
also needs to be running by default, IMO, as it does in SAM.
If one wants to install PCLOS, I am sure it would be no problem!
But as "Live CD', better luck next time!
203 • This comments area (by Oiving on 2007-07-05 12:24:59 GMT from United States)
Regarding posting #92 (and others like it from time to time here):
The four of us who use the three computers in this house were talking about linux and distrowatch and forums this morning. It's interesting for us, because up until very recently it turns out that we had not been looking at this "comments" section of distrowatch much at all. Joey told the rest of us about it a couple of months ago. I remember peeking at it once in a while.
The conversation turned to what got us going on looking at it every day and then making postings ourselves (some just joking around, some serious).
It turns out that the buzz about Puppy was not the first thing; it was Xandros making a deal with Microsoft, because this old machine, one of three in the house, had a bought and paid for Xandros 4.1 on it.
So I and Jerry read more (he bought the Xandros in January and installed it over BLAG) here and talk about it more, too.
It's just that it looks like this forum is drawing more participation of a negative nature than before. Maybe not. Maybe it was worse back before I ever looked at it. It's just that all I remember from peeking in before was a few postings about the rankings and various tech stuff. I could be wrong about this.. .. For us we agreed that it is distracting and negative at times but still fun, and we're surprised that the operator here, Ladislav Bodnar, has time to run the place and maintain such an important website in the world of linux.
Adam Williamson's "let it go" remark up there in response to another vocalisation about the pclos developes removing credits helps answer the "surprise" about the maintenance of the site in a way: it could be "self maintained" in a sense, as far as things getting out of hand, a voice of reason now and then from another user goes a long way.
People new to linux come from a lot of different online forum, chat, Usenet and BBS environments. Hopefully this one, if it's new to them, will cause them to see linux as a community of "voices of reason" for the most part. :)
204 • posting 192 (by Oiving on 2007-07-05 12:26:32 GMT from United States)
I made a mistake in my posting there, I meant "regarding posting 192," not posting 92.
205 • 190 • @188 again (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 02:47:35 GMT from Canada) (by gabbman on 2007-07-05 13:14:33 GMT from Canada)
All smoke and mirrors, Mandriva is getting closer to joining the 'remember when' dead distro junk heap a la JAMD, Lycoris and these are just last grasp screams from a dying distro.
206 • re 205 Contresens (by dbrion on 2007-07-05 13:28:34 GMT from France)
Ce n'est pas l'heure de la danse du scalp....dans un monde civilisé (les professionnels payent Y, Y se fait cloner par X ou s'autoclone) ou moins (les clonages gratuits servent à supporter du matériel payé par quel argent?, en quelle devise? sur l'ordinateur de parents d'enfants gâtés/pourris)
207 • Will they ever learn? (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-07-05 14:55:55 GMT from Italy)
Will some linux distros ever learn to create torrents of releases that can be reasonably expected to be in high demand?
I tried earlier to download Granular 9.0 with curl. It would have taken 20 hours!
Now I am trying to download KDE4 alpha2 LiveCD with a download manager. They have been 681 resume attempts so far!
Creating a torrent is extremely easy, won't put a strain on your servers and will allow the user to download fast and without corruption!
208 • RE: 203 (by Landor on 2007-07-05 15:20:49 GMT from Canada)
The descent of dissent is always "acceptable" to the masses. Most follow the line that others trod with very little peripheral view than their own theme. Why not, it's the net, to be expected. This is where stalkers, haters, bashers and the like gather like a storm.
I for one do make the odd outlandish incoherent expressive from time to time, but I do not accept that online is what it is. What I do accept is the fact that the world prefers talk shows than Hoss getting steamed at Lil Joe for taking his apple pie.
On a lighter note, my build from minimal is almost done. I just need to put the penguin on the desktop and do some decorating.
If I just had a folder with 20 or 30 options I called "Command Center" I'd be rocking!
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
209 • 208 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 16:41:23 GMT from United States)
You stick seems to be perennially somewhere other than "on the ice."
210 • Live CDs (by kirios on 2007-07-05 16:47:20 GMT from Malaysia)
I tried 5 live CDs (Ubuntu 7.04, Fedora 7, Mandriva 2007.1, PCLOS 2007 and Sabayon 3.3 mini edition) on a Dell Optiplex GX270, an Acer Aspire 1694WLMi and 'Frankenputer' (which was an IBM ThinkCenter once upon a time).
Mandriva and Sabayon were the only ones that booted on all 3 machines. Your mileage may be different, but the point is there'll always be at least one distro that works on your hardware. And it will probably be available as a free download. Awesome!
Re: 196 • Accelerant on the fire? (and other similar posts):
I agree with the comment in #203 ("...this forum is drawing more participation of a negative nature than before").
211 • Re: #208 (by roadie on 2007-07-05 16:48:19 GMT from Canada)
Landor,
You forgot Hop Sing, hell, he cooked the pie.
roadie
212 • @201 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 16:53:40 GMT from Canada)
Sorry, I'm not sure about that one :. As far as I know all distros ultimately use the same low-level tools for creating partitions (mkfs.*), so all I can think of is that Fedora / Debian use different versions from the other distros, or different parameters to them. But I'm guessing here, I haven't ever used Acronis or observed this issue.
213 • Mandriva (by Wahoo on 2007-07-05 19:46:54 GMT from United States)
"It would help if you would give helpful details (like *any details at all*) about what actually happened, as that post is completely useless in terms of giving you any help."
Adam, I did not want, need or ask for help. I got Mandriva Spring 2007 Orange Flowery Edition installed and running. It took two hours. Some video drivers were missing and networking needed to be manually started. I didn't bother with sound and fstab. I spent more time on it than I felt it deserved. Buggy and slow. All I'm willing to share about what happened is this anecdote, reasons why to follow. Believe it or ignore it, your choice.
Obviously, the free-beer single CD version of Mandriva is to entice those who try it into purchasing the full version. The advertising and default web links in FF make that obvious. The expectation is that a commercial venture will offer a superior product to volunteer efforts - as in, something worth paying for. It needs to install and work reasonably well - without CLI configuration - on most computers. I am a novice, but I am capable of entering basic commands at a prompt and running config tools/editing files. Do you expect that everyone who tries Mandriva can or will do that? Do you expect them to hunt down (or pay for) support? Then, will they be tempted to purchase based on that experience, or throw the CD in the trash and look elsewhere?
Please don't ask me to help solve Mandriva's problems. Mandriva has paid developers and testers. It's Mandriva's job. I send bug reports and cash donations to certain volunteer distros that work well for me, but I will not help a commercial venture that makes me fix the stuff they want me to buy before I can use it. Perhaps I'm not alone in this. I'll keep trying Mandriva. If it becomes useful, I might buy it. Big IF, though.
214 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 21:17:56 GMT from United States)
"Mandriva Spring 2007 Orange Flowery Edition"
Hey Adam, I was wondering about that myself. Who is the genius artist that chose the design for Mandriva? Was there a contest to find the ugliest possible default theme? Easy enough to change, but for heaven's sake even a Motif-based theme would look better. It's almost as bad as the Ubuntu brown/caramel/whatever.
215 • what's problem with "remastering" (by Onkel Ho on 2007-07-05 22:06:49 GMT from Germany)
I think mandriva have not problem to make a quickly and userfriendly Distribution, or mandriva use for come in the world sourcen from mandriva? No! Mandriva is come out from Redhat-sourcen, and Redhat is come out from Debian-sourcen, and Debian is come out from ... ;) What is the realy problem, if i give money for a "professional Distribution"(used opensources), but a professional "Unixer" make a better Linux with older sourcen and give this the users without dealing. Who have a problem, the Distributor, the Unixer or the user??????
We have not time to loose, the future is comming and hes go with or without Linux or Windows or all others OS! Not make war on Linux and Opensources, or you will used Windows in all of time?
Please think true, all Developers!!! for a Future with Linux!!!
216 • @213 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 23:24:48 GMT from Canada)
It is entirely impossible for any Linux company (or even Microsoft) to test with every piece of hardware out there. It's just not on the table. Given that we're a fairly small company, we have a fairly small QA department with a fairly small range of hardware available, and of course Mandriva is tested to work correctly on these machines. We simply can't replicate every configuration out there.
What this means is that if the distro doesn't work on a certain hardware setup the only way it's likely to actually get fixed is if someone who actually *owns* that hardware tells us what's going wrong in such a way that the problem can be fixed. This applies to all distributions, by the way - PCLOS, Mandriva, Ubuntu, SUSE, whoever. None of us can read a report that says "some video drivers are missing" and fix the problem. No-one could. It's just not possible. What video drivers are missing?
No, we don't expect that everyone who uses Mandriva will know how to configure stuff at a CLI, nor - generally speaking - do they need to. I re-iterate that I tested 2007 Spring One on several machines with NVIDIA cards and it worked absolutely correctly on each, installing and using the proprietary driver at the correct resolution for the attached display.
Of course we would like people to buy commercial editions of Mandriva. However, that's not the only purpose of the free editions. You can run Free or One as complete operating systems without ever sending us a penny. (Actually, fun fact - I never bought anything from Mandrake/Mandriva in the four years I used the distro prior to being hired :>)
217 • @214 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-05 23:26:26 GMT from Canada)
The orange colour is, um, polarising. Believe it or not, some people love it. Some people hate it. The response to the other schemes (Powerpack and Free use a pretty traditional Mandriva dark blue, Powerpack+ uses black) are less extreme at both ends of the scale. We've been using the orange for One and Discovery since I think 2006; I think we decided to stick with it because we like the response of the people who love it...:)
personally I prefer the blue, but I can live with the orange.
218 • pclos mandriva changelogs fiasco (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 23:38:48 GMT from United States)
Texstar said in a post above that the changelog was stripped to save space. How much space exactly? 1 K!? 10K!? Removing a small text file doesn't save that much space, even if you downloaded all available srpms.
I call bullshit, it was an unethical move to delete the changelogs, and I think it might have just been done to create the illusion that pclos was independent of Mandriva.
PCLOS should do what Ubuntu does-- be completely transparent about where the get their software from. Give credit where it's due. It's an abuse of gpl to take someone else's work, repackage it and pass it off as your own *without acknowledging the other contributors*.
I can't believe all the liars that posted here in previous DWs saying that pclos packages were independent of Mandriva. Would CentOS claim to be independent of Red Hat? After all they do the same thing-- recompile another distro. This campaign of misinformation must stop now!
219 • changelogs (by Anonymous on 2007-07-05 23:52:25 GMT from United States)
It has more do to with matching up srpms from pclos to mandriva to check out pclos patches which is hard to do without version changelogs than giving credit. If Mandriva really cared about their contributors they would be doing something to compensate them rather than letting them work free for a commercial company.
220 • Re: 215 • what's problem with "remastering" (by kirios on 2007-07-05 23:59:58 GMT from Malaysia)
"...Redhat is come out from Debian-sourcen, and Debian is come out from ..."
Red Hat is not a Debian fork.
221 • Red Hat (by Anonymous on 2007-07-06 00:25:59 GMT from United States)
Where DID Red Hat come from? It is an original right like Slackware.? I seem to remember Slackware as being the oldest Linux distribution?
222 • 221 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-06 00:50:00 GMT from United States)
Everyone knows the Linux world started with Ubuntu. :)
223 • 221. Where did Red Hat & other Distrocome from ? Linux Timeline (by jcsoh on 2007-07-06 03:29:25 GMT from Malaysia)
Check out Linux Timeline on origing of distros.
http://futurist.se/gldt/gldt76.png
224 • @219 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-06 04:01:39 GMT from Canada)
Actually, several Mandriva developers were hired out of the community: our LAMP packager, Oden Eriksson, began packaging apache2 as a volunteer; Per Oyvind Karlsen, who's worked on several projects inside Mandriva, was also hired from the Cooker development community. I was hired from the Cooker community as well. Rick James, who helps me with the Club forums, was hired as a regular poster to the forums. I think there have been several other examples in the past.
Beyond this, every major distribution, including all the commercial ones, has many volunteer developers. I find it a bit odd that you'd suggest we (distributors) don't value them unless we pay them. It's not like they're slave laborers who we are forcing to build packages against their will - they volunteer their efforts as they wish to be involved in the project. Any distribution which _doesn't_ provide an avenue for volunteer contributions is generally frowned upon as not being open. Do you extend your criticism to every commercial distribution, including Red Hat, SUSE, and - yes - Ubuntu?
We do try to give kickbacks to the development community where we can - many of them are given free Club memberships and sometimes free boxes and stuff, and we've hosted events in Paris for the development community before.
225 • @218 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-07-06 04:03:43 GMT from Canada)
It does actually come out to a significant amount of data when you tot up all the packages on a live CD. Not huge, but maybe 10MB or so (I'm guessing here but I think it's in that ballpark) - enough to fit in a couple more useful apps.
Please don't imply that PCLinuxOS's relationship to Mandriva is the same as CentOS's to Red Hat. CentOS really is just a redistributor of Red Hat with all trademarked stuff removed. This is not what PCLinuxOS does with Mandriva, they do diverge in packaging important components such as the kernel and KDE. My comparison was only meant to show that they took a *significant amount* of work from Mandriva, not that they simply copied it in its entirety.
226 • Re: 221 • Red Hat (by kirios on 2007-07-06 04:44:06 GMT from Malaysia)
"Where DID Red Hat come from? It is an original right like Slackware.? I seem to remember Slackware as being the oldest Linux distribution?"
Apparently, Slackware is the oldest active distro, but Debian and Red Hat are the oldest "original" active distros (for want of a better term).
227 • re 198 • RE 184 "Text only live distro" (by dbrion) (by Fractalguy on 2007-07-06 04:51:53 GMT from United States)
Hello dbrion, thanks for the ideas however I don't need a rescue CD because, recognizing this is a ten year old box and a once already throw away from my wife's work, I had added an USB card. This allows for keeping data and info on a 256MB thumb drive. So, with regular backups, nothing is lost - except my pride in keeping an old box going for 330+ days. :)
My wife says just throw the box away. But then she won't have anything to play on when my son wants on the Win2k box.
So, the problem remains, the graphics card is the problem giving stray lines and even huge messy patterns all over or total whiteout. I've tried many of my liveCD collection and found DSL in JWM to work at 800x600 - sort of. Then Sam, kanotix, BeaFanatIX, Vector, puppy, xbuntu, elive, sidux, Mint-xfce, slax 6, dsl, and more fail at some point in boot or in use. Many of these get into a fancy GUI before letting me select 640x480 or 800x600, so they are non-starters.
At 800x600 the 2006-10 edition of xfld-Xfce live demo looked pretty good but not perfect. There are a few random horizontal lines and it is possible to trash the display by visiting some sites with Firefox. But I installed links (text web browser) and the sytem is useable. I may install xfld and see how that does. This is interesting, gnewsense selected 640x480, no choice, and this actually worked without flaws. Some distros like Mepis don't even have that as a choice. So for now I'm running gnewsense-KDE at 640x480 and it is looking good (for a 1988 vintage screen). Even Burning Dog (Firefox 1.5 ugh) has not screwed up anything. For some reason, x/k/ubuntu series, dsl, and others don't work even at 640x480.
I'm still looking for a mainly text livecd that has lots of these consol programs and will boot up that way. I guess any of these could do it in mode 2 instead of mode 5. Switching to ctrl-alt-F1 didn't help. So I have more to explore on this. :)
228 • RE 227 (by dbrion on 2007-07-06 09:17:06 GMT from France)
Fractalguy:
the idea was not to rescue (though I wrote it would not harm, in a general case), but to take into account the fact that rescue CDs are CLI based and can ship a great amount of cool stuff .
I tried very quickly systemrescueCD and noticed it had at least half I thought you needed...and had a CLI mode...
Anyway, pointing out the existence of such CDs is not useless...
As for having PCs running for a long time, this is what I do; at work I have even 10 yrs old stuff (for mail, X and rsh connectivity)
I promised to _break_ her within 2 yrs (3 yrs ago!).
I have not yet achieved this goal (even by having her working 24/24h), and thus have not to switch to the two other replacement boxes (they are her clone-sisters!).... This is a ridiculous situation.
As far as your 1rst point about DSL goes, qemu (and VirtualBox) can start an iso with 48M RAM and it seems to work (launching top from a konsole); perhaps they are very _modest_ and do not want to give too much hope on very old computers... Perhaps weather was too hot and some typos were made... Perhaps they could not test it with less than 128 M stuff....
229 • RE 218 Have you read @188 first paragraph? (by dbrion on 2007-07-06 09:29:16 GMT from France)
It was not a unethical delibberate move, but an absurd
megablunder.
Good that 188 made this clear: I was looking for a welfare institution to give them 10 unused floppy-disks....
BTW, this kind of blunder can remove any commercial value to a distribution (and if they can buy and test some HW, it does not hurt) and to their neighbors (they are all like this weird crap)...
Moi mon colon, celle que je préfère, c'est la guerre de 14-18.
230 • RE: 209 and descending to the "bowels" of reason (by Landor on 2007-07-06 09:56:28 GMT from Canada)
I believe it's right where it should be or you would've scored so to speak
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
231 • RE: 211 (by Landor on 2007-07-06 10:06:11 GMT from Canada)
Hopsing was the least aired sub-character and he rocked! I wonder if his laugh can be freely used under the GPL.....
I'd definitely be a lemming to a major distro that embodied his cackle at start-up or when I feverishly banged a key too many times trying to get my opinion across so nobody will understand or agree with me, even though I imagined myself far more intelligent.
Issue related: I enjoyed the time line very much. Years ago I would've already known it had existed, but it's not years ago, and now I rarely go sniffing for such things. My son enjoyed seeing it and hearing stories of yesteryear and my triumphs or failures with some of the very first distros. Thank you for including it and giving my memory a jog Ladislav.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
232 • From Post 73 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-06 11:01:39 GMT from United States)
Adam Williamson said:
"What this seems rather strongly to show is that the majority of the PCLOS 2007 repositories are a straight clone of the Mandriva repositories circa October / November 2006 (which means, basically, a straight clone of Mandriva Linux 2007). The majority of the packages are never updated, even to resync with Mandriva changes, after being cloned. I don't want to provoke any controversy, but I'd say that the PCLOS guys could be a bit straighter about how many of their packages are simply straight rebuilds of Mandriva work, rather than just giving out the line about 'forking from 9.2' and 'taking inspiration from many distros'. "
233 • RE 232 War is Over (by MèreThereza on 2007-07-06 12:59:45 GMT from France)
Au soldat inconnu:
En suivant (avec "grep") Williamson, vous ne dénaturerez pas sa pensée et vous comprendrez quelque chose.
Normalement, les 'développeurs' de dieu/Texstar réparent leurs paquets, les généalogistes de Linux affutent leurs sources et les utilisateurs relèvent de la lobiotomie, de la gériatrie, de l'aide sociale, voire de l'intelligence, Dieu seul le sait...si ça L'interesse.
Keep your purse buying Microsoft XP
234 • 228 • RE 227 (by dbrion) systemrescuecd and gnewsense (by Fractalguy on 2007-07-06 21:45:28 GMT from United States)
dbrion, I just burned systemrescuecd-x86-0.3.6, a much later verson than I had. Indeed, it has several of the things I wanted. Thanks again.
For now, I installed gnewsense-kde on the hard drive. It will provide an excuse for keeping the box around for a while. I think the video card in no the way out... it just does almost work at 640x480. Even then, that old box is better than I had during 2/3 of my working life.
Just for perspecitve, one of my first PCs at the job was a Kaypro followed by a 8086/7 PC, both that I owned. Made my first color fractals on that PC, hehe. The addition of the 8087 math processor made the calculation about 6-10x faster. Some images in CGA (320x200) took all night. Now when our machines are 1000 times faster, they appear in real time on screen savers. [shrug]
235 • General Tittal Chattel (by Baul on 2007-07-06 22:04:30 GMT from United Kingdom)
If there is one thing I like about "Open Source" - is you can just try it - and make your mind up!
I have been reading the comments on DistroWatch on a CD-Live of the lastest Beta version of Ubuntu, while currently learning about the GUI of version of "Enlightment" a part of a Linux Distro that I wasn't aware of (I'm not a programmer - just an interested computer user).
I was able to download on a free test version - and write to disc - a version of "Elive" (which I haven't tried - yet but will try to review at some point - I will try also to honour some financial contribution to its project base and download system - because I respect the time that goes into creating free OS and its many available applications).
Importantly I know that MS does'nt give the joy that Linux does and very much acknowledged the "Spirit" and sense of freedom that comes from been able to access Linux!
Specifically I want to make the comment that I trained as a visual artist and have been working in urban regeneration, arts in health and have a genuine interest in contemporary art and its form of networking.
Why does the above bring me to Linux - in all it different forms. Well I guess any thing that helps people who are - for want of various reasons - unable to access important resources and knowledge - which can be helped through access to the internet - is just a tool for well-being.
Moreover coming to the point -
I really do have to take my hat off to this global Linux project that computer programmers have enabled - because I think it is unique, useful and incredibly important - In a sense this is my first post on DistroWatch - which wants to applaud the "Big Project" - while not being sentimental or fuzzey.
Objectively I am converted to the sense of Linux - and know I need to learn more - hopefully I will find some skills inside of myself that will (importantly - be appropriate) to enable to assist the Open Source Project.
Some distros work on my computer - some don't - but hey they work on others machines - so that is not really my bug bear.
I think the OS argument has been won - what is left is the basic visual "tarting up" of Open Source Application - which I think will become more interesting. I use alot of now Adobe (which were then Marcomedia) applications - but I have fun using others.
Can open source do better than Adobe?
Anyway from the perspective of this (PWSAG) - I won't give a definition - you can make your own minds up!
Linux does rock..
Cheers to all readers
Baul
236 • Funny but I agree (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-07-06 22:32:28 GMT from Italy)
From the Granular v0.90 Release Notes:
"Recommended user account
We highly recommend that you login as root user (analogous to the Administrator in Windows). Doing this gives you more freedom on your operating system. Moreover, KDE & XFCE have been perfectly customized for the root account.
So, in order to enjoy all the privileges in Granular, login with the root user account. But remember, with great power comes great responsibilities. So, don't try to mess up with any file(s) that may be important for the functionality of the system.
But if you are too reluctant to login as root, you still have the guest account to use for login."
So I am not the only weirdo who feels that logging in as root gives me more freedom, and that fairy tales about security are pretty nonsensical for a home user!
237 • Elive 1.0 (by Joey on 2007-07-07 00:41:08 GMT from United States)
"Comments" area, so here's my comment about the final of Elive. Wtf? Why are they calling this something other than another rc or beta?
On a nice new machine it doesn't work much.. wifi, screen rez, etc.
Nice that it's just a live cd; if I had installed this I'd be hopping mad. :)
Long live the live cd!
238 • Elive 1.0 (by KimTjik on 2007-07-07 14:50:22 GMT from Sweden)
Elive still frightens me. Seriously not in the real sense, but it's the only distro so far that has managed to in the hard-drive installation change how my partitions were flagged; booting constantly failed until I after some checking found out it had messed up my boot flagges, which could be easily fixed in GParted Live-CD. No hard feelings from my side, but Elive still owns a unique part of my distro experience for good and bad.
A question: have any-one heard anything about how Fedora will fix fire-wire support in the 7th release? I have a alternative kernel based on the old fire-wire stack, but it cripples some other functions.
PCLinuxOS: I've used it quite much, but Fedora 7 stole my attention. Overall it works very well, even though I would view for example Pardus as a more interesting distro with more potential. I did experience some rare instability in PCLinuxOS, I believe however it had more to do with KDE than the distro itself. The control center might be good... for some... but personally I get more confused by this GUI-options. I'm far from an expert, more of a novice in many fields, but still some things are more understandable and less confusing in text.... sorry, again I'm just talking about myself.
239 • Rodrigues by Lohness on 2007-07-07 15:28:37 GMT from Poland)
Comment deleted (spam).
240 • 215..@238 (by Onkel Ho on 2007-07-07 15:28:59 GMT from Germany)
This is not only your impression.
What i will say is, if all of the developers from many Distributions speaking together , two to four days of a month, for coordinate and learning together for and from their
work, then all people becomes a 99% perfectly OS, with witch Windowmanager or
Sources is alike. For future is important the user not our vanity.
Developers from all Distributions, please speak together and make one standard for the Systembases, so can the users choices the applications and last but not least, this give more time to thinking to you.
If your not make this, MS will winning and your work is for the cat.
For a better future with more Linux!
wfg
Onkel Ho
241 • 240 • 215..@238 (by Onkel Ho) Herding cats. (by Fractalguy on 2007-07-07 17:39:19 GMT from United States)
Well, distros and their devs are like cats. Getting them together is like herding cats. If all the distros unite, then Microsoft will only have to knock off only one and Linux would be done for.
As for repositories with different file types: debs, modules, RPMs, etc, there might be an extension of my argument there. One thing is for sure, the file types make it harder for users to figure out. I just took a look at ZenWalk live (posting from it now) and its modules are a "best kept secret". I checked the manual on the CD, the web site, etc. What a secret these are. No indication of where to get them, how to install them, how to launch them. So ZenWalk might be our last great hope since Microsoft will never conquer them not to mention figure them out. :)
So far I'm leaning toward these for livecds, in this order: LinuxMint, Elive, PCLos, sidux. And sidux would be higher when I figure how to get the forbidden fruit (codecs etc). I like sidux's basing on debian. Elive and PCLos are harder to set up for screen resolution, especially if one is not on line. Mint just works for me at 1280x1024 plus has the multimedia. Perhaps there is something about European based distros. But Mandravia One only gives me 1024x768. Oh well.
Bottom line, gather them all together into one winning distro and it'd be my luck it wouldn't work on my box. So far, having a dozen or more distros is required to get at least one or two to work. Why is that, the choice of kernel and driver add-ons?
242 • LinuxMint (by Jerry on 2007-07-07 18:29:54 GMT from United States)
Are you running Mint on a pc or laptop, Fractalguy?
243 • Re: 236 (by Eric Chapman on 2007-07-07 18:39:08 GMT from United Kingdom)
Logging in as root doesn't give you more freedom, just more opportunities to mess things up, or to get them messed up by an outsider.
The tiny inconvenience of having to enter the root password when you want to do some system administration seems a very small price to pay for the greater security.
244 • OSNews managin editor: Shame on you, Distrowatch (by Censor on 2007-07-07 18:39:34 GMT from United States)
I would really like to see what do you ,people, think about this:
http://cogscanthink.blogsome.com/2007/07/07/shame-on-you-distrowatch/
245 • RE 244 (by KimTjik on 2007-07-07 19:14:11 GMT from Sweden)
I don't have a clue and don't know anything about what correspondence have or haven't taken place.
Nevertheless the link for a stable download of Elive 1.0 takes you to Elive's page with the alternatives for downloads, either a payment for the stable version or development version for free. Hence I've got no idea what Thom Holwerda is talking about. Have he made any post here about it?
On the other hand all what Samuel ‘Thanatermesis’ F. Baggen can hope for is mutual respect, which he might get here on Distrowatch in view of how the links works right now. This is the dilemma for every developer of open-source projects: you can't really demand money, but hope for others to prove their appreciation... if they appreciate your work of course.
246 • RE: #243 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-07-07 19:20:29 GMT from Italy)
It just happens that I have been using Linux for several years now and I have never messed things up (unless of course I wanted to) and I have never had intruders. That advice is only good for n00bs. And even that is doubtful, because many new users give up in despair when they are severely limited in what they can do.
247 • 244 • OSNews managing editor (by Anonymous on 2007-07-07 19:33:00 GMT from Italy)
Although you might be partly right, the OSNews managing editor happens to be an arrogant kid who thinks of himself as God Almighty and likes to argue with everybody, including of course his own readers.
As to respect, well, let's talk about something else...
248 • RE 245 (by nedvis on 2007-07-07 19:34:08 GMT from United States)
It was me who posted the link published here at Distrowatch to Elive 1.0 *.iso file
http://www.osnews.com/read_thread.php?news_id=18216&comment_id=253359
OSNews managing editor removed link from my previous post without letting
people know it has him who removed link .
Simple note that link I've inserted in my post is illegal,immoral,inappropriate, whatever would help me not to look as an idiot who forgot to add link to the post.
On top of that he suspended my OSNews account too, for which I can't care less since OSNews become long ago poluted with flamewars, disrespectful comments and totally irrelevant in the area of expertize they want to be.
If I've made any harm to Elive developers I really appologize and I'm ready to
to donate some money to "heal the wound".
But, again, that's not of my biggest concern.
It was the way Mr. Holwerda does his job arbitrarily removing links without
notifying audience what's going.
Calling people unwilling to pay for download or those who made Elive 1.0 available as a free download "idiots" is not a sign of good taste anyway.
249 • "osnews" (by Anonymous on 2007-07-07 20:21:32 GMT from United States)
I find it a shame that the jerk who runs "osnews" has that domain.
The site is not about OS news. It's about Holweda's ego.
I'm sure he's quite the "gentleman," though.
250 • @ 241 (by Onkel Ho on 2007-07-07 20:50:54 GMT from Germany)
Hey, i can't see this.
So match peoples works in so match projects, and so match ways they going, but in real they all have one goal.
If they go together, they makes solved problems with drivers or other hardware a little bit quickly and better (same or as) now???????
I not want just one distribution, but one level of compatibility in all hardware handlings and software standards(p.e. translations,usability,...), it's what i mean.
And MS have a problem now, they not to be able to go quickly enough with windowskernel, make trading with "linuxfree-licenses"(p.e.with LG) and posing
contra Linux. I think they happy,if they can make "WINDOWS 2010" or what ever work on a Linuxkernel.
This my thinking, and i will the Linux- and OpenSource- Community
have power enough by many more users (userfriendly make this come on) for
the future. BeOS not had many users and had must go die.
Excuse my English, i'm learn now 9 weeks.
251 • re 250 • @ 241 (by Onkel Ho) Excuse my English, 242 • LinuxMint (by Jerry) (by Fractalguy on 2007-07-07 22:14:20 GMT from United States)
If my German would have been, at nine weeks, as good as your English is I would have gotten much better scores!
"I not want just one distribution, but one level of compatibility in all hardware handlings and software standards"
Perhaps that is also what I want, but for some reason it doesn't happen. Perhaps some distro bosses can explain. Why does KNOPPIX, Mint, Ubuntu, half of the PCLOS releases work but Mandriva, Elive, Vector, DreamLinux, ZenWalk, etc. don't (set correct screen resolution)? There is nothing hidden about these drivers, right? It is all about choice and perhaps size limits on a CD. Even so, if I'm booting while connect to the net, why can't the correct driver be fetched and used on the fly?
If these are not possible, then maybe we will never have the One Ultimate Distro for All (ditto for liveCD). Please don't consider me as complaining. Computers and OSs like present Linux have never been this good in the 45 years I've been a computer user. Never! It is like comparing a thumb flash memory to paper tape. About a million to one. :D
Jerry, I only have old desktops, but my wife says someday I'll get a laptop :) [When she gets a fur coat - oh, just kidding!!] Actually for about a year now I've been considering getting a used refurb IBM ThinkPad. Maybe they'll still be available...
252 • Re: 216 (Adam Williamson) and responses (by jrminter on 2007-07-08 00:55:59 GMT from United States)
Adam is absolutely correct. No Linux distribution can have access to every combination of hardware to test. One approach to this problem is that taken by Apple - to limit supported hardware by requiring carefully controlled proprietary ROMS. The result is a system that typically 'just works," - but at a cost, both monetarily and as a lack of flexibility. The other approach is that the user community must help with testing and, especially with new hardware, there is a significant potential for problems. A community can work together to solve things. With open source, a user is not hostage to the business plan of the vendor.
A second reality is that very few people have sufficient independent sources of funding to permit them to focus large portions of their time on open source development or community support. Most of the companies behind the larger distributions are faced with the harsh realities of having to generate sufficient revenue to meet payroll and other expenses. I have been willing to purchase the commercial editions of Mandriva because I perceive that i get value from the differential material provided in the commercial package. Adam and his fellow moderators on the Mandriva forum have provided me timely help with some issues particular to my hardware. I am pleased that the revenue that Mandriva gets from my purchases helps make sure these resources are there. I contribute help in the online forums where I am able, because it is good to be part of a community. It doesn't bother me that some make a living providing such support.
What does bother me is when companies are pilloried for actually trying to sell a product. Mandriva supplies a lot of free editions. Such is the nature of Open Source, I have seen the paid moderators on the Mandriva forums make a big effort to help users of the free editions who have not subscribed to the higher levels of the "Club." That, too, is exemplary.
I have no financial interest in Mandriva. i am a reasonably satisfied customer. is there room for improvement? Always. Does it look like Mandriva is trying to make the hard decisions required to succeed in a field where it is hard to see a great business model"? Yes. Let's give credit where credit is due.
253 • Don't you love it? (by Dr. David Johnson on 2007-07-08 02:46:16 GMT from United States)
... that the DW homepage has BIG Linux announcement just above the DamnSmall announcement? Ain't coincidences grand?
254 • RE: 244 (by Landor on 2007-07-08 07:16:46 GMT from Canada)
I personally find the whole donation deal absurd regardless. If I went over to a distro's mirror to see what it was like and found that it was either pay, or a download (and no I haven't been there to look so this is for example) that is going to run at some poor rate like 15kbps, I wouldn't even look elsewhere for it.
To make matters worse, if I noticed it was a one man show I'd think, money grubber, lookin' to profit only. The reason for this is simple. You would think someone trying to build a distro would look for a userbase first, other people within the community to help develop it in some way, way before covering costs/breaking even/profit.
The author of the article is quite rude himself and I have seen this numerous times there and stopped reading his articles altogether.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
255 • 244 OSNews managin editor: Shame on you, Distrowatch (by ladislav on 2007-07-08 08:05:27 GMT from Taiwan)
Just two corrections concerning Mr Holwerda's blog post:
1. Thanatermesis has NEVER EVER asked DistroWatch not to post direct download links to stable Elive ISOs. I am in regular correspondence with the Elive developer and I've just checked all the recent emails I received from the him, but I couldn't find a single one where he would ask me no to post the links. So either he is lying to Mr Holwerda, or Mr Holwerda is lying in his blog.
2. DistroWatch has NEVER EVER hosted any ISO images of any distribution, including Elive. Again, somebody is lying.
Is it disrespectful of DistroWatch to provide direct download links to the ISO images? Yes, absolutely. However, I don't believe it is any more disrespectful than forcing users to "donate" money or "providing" a non-existent slow server. If a project wants to sell its products, they should be honest about it and go commercial, instead of making everybody feel guilty for not supporting the project with cash.
Finally, a question to Mr Holwerda: DistroWatch has donated almost US$14,000 to open source software projects over the last three years. How about OSNews?
256 • RE :255 (by Landor on 2007-07-08 10:48:34 GMT from Canada)
Hello Ladislav!
I didn't believe any part of this article for a minute that pertained to DistroWatch and you.
I think it's appalling that others will read such tripe and ASSume it's legit. It's a shame it even came up in here, although thankful since the lies and lack of integrity of the "cough" author become apparent.
Maybe it would be appropriate for Thanatermesis to submit a small article about this in next week's issue to help clarify the reality.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
257 • New Distro? (by Technosaurus on 2007-07-08 13:19:46 GMT from United States)
Gentoo or other source based distro user? Picture this! You boot a clean kernel with all possible hardware modules available auto detected, loaded and configured. Once the configuration and settings are verified the appropriate modules are logged using lsmod etc... From here a fresh kernel is compiled to the system's hardware along with minimums required to run portage etc... (all pretty much automated or option for user directed to select/deselect kernel items). From here EVERYTHING else can be fresh compiled and installed as packages. Does this already exit? If not, anyone interested?
258 • 257 (by Anonymous on 2007-07-08 13:44:59 GMT from United States)
"Does this already exit? If not, anyone interested?"
You'd probably have to use the cli command, "exit."
Works for me.
259 • PCLinuxOS Page Hit Ranking (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-07-08 13:52:05 GMT from Italy)
PCLinuxOS is now first in the Page Hit Ranking also over 3 months!
G0 PCLinuxOS, go!!!
260 • Will the REAL Elive please stand up? (by Ohnonymous on 2007-07-08 15:15:11 GMT from United States)
Why over 3 different versions of "stable" 1.0? I've downloaded this twice, and each time the md5sum changes.
Enough already. Elive, decide what you the hell you want to call stable and provide it to the general public on torrent.
261 • Elive junk (by Anonymous on 2007-07-08 15:45:36 GMT from United States)
It appears they are doing this in a rather amatuer fashion; re-releasing a patched "final" over and over again after viewing
various bug reports and critisisms here and there.
The point is this should have been .7 or .75 or whatever, rc or
beta, but not 1.0 Final.
262 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-07-08 18:39:54 GMT from Canada)
I was told by a friend here in my city that they posted a comment here this issue and as luck would have it, I skimmed over the early comments and missed them posting. Going back to look for it I also found I missed a lot more, especially in regard to the ongoing "Puppy" issue.
When I read the Puppy do-do again something nagged at me that I was forgetting something, not from here, from over in there forums, so I just checked and found it.
We've heard a lot of people saying for the last couple weeks that what Mark said about the deleting of posts by moderators never happens, it's only errors. Well, from what I read of the whole thread, and from what I've seen of this one person who you read a snippet of his post from the thread there, he is respected in their community, and it was quite odd not one person made a comment about his post, nor denied it, very odd.
This was posted by Sage in the Puppy forum on June 26th 07:
But we all know who is the fly in this ointment. Indeed, if you examine my inbox, for which I grant permission should it be required, you will find an admission of deletion of one of my posts, barely an apology, from the guy who is and always has been creating mayhem around here. Sometimes, John's laudable loyalty results in us all being shot in the foot.
(end of snippet)
The full post can be read here : http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=124631&search_id=1276121399#124631
Very odd not one person denied it in the thread and when someone else even brought that fact up it was again not commented on, says a lot no?
For me, but it's only my opinion, it lends credence to the main part of Mark's article in last week's DistroWatch Weekly. It also goes to show that for all their bluff and bluster, the detractors to Mark's article felt safe rebuffing his claims of deleting posts, but they didn't when it came down to someone who could prove it has and does happen.
Also, another thing I missed, RE: 41, I thought Raffy was a girl too, I find that funny :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
263 • distro forum hassles (by Yahonsah Fop on 2007-07-08 23:45:12 GMT from United States)
Post 42 seems to adequately address the stupid "puppy"
situation, which can remain at the stupid "puppy" forums
and not polute this forum.
264 • Puppy responses (by Gene Venable on 2007-07-09 04:32:56 GMT from United States)
Until now, I rather liked Puppy. What has made me change my attitude is the tone of the responses to what I saw as mild criticism. The tone is so bitter that it indicates that there must have been some truth in the original charges. Truly tolerant people don't freak out totally when they are criticized.
Number of Comments: 264
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
| | |
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Archives |
| • Issue 1099 (2024-12-02): AnduinOS 1.0.1, measuring RAM usage, SUSE continues rebranding efforts, UBports prepares for next major version, Murena offering non-NFC phone |
| • Issue 1098 (2024-11-25): Linux Lite 7.2, backing up specific folders, Murena and Fairphone partner in fair trade deal, Arch installer gets new text interface, Ubuntu security tool patched |
| • Issue 1097 (2024-11-18): Chimera Linux vs Chimera OS, choosing between AlmaLinux and Debian, Fedora elevates KDE spin to an edition, Fedora previews new installer, KDE testing its own distro, Qubes-style isolation coming to FreeBSD |
| • Issue 1096 (2024-11-11): Bazzite 40, Playtron OS Alpha 1, Tucana Linux 3.1, detecting Screen sessions, Redox imports COSMIC software centre, FreeBSD booting on the PinePhone Pro, LXQt supports Wayland window managers |
| • Issue 1095 (2024-11-04): Fedora 41 Kinoite, transferring applications between computers, openSUSE Tumbleweed receives multiple upgrades, Ubuntu testing compiler optimizations, Mint partners with Framework |
| • Issue 1094 (2024-10-28): DebLight OS 1, backing up crontab, AlmaLinux introduces Litten branch, openSUSE unveils refreshed look, Ubuntu turns 20
| | • Issue 1093 (2024-10-21): Kubuntu 24.10, atomic vs immutable distributions, Debian upgrading Perl packages, UBports adding VoLTE support, Android to gain native GNU/Linux application support |
| • Issue 1092 (2024-10-14): FunOS 24.04.1, a home directory inside a file, work starts of openSUSE Leap 16.0, improvements in Haiku, KDE neon upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1091 (2024-10-07): Redox OS 0.9.0, Unified package management vs universal package formats, Redox begins RISC-V port, Mint polishes interface, Qubes certifies new laptop |
| • Issue 1090 (2024-09-30): Rhino Linux 2024.2, commercial distros with alternative desktops, Valve seeks to improve Wayland performance, HardenedBSD parterns with Protectli, Tails merges with Tor Project, Quantum Leap partners with the FreeBSD Foundation |
| • Issue 1089 (2024-09-23): Expirion 6.0, openKylin 2.0, managing configuration files, the future of Linux development, fixing bugs in Haiku, Slackware packages dracut |
| • Issue 1088 (2024-09-16): PorteuX 1.6, migrating from Windows 10 to which Linux distro, making NetBSD immutable, AlmaLinux offers hardware certification, Mint updates old APT tools |
| • Issue 1087 (2024-09-09): COSMIC desktop, running cron jobs at variable times, UBports highlights new apps, HardenedBSD offers work around for FreeBSD change, Debian considers how to cull old packages, systemd ported to musl |
| • Issue 1086 (2024-09-02): Vanilla OS 2, command line tips for simple tasks, FreeBSD receives investment from STF, openSUSE Tumbleweed update can break network connections, Debian refreshes media |
| • Issue 1085 (2024-08-26): Nobara 40, OpenMandriva 24.07 "ROME", distros which include source code, FreeBSD publishes quarterly report, Microsoft updates breaks Linux in dual-boot environments |
| • Issue 1084 (2024-08-19): Liya 2.0, dual boot with encryption, Haiku introduces performance improvements, Gentoo dropping IA-64, Redcore merges major upgrade |
| • Issue 1083 (2024-08-12): TrueNAS 24.04.2 "SCALE", Linux distros for smartphones, Redox OS introduces web server, PipeWire exposes battery drain on Linux, Canonical updates kernel version policy |
| • Issue 1082 (2024-08-05): Linux Mint 22, taking snapshots of UFS on FreeBSD, openSUSE updates Tumbleweed and Aeon, Debian creates Tiny QA Tasks, Manjaro testing immutable images |
| • Issue 1081 (2024-07-29): SysLinuxOS 12.4, OpenBSD gain hardware acceleration, Slackware changes kernel naming, Mint publishes upgrade instructions |
| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • Issue 1076 (2024-06-24): openSUSE 15.6, what makes Linux unique, SUSE Liberty Linux to support CentOS Linux 7, SLE receives 19 years of support, openSUSE testing Leap Micro edition |
| • Issue 1075 (2024-06-17): Redox OS, X11 and Wayland on the BSDs, AlmaLinux releases Pi build, Canonical announces RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu, key changes in systemd |
| • Issue 1074 (2024-06-10): Endless OS 6.0.0, distros with init diversity, Mint to filter unverified Flatpaks, Debian adds systemd-boot options, Redox adopts COSMIC desktop, OpenSSH gains new security features |
| • Issue 1073 (2024-06-03): LXQt 2.0.0, an overview of Linux desktop environments, Canonical partners with Milk-V, openSUSE introduces new features in Aeon Desktop, Fedora mirrors see rise in traffic, Wayland adds OpenBSD support |
| • Issue 1072 (2024-05-27): Manjaro 24.0, comparing init software, OpenBSD ports Plasma 6, Arch community debates mirror requirements, ThinOS to upgrade its FreeBSD core |
| • Issue 1071 (2024-05-20): Archcraft 2024.04.06, common command line mistakes, ReactOS imports WINE improvements, Haiku makes adjusting themes easier, NetBSD takes a stand against code generated by chatbots |
| • Issue 1070 (2024-05-13): Damn Small Linux 2024, hiding kernel messages during boot, Red Hat offers AI edition, new web browser for UBports, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 released, Qubes extends support for version 4.1 |
| • Issue 1069 (2024-05-06): Ubuntu 24.04, installing packages in alternative locations, systemd creates sudo alternative, Mint encourages XApps collaboration, FreeBSD publishes quarterly update |
| • Issue 1068 (2024-04-29): Fedora 40, transforming one distro into another, Debian elects new Project Leader, Red Hat extends support cycle, Emmabuntus adds accessibility features, Canonical's new security features |
| • Issue 1067 (2024-04-22): LocalSend for transferring files, detecting supported CPU architecure levels, new visual design for APT, Fedora and openSUSE working on reproducible builds, LXQt released, AlmaLinux re-adds hardware support |
| • Issue 1066 (2024-04-15): Fun projects to do with the Raspberry Pi and PinePhone, installing new software on fixed-release distributions, improving GNOME Terminal performance, Mint testing new repository mirrors, Gentoo becomes a Software In the Public Interest project |
| • Issue 1065 (2024-04-08): Dr.Parted Live 24.03, answering questions about the xz exploit, Linux Mint to ship HWE kernel, AlmaLinux patches flaw ahead of upstream Red Hat, Calculate changes release model |
| • Issue 1064 (2024-04-01): NixOS 23.11, the status of Hurd, liblzma compromised upstream, FreeBSD Foundation focuses on improving wireless networking, Ubuntu Pro offers 12 years of support |
| • Issue 1063 (2024-03-25): Redcore Linux 2401, how slowly can a rolling release update, Debian starts new Project Leader election, Red Hat creating new NVIDIA driver, Snap store hit with more malware |
| • Issue 1062 (2024-03-18): KDE neon 20240304, changing file permissions, Canonical turns 20, Pop!_OS creates new software centre, openSUSE packages Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
| • Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
| • Issue 1059 (2024-02-26): Warp Terminal, navigating manual pages, malware found in the Snap store, Red Hat considering CPU requirement update, UBports organizes ongoing work |
| • Issue 1058 (2024-02-19): Drauger OS 7.6, how much disk space to allocate, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop, UBports changes its version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication |
| • Issue 1057 (2024-02-12): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta, rolling release vs fixed for a smoother experience, Debian working on 2038 bug, elementary OS to split applications from base system updates, Fedora announces Atomic Desktops |
| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Issue 1051 (2024-01-01): Favourite distros of 2023, reloading shell settings, Asahi Linux releases Fedora remix, Gentoo offers binary packages, openSUSE provides full disk encryption |
| • Issue 1050 (2023-12-18): rlxos 2023.11, renaming files and opening terminal windows in specific directories, TrueNAS publishes ZFS fixes, Debian publishes delayed install media, Haiku polishes desktop experience |
| • Issue 1049 (2023-12-11): Lernstick 12, alternatives to WINE, openSUSE updates its branding, Mint unveils new features, Lubuntu team plans for 24.04 |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • Issue 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Issue 1045 (2023-11-13): Fedora 39, how to trust software packages, ReactOS booting with UEFI, elementary OS plans to default to Wayland, Mir gaining ability to split work across video cards |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
|
| Random Distribution | 
Julex
Julex was a Knoppix-based live CD distribution. Its aim was to be light-weight so that it works on older computers and was a small file to download.
Status: Discontinued
|
| Tips, Tricks, Q&As | | Tips and tricks: Command line weather, ionice, rename files, video preview snapshot, calednar, ls colour settings |
| Questions and answers: Hiding passwords when authenticating on the command line |
| Tips and tricks: Running Android applications on GNU/Linux with Anbox |
| Tips and tricks: Advanced file systems, network traffic, running a script at login/logout |
| Questions and answers: Running applications from a data partition |
| Myths and misunderstandings: Linux Mint's security record |
| Tips and tricks: A journey to get Falkon 3.1.0 running and problems with portable packages |
| Questions and answers: Debian, Devuan and systemd |
| Questions and answers: The transition from X11 to Wayland |
| More Tips & Tricks and Questions & Answers |
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
|
|
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
