DistroWatch Weekly |
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 229, 19 November 2007 |
Welcome to this year's 47th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Following our review of Fedora 8 last Monday, this week's DistroWatch Weekly offers a few more observations about Red Hat's community distribution - this time from the perspective of your DistroWatch maintainer. While clearly an excellent product, it nevertheless suffers from a few annoyances and dubious design decisions. In the news section, Red Hat Magazine introduces GNOME Online Desktop, Ubuntu releases a specialist distribution for virtual appliances, Oracle's Larry Ellison fires more ugly shots at Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Kurumin's Carlos Morimoto considers the future of the popular Brazilian community project. Finally, for those interested in Computer Aided Engineering, don't miss the new release from CAELinux. Happy reading!
Content:
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Reviews |
Impressions of Fedora 8
Two weeks ago I switched my main production workstation from Sabayon Linux 3.4 to Fedora 8. This was part of my scheduled distro rotation plan that I started two years ago in order to better evaluate the different options on the market and to stay on top of the latest open source innovations. It was also the first time in years that I used a Red Hat product; as far as I can remember, I haven't installed any on a production box since Red Hat Linux 9 and even that was just a simple mail server. But the Fedora of today is a very different operating system - not only is it one of the most innovative distributions around, it is now also a well-oiled community project with increasing participation of third-party developers and volunteer contributors.
I performed a clean installation of Fedora 8 RC3 (a near-final build), x86_64 edition, on a machine with the following specifications: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor; GIGABYTE GA-M55S-S3 motherboard with AMD Socket AM2 (with on-board LAN and audio, one IDE and four SATA channels), 2 GB of DDR II RAM PC2-5300, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT video card, 2 x 250 GB SATA hard disks (Maxtor); Acer AL2016W 20-inch wide screen monitor supporting maximum resolution of 1680x1050 pixels. I used the standard installation DVD (rather than the newer live CD option). Things didn't go as smoothly as I expected; after completing the installation with a customised package selection (to include KDE, a web server and development packages), the system refused to boot with a "file system error". I repeated the exact same installation - with the exact same result (the fsck utility found no errors, though). On the third attempt, I reverted to the default package selection and this time the system booted fine.
As soon as the new operating system was up and running, the early troubles were quickly forgotten. Fedora's hardware detection was flawless (it configured even the screen resolution correctly) and the desktop looked exceptionally pleasant; I was particularly impressed with the new Liberation fonts. I don't have any benchmarks to support my claim, but the desktop and applications felt noticeably snappier than on Sabayon Linux 3.4. After installing the NVIDIA proprietary driver from Livna.org, I enabled CompizFusion and this too worked very well. I spent the following hours installing all my favourite applications from the standard Fedora repositories and media codecs from third-party sources. This was perhaps the only disadvantage of Fedora 8 when compared to Sabayon Linux, which comes pre-configured with all the media goodies and browser plugins a desktop Linux user could possibly need.
No Linux distribution is perfect and Fedora 8 is no exception. In the process of installing software and configuring the system I came across a number of issues; most of them minor, but one near show-stopper that almost made me abandon the distribution. Since DistroWatch uses the SQLite database to store news and some statistical bits and pieces, I was rather shocked to discover that PHP on Fedora 8 is compiled with the "--without-sqlite" flag. This was apparently done because the maintainer of the PHP package at Fedora considers SQLite support in PHP unsafe. I am not an expert on the issue, but if the upstream, as well as Debian, FreeBSD, Mandriva, openSUSE and Slackware are all happy to ship PHP with SQLite enabled, then I somehow doubt that Fedora has a valid case here. In the end I solved the problem by downloading the source RPM of PHP, removed the absurd "--without-sqlite" line from the php.spec file and recompiled the package. Luckily, this worked fine, so now I can load DistroWatch from my own workstation too.
The default package management infrastructure as represented by yum, Pirut and yum-updatesd was another part of Fedora 8 that I found unsatisfactory. The way a Fedora installation seems to be configured is that every time any of these applications is run, it connects to the Fedora Project web server to retrieve a mirror list, then automatically assigns a mirror from which to retrieve the package database. For some reason, I always found myself getting the database from what seemed like the slowest mirror imaginable, located somewhere in Russia - it sometimes took several hours just to retrieve the package database! During this time it was, of course, impossible to use any other package management application, not even for search. It also drove me insane to see how there was no way to sort searched packages in an alphabetical order in Pirut. It wasn't until I discovered yum-fastestmirror and yumex (Yum Extender) that package management on Fedora became an acceptable experience. Why aren't these two applications installed in Fedora by default?
I prefer KDE on my desktop, so after a brief moment exploring the latest GNOME, I logged into KDE. This I always do with some apprehension; it is interesting to note that while the traditionally KDE-centric distributions, such as openSUSE or Mandriva, now treat GNOME as an equal desktop, the traditionally GNOME-centric distribution, such as Ubuntu or Fedora, still consider KDE a second-class citizen. That's not to say that the KDE desktop on Fedora is broken, but it's rather obvious that some of the new features as well as the new artwork were designed for and fully integrated with GNOME only. Also, while CompizFusion run without problem in GNOME, I couldn't start it in KDE - not until I came across a brief tutorial that included a list of extra packages that needed to be installed before CompizFusion would run in KDE. An occasional Arts error message also suggested that KDE had not receive the same amount of testing as GNOME.
The only other bug I found was in gFTP, which is my preferred application for uploading files to the DistroWatch server due to its support for the SSH2 protocol. It's an upstream bug that gives a "permission denied" error on world-readable files when in SSH2 mode; however, this bug was fixed in Debian and Gentoo almost two years ago, so I was disappointed to see it still present in Fedora 8 (it is also unfixed in the current release of Mandriva). I suppose it's just a matter of reporting the bug in Red Hat's Bugzilla, which -- as a good open source citizen -- I promised myself to do as soon as I find a bit of spare time.
With the exception of the PHP/SQLite issue and perhaps also the default package management infrastructure (which just isn't anywhere near par with Debian's APT), I found Fedora 8 a very usable and complete distribution. Besides all the innovation and generally trouble-free computing, I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the community part of Fedora now functions - the Livna.org packages were already in testing repositories before Fedora 8 final was released and I found them to be of very high quality. Even better, the Livna.org package maintainers are extremely fast with updates - I was impressed with the almost instant release of Livna.org kernel modules shortly after the recent Fedora 8 kernel update.
I also appreciate the fact that many of the more visible packages in Fedora get updated to their latest versions after the distribution's stable release; as an example the original Fedora 8 shipped with GIMP 2.4.0rc3, but it has since been updated to GIMP 2.4.1 via the normal update mechanism. I know that openSUSE does this too sometimes, but Ubuntu and Mandriva generally do not. With the exception of those who need a desktop with a mission-critical stability (in which case Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS would be better alternatives), most users will probably appreciate that the distribution is kept up-to-date with well-tested packages throughout its lifespan.
Overall, nothing (except for the occasional work needed to recompile PHP after any future updates) indicates that I won't be a happy Fedora 8 user for the next six months. It is considerably less buggy than Sabayon Linux 3.4 was and the existence of Livna.org makes adding media codecs and non-free drivers a painless experience. I didn't encounter any problems with using the 64-bit edition of Fedora - like in recent Mandriva and Sabayon Linux releases, the 32-bit and 64-bit libraries are seamlessly integrated into the system. Although Fedora 8 isn't perfect (which distribution is?), it comes a lot closer to delivering a superb desktop experience than one would expect from a company whose business is focused almost exclusively on the server market. Great job overall and a well-deserved 8.5 out of 10.
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Statistics |
Windows versus Linux
Will 2008 be the Year of Linux? While it doesn't look likely that Linux will become a dominant operating system for some time yet, the gap between Windows and Linux is definitely narrowing. That's at least according to the DistroWatch web server statistics, which collects information about the operating systems used to visit this web site. While in late 2004 the percentage of Windows-using visitors hovered at around 65% of all readers, this figure has since dropped to around 55%. At same time, the percentage of visitors using Linux has risen from around 28% in late 2004 to 36% today. In reality, the percentage of Linux-using readers is probably still higher, but the sheer number of search and spam bots which access the web site daily and which invariable identify themselves as arriving from a Windows client make the result look overly flattering for the Microsoft operating system.
The narrowing gap between the usage of Windows and Linux
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Miscellaneous News |
Fedora's GNOME Online Desktop, Ubuntu JeOS, Oracle vs Red Hat, future of Kurumin Linux, CAELinux 2007
One of the little advertised new features in Fedora 8 is the GNOME Online Desktop, an experimental variant of GNOME that offers quick access to popular Internet services. Red Hat Magazine offers a tour of the new desktop layout and its features: "GNOME Online Desktop is an alternate 'mode' or flavor of the GNOME desktop. We're experimenting with a few different things here. 1. The overall concept of tightly integrating the web into the desktop, as described here. 2. Specific user interface ideas, such as a desktop sidebar called BigBoard. 3. A set of platform components that support web integration - these can be used with any application or UI, including the more traditional GNOME desktop flavor. The platform components are hard to see in the screenshots, of course. But this tour shows off some of the user interface ideas."
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The Ubuntu development team has announced the inaugural release of Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced "juice"), a customised Ubuntu operating system layer designed for VMware virtual appliances: "Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced the availability of its Ubuntu JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) edition. Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced "Juice") is an efficient variant of the popular desktop and server operating system, configured specifically for virtual appliances. ISVs looking to develop virtual appliances will have a compelling platform in Ubuntu JeOS, an OS optimised for virtualisation that greatly reduces the complexity and maintenance overhead normally associated with general purpose operating systems. Ubuntu JeOS Edition has been tuned to take advantage of key performance technologies of the latest virtualisation products from VMware."
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The big business once again demonstrated its ugly face last week when Oracle's Larry Ellison attacked and derided Red Hat and its enterprise Linux distribution: "Oracle has been in the Linux business for a year now. With the Red Hat code all we did for the first year was fix bugs." Just to recap on the events, Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 in February 2005, while Oracle announced the availability of its "own" build of RHEL 4 in October 2006, attempting to undercut Red Hat's support business by offering a cheaper alternative. In March 2007, Red Hat released RHEL 5, a much improved version of its flagship product with many enterprise-class features - a challenge that Oracle has yet to respond to. But why does Larry Ellison dislike Red Hat so much? CNET's Matt Assay offers an answer: "Larry doesn't understand open source. Oracle desperately wants open source to be 'just another tool' that it uses for IT domination. It's not. It actually has the opposite effect."
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"Fim do Kurumin?" This was a question many Brazilian Linux web sites asked last week. The Debian-based Kurumin Linux, created by Carlos Morimoto (pictured on the right), has become one of the most widely used Linux distributions in Brazil since its launch in 2003, largely due to its compact size, attractive artwork, custom configuration tools, and excellent support for popular Brazilian hardware (e.g. "winmodems" and USB ADSL modems). But in a forum post last week, Morimoto hinted at a possible change in direction or even a complete closure of the project. As the main reasons he cited lack of time and availability of well-localised, easy-to-use distributions, such as Mandriva Linux or Ubuntu. As expected, the announcement was greeted with mixed reactions in the Brazilian Linux community. If you understand Portuguese, you can follow the discussion in this thread, with additional commentary and reaction by BR-Linux and MaxINFO.
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"People are often looking for a CAD solution for Linux but don't know that there is a full distro." This was a message sent to DistroWatch by the developers of CAELinux, a PCLinuxOS-based distribution with a collection of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) software. CAELinux is still on the DistroWatch's waiting list, but those readers who find this distribution useful will be pleased to know that a new version was released last week: "This first stable version of CAELinux is now officially released. Thanks to the new PCLinuxOS 2007 distribution base and the unique Salome_Meca 2007 FEA suite, CAELinux 2007 represents a jump in stability and ease of use, and we hope that you will enjoy it. As usual, this release is available either as a installable live DVD distribution or under Windows with our pre-configured VMware edition." The CAELinux 2007 live DVD image is available for download from here: CAELinux2007.iso (2,361MB, MD5).
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Released Last Week |
StartCom Enterprise Linux 5.0.1
StartCom Ltd has announced the release of StartCom Enterprise Linux 5.0.1, a distribution rebuilt from source RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and enhanced with additional software: "StartCom is pleased to announce the availability of StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-5.0.1. StartCom Linux is using the latest in open source technology and with its known stability, reliability and security allows for mission-critical server deployments. This update release provides improved support for virtualization - the running of multiple instances of operating systems on one physical hardware unit. The Global File System (GFS) provided in AS-5.0.1 allows the building and maintaining of high availability computer clusters, mainly used for data centers." Read the release announcement for further information.
BLAG Linux And GNU 70000
Jeff Moe has announced the release of BLAG Linux And GNU 70000, a single-CD desktop distribution based on Fedora 7: "BLAG 70000 (sugarwater) released. BLAG is a 100% Free Software distribution with all the tools you want from a desktop computer, plus more. It comes on a single CD, is easily installed, and user friendly. Power users have the resources of a repository that combines bits from Fedora, freshrpms, Dries, ATrpms, Livna, Planet CCRMA, and our own special brews. BLAG 70000 (sugarwater) is a new series with a new base (F7) and many new applications. It is released under the GNU GPL v3." Optimised for the i686 processor architecture, BLAG 70000 uses Linux kernel 2.6.22.9 and GNOME 2.18 as the default desktop. Read the complete release announcement for further details.
Blag Linux And GNU 70000 - a Fedora-based desktop distribution containing Free Software only (full image size: 714kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Linux Mint 4.0
Clement Lefebvre has announced the final release of Linux Mint 4.0, code name "Daryna": "Linux Mint 4.0, codename Daryna, was officially released today in both Main and Light editions. What's new in Daryna: mintUpdate - get automatic updates without compromising the stability of the system; mintInstall & the Software Portal - interact with mintInstall without starting from the Portal; mintDesktop improvements - major improvements in terms of usability; Liberation fonts; CompizFusion; upstream improvements - Gnome 2.20, Linux kernel 2.6.22; new repository structure. What makes Daryna ideal for the desktop? Out-of-the-box multimedia support; Windows integration (dual-boot, NTFS read/write support, migration assistant); one-click install system; easy file sharing (mintUpload)...." See the release notes for more detailed information about the product.
Linux Mint 4.0 - "Daryna" comes with many subtle improvements (full image size: 937kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6
Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.6, the 6th update to its legacy Red Hat 4.x product line: "Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the release of 4.6 (kernel 2.6.9-67.EL) for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 family of products. This release includes the following enhancements: availability of a full set of updated installable CD ISO with OS package updates and install-time support for new hardware; availability of updated Extras ISO images with third party package updates. New kernel features include: added getcpu system call on ia64; added /proc numa maps support; updated Infiniband OFED support to 1.2; added ability to disable out of memory killer; added smaps functionality; updated CIFS client to version 1.48aRH...." Read the release announcement and release notes for further details.
Zenwalk Linux 4.8 "Live"
Michael Verret has announced the release of the "Live" edition of Zenwalk Linux 4.8: "With great joy the Zenwalk Live team presents Zenwalk Live 4.8. New or improved features of Zenwalk Live include automatic wide-screen resolution adjustments, the ability to read and write to the NTFS file system, a LiloFix GUI tool, wireless free drivers and much, much more. This release also comes complete with enhanced localization and user guides translated into more languages than ever before so that you feel right at home, no matter where you are as you learn all of its features and just what this thing can really do for you. Weighing in at under 500 MB, this baby packs a punch!" Here is the full release announcement.
PC-BSD 1.4.1
The PC-BSD development team has announced the release of PC-BSD 1.4.1, an update version of the FreeBSD-based operating system for the desktop: "An update to PC-BSD was released today, version 1.4.1. This new version may be obtained from our download page, additionally users who are running version 1.4 may download a patch to upgrade. This version of PC-BSD has several important fixes: upgrades Compiz 0.5.2 to CompizFusion 0.6.0; switches from HPIJS to HPLIP for better printer / scanner support; adds extra screen savers with XScreenSaver package; updates NVIDIA drivers to latest releases from NVIDIA; fixes issue with 'tar' extract error during install when using custom partitioning; switches ISO to LZMA compression, speeding up the install and reducing the size of the CD ISO image." See the release announcement, changelog and release notes for further details.
ArtistX 0.4
Marco Ghirlanda has announced the release of ArtistX 0.4, a Debian-based live DVD with a collection of audio, video and 2D/3D graphics software: "ArtistX 0.4 is ready for download. It comes in two flavours (GNOME and KDE) and both include the Powua client and Powua tutorials. Powua is the Super Internet Computer and has been created to speed up CPU intensive tasks. For example you can realize an animation with Blender and directly from ArtistX upload and render it on Powua (more info on the Powua Wiki and in the DVD). ArtistX is based on the Debian Live initiative and includes the 2.6.22 kernel, GNOME 2.20, KDE 3.5.7, and includes about 2,500 free multimedia software, nearly everything that exists for the GNU/Linux environment." Visit the project's home page to read the full release announcement.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
Summary of expected upcoming releases
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DistroWatch.com News |
New distributions added to database
- gOS. gOS is an easy-to-use, Ubuntu-based distribution designed for less technical computer users. Its main features are the use of Enlightenment as the default desktop and tight integration of various Google products and services into the product.
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New distributions added to waiting list
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DistroWatch database summary
And this concludes the latest issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 26 November 2007.
Ladislav Bodnar
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Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • "¿El fin de Kurumin?" (by Pedro Leite on 2007-11-19 09:32:44 GMT from Brazil)
In Brazil, we speak Portuguese, not Spanish. The correct tagline would be: "Será o fim do Kurumin?"
2 • RE: 1 (by ladislav on 2007-11-19 09:39:36 GMT from Taiwan)
You are right, of course. I absentmindedly copied the phrase from some Spanish web site...
3 • KarachiOS (by Dr.Saleem Khan on 2007-11-19 10:16:35 GMT from Pakistan)
It`s nice to hear about KOS on www.distrowatch.com DW page but probing into the link http://www.linuxpakistan.org/kos/ doesn`t provide much info as usual except that KarachiOS Is Now Available In Pakistan ! We have been hearing/reading about KOS for quite some time now and though once I asked for its download link on www.linuxpakistan.net but got no reply back, so it looks like it`s going to be a payed download??
Congrats to Tariq Sahib for KOS , hope we see any download link/mirrors soon.
4 • gOS (by CombatWombat on 2007-11-19 10:20:49 GMT from New Zealand)
Has anyone tried gOS yet? Is all the hype true? It would seem ideal for the computer noob, with an easy gui, and solid Ubuntu base. What's your experinces with it?
5 • PCLinuxOS evangelists are gaming the page hit rankings (by Mike on 2007-11-19 10:30:12 GMT from United States)
PCLinuxOS evangelists are gaming the page hit rankings to advertise their distro. Please remove the rankings or use Google trends to measure the popularity of the different distributions.
6 • GNOME & KDE (by kyrazly on 2007-11-19 10:36:08 GMT from Spain)
I think any distro should be used with it's default DE. No matter which one exactly. If GNOME, good - just use it! If KDE, good too - just use it! The best way using K/Ubuntu for me is to install Ubuntu alternate cd and then install KDE and use it. This way I have my prefered DE and in the same time all good Ubuntu stuff.
7 • Mandriva 2008 and the Linux Desktop Revolution (by Dan MacDonald on 2007-11-19 11:09:44 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'm sure that most DW would agree with me in saying that good, easy to use out-of-box wireless support complete with working WPA(2) and WEP WAS one of the last big remaining hurdles for Linux to gain some major ground on the desktop. I've had varying degrees of success with wifi under Ubuntu 7.10 but it certainly needs a fair bit of work to catch up to the A1 wifi support offered by Mandriva 2008! I've so far tried 4 different wifi chipsets under Mandriva 2008 and every one has worked flawlessly, with protection too, and I've got a Belkin wifi adapter working under Mandriva that I never managed to get working under any other version of Linux. Mandriva 2008 offers by far the best wireless support I've ever seen. Not only does it work but its easy to setup and works reliably so big congrats to the Mandriva team and I'd suggest other distros look at what they're doing right that they're not.
I was so pleased with Mandriva 2008 I decided to burn 100 copies complete with promotional covers explaining the advantages of Linux, included software, the fact you can run it straight off CD without installing, its capabilities and an instructional CD label on how to boot off a CD. I then left these CDs in local shops, barbers, garages etc and explained to the owners what they were. Everyone I spoke to was interested but no-one had heard of Linux except one lady whose son was doing his doctorate in computing.
For most people, Mandriva will be easier and cheaper to install, use and maintain than XP or Vista. Most of the technical and usability probs of Linux are a thing of the past now, we have lots of great desktop apps too, Linux just needs more publicity which will lead to more users and wider acceptance and we can help achieve this by doing what I have done. Personally I would probably end up recommending Ubuntu or Debian to many prospective Linux users but Mandriva's inclusion of MP3 playback, flash plug-in, 3D drivers and its excellent wifi support make it the best Linux promotional live CD I'm aware of. I distributed the GNOME version of Mandriva 2008 ONE as I found the KDE versions window decorations would disappear if you turned on Compiz Fusion but GNOME is OK.
What's missing from Desktop Linux now IMO?
GNOME printer status monitor needs support for escpdutil and libinklevel etc so people can easily check their printers ink levels. Can't believe this is still missing!
GNOME and KDE both lack a working, integrated tool for easily formatting removable USB/Firewire drives
Full Linux support from all hardware vendors
Anyone know when we can expect a Mandriva 2008 based PCLinuxOS?
8 • Installation of F8 (by cgrille on 2007-11-19 11:19:38 GMT from Germany)
I have had problems with the installation process of Fedora8, too. I have selected the standard packages, but at the end the message has shown that some kernel-packages couldn't installed and grub not configured - maybe the next time.
9 • caelinux (by sully on 2007-11-19 11:36:51 GMT from United States)
thanks for the link for caelinux. i've been looking for a linux - cad solution for a little while now. this seems to be an excellent place to start.
thanks again!!!
10 • Some comments (by KimTjik on 2007-11-19 11:55:55 GMT from Sweden)
"I suppose it's just a matter of reporting the bug in Red Hat's Bugzilla, which -- as a good open source citizen -- I promised myself to do as soon as I find a bit of spare time."
A very good comment and something many don't understand (it took me a while also to comprehend how this works)! Actually a plain simple article on how to deal with bugs would be a nice addition to DWW. As it is now more and more users adopt the habit of complaining in forums (and too often it's done by questioning the quality of the whole distribution) without ever checking whether a bug report is made. Since we have thousands of possible hardware- and software-configurations, how on earth could we expect developers to simulate all these for us? They need bug reports. If not a bug could very well be inherited for years. So what do you say Ladislav could this be a good headline for a future article: "How to file a bug report ?"
"It wasn't until I discovered yum-fastestmirror and yumex (Yum Extender) that package management on Fedora became an acceptable experience. Why aren't these two applications installed in Fedora by default?"
I wonder the same. Yumex has improved and have been upgraded several times this year, so it should deserve to come out in the light. Personally it doesn't bother me, but I understand that many new users of Fedora will feel a bit lost without such an application. On Fedora 7 though my experience was that upgrades were better done by the update-application, because Yumex had a strange habit of just sitting there and waiting if you didn't time after time move around the cursor or something like that; pretty weired.
"...I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the community part of Fedora now functions - the Livna.org packages were already in testing repositories before Fedora 8 final was released and I found them to be of very high quality."
Very true. I usually never use any other repositories besides Fedoras own and Livna. Livna deserves some kudos for great contributions to the Fedora users. Install the Livna rpm and the experience for a home user could become very smooth. Fedora isn't for everybody's liking, but it for sure deserves its place among the great ones.
A last comment about BLAG: Jeff Moe is such a funny guy when it comes to desktop design. Nearly every release looks the same: same icons and some wierd wallpapers! He says he likes it. I don't but I really likes his work and how he has a personal involvement in the forum, and the community is a pleasant one. I don't know how many I have installed BLAG to, but it's for sure a great number.
11 • gOS (by lancest on 2007-11-19 11:55:57 GMT from China)
Used gOS for almost 2 days. Like it alot. Looks like it has a great future. But Problems with fonts, printer install, unfamiliarities drove me back to Ubuntu 7.10. gOS is unfinished but could be bound for greatness as an internet focused system. The internet is the computer with gOS and people are buying it at Walmart!
12 • gOS (by Bob on 2007-11-19 12:53:06 GMT from United States)
Tried gOS - will not play YouTube videos.
13 • Fedora 8 Install issues (by Stefano on 2007-11-19 13:00:12 GMT from United Kingdom)
I had only one problem during installation: After the installation rebooed, Fedora would stop trying to resume from the swap partition (if swap was removed It would stop with the dollowing message "creating root device") I had to remove PCBSD and it worked fine. I had also noticed that the "setup wizard" (set up user account, FW and SELINUX) would not start so I hat to remove rhgb and quiet when booting....
I have realized that people can get "attached" also to distributions when I was almost giving up using F8 (see above BSD partition issue) to become an Ubuntu 7.10 user......
14 • Re: #5 (by lalala on 2007-11-19 13:00:38 GMT from United States)
The ubuntu fanboys have gamed the rankings since ubuntu first came out. This is a fact. Also, Google Trends is no more accurate than page hit rankings. Google Trends takes into account all pages, even negative ones , about distros. So, if you type in "ubuntu vs. fedora", ubuntu comes out on top, but it doesn't mean ubuntu is better or more popular, there are just more pages with the word "ubuntu" on it (including "i hate ubuntu", "ubuntu is stupid").
15 • RE: #14 (by Mike on 2007-11-19 13:15:36 GMT from United States)
... and pages with "I hate fedora" and "Fedora is stupid".
Google trends is still more accurate than page hits which are being rigged to keep a little known distribution on top.
16 • Fanboys? (by MatthewV on 2007-11-19 13:16:13 GMT from Australia)
Please... the subject of fanboys gaming the rankings, as mentioned above, seems to come up in the comments of every DWW. Can't people just let this rest for once, regardless of personal opinion? Bringing it up every time certainly doesn't help matters at all...
17 • SEL-crybabies (by Darwin H. Webb on 2007-11-19 13:29:15 GMT from United States)
It is very obvious that hardly any of you old farts using Linux know squat about the many different areas of computer security. I have 3 Fedora 8 systems running and they are great. I use LVM and SELinux. I use NO 3 party 20th Century programs.
I cp files according to the SELiux-policy contexts using an admin staging area with an admin user (root, newrole admin implied).
I also follow Fedora dev, testing, updates-testing, devel snapshots vs the Fedora Pre-Release snapshots so that I know what is broke before I install or workarounds for last minte problems.
I've used Fedora since FC3 and have had the same issues you all run into but now I know the difference between Fedora and those other 20th Century antiques mentioned.
I can assure you that Fedora (Redhat) knows what it is doing concerning security and running Fedora dumbed down in anyway it absurd because there are many more distro that have less bugs. Stable and reliable , cough, cough, .. until the system is compromised. Fedora SEurity does let the compromise occur. SELinux is here to stay so learn it. It is not that difficult and the tools for F8 are better than ever.
Lastly, it would be nice if all the review experts would actual use the final release and wait 30 days for the finishing updates (as is and has been Fedora's sop for a release for ever.)
Whoami Crybaby new role SELbaby
Welcome to the 21st Century
Darwin
18 • Rank This (by Professor Yaffle on 2007-11-19 13:33:05 GMT from United States)
Well, we Debian users hate the idea of 'selling out' and becoming too popular, so we've engineered bots to actually take away page hits from Debian, in order to make it look like Debian is less popular than it really is (the browser stats vs. the page hit rankings confirm this)!
19 • Re: #16 - Fanboys? (by Ariszló on 2007-11-19 13:44:12 GMT from Hungary)
I agree. Whining about PHR is getting very boring.
20 • re:18 The Distro that Must not be named! (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 13:50:25 GMT from United States)
LOL!
Finally, someone with a sense of humor!
Doesn't anyone realize that the constant mention of a Distro - ANY distro, in these discussions will prompt interest in that Distro among readers wondering what the discussion is about? Add to that a live CD that is not DVD sized and you have an internet junkie's possible answer to their search.
21 • Re: #12 • gOS (and YouTube videos) (by Ariszló on 2007-11-19 13:52:06 GMT from Hungary)
They just could not squeeze everything into 700 MB. First install gOS onto a hard disk partition and then install the flash player.
22 • page hit manipulation (by bones113 on 2007-11-19 13:55:25 GMT from United States)
All you "jealous" users of other distro's who keep whining about this so called little distro's popularity all I have to say is PROVE it.The fact of the matter is PCLinuxOS is a very good and I mean very good distro in it's own right and can either meet or exceed the other more"mainstream" or larger distro's in performance and dependability.Distrowatch mainainer's themselves have investigated this on multiple occaisions themselves and found no such evidence of manipulation.Yes we have a small dev team and have not been around as long as other distro's but we are a good distro and deserve whatever success we get.We are and will continue to be a up and coming distro and there is no reason for your whining.Leave it alone.If you like ubuntu or any other distro then use it.It's linux right.That is the most important thing.Get used to PclinuxOS.It is not going anywhere.
23 • Fedora KYum (by Ariszló on 2007-11-19 13:57:03 GMT from Hungary)
Another nice gui front-end for yum: yum install kyum
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=22185
24 • Mike @5 (by EduardoZ on 2007-11-19 14:21:18 GMT from United States)
Can't we please have one DWW issue without the whining about PHR? Your point, such as it is, has been made over and over and over. You've added nothing of value, here. Find something meaningful to care about.
25 • re: #7 • Mandriva 2008 and the Linux Desktop Revolution (by michael King at 2007-11-19 14:30:52 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have to agree with Dan, I have been bowled over with Mandiva 2008, I had upgrade troubles on my thinkpads with Ubuntu 7.10 and after trying all the latest popular distros I settled on Mandriva. I used the "easy Urpm" site enable the easy download of programs not on the LIve cd . (If you buy the powerpack version all the multimedia stuff works out of the box) Its now free to join the Mandriva club, and that gives you access to the pdf user guides/ downloads etc. I have used Ubuntu for 3 years but I have to confess this is a much better bet for a family pc/ex-windows user. Its such a shame the recent distrowatch review was on a Mac!
26 • RE: 23 • Fedora KYum (by Béranger on 2007-11-19 14:33:32 GMT from Romania)
Ariszló, KYum is unmaintained since 2005. Too bad...
27 • RE: 17 • SEL-crybabies (by Béranger on 2007-11-19 14:37:13 GMT from Romania)
It's fine to praise SELinux, but it's outrageous to do it in such a way that offends everybody else (i.e., those not using SELinux)!
The whole rant about the "20th Century programs", "those other 20th Century antiques", etc., versus "the 21st Century" is just ridiculous.
As for "wait 30 days for the finishing updates", this brings the supported lifetime of a Fedora release just one month shorter, and it's always a short one.
Foo your 21 century! Stick it in your udev!
28 • No subject (by Warp0 on 2007-11-19 14:40:29 GMT from United States)
Actually, iIf you look at google trends, there has been a massive increase in relative search volume for Mint and PCLOS in the last year, at the same time that Fedora, Slack, Suse, and Debian have been flat or downward. Ubuntu has been increasing but at a lower relative rate than Mint or PCLOS.
29 • Re: Fedora KYum (by Ariszló on 2007-11-19 14:51:54 GMT from Hungary)
What a shame! It is still included in the Fedora 8 repository, though, and is still doing the job nicely for me.
30 • @10 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 14:57:42 GMT from Malaysia)
Just to add that the biggest "bug" is sometimes (perhaps often) the user. :-)
I posted a couple of weeks ago that wireless wasn't working with Ubuntu 7.10 on my notebook. Instead of verifying that there was a problem, I searched the Ubuntu forums and was misled into believing that I needed to install acer_acpi by this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224349&highlight=acer_acpi. Not being too keen on installing a beta module from a third-party repo, I gave it another try last night and discovered the "problem" was that Ubuntu turns off the RF switch on each boot. Embarrassing!
31 • What's missing drom Desktop Linux (by glr on 2007-11-19 14:59:01 GMT from United States)
# 7 Comment by Dan MacDonald; “What's missing from Desktop Linux now IMO?”
No doubt Linux has been accepted well by thousands of corporations world wide. The corporate world still looks for “solid “support. The corporate mind set of looking to another corporation for immediate [assured] support is why RedHat, Novell/SuSE and and quickly growing Canonical/Ubuntu are the top Linux names known by most IT managers. Time is money and rather than having full time Linux experts on the payrolls, a standard “support” subscription is obviously less expensive. Also Linux is so solid, there isn't always a need for babysitting it like Windows servers.
The Linux desktop is finally getting the attention with the preinstalls from Dell, Everex, Lenovo, etc. Yes there is a lot missing but like the early iterations of Windows 95/98 many great “Shareware” type applications were written then by users themselves.
Linux has gained some great programming tools. It's time we that program begin to use them for those “missing applications and utilities” but now as open sourced. . In the past I've programmed [lightly] with Visual Basic and now Real Software offers a great IDE for Linux as a free download to use [NOT a demo for Linux]. They are a commercial company with an impressive MAC/Windows/Linux VB type Basic IDE with that alone puts Visual Basic to shame. Sure it's proprietary, but you can write and provide the source and compile applications for Linux easily.
Those that like Dephi (Object Oriented Pascal) have an alternative open source package called Lazarus. It is cross platform Windows/Linux. It claims even to be able to import some Delphi code.
Then there's Kdevelop under KDE for those C++ minded folks.
RealBasic http://www.realsoftware.com/ http://www.realsoftware.com/download/ (It's available in PCLinuxOS repositories too and as an *.deb download for Ubuntu)
Lazarus [part of the free Pascal project] http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Kdevelop http://www.kdevelop.org/
Those that have the ability and time, let's roll up our sleeves and write those GUI applications desktop Linux needs. My question is, is there anyplace (outside of Sourceforge) like a TwoCows of Linux new creations can be uploaded to, to share with the community?
32 • Funny! (by davemc on 2007-11-19 15:08:51 GMT from United States)
For all the "PCLos fanboi's are gaming the PHR" comments I see here and elsewhere, I notice that there seems to be more people disgruntled by the fact that people are complaining about the gaming, then there are about the possibility of it. I guess that is just the common trend of our times in that people seem more interested in burying their heads in the sand than actually be concerned about the problems occurring within their communities and taking action. Be happy then when things do seriously affect you personally, because you did nothing to stop it when you had the chance. Of course I am speaking generally about all things, but this PHR gaming does arguably have an impact on a distro's success or failure, its ability to attract developers and commercial support. It is NOT something that should be dismissed lightly, and Ladislav does not seem to take it lightly either, for good reason.
33 • Re: #31 • What's missing drom Desktop Linux (by Ariszló on 2007-11-19 15:13:11 GMT from Hungary)
My question is, is there anyplace (outside of Sourceforge) like a TwoCows of Linux new creations can be uploaded to, to share with the community?
E.g. Google Code: http://code.google.com/
34 • Not PHR-related (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 15:13:46 GMT from Malaysia)
It's great that SPSS 16 is now available for Linux but is there a good open-source alternative?
35 • gOS (by seatux on 2007-11-19 15:16:41 GMT from Malaysia)
Had a Uni only Install Fest about 5 days ago. Someone asked for gOS and i provided it. But it had one fundamental problem, no GUI way of unmounting flash disks. The machine kept locking up in booting or shut down till i replugged the drive back. In all, E17 needs more work for it to a easy OS for the masses.
With today's installfests, Ubuntu now is picked my many at my little event.
36 • No subject (by Nobody on 2007-11-19 15:29:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
PCLinuxOS is very good. I use and recommend it. However, whilst poor spelling and grammar has become a feature of children on both sides of the Pond, it is a shame that developers engage staff with such deficiencies. I am sure Mr Bones can find a suitable night-school class whilst we wait on ignorant politicians to provide the necessary resources.
37 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 15:30:25 GMT from United States)
Just a question to those who are continuing the discussion about the PHR.
Why does it bother you that PCLinuxOS is at the top of the list? Do you really lose sleep because others want to find out information about PCLinuxOS? Is this worse than if they go to the PCLinuxOS page directly?
I don't use PCLinuxOS. My distro is down a few notches on the list, and that doesn't bother me. My distro is already well known. I expect that new distros will be the subject of greater curiosity.
Why, why, why do you care? How does it harm you in any way? Please answer me. I read the same comments every week and want to understand what is the point. I'm apparently missing the most important thing in the Linux world, so I want to be informed. I'm begging you. Please tell me.
38 • Android by Google is a new phone 'linux' (by Greg Weber on 2007-11-19 15:32:44 GMT from Canada)
The gPhone turns out not just be one phone. It turns out the gPhone can be many phones. Google was not doing a phone like some speculated. It was really a platform or linux based distribution. They are thinking of licensing under an Apache type license. They call it Android. They have released a software development kit. It also has possible applications other then just a cell phone or smart phone. Just how free it is when it comes to freedom is still up for debate. There is a contest with $10 million in total awards. See below for links to other information like the contest.
http://code.google.com/android/index.html is maybe main site? http://code.google.com/android/adc.html is the contest. http://www.engadget.com/tag/android/ has more links to information.
39 • 34 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 15:35:27 GMT from United States)
It depends what you mean by "alternative". There are many statistical packages out there, but none would in any sense clone SPSS.
If you mean point and click, Gretl is a good choice. If you want to write your own programs, there is nothing better than R. That is quickly starting to dominate statistics, at least among academics. Octave can be used as a matrix package.
I'm not aware of anything with a GUI and shiny icons and all the features of SPSS that is also free software. However, depending on the functionality you want, you are unlikely to be unable to do anything you can currently do in SPSS. It's just that (like anything) there is a cost to switching software.
40 • Re: #31 (by AliasMarlowe at 2007-11-19 15:42:26 GMT from United States)
"My question is, is there anyplace (outside of Sourceforge) like a TwoCows of Linux new creations can be uploaded to, to share with the community?"
Check out freshmeat.net which hosts announcements of updated packages and new releases. It provides brief descriptions of the packages, including platform requirements and links to their home pages. It's overwhelmingly FOSS, but includes some free-as-in-beer non-FOSS software also.
41 • Fedora (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-11-19 15:46:25 GMT from Italy)
I am also impressed by Fedora 8, to the point of considering replacing openSUSE, which has a long list of minor but annoying bugs, with it.
Ladislav, have you considered using Smart as the package manager?
42 • page hit rank (by mark on 2007-11-19 15:58:32 GMT from United States)
The honesty of distrowatch is in question.
43 • #42 (by R on 2007-11-19 16:03:51 GMT from United States)
By WHOM???!! It has been said repeatedly...enough is enough!! Don't like the hit counter?? IGNORE IT!! Empty accusations devoid of proof just provide and never ending argument that everyone is tired of hearing. DROP IT!!!
44 • Free Hosting (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 16:07:19 GMT from United States)
"My question is, is there anyplace (outside of Sourceforge) like a TwoCows of Linux new creations can be uploaded to, to share with the community?"
code.google.com (under 100 megs) savannah.nongnu.org (requires the use of the GFDL in all documentation) icculus.org (focus on games) freepository.com developer.berlios.de
more can be found on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_hosting_facilities
45 • Off Topic (by ceti on 2007-11-19 16:08:32 GMT from Brazil)
XMMS 1.2.11 RELEASED!!!!!!
"1211 days ago we released 1.2.10, so what better day to release 1.2.11?"
Full story: http://www.xmms.org/
PS - Mandriva 2008.0 rules!
46 • gOS vs *buntu, plus Klikit (by Soloact on 2007-11-19 16:17:05 GMT from United States)
Same old lappy that I've been trying to get a current Linux Distro installed on, an AMD K6-2 lappy with 192MB RAM. No *buntu live CDs would boot to GUI login, Kubuntu alternate would install, but sluggish, Xubuntu alternate would install, and actually runs well. I downloaded and tried the gOS Live CD, which booted right up, and runs well on that old thing. Even fast, for a Live CD. Am debating installing it on that lappy for a web-browsing machine for someone who isn't very computer-literate. There is still a learning curve, but a very slight one, even for a newbie to Linux. BTW, the person in question has never used a computer, so they'll get to learn the right way, the Linux way. On another note, still waiting for Klikit Linux to make it to the database from the "waiting list". Another great distro to get newbies started for not-so-ancient-as-that-lappy PCs. As always, I'm the continuously-learning end-user. Cheers everyone!
47 • Embarrasment of Riches (by Justin Whitaker on 2007-11-19 16:23:06 GMT from United States)
I find myself with copies of Fedora 8, openSUSE 10.3, Mandriva 2008, and Ubuntu 7.10, and PCLinuxOS 2007, all of which are great solutions for moving away from XP.
Instead of worrying about PHR, maybe people should take a step back and enjoy the fact that we have so many good options these days?
48 • PCLinuxOS (by Brad on 2007-11-19 16:52:00 GMT from United States)
PCLinuxOS, Mint, Ubuntu Ultimate Edition are the best distros. Why don't you just install PCLOS, use it for a couple of days and then see if you still feel like bitching about "gaming".
49 • Re: 7 • Mandriva 2008 and the Linux Desktop Revolution (by Dan MacDonald) (by davecs on 2007-11-19 16:52:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
You asked when a version of PCLinuxOS based on Mandriva 2008 will be out. The probable answer is "never". PCLinuxOS is a "meta distro". That means that it sets out to morph directly from one version to the next just by doing the regular updates. This means that some of the base system and compilers cannot be updated and when they become obsolete, we can no longer carry on and have to rebase and bring out a new version.
Late last year, the PCLOS dev team rebased on Mandriva, and worked on it for quite a few months before the final release. This meant that PCLOS users had to re-install for the first time in about 3 years. Let's hope the excellent base we got from Mandriva and other stuff incorporated from other distros and our own hackers can mean that we can use this base for another 3 years before forcing our users to reinstall.
At present, if you install PCLOS 2007 you will be presented with about 600Mb of updates. So the next release of PCLOS will be an update. Tex and Co are currently working on some stuff to ensure that more hardware will be correctly detected and set up, especially wireless cards. But existing users just need to keep updated through synaptic and they will have the same system.
Whilst we won't rebase unless we have to, if there is stuff in Mandriva 2008 or indeed any other distro which we can use under the GPL to improve PCLOS, we will!
By the way, that's why the dev team at PCLOS doesn't bash other distros. Each distro depends on every other one for new ideas, and the GPL reinforces this. PCLOS devs and others pioneered the "Installable Live CD" now it's pretty standard stuff. We all give, we all take, and Linux improves.
50 • gOs experience (by Phil T on 2007-11-19 16:59:38 GMT from United States)
This weekend I installed gOS on an old HP Vectra, PIII 500Mhz, 256Mb RAM, Matrox G200 video. Runs remarkably well. I had to install the Flash plugin and didn't get audio first time around. Installed ALSA mixer and then audio worked. All in all a pretty nice looking desktop. I was able to size down the icon bar so it wasn't quite so cartoony looking.
51 • Embarrasment of Riches... (by capricornus on 2007-11-19 17:08:18 GMT from Belgium)
Embarrasment of Riches (by Justin Whitaker on 2007-11-19 16:23:06 GMT from United States) I find myself with copies of Fedora 8, openSUSE 10.3, Mandriva 2008, and Ubuntu 7.10, and PCLinuxOS 2007, all of which are great solutions for moving away from XP.
I too, I'm about being fed up by all the silly discussions about PCLOS. We indeed have great distro's at no price, and they come in herbal colors and flavours, a richness that Window$ never knew. It gives all the people involved the (hidden) chance to discover the neighbour and his improvements in Linux Gardening: the consumer enjoys the fruits of that activity, isn't it?
Let PCLOS (and SAM) being discoverd a lot. Who really cares? Let the people that visit DW being interested in the alternatives, like Mepis and Mint etcetera. Don't chase them by bashing around like wild goose on the run for some fox that isn't there.
Let us enjoy the Linux Riches, displayed at DW. Make yourself 15 partitions and enjoy all these jewels of intelligence and perseverance.
52 • PCLinuxOS (by Brad on 2007-11-19 17:24:57 GMT from United States)
an addenda to my previous post: I feel remiss in not mentioning Mepis as one of the very best. It is terrific! I also think Pardus is up there too. Foresight has a new GUI for its groundbreaking package manager which I have yet to try - it is another top drawer distro - and Frugalware is great too. Now I am pretty sure that I have mentioned my favorites of the 50 or so that I have used over the last year (my first year with Linux).
53 • re:nobody from united kingdom (by bones113 on 2007-11-19 17:37:00 GMT from United States)
Comment deleted (insulting).
54 • Page Hit Rankings (by JimK on 2007-11-19 17:41:00 GMT from United States)
I think it's time to do away with the page hit rankings. Whether they're gamed or not, they've lost their credibility and therefore don't serve any purpose. Before, I was neutral about the rankings, since I didn't really look at them that much. But now, I get tired of all the people accusing one camp or another of manipulating them. It would be nice to read a DWW without all the bickering.
55 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 17:48:40 GMT from United States)
Maybe there could be comment system under the PHR. That way it would be easy to ignore those comments. And by the way, those comments usually have nothing to do with DWW anyway, so they are off-topic.
56 • Mepis 7.0 rc1 Released Nov. 19 (by Eddie Wilson on 2007-11-19 17:55:05 GMT from United States)
Just a note to say that SimplyMepis 7.0 rc1 has been released today. Thank You, Eddie
57 • gOS is base Ubuntu 7.10 using E17 DE (by Nemo on 2007-11-19 17:59:00 GMT from United States)
46 • gOS vs *buntu, plus Klikit (by Soloact on 2007-11-19 16:17:05 GMT from United States) Same old lappy that I've been trying to get a current Linux Distro installed on, an AMD K6-2 lappy with 192MB RAM. No *buntu live CDs would boot to GUI login,..... I downloaded and tried the gOS Live CD, which booted right up, and runs well on that old thing. Even fast, for a Live CD. Am debating installing it on that lappy for a web-browsing machine for someone who isn't very computer-literate.
It's an *buntu using E17 desktop, repos and all.
58 • gOS mini-review (by JimK on 2007-11-19 18:11:09 GMT from United States)
I tied gos. I like the concept of a simple desktop, and gos provides that. It has a very limited number of apps, settings etc.
The desktop was a little too green for my tastes. You can change it, but I believe there were no alternative wallpapers included.
The panel at the bottom looks and behaves like OS X. But it was at the left instead of being centered and since it's invisible you couldn't see the right edge of it, so it appeared that the buttons just got cut off there. And the running apps got a separate icon to the right of the panel, so if you were running Firefox, for example, you would see one Firefox icon in the panel and one in the running-apps area but you can't see where the panel stops and the running-apps space begins. So I think that design needs to be reconsidered for future versions.
There's a Google search bar at the top right of the desktop, but if you have a lot of mounted volumes, their icons or the install-to-disk icon will be covered up by the search bar. Also, when you use the search bar, your results come back in Web Runner instead of Firefox. Maybe that's so it will be faster, but I think it seems silly to have a second browser in a distro whose goal is to simplify.
Gos comes with Firefox, Skype, OpenOffice.org and Gimp. Most of the other panel buttons take you to Google Web apps, such as GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps etc. When you click on a Google app button it opens Firefox and takes you to the corresponding Web page, or, if Firefox is already running, it takes you to the Web app page in a new tab. Unfortunately, Picassa was missing, which isn't actually a Web app, but I did kind of expect to see it with the other Google apps. I don't know if gOS has a plain old text editor, but I sure couldn't find one.
I thought that since it was so stripped down, I might be able to fit it onto a 2G flash drive. But I couldn't quite squeeze it all on there, even using ext2 FS (and I don't believe there was an option for a custom install, so I couldn't just leave off OpenOffice and Gimp to make it fit).
I think with a little more work gOS will make a great little Distro for people who don't want to fiddle around with their operating system and just want an easy way to call up some apps.
59 • @53 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 18:16:15 GMT from Malaysia)
Why is it that the PHR doesn't seem to have attracted much attention while PCLOS was #2 but has been the subject of a majority of posts in the Comments section ever since PCLOS displaced Ubuntu?
By the way, Ladislav has an interesting review of Fedora 8 in DWW this week and it's definitely worth a click on the "DWW Only" link at the bottom of this page.
60 • @39 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 18:21:49 GMT from Malaysia)
Thanks for the info. Will try Gretl this weekend.
61 • Why no Ubuntu in the Upcoming Releases? (by Andrew Fountain on 2007-11-19 18:22:45 GMT from Canada)
I was wondering why Ubuntu is not listed in the Upcoming Releases? The dates are available here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyReleaseSchedule
62 • Mandriva (by plock on 2007-11-19 18:26:34 GMT from Sweden)
I agree with Dan MacDonald concerning Mandriva 2008. It's fantastic! It's the best looking and working release this season among the major distributions. On the other side, openSUSE 10.3 is a terrible one. Overall it looks ugly, buggy and works slowly. It seems that Novell has been sleeping during the last month
63 • DW in general (by 2cents on 2007-11-19 18:31:31 GMT from United States)
I don't have a whole lot of issue with the ranking system, I can just not look at it. The real problem I have is the top 10 distros (less but giving it some credit) are always featured in DWW this is so bogus! What's the point it doesn't separate you form any blog or Linux review site. You have the top one's being "watched" I would love to see some either I've never heard of or have heard of but never thought of installing them. Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, SUSE over and over and when not featuring one of the top it's something that has nothing to do with a distros.
Not to be to hard on DW. I can only imagine how hard it is to keep the site going. But I would rather have some good quality, then some review of a distro that I can find a many reviews just like it. It would be nice to feature the niche distro. If following the rankings the bottom half. Yes we got Blag this week but it was just a shout out, great for Blag but I would have rather read about an experience installing Blag.
Thanks for the hard work on the site.
Ladislav have you thought about asking for volunteers to submit reviews of lesser know distros? That would be true to the Linux philosophy, a community build the distro not one man. Just a thought again thanks for your hard work!
64 • @36 Question of Nobody (by alanbcohen on 2007-11-19 18:41:11 GMT from United States)
Okay, some people talk fast, omit commas, leave out spaces after periods. I don't know bones113 and I am not aware if he is part of the Ripper Gang (PCLOS' development team). I have no knowledge if he is a native English (either side of the pond) speaker. Out of curiosity, why do YOU care about his grammar? And, how is that relevant to the discussion of various versions of Linux?
65 • Re: 64 -- PCLinuxOS Ripper Gang (by davecs on 2007-11-19 19:05:54 GMT from United Kingdom)
It's easy to discover who is and who is not part of the PCLinuxOS development team. Just see the list here:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=69
Hope this helps
66 • gOS (by Bob Hunter on 2007-11-19 19:16:09 GMT from United States)
in response to #4,
gOS is a neat idea, poorly implemented. I've been running it for about 2 weeks now on a 500MHz box with 512MB of ram. Here are the main problems with it:
1. The menus do not auto-update when you add or remove software and there is no obvious way to edit them manually either. If there is a way to edit the menus, newbies will never find it. gOS needs to fix this as soon as possible.
2. Menus only cascade to the right and actually go off the right side of the screen rather than cascade to the left.
3. If you install certain apps using synaptic, you will get upgraded to a full gnome desktop with no easy way to switch back to enlightenment. And gOS has a custom GDM that doesn't let you choose DE.
67 • PHP not compiling on Fedora 8 ? (by LoveTux on 2007-11-19 19:23:04 GMT from United States)
> I was rather shocked to discover that PHP on Fedora 8 is compiled with > the "--without-sqlite" flag.
No matter how brave you might be; do-it-yourself attitude is not always the only choice. Use XAMPP instead:
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/index.html
68 • Mover over Linux (by Move Over on 2007-11-19 19:46:50 GMT from United States)
I got to say something big here, I was(am a bit) linux user for past 7 years, but its time to move over to something new and big,
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=indiana
The Indian project from openSolaris, I don't know if you have downloaded and tried this but I am very impressed for a beta.
Oh and PCLinuxOS is ok my favorite is still Debian, for something to be this alive for this long is great work!!
69 • @54 PHR (by Kanis on 2007-11-19 19:55:22 GMT from Italy)
I completely agree. I've said it before and I'm more convinced now: I bet DWW and the whole Linux world would be better without PHR. It's sad, but they are really stealing space to more interesting topics, both in&out DWW :((
70 • PHR (by Justin Whitaker on 2007-11-19 20:08:51 GMT from United States)
The whole page hit rankings discussion is a non-issue.
Ladislav has said on several times that the PHR are only indicative of page hits on his site, not of any sense of worth, utility, or value of the projects he covers.
In other words, you are complaining about the accuracy of something that he put up for fun. It's not accurate, it never will be, and it should not be used as a metric for anything.
I don't know what people have to say to you folks who accuse Ladislav of preferential treatment, etc., to get you to believe that he is not biased..other than to say that you can always start your own Distro news site and have it represent your own biases.
If you want to game the page hit ranking counter to make yourself feel better about your choice of Linux distributions, then I feel really sorry for you, because yours is an empty life.
Let's get down to making Linux better, and innovative, and stop kicking each other in the teeth.
71 • Fedora 8 + VMWare + Windows (by fin on 2007-11-19 20:08:53 GMT from Finland)
I now have a dual boot machine with Fedora 8 and Windows XP.
Is it possible to run my existing XP installation on Fedora using VMWare? Or some other virtualization software.
72 • @65 and note to Ladislav (by alanbcohen on 2007-11-19 20:19:01 GMT from United States)
Thanks Davecs, I really wasn't asking about bone113, I knew I didn't recognize the handle from the PCLOS fora (I'm aka The_Dadu). It doesn't matter who bones113 is, Nobody's comments on bone's grammar simply didn't add up.
Ladislav, I will continue to enjoy your efforts to communicate with all of us. Do entirely what you will with YOUR website!
73 • PHR , Distro "X" bashing (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 20:25:18 GMT from United States)
Are you people stupid or just morons? What does it MATTER!??! The point here is to inform people and have them switch to LINUX. NOT distro "X", and not because of PHR! Its no wonder more reporters are saying Linux is not ready or will never be ready. It is because of YOU that they write this stuff. GET OVER IT.
74 • gOS (by dooooo on 2007-11-19 21:21:04 GMT from Jordan)
We would've never heard of gOS without the Walmart offer . The question is: why using E17 as a DE while trying selling Linux PCs to completely newbies . Do they hate Linux and want it to fail as a desktop OS choice . If they thought KDE and Gnome are heavy , why not using XFCE . It is definitely light and newbie friendly yet almost fully featured compared to E17 .
75 • Not! (by Whitespiral on 2007-11-19 22:08:25 GMT from Mexico)
"I think it's time to do away with the page hit rankings."
Of course not. The community needs rankings. In fact, it needs several different rankings! This discussion will show up no matter who stands on top. Today's that's PCLinuxOS, but someday it will be Mint, or gOS, who knows.
But it's still suspicious that this proposal wasn't offered when Ubuntu was on top, I wonder why....
76 • Really?!! (by davemc on 2007-11-19 22:15:51 GMT from United States)
"49 • Re: 7 • Mandriva 2008 and the Linux Desktop Revolution (by Dan MacDonald) (by davecs on 2007-11-19 16:52:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
PCLOS devs and others pioneered the "Installable Live CD" now it's pretty standard stuff. We all give, we all take, and Linux improves."
Really?.. Where did you get THAT from?
...Hello!! Knoppix?
77 • @76 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 22:23:55 GMT from United States)
But, was Knoppix installable early on, when it was the pioneer Live CD. Me not sure.
>> "Installable Live CD"
78 • RE: gOS and #74 (by Bob Hunter on 2007-11-19 22:37:02 GMT from United States)
Gooooo, you are right, I think.
I have gOS installed on a 500MHz box with 512MB or ram and it runs pretty well. And it really is a neat concept, despite all of it's flaws. But I just don't see it as a good choice for newbies. A slimmed down and customized Xubuntu would have a better choice.
79 • oops (by Bob Hunter on 2007-11-19 22:38:35 GMT from United States)
oops, your name is Dooooo. Sorry about that.
80 • Re 76 Knoppix / PCLOS live CDs (by davecs on 2007-11-19 22:40:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
Knoppix was designed primarily as a Live CD, but not an Installable Live CD. At the time PCLinuxOS v0.4 first appeared, it was possible to install Knoppix, but it was not straightforward and that was not Knoppix's primary aim.
PCLinuxOS was designed from the start as an installable live CD. It's philosophy being "try before you commit". Now this is commonplace. But it wasn't 3 years ago.
The two distros are very different from that point of view.
81 • Re: Knoppix (by stone.otter on 2007-11-19 22:59:27 GMT from United States)
Back in the earlier days of knoppix the hd install command (at least one of them) was knx-hdinstall
82 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-11-19 23:05:48 GMT from United States)
Which distro will make it to the end? http://209.10.215.70/mp3/forum/2007/september/forum_0917.mp3
83 • Re: 57 gOS is base Ubuntu 7.10 using E17 DE (by Soloact on 2007-11-19 23:18:41 GMT from United States)
Yeah, I know about the base of gOS being Ubuntu, but none of the live K/X/Ed/ubuntus would boot on that old machine, and their alternate install discs still needed video configuration, as they all default to 24-bit color. gOS properly configured the video color depth at 16-bit and the low resolution that the old lappy is capable of, at boot, and it did boot. Also ran quite fast by comparison to other, older, Live Distros that would boot. gOS is good for what it is, basically an Internet browsing OS for beginners.
84 • Fedora 8 (by Shrek on 2007-11-19 23:19:32 GMT from United States)
Tried Fedora on my home system. The I386 version simply didn't load. The x86_64 loaded fine, but I was unable to get Java to work..at all. Otherwise a very fast distro.
Shrek
85 • ultumix (by craig on 2007-11-19 23:22:54 GMT from United States)
anyone know where to get ultumix I had the same problem with penut I only found a couple places with bit torrents for it and they never work
86 • Windows Replacement (by Paul on 2007-11-19 23:34:44 GMT from United States)
"If you want to replace Windows, which you seem to know very well, by something that works like Windows and looks like Windows, please just keep using Windows. Linux is not a replacement, it is a different operating system..." -- Klaus Knopper, Linux Magazine Dec 2007.
Ain't he great?
87 • Linux among noobs and non-noobs alike (by Landor on 2007-11-20 00:41:47 GMT from Canada)
I was in a meeting this morning with a man I never met before and the subject of computers came up. I discussed my use of DOS, Unix, BSD, Linux, and Windows with him. He was a graduate of Computer Sciences, I believe at a local university. He didn't like windows either and told me he used Linux full-time. We talked about distros and such and he said he had given up on tinkering and sticks with one distro now. More on that in a sec.
I know quite a few people who either used Linux already, or, I steered towards Linux for it's obvious advantages.
Almost all of these people, even my friend who still can't get his "ATI 2400" (chuckles) graphic card to work, use Linux solely at home, and no dual-boot.
The funny thing that I came to realize is the majority of them have chose Ubuntu or it's Flavours (almost everyone I know that has a set distro uses Kubuntu). One uses Mepis, another Sidux, and only one other uses Fedora.
The ones that I found distro-hop are the younger ones. But that's not always true either. My son for instance. He's quite happy with Gentoo, he has it on 2 systems and his PS3 as I've said, and has 0 desire to change, as he told me today discussing this. :)
What does it say for Linux? Linux works and most people are just happy to have a system do what they want, easily, and when they find it, they stick with it and go about their nomal lives. It also says a lot for Debian based distros, as well as KDE for a familiar/well laid out DE.
On one other point. None of the people I know use PCLOS at all, including those that distro-hop.
I may not be a fan of Ubuntu, but it sure has made it's mark.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
88 • No subject (by Warp0 on 2007-11-20 00:52:06 GMT from United States)
None of the people I know use Gentoo at all, including those that distro-hop. Course, that means nothing and I'm wise enough to realize that.
89 • No Subject regarding No Subject (by Landor on 2007-11-20 01:01:46 GMT from Canada)
Now there's two of us that do not know anyone who uses a certain distro. (grins)
Though one of us is wise about realizing something means nothing but still talks about it regardless. ;-) ;-)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
90 • RE: 61 Why no Ubuntu in the Upcoming Releases? (by ladislav on 2007-11-20 01:15:43 GMT from Taiwan)
Because right below the title in the link you provided, this is what I see in bold, capitalised letters:
THIS IS A WORKING DRAFT. NO DATES ARE FINAL. DO NOT PUBLISH.
91 • 71 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 01:17:00 GMT from United States)
I think you mean you have XP installed on an existing partition and want to access that installation and installed programs (without reinstalling everything, which may not even be possible).
This guide may be of interest. It is not a trivial, one-minute operation.
http://news.u32.net/articles/2006/07/18/running-vmware-on-a-physical-partition
92 • 71 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 01:23:23 GMT from United States)
Also, this will constitute a major hardware change so you will have to reactivate your copy of XP. Doing that once shouldn't be a problem, but you will have to call Microsoft. The joy of restricted software!
I've never done it but that is my understanding. Anyone who knows better feel free to chime in.
93 • re 72 (by Bones113 on 2007-11-20 02:28:53 GMT from United States)
I have been a active member of the pclos forums for over 2 years now.I am not a member of the dev team but am a active supporter of pclinuxos and linux in general.My typing is not as good as other's but I found nobody's comments insulting to me yet my post was deleted.Go figure.The maintainers of this site can do whatever they so choose.I must defend my favorite distro from accusations of dishonesty.Pclinuxos is a good distro with honest,good people.I wish people would just get over it.
94 • @ 68 (by Emelio on 2007-11-20 03:00:12 GMT from United States)
Yep, Debian is here to stay. And these so-called Debian forked distros wouldn't even exist without the Grandfather. Hell, SimplyMepis saw the light and went back. And I must say - Warren has done a good job with the 7 beta. He doesn't destroy the factual standards, force it on the users and render the documentation useless. If I wasn't a die hard Debian user, SimplyMepis 7 would be for me.
95 • Linux mint. (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 03:06:29 GMT from Canada)
Got a new notebook with Vista. Quickly got fed up with the slowness and general eye candy vs. substance. Tried PCLinuxOS because of DistroWatch and I wanted KDE. Internet and sound didn't even work. Tried new Ubuntu since I had it on my old PC. Good, but a hassle to install codecs, play DVDs etc. Then tried Linux Mint because it is based on Ubuntu and I was always impressed with Ubuntu's stability and update features. Finally found a real out-of-the-box distro. Java, Flash, DVDs, even wifi work without ANY other installation. I usually don't write to these kinds of things but I would definitely recommend this distro. I hope it lasts a long time.
96 • Bones113 @93 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 03:42:38 GMT from United States)
Your post is still there, #22.
97 • Is the "Radically Simple" distro an unfounded MYTH? (by Simple Minds on 2007-11-20 03:48:17 GMT from Australia)
"....Believe me, for last 14 days I am toiling hard but still nothing productive happened. oh my god after hundreds of hours toil I could not get my graphics card working on the Radically Simple PCLOS....." http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=26&topic=34805.msg272528#msg272528
PCLOS 2007 Live CD does NOT contain the "915resolution" package and if you need it and don't have internet connection, you are in trouble! That is what happened to the guy above. There are millions of PCs that require/required (new xorg with new "intel" [experimental] driver don't need it anymore) this package and surely the PCLOS TOUTS would admit to a serious flaw in their beloved distro? :-)
98 • font (by napoli on 2007-11-20 03:56:38 GMT from United States)
Not to interrupt the distro bashing, or KDE v gnome thing, but has anyone noticed that all of a sudden, the fonts in several distros(I do distro hop quite a bit), like Fedora 8, Ubuntu 7.10, Mint and PCLinuxOS now render fonts extremely well, at least on my LCD monitor with slight subpixel on. And I do mean a great improvement over previous versions. Have the Distro devs decided to use BCI on for the fonts or has someone figured out how to vastly improve font hinting?
A linux in general fanbboy!
99 • RE 98 • font (by napoli) (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 04:03:40 GMT from Australia)
Maybe its the Liberation Font set developed by Red Hat?
IMO, though font rendering may be much improved it still "not there yet" and I found myself installing the msttcore font set or importing my own from my xp partition.
100 • Install Problems: Pardus-2007.3 and Gutsy power pc (by chris on 2007-11-20 04:35:52 GMT from United States)
I've had the new Pardus install fail on several machines. Pardus has had installer problems before. I'm trying this workaround: In my installed Pardus-2007.2's Change the Pardus repository from Pardus-2007.2 to Pardus-2007.3 and do an upgrade.
It's more than a month since Gutsy was released and the Power PC version still won't install. The Power PC version is community maintained.
chris
101 • PCLos Voting WebBot Crashes! (by wb on 2007-11-20 04:43:37 GMT from United States)
Watching the 7-day Hit Per Day PCLos votes have been: 3462-3471-3322-3203-3083-2983-2860-2682 Looks like only one WebBot has gone down. The others are still pumping away.
102 • Fluxbuntu (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 05:18:03 GMT from United States)
I hope you will consider a donation to the Fluxbuntu project. I have been playing with it for a while now, since the new release. It really is a great distro: nice to look at, works on truly old computers, is the result of a lot of hard work by the devs. Plus, it gives access to the Ubuntu repos and is still Ubuntu.
I like it so much I am seriously considering putting it on all of my computers. It is much improved from the earlier versions.
My belief is that Linux use will grow rapidly on old machines now that Microsoft has increased hardware requirements so much. Fluxbuntu does an excellent job in that area.
103 • gOS and PCLOS (by beany on 2007-11-20 06:42:14 GMT from United States)
Last week when I was taking a break from gaming the ranking for my PCLOS I installed gOS onto one of my laptop partitions. I have Mandriva, Ubuntu, and PCLOS on the others. PCLOS is by far the one that works wonderfully. My Mandriva is riddled with problems, Ubuntu is still only halfway there for me. gOS seems to be working very well, Enlightenment is pretty cool and I also installed KDE on my gOS and it runs well. I'm not sure why it is that the gOS and PCLOS work so well and the distros that they are based on are giving me so many troubles. Maybe some of my PCLOS bots spread out to the other partitions and sabotaged them.
104 • #89 (by *.* on 2007-11-20 07:27:32 GMT from United States)
Landor , Everyone one I know use PCLOS. So Keep your stick in your ***
105 • #97 (by *.* on 2007-11-20 07:37:07 GMT from United States)
No internet , no electricity , no "915resolution" --keep yourself warm in the cave. BTW how do you post here?? Was it "Radically Simple"??
106 • Re: all the distros I ever ran and whether I liked it or not. (by Yeoman Rand on 2007-11-20 08:55:57 GMT from Canada)
1. First I ran Mandrake 10 or something but didn't like it. I had Windows XP too and I didn't like it. 2. Then I ran suse 9.1 pro and liked it. (I think I ran it but I can't remember for sure, but if I did I'm sure I would have liked it) 3. Then I ran suse 9.2 and liked it. 4. Then I ran suse 9.3 and liked it. 5. Then I ran Debian 3.0 and didn't like it. Later I would realize I should have liked it. 6. Then I ran Fedora 4 and didn't like it. 7. Then I ran FreeBSD 6.1 and liked it. 8. Then I ran Slackware at the same time as FreeBSD and liked it. I was also running Suse 10.0 at this time and I liked it. That was the only time I liked 3 different operating systems on my computer at the same time. 9. Then I only ran opensuse 10.1 and I didn't like it. 10. Then I panicked and ran Ubuntu 6.06 and thought I didn't like it. I later realized that I was being protective of my favorite suse 10.0. I was just jealous that it worked faster. 11. Then I ran Kubuntu and I didn't like it. 12. Then I ran Vector and I liked it. 13. Then I ran Yoper and didn't like it. 14. Then I ran Solaris and didn't like it. 15. Then I ran dynebolic and didn't like it. 16. Then I ran Zenwalk and I liked it. 17. Then I ran Pardus and didn't like it. 18. Then I ran Fox Desktop and didn't like it. 19. Then I ran open suse 10.2 and liked it. 20. Then I ran Ubuntu 7.04 and I liked it now. 21. Then I ran Debian and liked it this time. But now I was tired of configuring my computer. 22. Then I ran Ubuntu 7.04 and liked it again. 23. Then I ran opensuse 10.3 and liked it. But Firefox opened 0.4 seconds slower than Ubuntu so I didn't like it as much. 24. Then I remembered Firefox didn't open as fast on all my suse installations so I retroactively didn't like them as much. Except for suse 9.3 which I still liked. 25. Then I remembered I ran PCLinuxOs between 19 and 20 and I liked it a little but I was still protecting opensuse in my mind. 26. Then I remembered I ran Damn Small, Puppy, Frugalware, Xandros, SymphonyOS, and some other distros and some I liked and some I didn't like, but I mostly didn't like them. 27. Then I realized I was spending way too much time on the computer so I didn't like Linux anymore. 28. Then I installed windows xp on a spare partition and I kind of liked it again. 29. Then I contracted a virus on widows xp the next day and didn't like it anymore either. 30. Then I realized I tried to run plan 9 somewhere in the teens, and thought I would have liked it except I could get it to run. 31. Then I realized I had wondered occasionally about running Gentoo but was glad I didn't because of some off-the-wall humour site that poked fun at Gentoo users because they thought they were the coolest. 32. Then I realized that at one time or another I had thought about installing Netbsd, openbsd, dragonfly bsd, centos, sidux and a bunch of other distros and retroactively hated myself for spending way too much time thinking about linux and bsd's. 33. Then I thought about getting rid of my computer. 34. Then I decided to just run Ubuntu because I liked it. 35. Then I stopped thinking about linux so much and started living more day to day. 36. Then I realized that I didn't want to be a geek anymore. 37. I didn't like the name Iceweasel so that's why I liked Ubuntu better than Debian. But I like Debian's logo better. A decision had to be made. 38. Now I like linux again. 39. I like traffic lights. 40. But only when they're green. 41. Now I run opensuse 10.3 and it's really cool. You should install apt for suse.
Keep you PCLOS CD on the ice. (Actually you will need about 20 CD's to make a puck)
107 • #106 (by *.* on 2007-11-20 09:13:13 GMT from United States)
old stuff..and it's not funny to read it again
108 • #95 (by HAL on 2007-11-20 11:50:46 GMT from France)
> "I was always impressed with Ubuntu's stability and update features."
hugh! I supppose/hope that this is a joke... Stability? hmm not really. Update features? hmm. Not the upgrade of a version to the other in all cases. I hate to have to make a new install every six months...
109 • Re: all the distros I ever ran and whether I liked it or not. (by Yeoman Rand on 2007-11-20 12:06:01 GMT from Canada)
Comment deleted (duplicate).
110 • Congratulations (by LloydAlex on 2007-11-20 12:09:52 GMT from Canada)
Hi everyone, An associate of mine just introduced me to Linux recently and I'd just like to say that it's definitely the best hobby system I've ever seen. Keep up the good work!
111 • Please Think Before You Speak (by Friend of PCLOS on 2007-11-20 12:25:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
Up Front Disclosure: PCLOS 2007 is my primary linux distro, with Ubuntu 7.10 running in a VM, as my experience with both distros has been extremely positive and productive.
To fellow PCLOS users who feel the need to defend the distro ... don't. You only come across as raving fanboys, and make matters worse. Learn to let the criticism slide off your back. Eventually, the whole PHR matter will die off, and this comment board will get back to useful topics again. Throwing up comments like #22 only feeds the fire, and #104/105 add no value whatsoever. I can't imagine Texstar or any of the developers sinking that low on these pages, so please behave with the same level of dignity as them.
Ladislav ... thank you for all of your work here, and your patience with some of the posters. I've found this to be an invaluable resource in my 3 years of linux hopping.
Now, back to playing with the Fedora 8 Live CD, to see another distro in action, and learn more ...
112 • PCLinuxOS (by Lutfi Yelkenci on 2007-11-20 12:43:34 GMT from Turkey)
I used PLOS for a while. Why i do not use anymore is, it's KDE always crashes on my laptop. So in my opinion it's not so good distro
I use Ubuntu now, but i think Fedora and openSuse both best distros that i have ever used
Never used Debian...
113 • Linux vs. Windows (by Jeff on 2007-11-20 13:07:58 GMT from United States)
I generally read Distrowatch every morning when I arrive at work. Unfortunately, I am forced to use Windows there. We are even locked into Internet Explorer as our system administrator thinks IE is more secure than any of the alternatives???? At home the entire family is Linux centric. Between the four of us we run versions of Debian, PCLinuxOS, and CentOS.
Thank you for the excellent resource, Jeff
114 • Choice?.. Freedom?.. (by davemc on 2007-11-20 13:56:11 GMT from United States)
This whole discussion, twisted as it is, has just reinforced the whole notion that DW's PHR is doing NOTHING positive whatsoever for the Linux Community. It has created infighting and divisions where none existed before. It does NOT accurately reflect anything at all about X or Y distro. It needs to be removed from public viewing and should be used strictly privately for data gathering and research behind the scenes, where it would actually be of some real value. Because of the gaming on it now, it cant even be used for that.
DW is truly a wonderful website. Its main function seems to be to represent and advertise all Linux Distro's. It can do that just as well, if not much better, by advertising those Distro's and publishing their releases, as well as providing links to download sites, without including rankings. Afterall, it seems to be human nature to compete and "be the best", and some people take this to extremes, which even when done in good nature, can cause alot of political infighting which is not something the Linux world needs right now, especially given the fact that the Linux world badly needs to UNITE in the face of much stronger commercial interest group opposition.
Ladislav, please either remove the public rankings, and repost the private results on your weekly newsletter, or get rid of them entirely in the public realm.
115 • @97 - 915 Resolution available on almost any Distro (by alanbcohen on 2007-11-20 14:05:32 GMT from United States)
No one CD or live CD can support all features on every machine, there are simply too many variations of hardware combinations out there. I'm glad you found a distro that serves your needs. I was unsuccessful in installing 'buntu on an external drive at a 'buntu install fest this past summer in Maryland. The PCLOS team 'decided' (how and why I've never asked) to leave the '915' driver off the live CD with over 2gb compressed files. My Acer 9504 laptop needs the 915 resolution file to display it's primary 1440x900 image. It has been running PCLOS with '915' installed from the standard repositories since PCLOS2007 was released. Before that, it was running the same in 0.93a 'Big Daddy'. I would expect '915' to be available on almost any distro. Sorry you spent so much time 'spinning your wheels'. If you should try PCLOS again, I'd suggest the Forums as your 'ask questions' for items like this. There are no guarantees in life, but many of us would try to help.
116 • you should try this fluxbuntu, pardus, my story (by Dopher on 2007-11-20 14:24:20 GMT from Belgium)
yesterday i finally installed fluxbuntu, since on Saturday xubuntu seemed a bit to heavy after all.
Before that on wednesday i was working with the latest madriva. that worked about 3 days. as a matter of fact, nothing was wrong with it, but i just liked the theme of xubuntu so much that i convinced myself i had to migrate to it.
the week before pclinuxOS which was working okay, but i didn't liked blue.
Now on wednessday my brother called me, and he wanted to do a voIP conversation. I told him he had a to wait a little, because i was busy configuring mandriva (or what was it again?) saturday he called me again, and asked if i could send him my a picture i made once of his car. And whether we could discuss this through Skype. I told him that i had just installed xubuntu, and that i had to configure it, and that the pictures where still in the backup that needed to be extracted. I had to configure my mail client to work with my account again. would be done in a couple of hours.
Next day he called again, to ask me if i could send the picture, and wheteher we could discuss the matter by gizmo or skype. I told him that i just wiped my configured xubuntu from the computer and i was busy configuring fluxbuntu. And when it comes to skype or gizmo.. wait a few minutes, i have to apt-get it and configure it.
"Can't you just scan the picture with the scanner instead?" he asked. i answerred that that might be possible, if i configured the scanner again for my new installed fluxbuntu system. Or he could wait while i transfer my compressed backups to my new installation and extracted it, configured my email client, and then i could send it to him.
I'm really looking forward to the latest pardus, which i will probably install tomorrow, since the screenshots look very promissing.
My brother now uses the phone to talk to me, and we use snailmail and paper and enveloppes to send each other documents or pictures.
117 • Re:116 (by Dopher on 2007-11-20 14:34:37 GMT from Belgium)
btw, i am writing this from my girfriends pc, since my current pc is in the middle of a partitioning process.
ofcourse i am refreshing distrowatch a lot to check out if some distro has released a new (nightly build) release with the latest features, from new packagemanament, to emotionicons.
One has to stay up-to-date, right? I mean working with KDE < 4.0rc7 and openoffice 2.3.1.0125 nightly build, is just unacceptable.
And even having the latest stuff, the upcomming stuff must be far better.
118 • #114 (by RC on 2007-11-20 14:44:47 GMT from United States)
Reinforced it to whom? All of these ad hominem arguments attacking the PHR with absolutely no proof or justification are ridiculous. If the PHR is so offensive...don't read it. Most of the people on here find some value in it. And as another poster pointed out...this was not a topic of discussion when Ubuntu was at the top. Suddenly when a small distro takes that spot it is a crisis of epic proportions and the future of the free world is at stake. All it does is count hits to a website...nothing more, nothing less. Can we PLEASE talk about something Linux related that has some useful application?
119 • Fedora 8 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 14:49:20 GMT from Malaysia)
With notebooks increasingly being used as a primary machine, surely wireless is now as much of a pre-requisite as functional video and sound adapters. Mandriva and Ubuntu seem to have got it right during the previous "distro season" in April. Fedora 8 is mostly an improvement on Fedora 7 but wireless support is still flaky. The best I can manage with an RT2500 USB adapter is a signal strength of ~30% (according to the nm aplet) but it's essentially non-functional (even http://www.google.com times out). ipw2200 fared even worse on my notebook.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=171361&highlight=wireless makes for a disappointing read.
In last week's "Review of Fedora 8", Simon G. Hildenbrand wrote (http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20071112): "The only drawback that I had with the distribution is with the wireless support. I'm very glad that Fedora ships the Intel Pro Wireless 3945 drivers by default, but I'm surprised at how it is implemented. NetworkManager is not enabled by default so you have to first start the service and then set it to start at boot time by going into the Services application in the Administration menu. This is easy to do, but a step I think should already be done for the user when a wireless card is detected and installed during installation. Also, since I use WPA encryption on my network, by default on start-up, the boot-up will stop for a period of time while trying to find a network IP address. To fix this, I have to set the network card to not start at boot time. This is easy to do in the Network application, but another step that must be taken. After I've done that, I can now get wireless to work through the NetworkManger. Fedora 8 includes NetworkManager 0.7, which as far as I've read has been overhauled from previous releases. However, it's very buggy. Joining my wireless network was a hit and miss at times and sometimes it would ask for the password several times before it finally connected. I would have preferred Fedora to ship the previous version of NetworkManager since I felt as though it was much more stable than 0.7, but hopefully after an update, the issues that I saw will be resolved. So far I've found that the best wireless implementation is by Ubuntu 7.10. It just worked perfectly. Mandriva 2008 was also well, but at times I didn't see any networks available when many would show up under NetworkManger using Ubuntu."
120 • yeah _that_ subject. (by octathlon on 2007-11-20 16:08:34 GMT from United States)
I haven't commented on the PHR thing before because I didn't care about it and I didn't want to add to the junk posts. But I'm finally so sick of it that even I now throw in my vote to remove the PHR listing-- at least for a while. If kids won't stop fighting over a toy, you have to take it away from them. How about showing the Top 100 in a random order instead?
121 • re #118 (by Glenn on 2007-11-20 16:09:44 GMT from Canada)
Hi No use getting upset yourself. This forum seems to be unusually receptive to trolls The more everybody gets upset and feeds them, the longer this will continue. Not so long ago they were hammering merrily away at Puppy. Old forum rule Do Not Feed The Trolls. I do not mean you personally but anyone who reads this post. Ladislav is aware of the problem and he will deal with it as he sees fit. His judgement is fine with me. Have a good day. Glenn
122 • RE • 110 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 16:32:31 GMT from United States)
What is this OS you speak of?
You mean GNU/Linux the "hobby system" that serves up almost all the web pages on the internet?
The major OS used in industrial strength high performance distributed computing?
The same OS running my TiVO and my linksys router and my cell phone and my file/print/media/web servers my production machine and this Power Mac G3 i just got from a friend because he couldn't get this other non-hobby system to install.
Wow, impressive, what a shame it's only a hobby...
123 • 115 - 915resolution (by ray carter at 2007-11-20 16:45:27 GMT from United States)
FWIW - I could never get 915res to work on my Gateway M305 laptop. Now, however, it works fine with the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver. I first found the new driver on Mandriva earlier this year - it's now on Ubuntu and most all of the recent releases of other distros. This is a far superior solution. I've also seen great strides in the xserver-xorg-video-via driver. We now have a situation where some previously very problematic video chipsets are working extremely well.
124 • 122 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 17:34:58 GMT from United States)
I'm pretty sure he wasn't saying it's _only_ useful as a hobby system. To him it probably is a hobby.
125 • #121 (by RC on 2007-11-20 18:54:45 GMT from United States)
Yeah, I know that you are right, but I am up to my earlobes with this. My guess is that they figure if they whine and gripe and control the Comment section enough that the decision will be made to drop the PHR just to shut them up. I was never fond of manipulation or those who use it. I would prefer a filter on the comment section to weed out their sniveling so the rest of us could learn something.
126 • Re post # 125 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 19:28:50 GMT from Canada)
You aren't the only one "fed up" With advocating censorship - of OTHERS only !
Why not leave it to Ladislav - he is only one who cannot avoid reading comments
127 • 110 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 20:10:49 GMT from United States)
It's not a hobby, it's a REVOLUTION!
128 • RE: 102 Fluxbuntu (by IMQ on 2007-11-20 20:47:39 GMT from United States)
I tried out Fluxbuntu on my old laptop, an Omnibook 6000 P3 800Mhz with 384MB RAM and a 9GB partition along the main distro, Debian Etch.
- It felt slower than Debian KDE, which was really a disappointment. I though it would be much more responsive than KDE because of its very light weight in comparison to KDE. - IMHO, the Fluxbox menu is seriously in need of refinement. It has too many levels, making it very inefficient. I had to rebuild the menu to make it similar to GNOME or XFCE style of menu.
In the end, after playing with it for a few days, I replace it Zenwalk 4.8, which is very responsive. More so than KDE, as expected.
I am not sure why Fluxbuntu is so slow. But that was my experience. Also for some reason, the Fluxbuntu CD would not boot when I tried to install it on two of my desktops. I burnt 2 CDs using 2 different machines with same result. The same CDs booted fine on the laptop.
129 • Great week, but Austrumi doesn't like my PC (by RichardS on 2007-11-20 21:40:23 GMT from United Kingdom)
What a great week for distros, including:
- Pardus Live is fine; - Zenwalk Live is fine; - ArtistX will take weeks to explore fully - at least once I've discovered how to "pan right" to access programs which have names that start after "M" ;) The Powua project is probably not for me but does look interesting.
Sadly, Austrumi 1.6.0 doesn't like my AMD PC, either within VirtualBox or when booting from cold. So, I'll stick with 1.5.1 (Firefox) and 1.5.2 (SeaMonkey). (1.5.4 & 1.5.5 didn't suit.)
Within VirtualBox, Austrumi 1.6 fails to build its file system so fails during boot phase 1.
When booting the PC from cold, Austrumi 1.6 currently fails to connect to my Ethernet network - although it does seem to find my NIC. Also, it boots-up at 2048x1536 (ie. very, very, very tiny font) - rather inconvenient for a LiveCD.
Austrumi does contain re-mastering tools, but I'll probably be lazy & wait.
(Sorry, my Latvian is too weak for me to post to the Austrumi forum.)
130 • in reply to RE:116 i can now say i found the perfect solution (by Dopher on 2007-11-20 21:56:07 GMT from Belgium)
Well, after 1 year of fiddling around, i can now say i found the pefect solution for my desktop.
main distro is ubuntu 7.10 , because it's easy, and openoffice is implemented nicely. on partition 2 i keep opensuse 10.3 because i like the theme more.
I need puppy for real speed, so i keep that on partition 3 xubuntu, kubuntu and fluxbuntu are installed to partition 4, 5 and 6.
The rest of the aprox 35 distro's of which i sometimes need a a file or application will be stored on seperate partitions as well.
a last partition will be used to install all the release candidates as soon as they come out.
Basicly this is called the one application per distro concept. i have created a special script that saves openoffice documents to a random /home partition on one of those partitions. since i rotate my distro every hour, else i get bored, i will always find it some day.
It goes without saying that once a distro comes out with a new release, i will update it immediately, after finding out on which partition it was installed.
Talking about efficiency.
131 • Windows vrs Linux graph. (by Scottsdale Web Design on 2007-11-20 23:14:10 GMT from United States)
Windows very much seems to be a sinking ship. With easy to use Linux distributions or OS X being preferred by almost everyone in the computer industry it is starting to spiral out to the end user more and more. Personally I suggest anything other then Windows Vista to every person I have to help with computer problems, because I don't want them to have to deal with it, and I don't want to have to deal with it either.
132 • Using PCLinuxOS here (by Isaac on 2007-11-21 00:16:37 GMT from Mexico)
I'm using PCLinuxOS in my laptop (Compaq v3417LA) as main OS with Windows XP SP2 running in a vmware virtual machine. But I visit Distrowatch allways from my work pc which is Windows XP. No hits for PCLinuxOS from me, even no linux, but my main os is it. And please stop all the blah, blah against distro a or b , all are linux, all have their virtues and cons.
133 • Sidux (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-11-21 06:40:49 GMT from Italy)
From the release notes:
"the last two months have been pretty turbulent in Debian sid with X.org 7.3 entering the scene, several library transitions and infrastructural problems"
Is there any wonder? That is exactly what you can expect from Debian unstable. That is not an exception, that is the norm.
134 • Page Hit Ranking Linux (by Anonymous on 2007-11-21 08:42:51 GMT from Germany)
Yes, my evil plan, something akin to cyber-squatting. Tomorrow I will launch a new distro. I will call it Page Hit Ranking Linux Within minutes of it being listed on this site the PHR fanatics will bombard it with clicks and hey presto, it will surpass even the mighty PCLinuxOs or whatever it is in upward mobility.
135 • Mepis 7.0 rc1 (by adrian jones on 2007-11-21 10:35:55 GMT from United Kingdom)
Dear Ladislav Is there a reason for mepis 7.0 rc1not being announced on the distrowatch front page,it was the same for the beta 6 release as well.
Has there been a change in policy with not announcing beta or release candidates?
regards
Adrian
136 • RE: 135 Mepis 7.0 rc1 (by ladislav on 2007-11-21 10:49:52 GMT from Taiwan)
No, no change in policy. For a release to appear in the news I need a good release announcement, preferably with a list of changes or a link to a changelog / release notes. Otherwise it will only show up in the "Latest Distributions" section in the left column.
MEPIS used to produce excellent announcements, but starting from beta6, they seem to just recycle the same old announcements with barely one line updated and no changelog or release notes. If they don't make more effort, I won't either.
That's the same reason why I didn't publish the announcement for FreeBSD 7.0-BETA3 (the announcement merely said - it was released, get it from the mirrors) and Damn Small Linux 4.1RC2 (just four minor changes listed - what's the point of making a new ISO image then?).
Anyway, all releases are still published by DistroWatch, just make sure that you also check out the "Latest Distributions" section (front page, left column). Better still - subscribe to the RSS feed: http://distrowatch.com/news/dwd.xml.
137 • #126 (by RC on 2007-11-21 13:55:00 GMT from United States)
In the first place, I didn't advocate censorship. I said a filter so that I can choose whether I want to be inundated with useless conversations or not. In the second, freedom of speech ends at my freedom to choose to listen. It works both ways.
138 • @Dopher (by Max on 2007-11-21 15:46:45 GMT from Australia)
I love your posts!!! Seriously... Can you please tell us more about your daily life with linux? Has anybody else been calling you asking for pictures, besides your brother? What distro do you use to post on DW, as per your one-distro-per-task philosophy? I love Belgium... And Stella Artois... Would that be the stuff you're drinking? Which distro are you updating right now as you read this?
139 • BlueWhite64,ArtistX (by Guy on 2007-11-21 18:15:13 GMT from United States)
This is the first 64 distro I,ve tried that actually works for me,very nice looking too. And I only have one word for ArtistX(((Wow)))! Linux is so much fun. I feel like a kid in a candy store. I have been using Linux for about 8 months now. I love it so much that my wife and I only have Windows on a VirtualBox now. I love this comments section too, PHR conspiracy theories and all:) Ladislav does a great job. Kudos
140 • POST !# !37 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-21 19:55:41 GMT from Canada)
You mouth off about freedoms of expression - but only for yourself -
There IS a "filter"
STOP VIEWING
141 • #140 (by RC on 2007-11-21 21:40:22 GMT from United States)
Great idea. I am going to stop viewing you. Conversation closed.
142 • Dopher (by Matt on 2007-11-21 22:19:23 GMT from United States)
I agree with 138... We need more Dopher here!
143 • I can't believe it... (by Anonymous on 2007-11-22 05:34:21 GMT from United States)
CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION
PowerPC comment!!!
CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION
After trying every PPC distro from YellowDog to Etch and even the F8 live.
YellowDog crawled...
Etch panicked....
and F8, well that was a live cd after all, but being based on F5 I knew what to expect after the yellowdog fiasco...
So I thought what the hell, I'll try suse. I know there "evil" and all but hey I thought I'd see how there progressing on the POWER front after the re-imbrace.
To my surprize it was actually a very stable and speedy system on this old G3.
What a shame, isn't the POWER arch. YD's bread and butter, you'd think there system would be a little faster.
Anywho back to suse...
It wasn't all roses after I updated, it seems that yast decided to go ahead and install a new kernel, without asking me.
The only hint it gave me was after the update. I was presented with a dialog that read something along the lines of
"Well something got installed that requires you to reboot your computer"
But here's the kicker, it decided to remove everything associated with the old kernel, preventing be from getting online so I could reinstall it!
I only learned after the fact that your not actually supposed to update your kernel with yast... I don't know if that was old info, but after this clusterfsck I wouldn't doubt it.
Listen up Novell devs, you need to put a little more work into your magical "tool" and maybe it'll work as advertised one day. Who knows...
I actually thought about buying the box set beforehand too, so I guess I should thank you guys for saving me a little green, huh?
Love, peace and chicken grease!
144 • RE: # 143 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-11-22 07:48:57 GMT from Italy)
"I only learned after the fact that your not actually supposed to update your kernel with yast..."
Is that the case only with SUSE PPC? Because I have always upgraded my kernels with YaST.
145 • RE 143 ....openSuse Kernel issues (by My Tip on 2007-11-22 08:21:01 GMT from Australia)
Aways keep the debug version of the original (or later updates) kernel installed as a fall back for recovery purposes as it does not get removed when you update your normal kernel. Just make sure you have a boot entry for it in your menu.lst Grub boot file and your life will be easy.
Cheers
PS: Smart package manager is my preferred package installer and I use manual updates.
146 • LF's third annual desktop Linux survey (by Results on 2007-11-22 09:15:04 GMT from Australia)
Preferred distributions
So what desktop Linux are people using in their organizations? .... ...Ubuntu family of Linuxes, at 54.1 percent. This was followed by the Red Hat family -- RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora/CentOS) -- with 50.2 percent. The Novell SUSE group -- SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and openSUSE -- came in third, with 35.2 percent....
....For personal use, Ubuntu once more easily led the pack, at 55.4 percent. Here, though, the community Linuxes, such as Debian (22.2 percent), Gentoo (10.2 percent), Knoppix (7.1 percent), and PCLinuxOS (5.4 percent) become significant players. It was also interesting to see that the commercially supported, community Linux distributions -- Novell's openSUSE (19.5 percent) and Red Hat's Fedora (16.7 percent) -- are, like Ubuntu, important distributions both in the office and at home. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS9488592005.html
147 • -Which distro for a PPC G3 Mac ????? (RE:143) (by Caraibes on 2007-11-22 10:30:49 GMT from Dominican Republic)
I still have Ubuntu Dapper 6.06.1 on my Mac iBook G3 PPC.
I haven't found any other distro that would "work"...
Debian & Fedora have display issues and no sound... Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 is totally buggy... openSUSE 0.3 only comes in a DVD and my Mac doesn't want to boot from a dvd...
It is really too bad... I guess the PPC architecture is almost gone into history...
148 • Re: 138 (by Dopher on 2007-11-22 12:48:38 GMT from Belgium)
Thanks mate ;) Currently i'm typing this from the ubuntu liveCD, since the latest PClinusOS has destroyed my partition table. So i have to reinstall all my 56 distro's. Which is good luck and bad luck, since i now have the oppurtunity to have the latest greatest from all of them.
Though, restoring the backup of the home partitions for all of them is a tricky procedure.
My daily life with linux is a real experience. I have no friends, because i'm in my bureau, curtains closed, configuring, migrating, partitioning and updating my stuff.
But i know i will find THE ONE. THE cd/dvd image that will conquer my desktop. Where i'll have the perfect installation procedure. With the perfect icons and theme sets. And when i check all libs and applications and go to the manufactures website it will say.. "YOU have the latest version.. there is no newer version available!!"
THEN and only THEN i can throw my weapons away. And the day is near my friend.. i can feel it. It might be just one more download away.. one more linux cd/dvd image.. one more release...
In my dreams it happends on a wet morning.. there is high moisture in the air, and i hear a wolf howling in the background.. and the sun and the moon are are in a perfect 65 degrees seperated. I pop in the CD and there is... i already senced it when the lid was closed. I have this dream often.. so it isn't a normal one.
ow and btw, i am not drinking stella artois. I ordered some bottles of absint from an australian webstore, and i use that. :p
149 • RE: 136 (by Bucephalus the Great on 2007-11-22 13:38:06 GMT from Panama)
Ladislav wrote: >That's the same reason why I didn't publish the announcement for FreeBSD 7.0-BETA3 (the announcement >merely said - it was released, get it from the mirrors) and Damn Small Linux 4.1RC2 (just four minor changes >listed - what's the point of making a new ISO image then?).
IMHO, ALPHA and BETA releases should not be published on the front page of DistroWatch, no matter how detailed their changelogs and release announcements are. These "development releases" are aimed for developers and skilled enthusiasts, not for the general public. Only Release Candidates and final releases are meant for ordinary users.
Quite often those "development releases" (alphas & betas) are not even usable or at least they tend to be too buggy for daily use. People who are new to Linux don't know about the "release early and release often" scheme where projects publish many low-quality development versions for developers and advanced users to test and find bugs. Normal users think that all new ALPHA or BETA releases are a good way to update their system to the "latest and greatest" available versions and then they'll be disappointed when they find that these development releases have many problems. And then they'll conclude that "Linux sucks".
By announcing development releases (alphas & betas) DistroWatch does a bad favour for the Linux community, IMHO. Please consider announcing just releases that are safe for normal users, not these "for developers only" releases.
150 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-11-22 14:58:28 GMT from United Kingdom)
Reading though this Reader Comments page makes me think how windows users reading this must laugh to themselves and know they are safe from Linux ever getting anywhere near to competing with their OS. All the distro bashing and squabbling over which distro is top of the tree at the moment must make them happy they don't have any worries with just the one OS to choose from.
Linux is Linux no matter what flavor is in. Take the squabbling to windows users not to your own kin.
151 • RE: 150 - with freedom and plenty of choices comes some backdrops... (by KimTjik on 2007-11-22 15:58:19 GMT from Sweden)
... still the comparison doesn't fit. So how many choices of Windows do you really have? Just as you yourself stated, for desktop use there's in reality just ONE. What we have is merely different generations of the same, and still there's a lot of bashing going on between folks in the debate of XP vs. Vista. If you think that bashing is something unique for Linux, check out some hardware forums on the net. Humans are human, but not necessarily humane.
However I agree that the bashing is tiresome and unproductive, but sadly we've got to live with it. Linux users aren't any better humans than the rest, despite a better choice of software! So to ask for a change would be like ask the whole human society to change.
The only solution to get a bashing free Linux-community would be a big-brother-censorship. But we don't want that, do we?
Epilogue:
Arch works out-of-the-box; I installed it and Tux jumped out of the computer-box and started to dance on my desktop; and he hasn't ever stopped! Install Arch and get a Tux-out-of-the-box experience! --- my attempt of adding fuel to the basing ring of fire (it's burning hell just like love!)
152 • Radical laugh about Linux / some Linux users. (by dbrion on 2007-11-22 16:46:49 GMT from France)
"how windows users reading this must laugh to themselves and know they are safe from Linux ever getting anywhere near to competing with their OS."
There are windows users who do not laugh at all , as one century old Linuxen seem less flawless than to-day s ones (in the professionnal world, RedHat (or Red Hat clones such as CentOS or White Boxes) seem to be very stable enough. The criterion of easiness of installation is a mere radical laugh : OSes are installed for 4/5 years, and they need to be stable: if they are almost bug free => no reinstall, and if the install takes 1hr, it is better than reinstalling twice a year...even if it takes half an hour... => the Out of the Holy Box myth is radically ridiculous. Hardware recognition is expensive, and, in the case of sound/ music, no increase of productivity has been shown, except ... for milking cows....) A great majority of the most interesting free applications have been Windows ported (ex : vim, the Gimp, R; grass is almosrt ported -works under Cygwin-) => the active efficient community of pple testing new softs might be, to day, come from users of XP ported applications (sometiomes , they differ from : oh! lthat soft is baaad, baaad, becaus"e I dowloaded it, burnt a CD, did not read anything about it and was kicked off a forum, oiiin, oooin! which is the usual, radically..... simple PC ....winners discourse....) BTW, your opposition Linux/ Windows should be mitigated by ... a) BSDs b) Solaris.....
153 • Lies. damn lies, statistics. (by hab on 2007-11-22 18:04:55 GMT from Canada)
Axiom: ALL software sucks!
Corollary: Try to find software that sucks less! A HIGHLY subjective matter at best! Arguments about which distro is best is kinda' like listening to two colour blind people debating just what that particular shade of turquoise is!
cheers
154 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-11-22 19:48:44 GMT from United States)
"Just make sure you have a boot entry for it in your menu.lst Grub boot file and your life will be easy"
No grub, it uses yaboot "chainloaded" to lilo I think.
Is that the case only with SUSE PPC?
Maybe it's PPC spec. I don't know, I use sidux on my main box. I'm thinking it's a problem with yast (spec to PPC maybe?, no clue). It assumes the kernel is going to work correctly. That was my main problem with proprietary OS's and it's certainly not something I will tolerate from any Linux distro!
"openSUSE 0.3 only comes in a DVD and my Mac doesn't want to boot from a dvd..."
I used the netinstall and though it said it couldn't install the PPC bootloader, it started with yaboot just fine... that was weird to say the least.
155 • Re #54 No subject (by glenn on 2007-11-22 20:07:05 GMT from Canada)
Lilo. Hmmm.. Then you would update /etc/lilo.conf then use a command line SUDO LILO. This will update it.. If thats the problem actually, I really do not know PPC but it may be worth looking at your LILO? glenn
156 • updated sidux roadmap (by David Brabaw on 2007-11-22 20:40:56 GMT from United States)
The sidux site article about the release of sidux 2007-4 has a release schedule for the rest of 2008 near the bottom of the page. sidux 2008-01 "Νυξ" — calendar week 02-04 2008 - Nyx sidux 2008-02 "Ερεβος" — calendar week 13-14 2008 - Erebus sidux 2008-03 "Ωυρεα" — calendar week 25-26 2008 - Oyrea sidux 2008-04 "Ποντος" — calendar week 37-38 2008 - Pontos
157 • Thanks Dopher (by Max on 2007-11-23 03:27:17 GMT from Australia)
Keep us up to date... I now have a reason to read the comments every week... :) I might need to order some of that absinth to go along with the reading...
158 • Ultumix how to get the torrent. (by Justin Breithaupt on 2007-11-23 06:21:31 GMT from United States)
So you want to know why Ultumix disappeared NOT Ultimix. Well it's simple. coomjohn a moderator on Linuxtracker.org took it off every time I tried to upload it. His reasoning was that this was not indeed a Linux distro but some malicious prank even though he had not downloaded the iso himself. I have a torrent up that has been working around the clock for the last week. I had 41 leechers at a time when it was listed on Linuxtracker.org but now I'm down to 11 - 17 when it peaks. I have requested that linuxtracker.org lets me upload my torrent. We will wait and see.
go to www.mindblowingidea.com/Ultumix and download the torrent for version 0.0.0.0.4. The default download will take you there.
159 • Re • #155 • Re #54 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-23 07:32:57 GMT from United States)
Well I'm glad I learned something at least, after reinstalling I noticed YaST had an option to never uninstall packages I want kept, like the default kernel. such information would have saved me a lot of trouble. Such is life...
...
Configuration anomalies aside, this is a pretty quick distro on this 400Mhz B&W G3 with 448Mb RAM running Xfce4.4.1 (if I could only find the fluxbox package)
It's almost keeping up with my tunned sidux box (2.4Ghz Cely 512Mb RAM nV MX 4000)
And I really, really love how easy it is to create a RAID inside the installer.
You know, say what you will (non-specific) about Novell, but when it comes to Windows power users, none of my tweaked Distros elicit the kind of reaction a default suse install does.
When it comes to grandmas and novice computer users, yes the Mints and PCLOSs have an advantage.
I personally like sid and anything slack based and I'd rather use a command line than a GUI tool because I'm more interested in the guts.
However the Windows Power Users want more, they do not want to spend time learning how things work, they want to spend there time actually leveraging all that functionality in an intuitive manner and I think openSUSE has all the 'major' quality's (including the Microsoft backing!) needed to gain a lot more of that type of user in the future.
Yes there are a lot of kinks to work out but when a PPC distro makes me want to check out the latest x86 release of my least favorite distro (until 10.3)
Then it's time to reassess my perspective...
160 • 158 • Ultumix (by johncoom (aka coomjohn) on 2007-11-23 10:41:38 GMT from Australia)
Hello every one, for just part of the TRUE history in this saga :-( Refer to http://www.mypclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=1378.0
Personally I will never communicate with this 16 y/o boy again as I have often been mis-quoted and he has made more than one false claim about me and others :-(
Also you may come across this "When is a Distro not a Distro?" ? This is my argument:- When it has NOT been compiled from the source code ! As both Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS many other distro's do, until one does that it is only a remaster and not a distribution in its own right.
You may also come across a "Linux Time line (edited by me)" (where the "me" is him) on this he shows his Remaster as the ONLY one. He omits to list the many others that have been around a lot longer than his new one has ! http://docs.pclinuxos.com/Remasters
Please Note, that I would never have posted any thing in these comments about this at all. Who is it that has started this here ?
This will be my one and only comment at DDW about this subject.
161 • @158 (by Warp0 on 2007-11-23 16:10:18 GMT from United States)
Remastering PCLOS is not "making your own distro", and you should not be asking for people to donate to YOU for downloading this remaster.
162 • Wow (by spiritraveller on 2007-11-23 19:01:58 GMT from United States)
just scrolling through these comments, and I do declare... that you people are NUTS! Haha. Just keep enjoying yourselves and arguing.
It was Thanksgiving here in the US yesterday. One of the things that I'm thankful for is the Distrowatch website for promoting open source operating systems for many years now.
And I'm thankful for all of the people involved who help to make open source work. Fanboys and distro-nuts are included in that, but I'm even more thankful for the people who develop, write documentation, provide support, and report bugs on the thousands of successful open source projects.
You're all great. Thanks!
163 • One man's remaster is another man's distro! :-) (by What is Mint? on 2007-11-23 23:22:03 GMT from Australia)
161 • @158 (by Warp0 on 2007-11-23 16:10:18 GMT from United States) Remastering PCLOS is not "making your own distro", and you should not be asking for people to donate to YOU for downloading this remaster.
Is Mint an Ubuntu remaster? What about PCLOS? More effort goes into remastering Mandriva into "PCLOS" but, IMHO, it is still a remaster "distro". :-)
164 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-11-23 23:33:06 GMT from United States)
#163 and 161
One more category to confuse the masses with, DOMINATION is at hand my friends!!!!!
165 • Dramatic decrease in PHD for PCLOS on 7 day table (ie. recent) (by Strange on 2007-11-23 23:38:26 GMT from Australia)
How is it that a distro can have such a sudden drop - 4000---->2400 phd - in "popularity" in the space of a couple of weeks? IMO, its either Web Bots have been disabled or DW admin has blocked their operation. It may also be the case of trying to stay in front without being too obvious!?
166 • OGG vs. MP3 (by Oinky on 2007-11-23 23:41:50 GMT from Canada)
Hi, I'm just wondering if I should buy an MP3 player that can hold 10,000 or 20,000 songs? That's either 35 days or 70 days of continuous music. Is there any OGG players out there with such a capacity? And what if I only know 100 songs or so? Can I make a partition and install linux in there somehow.
167 • Re 166....You can make 35 days last 70 days (by If you sleep 12 hrs per day on 2007-11-23 23:50:42 GMT from Australia)
The rest of your question is a bit tricky. IMO, you should be able to partition a device that will be seen as usb drive. Installing linux on such partition, try and find out. :-)
168 • RE: 165 Dramatic decrease in PHD for PCLOS on 7 day table (by ladislav on 2007-11-24 00:43:05 GMT from Taiwan)
It's not just PCLinuxOS whose page hits dropped recently, most other distributions also dropped - together with the number of visitors on DistroWatch. This is not unusual at this time of the year. Once all the big releases are done, many people find better things to do than check DistroWatch every few hours.
But of course, there are still those who enjoy creating sensationalist theories to explain a perfectly normal phenomenon ;-)
169 • PHR (by VAX-11 on 2007-11-24 02:00:59 GMT from United States)
Gotta love how mint and pclos are on top now. The battle of the fanboi distros has begun!
Pure entertainment!
170 • PCLinuxOS HPP and downloads figures (by nedvis on 2007-11-24 04:58:52 GMT from United States)
Why would 2.400-4.000 daily hits per page at Distrowatch.com be a problem when at same time ibiblio.com record shows that PCLinuxOS have more than 500 DOWNLOADS EVERY DAY !?! I've been watching PCLinuxOS download figures just to find, for example, a Belgian FTP server delivered 66.742 PCLinuxOS iso files by October 30. and now that number is 77439. Ibiblio.com FTP server scored 86.209 download by the end of October , 89.005 by November 4 and today the number reads 101.405. What I meant to say is, if there are 2500-3000 PCLinuxOS downloads every day from 12 FTP servers around the globe why should the number of hits per page at Distrowatch ( a single server) be smaller? I don't say everyone who downloaded PCLinuxOS was visiting Distrowatch.com fist but thats what figures say. Distrowatch is certainly very good in its dispatcher role because I think most people looking for information on Linux are coming here,and those are not only PCLinuxOS fans. Distrowatch is Linux Agora and let it stay that way! If you don't like its Hits Per Page ranking system there's nothing you can do with it. Better yet justignore it! I'm using Debian Etch , Slackware 12 , Mint 4 and yesterday I ran latest Sidux ( very disappointing release) but PCLinuxOS is platform I'm using 95 per cent of my computing time and it really amazes me how reliable it is. http://tinyurl.com/383ajq
171 • @169: "The battle of the fanboi distros has begun!" (by Anonymous on 2007-11-24 08:34:01 GMT from Malaysia)
PCLOS is not "radically simple" in comparison with Mandriva and "elegance" is not an obvious difference between Mint and Ubuntu.
Both are basically identical to their respective parent distro with the exception of the menu (Mint), package manager (PCLOS), additional configuration tools (Mint), multimedia codecs and theme.
The "battle of the fanboi distros" is almost a war by proxy.
172 • OGG vs MP3 (by davecs on 2007-11-24 09:02:31 GMT from United Kingdom)
You get a better Quality/Filesize ratio with Ogg than MP3 (fact), and the distortion artefacts introduced by OGG are less intrusive than with MP3 also (my opinion).
My player is a Cowon iAudio M5L which is a no-frills 20Gb audio player but I don't think you can get them any more. However if you look for their current stuff, you should find that OpenSource codecs like OGG and FLAC are supported by Cowon iAudio stuff, and the emphasis is on sound quality (though you need better headphones).
173 • Remasters (by davecs on 2007-11-24 09:50:08 GMT from United Kingdom)
There is a root level command included in PCLinuxOS called "remasterme". It is "mklivecd" with a number of parameters passed to it. More experienced users can use mklivecd with their own parameters.
Either way, you can create an iso which can be burnt to a CD/DVD in order to install on another computer. I personally use such a remaster to install Linux for friends, adding a few extra programs and graphics, British English support and a full update. But I think it would be rather cheeky to say I had invented a distro. The result is merely a snapshot of a PCLinuxOS install as it is updated and growing.
Without wishing to judge what anyone else has done, that's what I call a remaster. johncoom is entitled to use his own judgement at LinuxTracker as to what constitutes a distro, and whether it includes stuff that may not be legal and the mods at PCLOS also have to make a judgement if someone posts a thread advertising a remaster as to whether it's good for PCLOS or could lead it into disrepute.
I'm not saying these judgements will always be correct, we're all human after all, but continually reposting stuff which was deleted, whether a mailing at a forum or an iso at LinuxTracker, is hardly the way to ingratiate yourself, neither is publishing whinging articles all over the internet.
174 • Lin4Astro (by Oncle Jean on 2007-11-24 09:51:05 GMT from Canada)
Hi all,
Looks like an interesting distro but I'm not sure it's still active, I can't find the information. Any help ?
Thanks, Oncle Jean
175 • Can't we all just get along (by AH1 on 2007-11-24 16:04:05 GMT from United States)
"Both are basically identical to their respective parent distro"
I can't speak for (K)Ubuntu vs. Mint, as I haven't tried Kubuntu in over a year very much, or Mint at all. I've run 7.04 very briefly, and had consistent errors and lockups at shutdown with my new system (no other distro does this, and I didn't look into the cause). However, PCLOS and Mandriva, although they are very much the same, are not the same animal. I ran PCLOS for almost 7 months and had no major problems, I then installed Mandriva 2008 and have been running it since launch, and had a few annoyances that a newb wouldn't have figured out easily, although it did work and I did overall like the system. One, if I'd customize the taskbar, the settings would not stick after reboot. The fix was to remove the clock applet, then add it again (found in forum), then the settings stick. Also after an update, I lost the window borders. I knew this was a compiz problem, it turns out they had an incorrect file in the repository (although they fixed it very quickly). In my opinion, synaptic is a better package manager. Mandriva's works, but it is much, much slower to check for updates/refresh the database, taking a few minutes as compared to less than one for PCLOS at the most on my C2duo with 4 gigs of ram. Also I installed some apps in Mandy's repository, they would install successfully, but when I would click on their icon in the menu, they would not start, this did not happen with PCLOS. Bottom line, use them both for a while, they simply don't act the same. Looks aren't everything to it (any distro can be made to look almost exactly like another), it's the little changes that can make a difference. Overall I would still recommend Pclos over Mandy 08 (let the names begin), moreso when the updated version gets released.
At the moment, I just downloaded Sidux, and I have to say I am very impressed. Although a person isn't supposed to use Synaptic, it is easy and fast using apt-get, but I think someone switching from Windows wouldn't like this as well. Also it was very easy to set up Compiz Fusion. Flash wasn't so bad either (even though I have Sidux 64 bit) So far it has been solid, it boots much quicker on my system than PCLOS or Mandy. Fastest install time I've seen too. It might be a temporary keeper, everything I'm trying is working correctly the first time, so far. I'd say it would be more for a more advanced user base, or one that isn't that just wants a working system out of the box, and possibly to learn on.
All distros have their positives and negatives, none of them work perfectly on everything. Someone saying that the distro they are using works shouldn't result in a "go away fanboi" response. This constant bickering on here is annoying. Leave poor Ladislav alone too, the PHR is what it is, some of you just don't seem to get that, and continue to say it's flawed week after week after week.
176 • RE 175 Strange behavior of a PCloss' clone (by dbrion on 2007-11-24 16:29:24 GMT from France)
I am very surprised that Mandriva 2008, the PCloss'clone (qu'ewst que l'on ne ferait pas pour être politiquement correct!!!) did not work : it worked flawlessly on two PCs, after being installed by two ... radically PC ignorant pple... I never will advise the original (encore une fois, je suis très polituiquement correct!), buttered slice, eight wonder of the world as it is .... monolingual (unless the huge efforts of converting american English to British English are to be considered as marvelous linguistic efforts... In this respect, SAM is better..... but highly redundant ..... The "method" of testing : I download/burn, and then cla
177 • 176 suite (by Anonymous on 2007-11-24 16:35:08 GMT from France)
and then either claim: thanks to godTexstar/Clem, it works!!! Alleluiah! or Odf course it did not work; I should have thought about it (and I thought about it) by reading the Holy PHR. seem a good indicator of Linux future ( in the last century, what *made* linux interesting *was* the testing by a competent communauty). Thanks Heaven/ the regents of the BSD University, there remain xxxBSDs...
178 • Mandriva 2008 (by Caraibes on 2007-11-24 17:08:46 GMT from Dominican Republic)
This week I installed Mandriva 2008 on 2 customers PC's...
One was a dinosaur (Pentium 2 @ 333Mhz, 192 megs of ram...), but the install went fine: I chose Gnome, but afterwards, I set it to use IceWM...
The other was a newer Dell desktop, with Sata hdd. The other techies couldn't install their pirated winxp's because of that ! But Mandriva worked like a charm...
Despite being on Fedora 8 for my desktop, I used Mandriva for those customers. Good control center, perfect in Spanish.
179 • re 176 and sarcasm (by good grief on 2007-11-24 17:44:27 GMT from United States)
Intelligent and well thought out post. Nice response to one person that took time to share their true experiences with a few distros. Let the weekly name calling/distro bashing/making fun of continue.
180 • @175: Is Mandriva radically difficult? (by Anonymous on 2007-11-24 18:08:38 GMT from Malaysia)
"I installed some apps in Mandy's repository, they would install successfully, but when I would click on their icon in the menu, they would not start, this did not happen with PCLOS."
Which apps? Were these from main, contrib or plf?
"Someone saying that the distro they are using works shouldn't result in a "go away fanboi" response."
No, it shouldn't. What I actually said was that PCLOS and Mint are basically identical to their respective parent distros. This was prompted by numerous posts on this forum about PCLOS being "radically simple". I used PCLOS for a couple of weeks but didn't notice any significant advantages over Mandriva. Which part of PCLOS is radically simpler than Mandriva (or Ubuntu)?
181 • Re 178 (by AH1 on 2007-11-24 18:09:20 GMT from United States)
Yes, once the kinks were worked out, it is a very good system. The "problems" I mentioned were experienced by others on their forum, but appeared to only affect a few. I don't know how the updater would work with faster internet (I only have Sat./high ping times). Several times it said that one or the other repositories weren't available, if I'd change to a different mirror it would work. Forgot one other thing with Mandy, completely randomly during startup, the Hal daemon would fail to start. Cold or warm start, sometimes it would sometimes it wouldn't. Clean reinstall, same thing. Only tried it on the one so far. Most people around here only have dialup since nothing is available, and updating/installing would be a pain on dialup, and one proprietary program that people use will not work on Linux (not with Wine), so I don't switch that many people.
I just got my Ubuntu and Kubuntu 64 (and non 64) 7.10 cds in the mail today (I don't download much because I have limited bandwidth), about an hour ago. I booted it (64), and my monitor went to sleep during both startup and shutdown (U, 64 only tried), it woke up when the desktop was up. I don't know if this happens to others too, haven't looked. However it worked just fine otherwise. I'll mess with that more someday.
182 • re 180 (by AH1 on 2007-11-24 18:27:39 GMT from United States)
"radically simpler" I never said that myself. Some people take that slogan and run with it. The slogan was voted on and chosen by the community. As with any slogan for any distro, I say so what, has nothing to do with the distro itself. People that use a simple slogan to judge a distro either way aren't doing it fairly.
My main reason for liking PClos better is synaptic, along with other little things. Overall, after months of using it, and about a month with Mandriva, PClos behaved better on MY machine (anyone else's results WILL vary). Someone shouldn't be criticised for saying that.
As to which apps..., I don't know.... I did not enable PLF, nothing there needed, so main and contrib only. I randomly searched for games/media players/etc., installed what looked interesting while reading down the lists, tried them right away, and if they didn't work, I took them off immediately. If I had been reporting them, I would have made a list. But as you know, some of the names are obscure for some of the programs, so I didn't think I needed to remember them, and there were only a few (like 5?) that didn't work when I tried.
I wiped PCLOS and kept Mandy for now to install Sidux by the way....
183 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-11-24 18:30:54 GMT from Malaysia)
"my monitor went to sleep during both startup and shutdown"
May be related to this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/150930
184 • re 182 (by AH1 on 2007-11-24 18:32:35 GMT from United States)
...because PCLOS needed too many updates, I'm waiting for the new cd to just download the whole thing and reinstall from scratch.
185 • re 183 (by AH1 on 2007-11-24 18:37:50 GMT from United States)
Possibly, I'll check into it later/someday.
Samsung 216bw (1680x1050) with 8600gt
gotta go for now and get something more accomplished for today.
186 • @176 (by wARP0 on 2007-11-24 23:18:51 GMT from United States)
If you want a distro in French, don't select one that is in English only. Are you with me so far or do I need to go slower?
187 • Pardus, first thoughts (by mikkh on 2007-11-25 00:56:38 GMT from United Kingdom)
It's great !
OK, more detail then.....
Pros
Reads and writes NTFS properly Plays encrypted DVD's Comes with Java and Flash pre-installed (slightly old Sun Java though) ATI 3D drivers pre-installed (hoorah) Nice reworked control center Latest K3B with all supporting programs installed The fastest loading Linux I've ever tried - and I've tried lots Isn't based on *buntu
Cons
Haven't found any yet, apart from the default desktop wallpaper being low quality and not to my taste, but obviously that's easily fixed
And if I was really nitpicking, I'd say the install was a bit slow, but certainly not on a Suse scale, and it only needs doing once after all
Yup, this a keeper
188 • Pclinuxos (by blarney on 2007-11-25 01:22:09 GMT from United Kingdom)
Just come on to distrowatch for the first time and am so happy to see that Pclinuxos is No. 1!
I was a windows user since DOS 5, but after trying dozens of Linux Distros, I hit upon PclInuxOS. I can't believe how this is no. 1 when the team of developers is so small? I deleted XP soon after installing. What makes this so special?
1) It looks good 2) Most everything works 3) The community is small and helpful
Never before has so much been achieved by so few in the field of operating systems.
189 • @187 Pardus (by debinmt on 2007-11-25 03:21:12 GMT from United States)
I agree. I installed it last night and started playing and configuring and I think it is a fine distro. It's a keeper here. I have compiz up and running which is fun but I don't keep it on all the time. I ran Sidux since it began ( also a fine distro, for me anyway). I Just felt like a change. Tried Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, a few others I can't think of right now and I was delighted when I tried Pardus. Good Job !
190 • Re 168....."perfectly normal phenomenon" (by Anonymous on 2007-11-25 05:27:15 GMT from Australia)
>168 • RE: 165 Dramatic decrease in PHD for PCLOS on 7 day table (by ladislav from Taiwan)<
It's not just PCLinuxOS whose page hits dropped recently, most other distributions also dropped - together with the number of visitors on DistroWatch. This is not unusual at this time of the year. Once all the big releases are done, many people find better things to do than check DistroWatch every few hours. Your Awstats figures suggest that you have more visitors now than when pclos hit the peak of 4000 in September. So I don't buy into your rationalization. Those other distros peaked for a short period around the dates of their new releases and this was/is NATURAL.
Here are some figures: Reported period Month Nov 2007 First visit 01 Nov 2007 - 00:00 Last visit 25 Nov 2007 - 04:00 (24 1/6 days)
Month...........Unique Visitors.....Calculated unique visits per day Jan 2007........901377..............= 29076.677419354838709677419354839 Feb 2007........845680..............= 30202.857142857142857142857142857 Mar 2007........935059..............= 30163.193548387096774193548387097 Apr 2007........916112..............= 30537.066666666666666666666666667 May 2007........899371..............= 29011.967741935483870967741935484 Jun 2007........855867..............= 28528.9 Jul 2007........828271..............= 26718.41935483870967741935483871 Aug 2007........817523..............= 26371.709677419354838709677419355 Sep 2007........784988..............= 26166.266666666666666666666666667 Oct 2007........968612..............= 31245.548387096774193548387096774 Nov 2007........745297..............= 30,848 per day
Nov Unique visits: 745,297 / 24.16 days = 30,848 per day
http://distrowatch.com/awstats/
But of course, there are still those who enjoy creating sensationalist theories to explain a perfectly normal phenomenon One man's "perfectly normal " phenomenon is another man's "unnatural" behavior! :-)
191 • @190 (by memena on 2007-11-25 06:29:33 GMT from Philippines)
http://distrowatch.com/index.php?dataspan=4
Well 13 out of the top 20 dropped, and three broke even in the month's span. So ladislav's point that most other distributions also dropped still stands.
That's a nice table though. Thanks for the info :-)
192 • RE: 190 Re 168....."perfectly normal phenomenon" (by ladislav on 2007-11-25 08:35:41 GMT from Taiwan)
I somehow doubt that you'll ever stop searching for signs of conspiracies, but for what it's worth:
1. Yes, the average for November is still pretty high, but I thought we were talking about the last 7 days, not the entire month - at least that was your original argument. If you are going to try to prove your point then please compare the first week of November with the last seven days, not the whole of November with the whole of October/September.
2. The September figures are skewed because of the DDoS attack on DistroWatch.com when more than two days of data were lost. However, the page hit figures were not affected because I didn't just fill those two days with zeros, I left the two days out completely (as if they didn't exist).
3. Even if the total number of unique visitors were at record highs, the data you provided does not show which pages they visited. They could have been looking at the main page or the weekly pages or (dare I suggest it) on the comments page.
Anyway, have you tried the latest RoFreeSBIE 1.3? It's really good. Maybe taking it for a spin is a better way to spend the weekend then worrying sick over the DistroWatch page hit stats ;-)
193 • RE 186 I am not a radical moron (by dbrion on 2007-11-25 14:02:49 GMT from France)
" If you want a distro in French, don't select one that is in English only. Are you with me so far or do I need to go slower?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- " You do not need to go slower. I explained why I was not interested at all by the original source of Linux, PClos.. and would *never* advise it to friends....
BTW, Whiteboxen (fair Redhat's clones, recompiled near Atlanta) have a nice keyboqrd/ language recognition (as do almost any serious linuxen). . Anyway, I hope god|Texstar linguistic efforts will end up in having three languages american, modern British and Chaucer's English.. If it takes too long a time, he may, natively, copy Debian's| WhiteBoxes'| Mandriva (though it might be a repetitive task) language selection and handling... Keep up with the good original work.
194 • re 193 (by ... on 2007-11-25 15:33:03 GMT from United States)
You would never advise it, fine, there is nothing wrong with that at all. That is your choice. However you continue to bash it and it's head guy with sarcastic comments. You fault it for being english only (even though operated by a handful of VOLUNTEERS and not paid employees, I doubt those guys get enough money to pay their own bills off of the project, let alone any profit). If you don't want an english only distro, don't get it, your choice. I don't know why distro bashing is allowed here, if it were up to me, it would be stopped, and you would be banned. But that's just me. Comparing god to texstar? What purpose does that serve? You seem to have a problem if a certain distro works for people. Would you care to tell us what distro we should all use so that it would be ok with you? That would end all the senseless comments, and distrowatch could be just that, watching one distro....
195 • RE 194 (by dbrion on 2007-11-25 16:29:44 GMT from France)
" If you don't want an english only distro, don't get it, your choice. I" There are hundreds of non english only distrs.... "Comparing god to texstar?" This was the implicit idea of many, many unmotivated comments.... for months and months.... " Would you care to tell us what distro we should all use so that it would be ok with you?" No : as I am not a missionary, nor a totalitary man, I think any distr is adapted to someone's purposes/jobs. Making ONE monolingual distr the standard, and telling everyone who does not agree is distro bashing, sees to me absurd..... and can be ongoingly and ongoingly found. If PCloss lovers had been , for months and months, a little (i.e :infinitely) more objective, perhaps I would have tried it....
OTH, I would be glad if I knew ONE (not ZERO, ONE -more would not harm!!!) original feature of PClos (being badly paid is common to many distrs teams..., telling they whill release in time is courageous and intelligent, but Aesopus turtoise did it ~2400 years ago -speude bradeos-).
196 • No subject (by Warp0 on 2007-11-25 19:53:32 GMT from United States)
Zero?
Try to install the new Mandriva on a Fujitsu P1510D. Cela ne marche pas. Try again with PCLOS. C'est l'un? Vous voulez encore? Il y en a beaucoup.
My opinion: if you want your language in a small distro, volunteer to help rather than complain. Mandriva has more capability to add languages than Tex does, non?
197 • re 195 and 196 (by davecs on 2007-11-25 21:34:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
This is because, despite the fact that PCLOS2007 rebased itself on Mandriva, a lot was done before it finally came out, including changes to scripts and kernel, as well as loads of the stuff like KDE etc that faces you when you fire up the distro.
Therefore it is no surprise that some hardware works on PCLOS and not on Mandriva, and I would also be surprised if the reverse were not also true on occasion.
After quite a frank exchange of views some time back here in distrowatch, involving a few people from PCLOS and Adam Williamson from Mandriva, I think it was generally agreed that whilst PCLOS did rebase on Mandriva 2007, a lot had been changed and PCLinuxOS was not a clone of Mandriva.
There is much work being done by volunteers to remaster PCLinuxOS for different languages. There is a limit to what a small group can do with a CD-worth of packages. but it's happening, slowly but surely.
Anyone who wants to add further language support to PCLinuxOS and has the know-how to help is more than welcome.
198 • RE • 188 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-25 22:13:35 GMT from United States)
"Never before has so much been achieved by so few in the field of operating systems."
Oh my gosh, are you serious? Do the people who use Personal.Computer.(GNU/)Linux.Operating.System actually do anything even remotely complex with there computers?
I should make my own OS then! It would seem that all an OS has to have is solitaire I.M. and a web browser to get a vote from some of you knuckleheads.....
199 • RE: 198 (by Anonymous on 2007-11-26 00:03:06 GMT from United States)
That should have been "their" and not "there," knucklehead.
200 • ;-) re 199 (by :-) on 2007-11-26 00:57:02 GMT from United States)
That should have been ""there"," and not "there," knucklehead.
Number of Comments: 200
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• 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.
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Random Distribution |
EndeavourOS
EndeavourOS is a rolling release Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. The project aims to be a spiritual successor to Antergos - providing an easy setup and pre-configured desktop environment on an Arch base. EndeavourOS offers both off-line and on-line install options. The off-line installer, Calamares, uses the Xfce desktop by default. The on-line installer can install optional software components, including most popular desktop environments.
Status: Active
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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.
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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.
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