 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 259, 30 June 2008 |
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Welcome to this year's 26th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! You've seen it too - a recent Linux convert, used to clicking on executable files to install software, is often shocked to discover that Linux distributions use dedicated package managers to install and remove applications. But with a large number of distributions and philosophies, which is the best tool on the market? And how do they differ in terms of usability and convenience? If you are a new Linux user then our article explaining the various package management options is a must-read. In the news section, openSUSE developers defend their inclusion of KDE 4 into the recently released openSUSE 11.0, Mandriva cancels the first alpha release of version 2009 due to problems with X.Org, Debian completes the security infrastructure for the upcoming release of Debian "Lenny", and Ubuntu unveils the first developers' build of the new MID edition for mobile Internet devices. Also in this issue: a link to an interview with Zenwalk's Jean-Philippe Guillemin, a review of the upcoming Acer Aspire One and a round-up of rescue live CDs based on Linux. All this and more in this week's DistroWatch Weekly - happy reading!
Content:
 Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in ogg (14MB) and mp3 (13MB) formats (many thanks to Russ Wenner)
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Feature Story |
Package management (by John Frey)
A few weeks ago on DistroWatch there was some debate about package managers. I think you will agree that we can never know too much about package management. I have done some research and would like to share some of what I have learned.
What is a package?
The first thing we need to know is, what is a package? There are two ways to install software. The first way is to get source code and compile it on your system.
#./configure
#make
#make install
The 2nd way is to get and install a package. A package contains source code pre-compiled and packaged as a binary installation file (executable). It may include icons, libraries, configuration files, binaries, man pages, desktop shortcuts, header files, fonts, etc. In addition, it may contain meta data, such as version information, package maintainer and software authors' names and contact information, licensing, changelogs, READMEs and web location for the project and source code. Each package format has a file structure for storing data and is compressed. When the package is executed, it uncompresses the data and copies all the files from the package into the file system of the operating system, creating symbolic links where needed, putting start-up links in the menu and on the desktop, and sometimes giving configuration options to the user.
Packages are distribution and version-specific as the location for dependencies may vary between distributions and between versions of a distribution. Sometimes it is possible to download and install software the Windows way by just clicking on the package, provided it is compatible with the operating system. For instance, I downloaded and installed the Flash plugin RPM from Adobe on my Mandriva Linux system. More on that later.
There are many package formats, with .tgz, .deb and .rpm being the most common. Others like .pup, .pisi, .tazpkg and .mo are less common. Source code is usually distributed as tar.gz or tar.bz2 files, but some distributions distribute their binary packages this way as well. Most of us probably use .deb or .rpm packages.
An example of a modern graphical package management tool: PiSi by Pardus Linux
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Package managers
OK, so we know what a package is, what is a package manager? In a nutshell, a package manager installs, removes and updates packages. That is the simple definition but a modern package manager can do so much more. It can automatically connect to a repository, automatically download software, check for and resolve dependencies, list packages, list dependencies, search the package list, sort the list, and add and remove repositories. It can specify a repository for a specific package and block upgrades to specific packages, verify checksums and digital signatures to insure the integrity of the packages, allow automatic updates, and remove dependencies when uninstalling.
Not all package managers do all of those things, nor do they all perform equally well on all of those functions. This has given rise to different package managers and, contrary to the perceived notion, they do not all perform the same function except as viewed on a very superficial level. As you read about these package managers this will become clearer.
Repositories and package management system
Repositories are collections of packages typically on a remote server, but they can also reside on the local hard disk, a CD-ROM, DVD or other storage media. The important thing to know about repositories is that they store data about packages in a particular format depending on the package manager. As an example, Mandriva's urpmi cannot read Fedora's yum repository despite both containing .rpm packages, while Debian's APT can't read Mandriva's or Fedora's repositories. The package manager, package format and repository comprise the package management system.
pkgtool
Slackware and its derivatives use this system. The package format is a tar.gz file given the .tgz extension. That is, it is a tape archive (tar) that has been compressed with gzip (gz). This is not a package manager in the sense we normally think of it today. It's really just a package format and some command line tools to create, view, install, remove and upgrade. The packaging system allows embedding of install scripts. Those scripts are the only difference between installing a source tarball and a Slackware package. There is no dependency checking, no automatic connection to a repository, no automatic updating the system or checksum verification. Using pkgtool, one can access a list of installed software for removal, install packages or run install scripts. Packages are manually downloaded from a repository. This is the system that all package managers set out to improve in the days when Slackware Linux was a dominant Linux distribution. Slackware provides a package browser on the Internet and RSS feeds are available too. Both of those tools look to be recent additions. SWareT, slapt-get, slackpkg and NetBSD's pkgsrc are third-party tools that have been developed to aid package management in Slackware and/or its derivatives. These tools all provide dependency resolution and may provide some more advanced functions.
Gslapt is a GTK+ front-end to slapt-get, an APT-like package management system for Slackware Linux.
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Advanced Packaging Tool (APT)
APT is used primarily in Debian and its derivatives. APT is a library of routines in libapt that acts as a front-end for dpkg, which is a low-level package manager with utilities to install, uninstall and update .deb packages. APT provides dpkg with more advanced functions, not the least of which is dependency resolution. The APT of today has evolved a long way from its origins but has retained its relationship to dpkg. All Debian derivatives use APT by default. Development of new capabilities has kept pace with other package managers of more recent vintage. There is little question that it is one of the best, most feature-rich package managers available. APT has been ported to OpenSolaris and Mac OS X, and can be used with RPM-based distributions via apt4rpm or apt-rpm.
Synaptic - a popular graphical package management tool for (not only) Debian-based distributions.
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RPM Package Manager (RPM)
RPM is both a package format and a package manager. It is easily as popular as APT. While RPM has some of the higher level functions built into it from the start, like dependency checking (but not dependency resolving), it seems that adding all the features of a modern package management system to the RPM standard is not easily done. This has given rise to new package management tools like YUM, urpmi, YaST, up2date and apt-rpm that offer dependency resolution and more advanced features while leaving the lower level routines to RPM. These utilities are sometimes called Meta Package Managers because they manage RPM which is already a package manager. RPM has been ported to IBM's AIX architecture and is the default package format for the Linux Standard Base (LSB).
urpmi
Mandriva is the only distribution using urpmi, just as openSUSE is the only distribution using their system. The package format is .rpm. The urpmi utility is one of the first, perhaps the first, package manager for RPM packages. It actually consists of a number of different utilities to perform various functions: urpme uninstalls software, urpmq queries the database for a matching file name, urpmi installs packages, and so on. One of the interesting functions of urpmi is that it will add the meta data for RPMs installed from a local directory. If you remember way back, I mentioned downloading Adobe's Flash plugin. All I had to do was click on the RPM package, that brought up a dialog box asking me if I wanted to install, save or cancel. I chose install and urpmi added the RPM to my list of installed software. This means that I can use urpmi to uninstall or upgrade the plugin provided I remember to keep the original RPM file.
Mandriva's Rpmdrake is a graphical front-end for the distribution's package management utility called urpmi.
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Yellow Dog Updater Modified (YUM)
Derived from Yellow Dog Updater (YUP), YUM is a Package manager for Red Hat/Fedora-based systems using the RPM package. It has become the default package manager as of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and is used by most Red Hat/Fedora-based systems. Modularity is a major feature for YUM. Extra functions are added through plugins and with the yum-utils package. Critics say the tool is not integrated enough and performance and maturity of modules can vary. Nevertheless its wide adoption is evidence that it is a good package management system. Red Hat has long offered a subscription service to provide updates and patches called Red Hat Networks (RHN). The subscription service is important to their business plan and as such they have not spent as much time on development of a non-subscription service package manager. Third parties developed YUM before it was picked up by Red Hat. RPM is the traditional Red Hat package manager superceded by up2date, now replaced by YUM.
Yum Extender (YumEx) is a powerful graphical package management tool for Fedora-based distributions.
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ZYpp
SUSE Linux and openSUSE use a veritable dog's breakfast of utilities for package management. Input is given through either rug (a command-line front-end) or zen-updater (a GUI frontend) to Zenworks Management Daemon (ZMD). ZMD listens for commands and passes them off to the libzypp ZMD helpers, which communicate with the software database, parse metadata, and pass data and commands to libzypp. Libzypp does dependency resolution, installation, removal, and upgrades - using the RPM package management utility. One can also use YaST or zypper (command line) to talk directly to libzypp. This is the extreme other-end from pkgtool used by Slackware. Three front-ends, two package management systems, two repositories. The zen-updater system also adds a daemon and the helper layer (that no other system has) before it reaches the package manager for dependency resolution and installation routines. I used this system when openSUSE first introduced it in version 10.0. It was very slow as many will remember, but recent reports say the speed has been improved markedly.
YaST2 is an openSUSE system administration utility that includes an advanced graphical package manager.
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Source-based distributions and the BSDs
For these systems, a repository contains install scripts instead of pre-compiled binaries and compiling is done on the local machine. Portage in Gentoo uses scripts called ebuilds that link to source code and contain instructions for the compiler and install routines. This system does function like a package manager in many ways, including installing, removing, updating, tracking installed software, dependency resolving, etc. This is generally the way BSD Ports work as well, with installation scripts instead of packages. The appeal of this type of management should be obvious. Install scripts are smaller than packages so the repository is lighter. Original source means possibly cleaner code and less third-party "optimization", though install scripts may contain patches. Local compilation means no extra code to support hardware not on the system and optimizations can be made for the available hardware. Other advantages exist but you can read Gentoo or BSD documentation for that.
DesktopBSD's package manager (dbsd-pkgmgr) is an innovative graphical tool that allows installing both binary and source packages.
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Summary
Those are some of the package managers out there. I hope you can see the differences between them after reading this. The early package managers were collections of simple install, remove and update routines. While APT was eventually developed to be very feature-rich, third-party package managers for Slackware Linux are mostly simple programs that add dependency resolution and one or two other features. RPM was an evolution of the package manager closer to a complete package management system. It added features like dependency checking, tracking, automatic installation and checksum verification. RPM has many more functions than dpkg but fewer functions than APT. For whatever reasons, instead of adding functions to RPM, developers created "meta package managers" like YUM, urpmi, Smart and YaST. Finally, we have script-based package management that uses original source code and compiles it at install time. Script-based repositories are smaller than package repositories, and scripts possibly require fewer resources to maintain through minor variations of software updates. However, they require close monitoring of the software sources to ensure that hyperlinks in the scripts remain valid.
There are many package managers not described here. They range from extremely feature-rich, like Smart, to slim, like (Arch Linux's) Pacman. They are usually developed when no other package manager fits the bill for a distribution's base and philosophy. Smart and YUM, among others, are being developed to read several types of repositories. We keep seeing new package managers and meta package managers. Even Puppy has its own, undoubtedly optimized for size. Then there are the many, many graphical front-ends. They don't add new functions but improve usability. Personally, I prefer a graphical front-end for browsing packages in much the same way I prefer a graphical user interface for file browsing.
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| Miscellaneous News |
openSUSE defends KDE 4, Mandriva cancels alpha release, Debian completes Lenny's security support, Ubuntu unveils MID edition, Zenwalk's Jean-Philippe Guillemin, Acer Aspire One, Linux rescue CDs
 The recent release of openSUSE 11.0 was marred by some aggressive and even insulting posts of some users on the distribution's mailing lists. The reason? Many of them fail to understand how KDE 4, which they consider an unfinished and buggy piece of software, could become the preferred desktop on such a popular distribution. But as Benjamin Weber explains in his blog post, KDE 4 is not the default desktop and anybody installing the distribution from the installation DVD has to make an explicit choice between GNOME, KDE 3 and KDE 4: "Both KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 (and GNOME) are offered when installing from the DVD or the 'netinstall' image. There is no default. Users are not forced or even suggested to change from KDE 3 to KDE 4." In a separate blog, Mike McCallister continues to expand on the KDE 4 dilemma faced by the openSUSE developers: "The KDE 4.0 desktop environment was released in January, with an entirely new way of doing things. The Plasma desktop, Phonon multimedia framework, and Solid hardware framework represented some spectacular changes from the familiar KDE 3.x interface in place since 2002. Unfortunately, some key pieces of the complete desktop (including the KOffice suite, Kontact personal information manager and Amarok multimedia player) had not yet migrated successfully to the new platform. So KDE 4.0 was defined, rightly so, as a work in progress, while 4.1 would be the more stable, mature platform."
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 Mandriva's plans to release the first alpha build of its upcoming Mandriva Linux 2009 suffered a setback last week when its development branch was deemed too problematic for public testing. Adam Williamson explains: "Those of you who saw the recent announcement of the Mandriva Linux 2009 release schedule may be wondering about the status of alpha 1, which was scheduled for public release on June 25th. Due to some major problems in this release related to X.Org, the migration from KDE 3 to KDE 4, and generation of One images, we have decided not to make a public release of alpha 1. If we had waited to resolve these problems before releasing Alpha 1 it would have come out only a few days before Alpha 2, not allowing enough time for much real testing. Therefore alpha 1 will exist only as an internal release, and will not be made public. The first public pre-release for Mandriva Linux 2009 will now be Alpha 2, which will be released according to the announced schedule, on July 10th."
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 As Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" moves closer to its final release, many people are wondering whether it's safe to run the distribution on a production system. Here is some good news - from the security point of view, Lenny is ready. Nico Golde explains: "With some pride we can say that testing has never been in such good shape security wise. The tracker reflects very accurately the current known security issues in the testing distribution. Our new announcement emails provide a notification for users whenever a new security fix reaches testing, whether through migration from unstable or DTSA for testing-security. Also fewer packages are getting removed from testing because of security issues." However, it should be noted that once Lenny is out, the testing branch won't receive the same attention from the Debian security team as the current testing tree: "After the release of Lenny, there will probably be no security support for the new testing distribution for some time. It is not clear yet how long this state will last. Users of testing who need security support are advised to change their sources.list entries from 'testing' to 'lenny' now and only switch to lenny+1 after the beginning of its security support is announced."
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 Here is an interesting piece of news for the fans of Linux-based mobile Internet devices. As announced by Canonical last week, the first alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04 MID edition is out and available for testing: "We are delighted to be able to welcome Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) edition 8.04 to the world as a full developers' release. It is based on the Ubuntu Desktop edition, and it is now available for download. The Ubuntu MID edition 8.04 has been built by the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded community that is sponsored by Canonical and in co-operation with Intel Moblin.org community to take advantage of the Intel Atom Processor, the chipset that is underpinning the Mobile Internet Device (MID) category. Ubuntu MID edition will always be an open source distribution and is freely available." For further information and screenshots of the Ubuntu MID user interface please visit the Ubuntu MID page.
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  Speaking of portable Internet devices, CNET has published a detailed review of Acer Aspire One, an upcoming ultra-portable laptop running Linpus Linux: "Despite its lateness to the party, the One has pretty much everything it takes to be a market leader. It's attractive and lightweight. It offers solid performance and it's easy to use. Most importantly, however, is its price: in the UK the entry-level One costs a very pocket-friendly £220." And how does Acer Aspire One compare with the popular ASUS Eee PC? "In some respects, the Acer Aspire One is better than an Eee PC 901. It has an excellent keyboard, solid performance and is highly portable. The Eee C 901 still has the edge in terms of battery life and mouse input, so it's a close call between the two machines."
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 The developers of free operating system are often visionaries who spend much of their spare time hacking on open source software. But who exactly are these guys? And why are they doing all this? Last week, an Italian web site called oneOpenSource interviewed Jean-Philippe Guillemin, the founder and lead developer of Zenwalk Linux. Firstly, who is Jean-Philippe Guillemin? "I am 36-years old, married, and working as a security engineer for Telindus Corporation." How did Zenwalk Linux come about? "I started the Zenwalk project (formerly Minislack) as a way to learn the internals of GNU/Linux. Building an operating system is a great way to understand IT deeply because you're on your own to solve the problems when things don't work as expected." Why did he choose Slackware as the base system for Zenwalk Linux? "In my opinion Slackware is the best Linux distribution in the world; it is fast, reliable, secure, up-to-date, and built with respect for the UNIX spirit." And how does Zenwalk differ from its parent? "When you install Zenwalk, you immediately get one application for each task, optimized and ready to use, along with a refined look and feel. The pre-selected packages are carefully chosen by Zenwalk developers to provide the user with only the best and most usable applications."
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 Finally, a great article on an extremely useful, but not particularly glamorous class of open source live CDs - the Linux rescue systems that provide ways to recover lost files and hard disk partitions, to scan for and remove Windows viruses, and to perform a variety of system diagnostic and forensic tasks. Serdar Yegulalp in InformationWeek: "At some point, it hits all of us. One day you're chugging merrily along, and then you're staring at a machine that won't boot - a machine that just happens to contain everything of importance to you. While some degree of disaster is inevitable, it's how you cope with it that counts. While computers and file systems get more robust with each passing year, there's always going to be room for disaster recovery techniques. With open source solutions to help you recover from such messes, you're not tied to a proprietary product's costs or licensing agreements, and if you're so inclined you can rework the source code to meet your own needs." The 5-page article investigates the goals and capabilities of a number of useful Linux rescue CDs, including SystemRescueCd, Parted Magic, BackTrack, STD and Helix, as well as several popular data recovery programs, such as dd, TestDisk and PhotoRec. A good article to bookmark in case disaster strikes.
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| Released Last Week |
eAR OS 1.10
Peter Thomsen has announced the availability of an updated version of eAR OS, an Ubuntu-based, multimedia-oriented distribution: "The new eAR OS version 1.10b has been updated to use the new Firefox 3 browser with the Medialayer Connectivity plugin to watch movies on the Internet. This version is faster because now the graphical rendering of the eAR Media Center is hardware accelerated, it comes with a brand new theme for better look, you can select a username and password of your own choice, and it comes with many other improvements. All packages are the very newest and it comes with the latest Real-Time Linux kernel. The installation is easier too: if you want it to be up and running after installation to the hard disk with a minimum of tweaking, then enter 'earmusic' to be the username and select a password of your own choice." Visit the project's news page to read the full release announcement.
Molinux 4.0
After a brief beta test, Molinux 4.0, an Ubuntu-based distribution developed by the regional government of Castilla la Mancha in Spain, has been released. Molinux 4.0 comes with the following new features and changes: updated artwork; new versions of most included applications; live CD that allows users to evaluate the operating system without installation; AppArmor security framework; Cheese - an application for taking photos and videos with a webcam; updated user manual with a system of "recipes" that allow the user to learn common computing tasks fast; new backup manager that makes it simple to perform unattended backups over the local network. Read the complete release announcement (in Spanish) for further information.
Molinux 4.0 - a distribution for government offices and schools in Spain's Castilla la Mancha region
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CentOS 5.2
Karanbir Singh has announced the release of CentOS 5.2, a desktop a server distribution built by recompiling the source RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2: "We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS 5.2 for the i386 and x86_64 architectures. CentOS 5.2 is based on the upstream release 5.2 and includes packages from all variants, including Server and Client. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. And the option to further enable external repositories at install time is now available in the installer. Further arch support for PowerPC, IA64 and SPARC are planned and will be released soon." Read the release announcement and release notes for more a detailed description of changes and new features.
Arch Linux 2008.06
Arch Linux 2008.06 has been released. Arch Linux is an independently developed i686/x86_64-optimized community distribution, based on a rolling-release package model and targeted at competent GNU/Linux users. From the announcement: "Arch Linux 2008.06 'Overlord'. The Arch Linux 2008.06 ISO images are out. This release introduces many changes: 'base' category is always installed; use of UUIDs for persistent device naming; availability of USB disk images alongside traditional ISOs; true live Arch installation environment; inclusion of the beginner's guide from the Wiki; documentation updates; includes the current stable kernel, 2.6.25.6." Here is the very brief release announcement.
sidux 2008-02
Stefan Lippers-Hollmann has announced the release of sidux 2008-02, a desktop Linux distribution based on Debian's unstable branch: "A little later than planned due to a number of library transitions in Debian sid, we now have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of sidux 2008-02 'Erebos', shipping in 'kde-lite' flavours for amd64 and i386, a combined i386+amd64 release with KDE for 'kde-full' and an xdelta to add initial localisations for all currently supported languages. Enhancing the sidux family, an Xfce variant has been added for amd64 and i386 architectures for the first time. 'Erebos' concentrates on integrating the changes caused by kernel 2.6.25.9, the addition of Xfce as a supported distribution variant, as well as several installer improvements and updating the packages affected by the OpenSSL security problems in Debian." Read the detailed release notes for further information.
sidux 2008-02 - now also available in a light-weight Xfce variant
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GoblinX 2.7 "Mini"
Flavio Pereira de Oliveira has announced the final release of GoblinX 2.7 "Mini" edition, a minimalist desktop live CD based on Slackware Linux: "GoblinX Mini 2.7 is released. After more than four months of development we are pleased to announce the availability of the new stable version. The GoblinX Mini edition is the son of GoblinX and contains only Xfce as windows manager and GTK+ applications. Main upgrades since RC2: added bookmarks to Xfce panel; corrected some small errors and bugs; upgraded some packages, interfaces and scripts; added xf86-video-openchrome, libmpd, cdstatus and Xfmpc; added some missing applications to Xfce menu; added extra folders to be used as package repository; added media package repository to Slapt-getrc; added package upgrade check to Xfce panel with Xfce4-smartpm-plugin; added interface to build module with Slapt-get help; added more Thunar and Nautilus actions; added Totem as audio CD player option." Visit the GoblinX news page to read the full release announcement.
Myah OS 3.0 "Dragon"
Jeremiah Cheatham has announced the final release of Myah OS 2.7 "Dragon" edition, a complete desktop distribution featuring the KDE 3.5 desktop: "For all current fans of Myah OS and all those soon to be, we give you Myah OS 3.0 Dragon. Dragon is the code name for Myah OS built around the KDE 3 desktop. We chose KDE 3.5.9 since it's still considered the most stable and best supported version of KDE. As with all other versions of Myah OS, Dragon has full multimedia support and a wide range or software. There is a complete KDE desktop as well as KOffice, KTorrent, Amarok and many more KDE software packages. Dragon brings the best of KDE and the best of Myah OS together in the same system. There have been several updates since the release of Box. The backup LXDE desktop now uses Metacity instead of Openbox as the window manager. Firefox has been updated to 3.0." Read the rest of the release announcement for further information.
Pardus Linux 2008
The Pardus development team has announced the release of Pardus Linux 2008, an independently developed desktop distribution with custom package management and system configuration tools: "New version of the Pardus project, Pardus Linux 2008, improved by the latest technologies and up-to-date applications, has been released. As always, Pardus 2008, is being freely distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License. In compliance with the main goals of the Pardus project, Pardus 2008 has lots of new features for ease of installation and use, both at the infrastructure and interface levels. In addition, Pardus 2008 provides enhanced hardware support, stable and reliable Linux infrastructure and numerous applications on a single CD." Visit the distribution's home page to read the release announcement and check out the release notes for information about new features.
Pardus Linux 2008 - a well-designed KDE 3.5 distribution with convenient administration tools
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Scientific Linux 5.2
Connie Sieh and Troy Dawson have announced the release of Scientific Linux 5.2, a distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, but enhanced with extra software and features: "Scientific Linux 5.2 has been released in record time. XFS, the file system, is now officially in Scientific Linux 5.2. XFS is not available during the installation as an option for formatting partitions, but you can install it so that pre-formatted partitions will be recognized. KDEEDU has also been added in Scientific Linux 5.2. This was added mainly because KStars is part of this package, but the other educational programs are also helpful to schools. Alpine has officially replaced Pine in Scientific Linux 5.2. Scientific Linux release 5.2 is based on the rebuilding of RPMs out of SRPMs from Enterprise 5 Server and Client, including update 2. It also has all errata and bug fixes up until June 26, 2008." Read the release announcement and release notes for more information.
Parsix GNU/Linux 1.5r0
Alan Baghumian has announced the release of Parsix GNU/Linux 1.5r0, a Debian-based desktop distribution and live CD: "After a 2-week delay, we proudly announce the immediate availability of Parsix GNU/Linux 1.5r0, code name 'Viola'. Parsix Viola brings several new features and it includes a new kernel, updated software packages, updated documentation, improved installer system, and several fixes for reported defects. This version is synchronized with Parsix and Debian testing repositories as of June 25, 2008. Several bugs have been solved. Replaced GQView with gThumb, Camorama with Cheese, and re-added iptraf and nmap. Parsix Viola officially supports Compiz Fusion, VirtualBox-OSE, and GNU Flash Player. Highlights: GNOME 2.22.2, X.Org 7.3, Linux kernel 2.6.24.4, OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 and GNU Iceweasel 3.0 RC2." Read the release announcement and release notes for more information.
Parsix GNU/Linux 1.5r0 - a new update of the desktop distribution based on Debian's testing branch
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Network Security Toolkit 1.8.0
Network Security Toolkit NST is a Fedora-based live CD designed to provide easy access to open source network security applications. A new release, version 1.8.0, was announced yesterday: "We are pleased to announce the latest NST release: v1.8.0. This release is based on Fedora 8 using the Linux kernel 2.6.25.6. Here are some of the highlights of this release: transitioned from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora 8 as the underlying base of the NST; addition of wireless firmware packages to support several new wireless chipsets; most networking and security applications included have been updated to their latest version. The NST Web User Interface (WUI), has been greatly enhanced and cleaned up. Some note worthy enhancements include: Multi-Tap Network Packet Capture and Management; an enhanced Network Packet Capture Management and Status Interface; the use of AJAX and JSON to provide a more dynamic and interactive NST WUI; support for WPA-PSK wireless connections...." Read the release announcement and visit the project's home page for further details.
Network Security Toolkit 1.8.0 provides a comprehensive web-based administration utility for a variety of tasks.
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Finnix 92.0
Ryan Finnie has announced the release of Finnix 92.0, a Debian-based live CD designed for system administrators: "Finnix 92.0 released. Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian 'testing'. Today marks the release of version 92.0 for the x86/AMD64, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms. Major new features: Finnix 92.0 contains the fix to the Debian OpenSSL predictable RNG vulnerability - a reminder that all versions of Finnix from 89.0 to 91.1 (inclusive) contained this vulnerability, so please keep this in mind when running OpenSSH servers on vulnerable versions; Linux 2.6.25; a new graphical boot menu - this boot menu will still perform 32-bit/64-bit auto-detection, and options such as 'toram' and 'testcd' can still be added to boot profiles by pressing [TAB] over a desired boot profile." Read the release announcement and release notes for a more detailed list of changes and new features.
SystemRescueCd 1.0.4
SystemRescueCd, a small Gentoo-based live CD designed for hard disk partitioning and data rescue tasks, has been updated to version 1.0.4. What's new? "Updated the default kernel to Linux 2.6.25.7 with Reiser4fs; fixed problem with Samba due to bad case in the UTF8 character set; fixed the LVM package - LVM 1.x support was broken; fixed the LVM service - now it starts after mdadm so that LVM on raid works; updated NTFS-3G to 1.2531 (NTFS full read-write support); updated the Btrfs file system support to 0.15 (kernel module and utilities); ability to boot Linux from an LVM disk; added option 'root=auto' to boot the first Linux system found on the hard drive; added 'mhdd' boot floppy disk image (low-level hard-disk diagnostic tool)." Here is the complete changelog.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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New distributions added to waiting list
- F-Secure Rescue CD. F-Secure Rescue CD is a Linux live CD whose sole purpose is to scan files on FAT and NTFS partitions for presence of viruses and malware.
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DistroWatch database summary
And this concludes the latest issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 7 July 2008.
Ladislav Bodnar
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1 • openSUSE 11 (by PP on 2008-06-30 09:41:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
Installed openSUSE 11, with KDE3.5, and am very pleased with it (after reports decided not to go to KDE4). Only one strange problem - after installing crossover 5.0.3, and attempting to install MS Office 2000, the installation stalls near the end. This does not happen with openSUSE 10.3 nor Kubuntu 7.04/7.10. Have not been able to find any explanation to this anywhere.
2 • Zenwalk buggy (by NK on 2008-06-30 10:15:55 GMT from United States)
i really had great first impressions with Zenwalk. I had some difficulty getting the printer to work, and after I did that it would no longer recognize hotplugged USB devices. I have yet to get the USB 2.0 PCI card working. When the iceweasel browser was upgraded it lost some functionality such as recognizing URLs in other apps. I do not understand the inclusion of iceweasel when zenwalk provides "nonfree" codecs. I much rather would have seen a firefox install (or at least the option instead of forcing that ideology on us - yea I know all the arguments, but there *are* differences) out of the box. I am unable to print when inside Mousepad.
All in all a promising release, but it seems like it's one or two versions from maturity
3 • Red Hat will be pissed (by Mr. Pink on 2008-06-30 10:22:39 GMT from United States)
RPM - Red Hat package Manager
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager
4 • openSUSE 11.0 + KDE (by Charlie on 2008-06-30 10:22:39 GMT from Hong Kong)
KDE 3.5.9 works fine in my machine.
Many reports have already stated that KDE 4 is still not usable.I doubt that those complained haven't read any news about the KDE development ?
Besides,openSUSE has already did a good job to try to provide users a stable system by not dropping KDE 3.5.x out.At the development stage they even tried to modify the YaST installer so that users wouldn't think that they wanted to "push" KDE 4 to users,yet it seems failed for unknown reasons.However,they also said that neither KDE 3 NOR KDE 4 are the default DM and they are willing to give support to both KDE 3 or KDE 4 users,so all is upon THEIR CHOICES.
5 • package managers for OpenSUSE (by wildpossum on 2008-06-30 10:23:52 GMT from Australia)
Just a comment on package managers for OpenSUSE. It is true that there was a lot of upheaval in package management tools starting with 10.0 due to an ill-advised desire to merge with Novell's enterprise solutions, but eventually it was accepted that OpenSUSE should have its own packaging system and blaze the path. With 11.0, OpenSUSE has standardised on YaST as the front-end, zypper as the CLI tool, interfacing to libzypp and rpm at a lower level. rug and zmd are bad memories now and rightly so. The repository update speed in 11.0 is much faster than in 10.x and no longer a reason for grumpiness.
6 • Package Managers (by trevor on 2008-06-30 10:25:12 GMT from Germany)
Hey! Where's pacman? IMHO is one of the best out there... Otherwise great article :)
7 • KDE4 on OpenSUSE 11.0 (by wildpossum on 2008-06-30 10:27:30 GMT from Australia)
I have to say that I haven't experienced any instability with KDE4 on OpenSUSE 11.0. All my usual apps work. But I also must say that I am not adventurous with my desktop. I don't have fancy 3D effects etc. My desktop is a productivity tool, not an entertainment venue. And it is correct that the installer makes you choose your desktop, GNOME, KDE3/4, etc. It explicitly refrains from making any recommendations. You can even have both KDE3 and 4 install and switch back to the mature KDE3.
8 • Package management (by Didier Spaier on 2008-06-30 10:32:27 GMT from France)
As a Slackware (12.1, for now) user I use mainly installpkg, upgradepkg and removepkg and slackpkg for packages management. Slackpkg (found in /extra in the distribution) is very useful too, as allow you to do a lot of things with a simple command (it rely upon aforementioned ones):
bash-3.1# slackpkg
slackpkg - version 2.70.4
Usage: slackpkg update [gpg] download and update files and
package indexes
slackpkg install package download and install packages
slackpkg upgrade package download and upgrade packages
slackpkg reinstall package same as install, but for packages
already installed
slackpkg remove package remove installed packages
slackpkg clean-system remove all packages which are not
present in the official Slackware
package set. Good to keep the house
in order
slackpkg upgrade-all sync all packages installed in your
machine with the selected mirror. This
is the correct way to upgrade all of
your machine.
slackpkg install-new install packages which are added to
the official Slackware package set.
Run this if you are upgrading to another
Slackware version or using current.
slackpkg blacklist Blacklist a package. Blacklisted
packages cannot be upgraded, installed,
or reinstalled by slackpkg
slackpkg download Only download (do not install) a package
slackpkg info package Show package information
(works with only ONE package)
slackpkg search file Search for a specific file in the
entire package collection
slackpkg new-config Search for new configuration files and
ask to user what to do with them.
Didier from Paris
9 • Rug and ZMD (by Plop on 2008-06-30 10:38:17 GMT from Switzerland)
Rug and ZMB are not part anymore of openSUSE, their were dropped since the 10.3 release. They are still used with the Enterprise version, but openSUSE has only Libzypp now (YaST as frontend and Zypper as CLI).
10 • Distrowatch (by CombatWombat on 2008-06-30 10:39:31 GMT from New Zealand)
Thanks for another awesome Distrowatch. I enjoy my Monday nights, because I can read my favorite linux magazine site, right here.
Hey Ladislav, maybe it's time to start looking at making this magazine a little more glossy? It could do with some nice CSS themes, and even make them user definable (require a user registration/login).
I really respect the stand that you have made to only get advertising dollars from related products. It always makes me cringe when I find MS ads all over sites dealing with open source.
11 • KDE4 on opensuse (by Gigi on 2008-06-30 11:28:37 GMT from United States)
Tried the KDE4 OpenSuse 11 64bit live cd. It would boot, show the splash screen and then crash saying that "could load plasma". I tried on my laptop, KVM, virtualbox, vmware. The result is the same. I am planning to download the DVD and try.
12 • Zenwalk (Zenwalk-core) (by Pig_Pen on 2008-06-30 11:40:56 GMT from United States)
I love both Slackware and Zenwalk, and find Zenwalk a little more optimized for PCs with SATA harddrives. I have an older PC running Slackware and a new PC with SATA drives that I tried various distros on and Zenwalk runs this new PC the best! much thanks and appreciation goes to Pat Volkerding & Jean-Philippe Guillemin :)
13 • kde4 4.1beta on openSuse (by Bill on 2008-06-30 11:49:11 GMT from United States)
should be be mentioned that in addition to kde4 4.0 there's a repository for 4.1beta called "kde4 unstable" and it's pretty stable. Personally I think there's still things missing from 4 but there are a few workarounds such as having both the kde3 and kde4 panels installed (which Suse does) to provide access to 3rd party applets (found in kde-apps like kima and kbandwidth). Also there a little program to convert your current service menues to your kde4 apps called "KDE4-servicemenus" also found on kde-apps.org.
14 • Zenwalk 5.2 and Firefox (by Distroman on 2008-06-30 11:55:59 GMT from United States)
@ NK Yes I agree, Zenwalk is buggy and they still have not fixed the problems with the CD/DVD burning software (ie: brasero,K3b). And the mounting (exo bug) problems were finnally fixed after i don't know how long. Anyway to install Firefox, install gslapt and add one of the hard repos for Slackware 12.1 at www. slacky.eu
Distroman
15 • Pacman package manager (by Anonymous on 2008-06-30 11:56:10 GMT from Canada)
Pacman is probably the best package manager in the world. It is a lot better than apt.
http://www.archlinux.org/pacman/
16 • MINT REVIEW? (by Jimbo on 2008-06-30 11:56:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
Every week I tune into Distrowatch hoping to read a review of Mint 5 :-( I wanna know if this new distro shooting up the rankings is actually any good or not.
17 • Traditional building (by dbrion on 2008-06-30 11:57:29 GMT from France)
"The first way is to get source code and compile it on your system.
#./configure
#make
#make install
"
configure && make && make check && make install clean
can only work at root level, with places where softs are put being predefined : normally, they may replace your distribution's carefully precompiled softs.... and therefore break it=> no distributor can help you to repair it, as they have already done the work.
The usual way(used by ...users(!-computers are meant to it?-) who want something their sys"admin" forgot to put, or in many Unixes, or (incl) to test new versions of ones favorite application) is to
read all the doc shipped with the tarball, and
configure it with an unusual prefix, thus having as many versions one can test (with different compilation options, etc..) and often avoiding being root...:
if there is no configure file, one must edit Makefiles
then make check, ( if needed su to root level) make install
and run all the test upstream provided.
This traditional way of building is useful to fix things (but one leaves the distr.s support, if any), or to have a limited (but that cannot be 200(0(0)) packages, as it is slow) number of applications one can recommend (or not) even if they are earlier than ones distribution... and to keep this distribution working!
18 • RE:16 Mint 5 Reviews. (by Eddie Wilson on 2008-06-30 12:09:54 GMT from United States)
LinuxMint 5 is very good and there are a lot of reviews listed on the main page of Distrowatch you can read.
Eddie
19 • System Rescue (by Tx_King on 2008-06-30 12:27:26 GMT from United States)
Thank you for mentioning System Rescue CD. I would not have been willing to learn anything about Linux without first having a great partitioning/backup tool, and hope to see other distro's flatter it by copying its feature set.
20 • Package managers (by Jesse on 2008-06-30 12:50:20 GMT from Canada)
The package manager piece was an interesting read, but I wonder who it was aimed at. Chances are many Linux experts already know all of this; the newbies are likely to look at an article like this and just get confused. Take the following line as an example:
"APT is a library of routines in libapt that acts as a front-end for dpkg"
I understood that, but only because I've been using various flavors of Linux for years and I know what an object library is. To most people the above sentence is going to look like alphabet soup.
While a good review for advanced Linux users, I think there should be a much more simple package management 101 article for new comers to the scene.
21 • RHN, Comparing RPM to APT (by Rahul Sundaram on 2008-06-30 12:50:57 GMT from India)
"The subscription service is important to their business plan and as such they have not spent as much time on development of a non-subscription service package manager. Third parties developed YUM before it was picked up by Red Hat. RPM is the traditional Red Hat package manager superceded by up2date, now replaced by YUM."
Note that the primary developer of Yum works at Red Hat and RHN web service works in RHEL via a yum-rhn plugin.
"RPM was an evolution of the package manager closer to a complete package management system. It added features like dependency checking, tracking, automatic installation and checksum verification. RPM has many more functions than dpkg but fewer functions than APT. For whatever reasons, instead of adding functions to RPM, developers created "meta package managers" like YUM, urpmi, Smart and YaST"
Comparing APT to RPM doesn't make much sense. Again
RPM as format ~= deb format
RPM tool ~= dpkg tool
Yum, apt-rpm etc ~= apt
22 • Mint Reviews (by Fingers on 2008-06-30 13:05:10 GMT from United States)
As Eddie pointed out there are Mint reviews on DW but in a nutshell...
Mint is based on Ubuntu. Although based on Ubuntu, the developers have added some great tweaks and tools of their own. It seems to me they've managed to make it even friendlier and easier to use.
Using Ubuntu repositories gives you a huge package library and Mint uses several package management tools including Synaptic so installing packages is simple. Removing packages is even easier. Simply go to the program menu, right click on the program and then hit remove.
Gnome is the default desktop for Mint but installing KDE or any desktop you prefer is simply a matter of installing the packages.
I've continued to try other distros but since Mint3, I've kept coming back to Mint.
Instead of simply reading a review, why not download and burn a copy and try it for yourself. I think you'll be impressed.
23 • Package Managers (by My Linux Page on 2008-06-30 13:05:24 GMT from United States)
That is the great thing about Linux and the Open Source community: we get to choose what kind of package managers we like. It's not like Windows were you have to do things like Redmond tells you.
24 • RE: 16 • MINT REVIEW (by JeffM on 2008-06-30 13:08:45 GMT from Canada)
I find myself using Mint as my main distro lately. I've had no major issues so far, although sometimes when I click a window to restore it, doesn't show up. Its running down in my panel bar but for whatever reason it just does not want to show itself.
I use to be a KDE user (suse) but since 4.0, switched back to gnome.
25 • RE 23 : The evil Window$ has gnu ports of package mangements (by dbrion on 2008-06-30 13:15:12 GMT from France)
"It's not like Windows were you have to do things like Redmond tells you.
"
Thanks to RedHat, cygwin has a package management (can at least hint for dependencies before instaalling|removing)... under Windows (rpm and *deb have been Windows ported, too, but without success)... and Msys/Mingw are meant to support traditional install . (therefore, beginners can get dangerous habits before switching to linux)....
FYI : sometimes, the authors of free and GPL software show the percentage of GNULinux downloads, OSolaris, BSDs and Windows...(ex: qgis, yesterday there was a vote....) .... Msys (a Cygwin fork, very minimalistic) and Cygwin outnumbered yesterday the real *nuxes/*nixes...
26 • OpenSuse 11 & KDE4 (by burpnrun on 2008-06-30 13:22:34 GMT from Canada)
Having tried both KDE 4.x and 3.5.9 with OpenSuse 11, I can say that 11.0 has a few bugs but is generally OK and stable with KDE 3.5.9 although fonts are still a bit fuzzy. KDE 4 is, however, an unmitigated disaster.
It is a completely new desktop metaphor and user experience. It is still missing many functions and applications that worked well in 3.5.9. and it doesn't seem to have a schedule for porting these other essential functions It is very buggy. The KDE4 Control Panel is dumbed down and featureless enough to qualify as "designed by Gnome's usability experts". Changing the font size for the clock in the tray needs an act of Parliament, 4 shamans, a lot of chicken entrails, and a host of C++ programmers ... plus secret incantations.
KDE4 is, in a nutshell, nothing more than a glitzy shell and should really be v3.9999.01 of KDE. It is *not* ready for mainstream productive use, although those who are impressed with Vista-style bling and glitz (which it reminds me of) will no doubt feel at home with it, and love to tinker with its crude foibles amid cries of "hey, that's neat!". And it's KDE.org's problem to fix. Hopefully they will listen to the majority of mainstream users when they try to end up with at least a non-distracting, logical and usable desktop rather than what they have now.
But I blame the openSuse folks even more than KDE.org. KDE4 did *not* deserve a place on the installation menu and, if it did, it should have been accompanied by stern warnings that this was an early attempt at a completely new desktop (and was missing essential functionality), and that it was hardly a 4.x "beta".
So my recommendation, for users needing a productive, stable and familiar desktop, would be to completely ignore KDE "4" until 18 months has passed, and then take a look at it. Hopefully by then the KDE developers will have something almost useful and stable, and will have come to their senses. A good starting point would be to adopt all the good things in 3.5.9 that are useful and productive, rather than "deciding" that these don't fit their new bling and glitz model. And get rid of those sub-icons withing desktop icons .... the ones that do the same function as a right-click on an icon did in 3.5.x, but which occuply tons less deskspace. Of course, that would be less "blingful" ... so I'm not hopeful.
Another commenter, in another forum, encapsulated it best: "Give us back our desktop!". When comments like that are made, you can be sure that the "avant garde" nature of this new desktop metaphor may need some rethinking.
27 • Package Managers (by Spencer on 2008-06-30 13:30:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
It really does seem that the writer has never actually used RPM. At some points correct comparisons between dpkg and RPM are made but then random references to APT are chucked in when it is in no way part of dpkg and its own separate library with a front end apt-get. This is exactly the same as say the relationship between RPM and libzypp on opensuse. But apart from some outdated descriptions like the one on opensuse and the RPM mistakes it was a nice article.
P.S. libzypp > libapt :)
28 • Package Managers (by glenn on 2008-06-30 14:06:32 GMT from Canada)
Hi Gang.
IMO.
The author of the Package Managers Article is John Frey who often posts comments here. In his opening he refers to discussions of the past few weeks regarding package managers so this is his attempt to bring them to light and share what he has learned as he puts it. He does not claoim to be an expert in any or all of them.
Thats how I interpret the intent.
Ergo, this was aimed at us, the distrowatch afficiandos. Ladislav has often called for one of us to do a review. John answered that call. Nice going John!
Of course John would be aware that his statement would be subjected to scrutiny and comments both positive and negative here. So in my opinion, we now have a focus to argue about and comment on which is the whole point of his article (I think) and we all learn something new.
For myself, I prefer to compile when I can otherwise I will use package managers Synaptic for Debian, pkgtoool/swaret for Slackware, and reluctantly, URPM(Mandriva).
Even within a single distro we have a choice of how we want to accomplish package management including making your own up. As someone point out in an earlier post thats better than being forced to do it the Redmond way. But then again, some people do not want choice and like being told what to do. (insert wide grin here).
Glenn
29 • No Dial up???? (by Dusty on 2008-06-30 14:21:03 GMT from United States)
Most Distros have a Dial up option!. But a number don't
If I spend hours downloading a distro or bought a CD,it better have Dial up or I have wasted my time.
Is it so hard for Distro developers to list in their features list {NO DIAL UP}???.....some with DSL and Cable have a backup Dial up account.
30 • KDE4, etc. (by a1b1 on 2008-06-30 14:26:05 GMT from United States)
I tried KDE4 on Mandriva in February. It was not usable on my system, with all desktop effects turned off. Dialogs were slow to open and close, some buttons didn't work, things on the screen didn't get drawn correctly, jerky performance/scrolling, etc., crashes all the time. In other words, on my machine, a mess. I just installed Opensuse (only for testing purposes), with KDE4. Now it is fast, everything has worked that I have tried, and I've only had one crash in the few days I've played with it (I still do my main things on Mandriva). And I was changing a bunch of settings at the same time when that crash happened. It has come a long way, give it some time.
(core 2 duo, 4 gigs ram, 8600gt, so no, my system isn't slow).
That being said, I haven't looked at Opensuse for 2 years, looks like a nice distro now. I won't use it over Mandriva, Debian (based), PCLinuxOS, etc.), I like aspects of them better, but it isn't that bad. Some may not like it because of MS, but it is a solid looking distro.
As to package managers, Synaptic.... It works..., it tells you how much total you have to download/how long left (some don't do that). Why not just improve on a good thing?
31 • No subject (by matyas on 2008-06-30 14:44:53 GMT from Argentina)
Hey, very nice article, although I must agree I miss Arch/Frugalware's Pacman in the article.
32 • APT and Sidux (by Neil on 2008-06-30 14:51:00 GMT from United States)
Interesting that you included Sidux in editon with pkg managers. Sidux is a Debian-based distro... but they discourage the use of the well-known Synaptic front-end for Debian. That keeps me from using it. I don't want to go back to arcane command line methods. That boat sailed a long time ago.
33 • (Almost) magical package manager: Sorcery (by mipmip on 2008-06-30 14:57:34 GMT from Germany)
Source Mage GNU/Linux has a very cool source-based package manager, called Sorcery. It is written in Bash and it takes care of dependencies automatically. Sorcery downloads the source tarball packages from the original developers' web sites and then it compiles them with your preferred optimizations (that you can set in Sorcery's menu), and then it installs the compiled binaries. Of course, Sorcery makes also removing and upgrading packages just as easy as installing them.
Source Mage has a funny(?) way of calling the different aspects of this package management with "magical" names. The Bash scripts that download & install software are called "spells"; the command for installing packages is called "cast"; the command to remove packages is "dispel"; the command to view package information is "gaze"; the command to download source packages is "summon"; the command to organize the collections of "spells" ("grimoires") is "scribe"; and the command to clean logs and package archives & to fix installation problems is "cleanse".
Further information about Sorcery:
http://wiki.sourcemage.org/
http://jucato.org/sourcemage/sorcery/index.html
It's been way too long since the last Source Mage release. The good news is that a brand new installer is currently under development and the testing ISOs will be made available here:
http://dbg.download.sourcemage.org/iso/x86/0.10.0/
Another cause of grief for Source Mage fans is that the "spell" for modular Xorg is still not finished yet, although some developer discussions suggest that it should become ready sometime during this summer. Meanwhile, temporary solutions have been offered in the Source Mage Wiki:
http://wiki.sourcemage.org/HOWTO-xorg
34 • well done (by arno911 on 2008-06-30 15:04:55 GMT from Germany)
thx John Frey, nice overview.
35 • RE 32 : very superficial CLI bashing.... (by dbrion on 2008-06-30 15:06:33 GMT from France)
"arcane command line methods. That boat sailed a long time ago"
But it never wrecked.... unlike the Titanic and urpmi in OcT, 2006 (and others so loooooooooovely GUIs I bet) ... Bugs in classical commands are very exceptional, today...
And CLI makes things reproducible ..... and easy to become fully automatic, if needed...
Knowing CLI does not look sexy, though there are lots of manuals and howtos very easy to understand, even in English, Spanish or Portugues...
If a desktop may sometimes break , or a package manager, it is a way to fix it... at least if one understands what one does.
And pissing off the CLI is the best way people wonot want to read/learn about it.... making the Holy free software a Charityware, Sheepeat untested, undebugged product (unlike the ritually ugly Microsoft, which , *this century*, tests correctly).
36 • CLI IS sexy (by arno911 on 2008-06-30 15:21:41 GMT from Germany)
and the most userfriendly thing in the world and my number one reason to use linux/unix; cause it just works and doesnt hide errors behind shiny GUI "attempts" like (do you remember?) gtk1 -alikes. is there a man? can you read it? go tell your Computer what you want from him.
im not a cli "guru" btw, I just clearly see the advantages.
no GUI-"bashing intended, but the pun ;)
b.r.
arno911
37 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-06-30 15:31:38 GMT from United States)
The KDE devs are a lot like the Arch devs: it's their project, they're doing it their way, and anyone who doesn't like it can go fly a kite. Whatever happened to the idea of writing software for the user, rather than as a way to build your self esteem?
> You've seen it too - a recent Linux convert, used to clicking on executable files to install software, is often shocked to discover that Linux distributions use dedicated package managers to install and remove applications.
I've seen this discussion so many times. Question: is there a way to make the package pop up a message saying "Use the package manager to install this package"? At the very least, there should be an icon on the desktop of newbie distros (are you listening Ubuntu) labeled "Software installation help".
Compliments to John Frey for an excellent article. If it is published under the GPL, others can modify it for the group they think it should reach. Or use it as a starting point for their own writeup.
38 • about .deb and .undeb (by arno911 on 2008-06-30 15:45:29 GMT from Germany)
some ubuntu packages break debian systems prior warning. it used to be enough to look at the architecture and you could install a .deb on a debian system. now this is a dangerous game. what about calling them .undeb, Canonical?
39 • Comparison of wifi tools (by DM on 2008-06-30 16:04:22 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi Ladislav and DWW readers!
I'm sure that I can't be the only DWW reader who is very interested about the quality / effectiveness of the different wifi tools utilised by the different distros. It is a very important feature for many computer users today and this is actualy one of the main things I look for in a distro these days - easy and reliable wifi setup. Hence, I would love to see a feature comparing the different distros and their networking apps.
I've certainly not tried all the 300+ distros listed on this site, but all the distros I've tried either use network-manager (which I abhor and put a lot of Linux's failure to really take off on the desktop down to Ubuntu and other major disros using this junk) or the inifinitely superior net_applet (if they're based on Mandriva like PCLOS). Surely some distros must use the fantastic wicd?
What I'm looking for is a (pref.) light-weight, Ubuntu-based, installable live CD that comes with wicd as standard. Does anyone know of such a thing? Basically, Crunchbang Linux with nm replaced by wicd would be nigh-on my perfect distro but unfortunately I've not had any luck getting wicd running properly under crunchbang even though it works perfectly under vanilla 'buntu 804 (32 and 64bit editions). I prefer Ubuntu/Debian based distros but as it stands I could only recommend them Mandriva or PCLOS to any Linux newb who wants to use wifi without config editing, experimentation, research and major hair loss.
Any thoughts?
40 • Sidux with XFCE (by RuralRob on 2008-06-30 16:37:19 GMT from United States)
Last night I installed the newest Sidux (XFCE version) on my laptop, after a brief fling with Windows Server 2008 (which *is* better than both XP and Vista as a desktop OS!). I spent an hour or so tweaking the desktop to something more like the KDE layout I'm used to, but now I must say this is the best Linux I've run yet. Everything just worked out of the box, even on this hard-to-please Dell Vostro laptop. I had to use ndiswrapper for the laptop's draft-N WiFi, but that's true of any distro right now.
Somebody above mentioned Sidux's reliance on command-line updating tools. With the latest version, they seem to be de-emphasizing this. They don't even include the (in)famous "smxi" script on the CD any more - you have to download it if you want to use it. From what I've read in the forums, they seem to be grudgingly accepting the more "standard" methods of updating a Debian-based system, including the popular GUI front-ends to apt-get.
41 • Uninformed Writer (by Anonymous on 2008-06-30 16:38:00 GMT from Germany)
> Input is given through either rug (a command-line front-end) or zen-updater (a GUI frontend) to Zenworks Management Daemon (ZMD).
Was nobody available to write this article who would actually use/try what he writes about rather than copy-cat from some outdated web pages?
42 • RE: 41 How About Yourself? (by Eddie Wilson on 2008-06-30 16:48:09 GMT from United States)
Instead of asking a silly question like that, why don't you enlighten us with your expertises on the subject?
43 • RE: 41 How About Yourself? (by Anonymous on 2008-06-30 16:54:01 GMT from Germany)
Read comment 5 which is right except that zmd was introduced in 10.1, it didn't exist in 10.0.
44 • sidux 2008-02 is awesome as usual (by Brian Masinick on 2008-06-30 17:10:17 GMT from United States)
I already had sidux 2008-02 Preview 1 installed on two of my home systems. On one of them, a Lenovo 3000 Model Y410 laptop with 2 GB of memory, I reinstalled the released version of 2008-02. There were no functional difference, and given that system was already up to date, including the latest sidux kernel, I observed no differences between the Preview and the released version, which makes sense since this is really a rolling release version anyway.
I had to briefly connect a thinwire Ethernet to download the Intel Pro Wireless 3945 drivers, a procedure well documented on the installation page - both on the Internet and on a page that displays when the Live CD is started. The procedure works perfectly, and once completed, I used the ceni network management utility to connect to my wireless access point and continued to configure my system like my previous instances.
The one thing I would love to see added is a way to boot a Live system, scan the hard drive for existing sidux instances and offer to upgrade them instead of install or reinstall only. This would be useful if you have a system that has been off line for a while, and you want to install a sidux system with the latest and greatest snapshot of the software and upgrade from there. While this is not absolutely necessary - you can manage your personal files by mounting them on a separate disk partition, then simply reinstall the core applications, it sure would be nice to have a release upgrade procedure as well as the existing rolling upgrade. That way you can occasionally change themes easily without having to completely reinstall. This is a small point because you can get there other ways. Nevertheless it would be a useful addition, in my view, to an already excellent system - one I find to contain the best cutting edge software that actually works.
Regarding the comment in #40 regarding the use of the smxi script to manage system updates, the sidux team steadfastly claims that the smxi script is not, was not, and never was included on their CDs. Instead it is an optional add on script. I do find that a curious posture since siduxcc, which IS part of the 2008-02 release, clearly relies on smxi for software updates. Something does not quite match up there. I recommend getting smxi before doing any dist-upgrade activities. With smxi, I have never once seen sidux mess up an upgrade. Unless and until sidux provides an official upgrade tool that does a better job and is claimed to be supported, I recommend the use of smxi.
Six months ago, whether it was official or not, I had more than one person on the sidux team recommend to me that I use smxi. I followed their advice, really liked the tool, and I simply append a 3 to the end of the sidux boot command from the GRUB menu, the boot procedure takes me to a multi user console, (init 3), I run smxi, then I proceed to init 5, the multi user graphical user interface boot level. Works perfectly in 100% of the cases since I started using it.
45 • Architecture is great to see! (by Landor on 2008-06-30 17:11:41 GMT from Canada)
I only just noticed the Centos anouncement in full detail thanks to it's info here.
I think it's amazing they are adding more architectures to the list in which they build Centos Releases for.
I hope everyone takes it as a big deal. I'm sure some won't, but no matter. With such an increase it's only a win-win situation for Open Source and Linux in general. It tells you the Centos project is growing, which is great for everyone as always, and it also brings a highly respected flavour of Linux to more systems, which of course means more users.
Kudos to the Centos team for taking on so many tasks that not many distros do.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
46 • package management (by fox82esp on 2008-06-30 17:13:24 GMT from Spain)
While reading the article I felt shocked about SUSE.
I am using openSUSE since 10.2 and those lines about its package management are wrong. Since 10.3 zmd and rug were removed from the community distro and you could just uninstall those tools in 10.2 and use zypper and libzipp.
Please modify it or del the wrong part.
47 • Qu 43,41 : Are slight inaccuracies in chronology such bad? (by dbrion on 2008-06-30 17:19:07 GMT from France)
For at least 5 different package managers (and likely without being reread by another)....
Giving a definition, explaining how they work(ed) and having a clear structure might be sufficient for most people; those who wish to know more can verify by google-searching, if necessary, for *their* use...
The most ennoying part was the way he compiles : all my friends and I use the traditional way of installing, very flexible but slow, , but with more elaborated, less destroying options than the standard default one... This was the only flaw I see now...
48 • Can A GUI Get Faster? (by Landor on 2008-06-30 17:23:17 GMT from Canada)
I hear a lot about Synaptic and yes I know it's one of the huge favourites in our community but there's one flaw in it that I feel another manager fixes.
When I returned to Linux I tried out a ton of different distros rather quickly, package management (cli and gui), DE's and WM's, and stability were all key points I paid close attention to on all fronts. I believed that in the area of search for a package to install, Adept had any of it's rivals beat that I tested. When I went to type a package keyword in the search field it automatically starts searching based on the string I entered.
GUI's are about ease of use, and speed, but sometimes people forget other types of speed involved. Call it laziness, but if you're in a GUI and you want ease of use and speed, why should you have to click a search button or the like, like other managers.
A small thing of course, but something that stood out right off the hop when I used Adept.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
49 • Ref. #29 • No Dial up???? (by dialup on 2008-06-30 17:33:29 GMT from United States)
Assuming you have an external serial modem rather than a winmodem, you should be able to get dialup working with (almost?) any Linux distribution. KDE (at least prior to 4.x) includes the KPPP applet. An exception is SuSE which, the last time I tried it, used Kinternet instead. Gnome isn't quite as easy because afaik there is no dialup applet that's an "official" part of the desktop. I suggest using the forum for the particular distribution/release you want to use to ask what application will work. Gnome-ppp usually works, but not always.
50 • Pacman! (by Andrew on 2008-06-30 17:52:31 GMT from Canada)
A few days ago, I ended up installing the latest Arch release after my Gentoo installation died (again). After having gone through some pretty serious issues with portage, I have to say that pacman really is excellent, perhaps rivalling apt. Packages are stable but very recent, unstable packages are easy to access, dependency resolution is perfect, and it's incredibly fast - much faster than any other binary package manager I have ever used.
51 • Pardus an package managers (by MacLone on 2008-06-30 17:54:34 GMT from Mexico)
I think too Pardus must climb to the first 10 distros at distrowatch but you don't mention the rough edges. Is there a Pardus Forum? nope, just an obscure and hidden mailing list. A linux distro without a forum is unforgivable. I really don't know why installation takes so long, If there was a real technical issue i really don't understand it. Almost every distro installs in 10-15 minutes, apart of that is clearly one of the best kde distros i ever used. They should offer Gnome too ( Are you paying attention Pardus?)
About the package managers i have one question: why all the slackware GUI package managers fails or are too slow? The best comes from Zenwalk but even zenwalk's package manager is slow and repos are desynchronized... being Vectorlinux's the worst. Yes, you can use pacman or whatever but why still needing a console?
52 • RE:43, Fair Enough (by Eddie Wilson on 2008-06-30 18:17:53 GMT from United States)
Thats fair enough but also lets remember that for a few mistakes the article was helpful. Furthermore the comments section is a place where mistakes, if made, can be corrected and not for personal attacks. The mistake was corrected so now all is right with the world.
Eddie
53 • Mandriva 2009 (by JBR on 2008-06-30 18:49:30 GMT from France)
Les changements dans la future Mandriva sont tellement importants, j'espère qu'il n'y aura pas trop de couacs, la 2008 et la 2008.1 ont commencé à bien redoré le blason de cette distribution, il faut continuer sur la même voie ! Donc avoir fait l'impasse sur la publication de la RC1, je pense que c'est une bonne idée, ça serait dommage de ternir l'image de la 2008 qui marche vraiment bien en sortant prématurément une nouvelle préversion qui va vraiment bouleverser les utilisateurs !
54 • About Sidux (by Blue Knight on 2008-06-30 19:00:29 GMT from France)
"Sidux is very good, and their customized kernel is usually giving you a very fast system.
The major problem it has? It's based on Debian UNSTABLE. They should have been based on "testing", like Parsix is doing, for instance.
Being based on "unstable", you're NOT SUPPOSED to "just apply all the updates". You're NOT SUPPOSED to use Synaptic.
Sidux is the fruit of an excellent work, but it made the wrong choice for the branch (sid) it's based on."
I agree with this quote from a website.
55 • Pardus, ref # 51 (by Andy Axnot on 2008-06-30 19:00:49 GMT from United States)
Pardus does have a forum, see its Distrowatch page.
I think Pardus shows great promise and all the reviews so far have been positive, but I have had problems on two different machines. Just bad luck, I suppose.
One of the problems involves trying to use the menu.lst from another distro to boot Pardus. There were a few comments on this at the forum so I'm not the only one. One review seems to contradict my experience, though.
The installation is nice and smooth, but sloooow. Patience is required.
Andy
56 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-06-30 19:05:39 GMT from Canada)
YUM was developed at Duke University. Although developers may now work at Red Hat, YUM was originally a 3rd party tool.
I understand the desire to equate rpm with dpkg and apt with urpmi, YUM, etc. It depends on how you look at it I'll admit. RPM is not an equivalent to either, IMO. It was an evolution of package management but not a full featured package management system like Apt is today. That's my interpretation of the historical development.
As Dbrion kindly notes this is an outline of package management systems as they exist(ed). There is a lot more to package management than this poor article could contain.
The section for Zypp was intended to cover both Suse and OpenSuse. A minor edit unintentionally altered that. While Opensuse may have changed their package management system Suse still has not. I appreciate the notice that Rug and ZMD have been deprecated in Opensuse. We can probably expect Suse to follow suit in the long run although the ZMD/Rug stuff has options for automatic network updating a la Red Hat Networks that, AFAIK, are still not available with Zypp.
Sorry Pacman fans, I knew you would comment but I had to choose a cutoff. I did not have enough info/experience with Pacman to include it. I have used it several times briefly and agree it is very easy to use and very fast.
The Package Managers that I have extensive, long term experience with are Apt and Urpmi. Every package manager could well use it's own article to list all the features. Comment #8 Didier Spaier, gives a good example of what is available in a package manager and that is a nice format that could be expanded on.
It would be nice to have a table that compares the package managers and their features as well. So many projects...
Comment #28 Glen, hits the nail on the head. This was an article for DWW readers, not newbies and not developers. At least it is a starting point for discussion leading to better understanding.
57 • @56 (by john frey on 2008-06-30 19:07:51 GMT from Canada)
comment was by me
58 • Update on the sidux smxi script (by Brian Masinick on 2008-06-30 19:20:35 GMT from United States)
To clarify and correct my comments in #44 in partial response to #40, the sidux smxi script has never been directly on the sidux CD, but in previous releases the link and hook to grab smxi was formerly included in the configuration, a step that has been eliminated. The reason for this change is that smxi is a user written script (albeit a very smart user). At times there are non free binaries that are added to sidux through this script. While useful, these kinds of techniques are not part of the standard Debian Social Contract, which emphasizes software which is completely "free" in the sense of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and free in cost as well. Social contracts of this type do limit the use of "non-free" software. It does not mean you cannot run "non-free" software, it just means that, with very few exceptions, you do not run "non-free" software installed directly from a system that adheres to the social contract; you get it from elsewhere.
This does not mean that you cannot use smxi - you can, and the ways to get it are still clearly documented in the sidux forums and within the sidux manual at http://manual.sidux.com/en/smxi-en.htm#smxi
59 • Pardus @55 (by MacLone on 2008-06-30 19:34:45 GMT from Mexico)
I went to their site and there's no link to any Pardus Forum. If you don't mention distrowatch's reference i could never know.
About Sidux:
Once i have asked why not use Synaptics and someone told me it does not work well with SID repos. Something like synaptic was incomplete and they had to use apt-get instead. They are truly mad about this, they hate people asking them why not use synaptics instead. Well, i'm sorry for asking sidux guys.
60 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-06-30 19:44:10 GMT from United States)
In #39, entitled "Comparison of wifi tools", DM wrote: "What I'm looking for is a (pref.) light-weight, Ubuntu-based, installable live CD that comes with wicd as standard. Does anyone know of such a thing?"
Well, I know of a great lightweight distribution, based on SimplyMEPIS, which has an installable Live CD (one which boots live in a fraction of the time required by Ubuntu), but may still contain some "elements" of Ubuntu. It is the great AntiX M7.2 from my friend "anticapitalista".
It actually has (or has had) THREE different wifi configuration tools: ceni from sidux, the MEPIS networks tool from Warren Woodford's MEPIS toolchest - (I believe it may be called mnetworks), plus it has wicd, which gets started as a daemon process when the system boots.
I highly recommend AntiX.
61 • @38 - deb compatibility (by areuareu on 2008-06-30 20:07:38 GMT from France)
This is far from new. Everytime you tried to install a deb coming from another stage in Debian, you broke the machine, for instance when you attempted to installi a woody deb on potato or a sarge deb on woody. Deb is not magically compatible. It is compatible _within_ a given domain.
Gilles
62 • #60 - response to #39 - try AntiX! (by Brian Masinick on 2008-06-30 20:16:43 GMT from United States)
I wrote topic 60 and intended to identify myself and submitted my comment prior to identifying myself and adding a subject. Do look into AntiX - though modest in size, it is a very capable system. You can add to it or remove packages. Extremely capable system, flexible, light, extensible as needed, great tools.
63 • Something's missing? (by technosaurus on 2008-06-30 20:31:59 GMT from United States)
Wow! all that talk of packages and no mention of alien, CNR, or package kit. Still, I do like Desktop BSD's tool - nice mention.
64 • Re comment #10 on "glossing" things up & using CSS (by The Text Browser on 2008-06-30 20:49:03 GMT from Canada)
Comment must have been from a former Windoze user who does not recognize "perfection" when he sees it and and probably never uses the command line either. There is great beauty in simplicity. Your site is perfect as it is - leave it that way!
If you do feel a need to use CSS, at least provide a place to click on to disable the crap. CSS Ranks right up there with the evils of java & flash dependent sites in my book. If a site can't be navigated by a text mode browser such as Lynx or Links, then many people (eg -vision impaired or other problems) who access in other ways will have problems. Java and Flash introduce a whole host of unnecessary security issues.
For a site like yours, where the key function is providing text-based news, and, in the comments section, reader/viewer interaction & information exchange, you already have the perfect setup!
One last comment for websites with a documentation page: The single most important piece of documentation you can put up there is a single doc.pdf download, or at least all the html stuff targzipped for download. Not everyone can afford home internet access, and what access may be available is probably severely time limited. To be forced to browse through numerous online pages instead of being able to peruse at home, offline, is a totally unrealistic expectation for many people. If needed, you can include some "advertising" in the downloaded documentation, but at least the user has access this way and can still "click and run" with the limited precious few minutes of internet time that may be available to them. In many cases where you have "guest" access somewhere, doing something with wget or curl is not likely to be an option either, and using a bootable linux CD or USB key will get you permantly tossed from the place.
Again, YOUR site is perfect. It is text mode browsable, and I can just click to download and peruse later. So keep the KISS thing going, and ignore those sheep who are hypnotized by "glossy" looks.
65 • Package Managers - CLI (by DeniZen on 2008-06-30 20:49:43 GMT from United Kingdom)
Once you get used to Apt, its (generally) rather hard to go 'back' to another method - IMO.
I did fiddle about with Arch for a while though, and Pacman is quite possibly as good as it gets for CLI Package Managers.
I recently installed Pardus on someone elses Laptop for them, and I really liked the bespoke Package Manager (Pisi) what?! sounds like .. Pissy
anyhoo ..
Hardly gave Pisi an exhaustive trial, but it was intuitive, and fast.
The animated Cat on the progress-bar frame turned me off though .. ;)
But hey .. I guess thats small fish. (thats what it was eating .. small fish ..)
66 • Comments (by Alan on 2008-06-30 20:59:13 GMT from United Kingdom)
Package Management-John Frey
Thanks for taking the time and effort to write this article. It's nice to see
contributions from readers. It's what the "community" is all about IMHO.
Pardus
Slow to install? Too true! Took me 2 hours, although this was on my old pc.
I couldn't find the forums on their website either. Now I know where to look.
Parsix
Only recently installed this but so far it's looking good. Nice to see a distro
based on Debian rather than the usual Ubuntu. I'm not knocking Ubuntu by the way. I use it on my main pc. (Haven't bothered to update from 7.04 yet because it still runs fine).
Distrowatch
Thanks Ladislav for a great site. One of my "must read" websites.
67 • NixOS (by René Leonhardt on 2008-06-30 21:33:04 GMT from Germany)
Has anyone tried VCS based package managers like Nix or Conary?
http://nixos.org/index.html
http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary
I am wondering why they are not becoming more popular, distributed SCMs like Bazaar have so many advantages.
68 • Sidux 2008-02 (by chris on 2008-06-30 21:47:15 GMT from United States)
I have been working with the Xfce version.
I've expanded Xfce to Gnome
to mount a Windows share with Nautilus.
I ended up installing
gnome-desktop-environment,
a huge metapackage, I think it's called,
and changing the session from Xfce to Gnome.
Both Xfce and Gnome use the gdm display manager.
This is probably the direction that Sidux will go.
All the other major distros have a Gnome version.
Along the way,
I learned how to mount a Windows share on the command line.
It is a much simpler and reliable way to do it than to use Nautilus.
Install the Samba packages, samba, smbclient, smbfs, samba-common.
In some directory, I used my home directory,
# mkdir samba
# mount -t smbfs //CLIENT748/Public samba -o user=cshoyt
Windows will ask for a password.
The user and password must be the person currently logged on in Windows.
chris
69 • RE: 46 and others on SUSE package management (by ladislav on 2008-06-30 22:09:34 GMT from Taiwan)
Please remember that openSUSE is not the only "SUSE" out there, there is also SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop/Server, which might still use some of the package management utilities that openSUSE no longer includes.
70 • RE: #29 No dialup support (by Anonymous on 2008-06-30 22:29:51 GMT from United States)
I know how it is...Dial up is always for me a plan "D" if the install is not working correctly. A few distros don't give you a plan "B" which is a working ethernet connection on the live cd (ie Goblinx). Plan "C" is wifi support. Zenwalk was pretty limited in this area as are many other distros. The work around is less than step by step and requires some kind of other connection to get working and that is not using the package manager. I like having a fall back and make sure it is going to work before I try a install as I've been burned with a non working pc after a install.
71 • KDE (by daniel on 2008-06-30 22:56:19 GMT from Germany)
I too tried Opensuse 11 with KDE4, and I must say KDE4 it is just a toy. After you play a bit with it, you realise that KDE3 was better in many ways. If you want more bling, try KDEMOD (Modular KDE for ARCH). Its just beautiful, and still productive.
72 • #15 (by someone on 2008-06-30 23:19:07 GMT from Aruba)
You might be right. Out of all the package managers out there, Pacman is the one with the least amount of problems, IMO. It_just_works. Period. That's how all Linux distro's should strive to be, and not "will this work if I cross my fingers".
73 • No subject (by user on 2008-07-01 00:48:48 GMT from Australia)
Installed opensuse 11 and am very impressed. Everything works but the things that didnt were just a click away from installing. Very good polished distro. Ended up going with KDE 3.5 instead...... 4.0 not cooked yet!!!
MS should be afraid
74 • RE73, Why? (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 01:27:22 GMT from United States)
Looking at the Novell / Microsoft pact I don't think MS is going to be afraid of their own kin. Remember the coupons?
75 • Package Managers (by johncoom on 2008-07-01 03:47:48 GMT from Australia)
If one does a Google search for "linux Package Managers" (with out the quotes)
You get presented with lots and lots of links, the first (for me) of which was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_management_system
From the Wikipedia you can find lots of other links. This with the original Google search should give every one lots of places to find out more on the subject !
76 • @ comment 67 (by Adam on 2008-07-01 05:05:16 GMT from Australia)
I can't comment on Nix.
My experience with Conary, in Foresight Linux, was that it was painfully, ridiculously slow. I'm talking, five minutes of checks before even beginning to download new packages.
I spent a good deal of last year distro-hopping for the sheer fun of it. To this day, Foresight holds the record (in my books, anyway) for the longest install time. That record was previously held by Sabayon Linux, at about 40mins. Foresight smashed that, easily doubling it! (This data dates from October last year, IIRC.)
Foresight is visually beautiful, GNOME at its most elegant. But in my experience, Conary, and Foresight in general, needs A LOT of work.
77 • Xorg is NOT getting any better with age, I am sorry to say (by Getting worse by the day! on 2008-07-01 06:35:08 GMT from Australia)
In my experience with Acer 1644 wlmi laptop/notebook (LPL Screen and 915 Intel Graphics Card), ever since new "experimental" Intel driver came into mainstream use about 12-14 months ago, only openSUSE (Kde) and Fedora (Gnome) have worked OK. The BIG FONT syndrome has afflicted 2 versions of Mandriva and Ubuntu (as well as their derivatives, e.g. Mint 5) and the likes of Pardus, Sidux and now Knoppix 5.3.1 (which means Debian Lenny will be same).
Fast package managers and other distro bragging rights are worthless to me if I am not able to even get my display screen working correctly and safely. I am VERY disappointed with Knoppix 5.3.1. Tinkering with Linux over the years, I have had a few monitors die a premature death and I don't want my laptop screen to go the same way. Xorg camp needs to pull its finger out and get its act together real soon, IMHO!
78 • KDE4 (by Peter Besenbruch on 2008-07-01 06:36:56 GMT from United States)
Based on last week's Distrowatch Weekly, I downloaded and installed the net install version of OpenSuse 11. I chose Kde4. It was better than I expected, almost usable, though version 3 has better features. I run Debian and am glad the distro is not going to include version 4 in Lenny, but I could see it being ready for Testing in 6-12 months.
I have been tracking KDE4's development with KDE4DAILY builds in a Qemu image. KDE4 has improved a lot in the single month I have been following it.
79 • @79 and all in general here (by Jock Rash on 2008-07-01 06:58:08 GMT from Australia)
Looks like Xandros and Linspire are one now...
http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/surprise-desktop-linux-move-xandros-buys-linspire/
And they both signed deal with Microsoft.... Conspiracy theorists must be having a field day!
The deadly machinations of Redmond are beginning to bear fruit.
he he he...
80 • Not going to rock the Linux world (by john frey on 2008-07-01 07:28:21 GMT from Canada)
I really wonder what assets would make Linspire worth buying.
81 • pacman and console (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 07:43:22 GMT from Ukraine)
> Yes, you can use pacman or whatever but why still needing a console?
Discover Shaman - Qt4 frontend for pacman!
BTW, v2 will support more packaging managers and will be included in KDE's extragear ;-)
82 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 07:45:50 GMT from Ukraine)
> Yes, you can use pacman or whatever but why still needing a console?
Because Arch users are not scared of console.
It is used to install and configure the system (though after that you can use gnome-system-tools that have a backend for Arch).
83 • Re: #26 - OpenSuse 11 & KDE4 (by Ariszló on 2008-07-01 08:04:40 GMT from Hungary)
burpnrun wrote: "And get rid of those sub-icons withing desktop icons .... the ones that do the same function as a right-click on an icon did in 3.5.x, but which occuply tons less deskspace."
With respect to portability, KDE4 aims to be a swiss-army-knife desktop envirenment. Since right-click is not available to touch screens, they must provide a solution that does not require a multi-buttoned mouse.
84 • xorg at fault? (by NK on 2008-07-01 10:57:50 GMT from United States)
Why wouldn't your problems be related to the specific intel driver and not xorg?
85 • RE: #60 / #62 - Antix and wifi (by Dan MacDonald on 2008-07-01 11:34:35 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi Brian!
Thanks for pointing out Antix but as it happens I discovered Antix myself shortly after I'd made my last posting here and I'd just returned to tell other DWW readers that there is indeed a Debian based distro which includes some good wifi tools out-of-the-box.
I gave Antix a once-over last night and you can read my 'review' here
http://antix.freeforums.org/ideas-for-next-release-t890.html
I am indeed impressed with Antix but I think it could take a few hints in package selection and default config from crunchbang.We'll see how receptive anticapitalista is to my suggestions but otherwise I might look into creating a fork of Antix that has gdm and a full suite of multimedia packages.
Ladislav - do you not place the same importance on easy wifi setup as I do? Do you not think this aspect of Linux distros would be worthy of a DWW article?
86 • Why delete comments? (by BhaKi on 2008-07-01 11:59:06 GMT from India)
Ladislav, if your beliefs about openSuSE are so firm, please try to post some concrete and verifiable evidence. That's much more ethical than deleting comments.
87 • RE: 77 • Xorg is NOT getting any better with age, I am sorry to say (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 12:02:14 GMT from Romania)
> The BIG FONT syndrome has afflicted 2 versions of Mandriva and Ubuntu (as well as their derivatives, e.g. Mint 5) and the likes of Pardus, Sidux and now Knoppix 5.3.1 (which means Debian Lenny will be same).
NO, no, no! This has nothing to do with X.org!
The "big font" syndrome is related to the fact that both GNOME and KDE used to use a FIXED dot-per-inch screen resolution: 96 dpi. In GNOME, this was "hard-coded" (but it was changeable with gconf-editor).
Since GNOME 2.20 (2.19), they decided to trust the X server in determining the "real" screen DPI, which is breaking the usual habits of people! (And recently, some distros have chosen to stop forcing KDE to 96 dpi and use the "system default".)
Before GNOME 2.20, and before Vista, most computer users were practically habituated that, once you change the screen resolution (on a CRT), you get a smaller pixel, and you also get smaller fonts -- no matter you have defined them in typographical points, not in pixels. Today, since the DPI is "computed" from the physical screen size (often wrongly reported or wrongly detected), the idea is to keep a font of a given size (in Points) of a fixed physical size, no matter what the screen resolution is in pixels.
This is crazy, because the first effect you see is people complaining of huge fonts!
88 • @54 sidux from Blue Knight (by arno911 on 2008-07-01 12:45:02 GMT from Germany)
sidux was not the idea of some people who wanted to have something to do in there spare time, saying lets make a Distro, what can we use as a base? oh lets use debian Sid and see how it goes.
sidux is, as the name might tell you, the project of people who like Debian, use it, and WANT the unstable branch, cause it rocks. you are free to make your own "testdux" based on testing. :) sidux users want to use Sid.
89 • 85 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 13:15:00 GMT from United States)
You can install all that stuff after the fact. Just use Synaptic to add GDM, GNOME, or whatever you want.
AntiX is supposed to be a lightweight distro for old computers. Adding a bunch of bloat defeats the purpose. In fact, it defeats the purpose in the most obvious way - you'd just have Mepis, as AntiX is a lite version of Mepis.
90 • Re #88 (by glenn on 2008-07-01 14:07:52 GMT from Canada)
Hi.
I have to agree with arno911. There have been a lot of comments on SIDUX the last few weeks so I gave in and decided to try it out a couple of weeks back. I'm still running it. I was really impressed with the ease of installation and that it installed correctly on my 3 computers without my having to play with it too much. I cannot say that about some of the main distros I use. Sidux installation also allowed me to install and enable the drivers (via NDISWRAPPER) for my WUSB300N adapters very easily at startup time. I then decided to install some work applications such as Lotus notes, Sametime, ATT VPN, along with piles of other junk. They all installed cleanly and ran. I did not have to fiddle with them like I have had to do with Ubuntu or one one of its derivatives, I began to see that using a system unadulterated by a distro modifying some of the underlying packages, libs, etc., was a definite advantage to me.
Since Installation I have applied updates as they became available expecting to see a system crackup but that has not happened so far. I have to admit that I am very impressed with Sidux overall even though it is based on an unstable Debian branch.
Following is a bit off topic although I like to think it is related
Being in the field for a long time I usually have 2 partitions per Operating system configuration, one for Production use, the other for test where I apply any updates etc. to see their effect prior to me installing it on my bread and butter system. I really do not want the stress of trying to recover from a borked distro or a part of it where, on a customers location, all of a sudden some part no longer works as expected and I have to apply some sleight of hand (for non english speakers that means performing a magic trick) to get out of it. Sometimes the customer has an application I have to install. That will go on my test system of course.
I like a slogan they used to have at an Airbase I used to fly out of "A superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid those situations requiring the use of his superior skills" I try to apply that to my computer adventures also. (insert grin)
To conclude this little diversion, if one is a bit nervous of a distro and applying updates to it, the use of a test partition may be a benefit and help reduce those doubts.
Glenn
91 • Something else about Sidux (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 15:21:41 GMT from United States)
One thing that seldom gets mentioned about Sidux is how nice it looks. I don't plan to move to Sidux, but it has a user-friendly install, runs fast, offers the wide selection of updated packages you expect with Debian Sid, and is overall just a great experience. The thing that impresses me most though is the default artwork, fonts, and interface. It looks a lot better than most distros. Definitely worth a try if you are distro hopping.
92 • re: #87 fonts in points rather than pixels (by Anonymous Hero on 2008-07-01 17:29:30 GMT from Sweden)
"Before GNOME 2.20, and before Vista, most computer users were practically habituated that, once you change the screen resolution (on a CRT), you get a smaller pixel, and you also get smaller fonts -- no matter you have defined them in typographical points, not in pixels. Today, since the DPI is "computed" from the physical screen size (often wrongly reported or wrongly detected), the idea is to keep a font of a given size (in Points) of a fixed physical size, no matter what the screen resolution is in pixels."
And thus, Vista and Gnome caught up with OS/2 v2 (1990).
Funnily enough, this feature which´is praised today in Vista and Gnome was heavily criticized in OS/2 v2 and v3 by magazine reviews of the 1990s.
93 • About SIDUX (by IMQ on 2008-07-01 18:39:28 GMT from United States)
One of the things that not frequently mentioned is how fast Sidux installation process goes. Last time I did the installation under 6 minutes on a relative old machine by modern hardware: AMD 2500+, 1GB PC3200 RAM, and nVidia MX4000 with 64MB.
No other semi-full or full CD/DVD distros come close to the speed of sidux installation. Not a big deal if you are not in a hurry. The slowest, in my experience, was openSUSE, which used to take a long time to installed until the just release 11.0: faster but not very fast from a DVD or LiveCD.
I know it's just a trivial thing but... little things add up, you know what I mean ;)
94 • @88 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 19:04:46 GMT from France)
>"sidux users want to use Sid."
This remains a wrong choice... ;-)
> "WANT the unstable branch, cause it rocks"
hmm allow me to disagree with that. :-)
95 • @88 again :-) (by Blue Knight on 2008-07-01 19:15:00 GMT from France)
the comment 94 was from me (sorry I forgot to write my pseudo)
I just want to point out that despite what I wrote and I shall not withdraw, I never say that Sidux was a bad distro. It is a good KDE distro, but they chose the wrong branch of Debian...
96 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 19:27:03 GMT from United States)
If you want Debian testing, why not just install Debian testing? I thought Sidux was there to make Sid usable. Lenny is already usable.
97 • Assets RE: 80 (by Landor on 2008-07-01 19:42:29 GMT from Canada)
It's quite possible that they looked at Linspire and pondered some accounts they had, development team, etc. Although I wasn't involved with Linux I still kept slightly abreast of some things and I wondered the same as you (at that point in time considering it's problems) over the Mandrake deal. We can see what came out of that :)
I hope you're enjoying Canada Day!
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
98 • Canada Day (by john frey on 2008-07-01 21:15:06 GMT from Canada)
The joys of mostly being self-employment. I had yesterday and today off:) Back to the grind early tomorrow. Man it's hot! I went to Deep Cove yesterday and sat in the shade with a nice breeze off the ocean.
Yes, I noticed the similarity to the Mandrake deal myself. What did come out of that besides a name change?
99 • RE: 92 • re: #87 fonts in points rather than pixels (by Anonymous on 2008-07-01 21:52:29 GMT from Romania)
And thus, Vista and Gnome caught up with OS/2 v2 (1990).
Funnily enough, this feature which´is praised today in Vista and Gnome was heavily criticized in OS/2 v2 and v3 by magazine reviews of the 1990s.
...and it's still criticized by me today, with regards to GNOME/Vista! :-)
100 • Sidux (by mika480 on 2008-07-01 22:29:25 GMT from Italy)
Sidux is running on my 3 computers without ANY problem!
Compared to Bunto's......Try Yourself and never come back!
Sidux IRC channel is great....not so much the Zealots Italian Ubuntu Forum.....
101 • Which Distro is best for windows to Linux switcher (by san on 2008-07-01 23:45:51 GMT from Canada)
For a person who has been using windows for long time , wants to try something new or got fed up of virus or screwing up slowup machine which Distro would be the best to pickup being novice to Linux environment.
102 • Conectiva & Mandrake (by Landor on 2008-07-01 23:56:10 GMT from Canada)
I can't say for sure about the intentions of the purchase. It was quite the intelligent move in my opinion though. Conectiva had their fingers in many pots in South America, and to some degree, even worldwide. If I remember correctly they even produced their own magazine at one time. I'm sure I read it somewhere. Good foothold into a part of the world it seems many like to forget about at times, when markets are stronger elsewhere, or so companies think.
I also may be wrong in this, but isn't the Mandriva development "mainly" done in South America? Adam?
I hear you about self-employment. Being semi-retired myself, I get to enjoy a leisure pace when it's time to choose so :) Great Cove though, you're a West Coaster :) I'm from Southern Ontario, the Steel City of the Ti-Cats. It's a little cooler here than there I'm guessing. :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
103 • re 101 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 00:36:26 GMT from Canada)
Mandriva
104 • re 102 (Conectiva & Mandrake) (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 00:40:56 GMT from Canada)
I think the thing that Mandrake got from Conectiva was the build system. Mandrake's build system was crap. Conectiva's was one of the best. Since the merger Mandriva stopped having problems with building the releases. This is one of the reasons the quality of Mandriva's releases has sky-rocketed.
105 • RE: 101, 103 (by keepyourstickinthewater@by.com on 2008-07-02 02:13:29 GMT from United States)
103 wrote Mandriva. Mandriva is okay, but why not let the person try some livecd's recommend Mandriva One, Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora Let's say one of the top 10 Distros. They can play around with them and the one that feels the best is the one that they should install. I used to like Mandrake alot, but when they moved to Mandriva, something does not feel right. The desktop feels the same though same warm feeling as I had with Mandrake which was one of the best back then, I am not so fond of Mandriva though.
To Landor:
Keep your stick on the "Ice", the Ice is melting because of global warming and other issues. You will have to keep your stick in the water now, becuase the ice has melted :)
Cheers!
106 • 97, 102, 104 (by Adam Williamson on 2008-07-02 03:19:00 GMT from Canada)
Well, interesting question.
If you look at the actual product that resulted from merging Mandrake Linux and Conectiva, it's clearly a lot more Mandrake than it is Conectiva. Development was basically an unbroken stream from Mandrake - what is Mandriva now is directly in the same line as Mandrake. What really happened at the time of the merger is that we looked at what was needed to make Conectiva upgrade smoothly to Mandriva - mainly dependency tweaks and installer logic - and implemented that. We also ported the most important Conectiva customizations to core packages, and a few things like the task-* convention for metapackages. But Mandriva is really a lot more Mandrake than it is Conectiva.
However, ultimately the more significant contribution from Conectiva has been in two places - commercially and technically. I guess a lot of people don't know how big the previous Conectiva market is to Mandriva commercially: the Brazil office is still there, as big as it was when Conectiva was independent, and we have a lot of very significant deals in Brazil (and through Latin America) that basically came with Conectiva. We have an ongoing deal that has Mandriva pre-loaded on tens of thousands of machines sold in Brazil. There's actually about as many people in the Brazil office as there are in the Paris office.
Technically speaking, ex-Conectiva developers make up a lot of the maintainers working on Mandriva these days. Two of our kernel devs are from the Brazil office; one of our KDE devs; our X.org maintainer; our buildsystem maintainer - a lot of guys, basically. At a rough guess, paid staff working exclusively on the technical side of developing MDV are split about 50/50 between Paris and Brazil.
104 is also basically correct about the buildsystem. Mandriva basically adopted the Conectiva buildsystem wholesale. This is based around an SVN repository which houses spec files, sources and patches, and uses dynamically created chroots, a build bot, and scripts (managed by the 'iurt', 'repsys' and 'mdvsys' tools) to automate the actual building, checking and distribution of packages.
The workflow with this system is to check a package out of SVN, make changes to the spec (and sources / patches if necessary), test the build locally, then commit changes back to SVN and run a single command which causes the buildsystem to create a clean chroot, install the build dependencies, build the package, and upload the resulting package to the master server.
This was a major improvement on the Heath Robinson-esque old Mandrake buildsystem, which basically involved maintainers building the packages locally and uploading them direct to Mandrake's master server, then retroactively committing their changes to a CVS repository. As 104 said, this definitely had a positive impact on the general packaging quality of Mandriva.
107 • re: 94 (by BlueJayofEvil on 2008-07-02 03:36:46 GMT from United States)
>>"sidux users want to use Sid."
>This remains a wrong choice... ;-)
Why then, is sidux more usable, stable, and pleasant than other "bleeding edge" distros? I've had better luck with sidux than Fedora, just to name another "bleeding edge" distro.
If it's the "wrong" choice, why does it work, and why are people saying good things about it? Why is the project still going strong?
This isn't a matter of "right" and "wrong", it's a matter of how "up-to-date" you want your software and how well you feel about risk-taking in regards to software.
It may be an 'unwise' choice, but not "wrong". The only question left is how long until someone makes a distro of of Debian Experimental branch? ;-)
108 • re 105 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 04:03:32 GMT from Canada)
Mandriva is okay, but why not let the person try some livecd's recommend Mandriva One, Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora Let's say one of the top 10 Distros. They can play around with them and the one that feels the best is the one that they should install. I used to like Mandrake alot, but when they moved to Mandriva, something does not feel right. The desktop feels the same though same warm feeling as I had with Mandrake which was one of the best back then, I am not so fond of Mandriva though.
1.We agree on Mandriva. I am very fond of Mandriva. It changed a lot since those bad years (2005, 2006).
2.Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu I wouldn't recommend Kubuntu (a little bit buggy in my opinion)
3.OpenSuse. I don't recommend it for ideological reasons. The guy is trying to get away from Windows.
4.Fedora. I use it as my main distro but still I wouldn't recommend it to a newbie. I had to fix the sound, the network card and a few other things in order to make it fully operational.
109 • Re: comment 101 (by Adam on 2008-07-02 05:57:34 GMT from Australia)
Question to the reader base, regarding comment 101:
Any thoughts on MEPIS for beginners?
Barring a very short liason with Red Hat 9 way back when, I started with Ubuntu. I can't use it today because I feel they've made it too restrictive, too foolproof, and I learn through making mistakes. (So I can't learn from it!)
Although I continued to try out distro after distro, MEPIS became my distro of choice for Real Work, my workhorse until I found sidux.
110 • verrry interesting (by john frey on 2008-07-02 06:07:27 GMT from Canada)
Thanks Adam, I had a little experience with the package system a while back when I tried to build some Mandrake packages. I was surprised to find that packagers were building locally and not in a chroot. It seemed an unsafe practice unless a 3rd party checked the build on a dedicated machine. Whatever, sounds like a much better system now.
111 • @101 (by john frey on 2008-07-02 06:20:35 GMT from Canada)
That is a good question. Check out live CD's as was suggested already. You will make your choice based on your preferences.
My suggestions:
Mandriva
Slax
PCLinuxOS
Pardus (which I've just finished installing by the way)
Try out the Search feature at the top of the Distrowatch page. It's real helpful.
112 • RE 101 : best distro for beginners (by dbrion on 2008-07-02 06:22:24 GMT from France)
If you have reliable *and* patient friends, neighbors or colleagues who have already installed a GNU/linux => their distro is the best...
Else, you can try at no cost (but not for HW recognition) distros with qemu, VMplayer or (incl) VirtualBox (each is W ported). You will then know whether their package management appeals you, their install procedures are easy or not, etc.. If they have live-cds, you can try their HW recognition , too, at no cost (or ask, once you have chosen 3 or 4 from >100).
If "only " viruses ennoy you, there are specialized live-CDs and clamscan/clamav has been W$ ported (though I know it is Holydays for virus hunters, but not for viruses manufacturers in Summer)
113 • Seggesting reviews. (by Yehia on 2008-07-02 06:45:23 GMT from Egypt)
I suggest reviewing Pardus and/or Parsix..
114 • REF#32 • APT and Sidux !!! (by Verndog on 2008-07-02 07:27:38 GMT from United States)
Thank you Neil! That is one reason I left Sidux. Try and post any comments regarding their precious smxi or whatever its called. It took FOREVER to update, using that nonsense tool. A tool? Its more on the lines of some neanderthal sharpened rock. It's all so pitiful.
One of their older users questioned why they didn't go with some GUI installer, like ubuntu has. That brought the wrath of hell upon him. They were relentless in their pursuit to go and hang the guy.
Its true that Sidux installs faster than a speeding bullet, but just don't expect smxi to finish the job. I'm always reading of some sort of failure with that shell script.
The boat not only has left, but it has sunk as well!
115 • @112 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 09:33:08 GMT from France)
> "clamscan/clamav has been W$ ported"
ClamAV is one of the worst antivirus on Unix....
116 • @ 93 and a few other posts (by DerniZen on 2008-07-02 10:24:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
Why is the 'installation speed' of such particular interest for Home users I wonder?
I doubt its of real concern in commercial deployment either, otherwise Solaris would have been deemed unsuitable ages ago ;) (and besides, of course a SysAdmin would hardly be choosing Sidux or similar, fast install or not!)
So, surely once installed (whether it takes 10 mins or 30 (or gasp! - 60 mins), thats that
After that - how it performs in usability, stability, and yes speed too, is more important.
I saw a recent review of (Pardus I think?) where the reviewer was ready to be negative from the outset - because it had taken too long to install (what -- like days or something? - No .. less than 45 mins. .. Crazy ..)
If you are installing 5 different distros a night - every night - for some utterly bizarre reason, maybe install speed is a real issue.
Last time I installed Windows it took a fair time I recall. OSX aint a quick job either!
'Put some Ice on your Stick' ;) (with apols to Landor)
117 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 11:53:23 GMT from United Kingdom)
@116 Well it's a bit like having a drug habit...
Open browser. Go to Distrowatch homepage.
Oooh look! I've not heard of XYZ linux before.
A few clicks later and it's too late.
Up pops the download window, here we go.
Re-format hard drive on spare pc, removing all traces of your last linux fix...
Many cups of tea/coffee later, burn downloaded distro to disc.
Insert disc into spare pc.
Reboot.
Stand back in amazement at splash screen.
By now, it's 1 am in the morning.
And Pardus is taking another 2 hours to install...
Keep your stick in the ice and give the stick to your dog.
Regards, Alan.
118 • Netgear WG111 USB Wireless Dongle (by Best Linux Options? on 2008-07-02 12:07:25 GMT from Australia)
prism54usb is the driver installed by Ubuntu 8.04 but connection drops out and signal is weak. What are the best options (if any) for connecting with this device in Linux?
@ubuntu:~$ lsusb -v
Bus 005 Device 007: ID 0846:4240 NetGear, Inc. WG111 WiFi (v2)
Device Descriptor:
idVendor 0x0846 NetGear, Inc.
idProduct 0x4240 WG111 WiFi (v2)
bcdDevice 10.40
iManufacturer 1 GlobespanVirata
iProduct 2 NETGEAR WG111
iSerial 3 3887-0000
root@ubuntu:~# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"Wireless"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:0B:23:E7:AC:D0
Bit Rate=5.5 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:xxxxxx[2]
Link Signal level=83/127
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
--------------------
Going by NetGear's website info, the serial number (WG72xxxx) suggests that it is version 1 but the NDISwrapper Card List [http://tinyurl.com/3dknjs] says it is v2.
Any Good advice would be appreciated, these are my first few steps in the world of Linux and Wireless. The amount of dropouts are unreasonable as it is now.
TIA
119 • Hopes for Pardus (by Andy Axnot on 2008-07-02 12:32:53 GMT from United States)
I have great hopes for Pardus, but for now it has a few problems with some hardware.
One of them is the time to install it. With some distros taking as little as ten minutes to install an hour and a half or two hours is a lot. And if there are problems Pardus doesn't offer tools to fix the install/Grub/mbr problem. This can be really be annoying. Don't ask how I know. :-)
Andy
120 • openSUSE (by wheaties on 2008-07-02 13:37:23 GMT from United States)
Usually I steer clear of RPM-based distributions, but I will almost always download them in case my buddies want a copy for some strange reason. That's why I downloaded openSUSE 11.0 in the first place. After letting it sit around for nearly a week, I decided that I might as well give it a spin on my own computer to see if they had addressed any of the beefs I have with RPM-based distros. I was actually quite impressed. Things have sped up quite a bit.
I'm not sure what the exact deal was, but it seemed like using any of the 64-bit versions or KDE4 on my computer was asking for problems. My system would lock up and I'd have to do a hard reset. Once I tried the 32-bit KDE 3 (not a GNOME man myself), things seemed much more stable.
So if you're interested in trying openSUSE but have/had stability issues, try using the "lowest common denominator" possible. You might not get the most out of your system this way, but you'll likely get more than the alternatives offer if your situation is anything like mine.
121 • Parsix // Sidux (by capricornus on 2008-07-02 13:53:32 GMT from Belgium)
Parsix offers limited screen resolutions, not 1440x900. No way to get around this little problem that causes big frustration. No Parsi-OS on my X.
Sidux does a lot better, but still halts on booting on my damned P4DC (on which only Granular1 does the job as it should). On my other pc's it recognizes resolutions and offers a nice OS, but for Iceweasel: who likes this browser? But comparing Mepis7 with Sidux becomes harder and harder, Debian-based distro's are fast, consume little cpu and are extremely logically build and stable.
122 • #101 (by RC on 2008-07-02 14:27:14 GMT from United States)
Although I have nearly two decades in the IT sector I am pretty much a newbie myself when it comes to Linux. I am constantly trying to convert all my old customers and associates to Linux. My choices for a modern machine are in order: PCLinuxOS, MEPIS and Mint. For an older machine Puppy is extremely hard to beat and you might want to try Antix. Getting an older machine to run a distro with a decent interface is tougher. I wish someone with some expertise would do a real indepth comparison of current choices. I would find it beneficial and I would think many others would.
123 • @ the above (by capricornus on 2008-07-02 14:36:14 GMT from Belgium)
I truly am concordant with your opinion: a newbie can have a nice start in Linuxstan with Granular1 (PClinuxOS), MEPIS7 and MINT5.
Puppy 4 for older machines indeed is a revelation (and often Wolvix Hunter does a hell of job and is far more complete).
Whish you luck.
124 • 122 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 15:39:34 GMT from United States)
What info do you want?
Old machines will run XFCE, Fluxbox, JWM, and so on. These interfaces strip the bloat, and in the process, probably what you think of as a decent interface.
The key with distros like Puppy is that they provide an up to date OS with access to many packages, even for those of us with old machines.
BTW, I'm running Debian Etch w/XFCE on a 250 Mhz Cyrix processor. The machine is coming up on its tenth birthday. It came with Windows 98. It takes a little time to change the icons, theme, and background, but that's just the way Debian works. It's pretty snappy considering the hardware. It runs Abiword and even Iceweasel fairly well.
125 • @118 (by Adam Williamson on 2008-07-02 15:57:05 GMT from Canada)
Definitely try ndiswrapper. I'm not sure what's the best way to set it up on your distro, though. Sorry. Ask in the forums.
126 • 118 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 16:42:23 GMT from United States)
Do you have a Windows driver disk? If you've got that, it should be easy to install using ndiswrapper.
127 • Qu 90 : how does your protection against "up"grades work? (by dbrion on 2008-07-02 17:46:01 GMT from France)
(you) " usually have 2 partitions per Operating system configuration, one for Production use, the other for test where I apply any updates etc. to see their effect prior to ()installing it "
.....
"To conclude this little diversion, if one is a bit nervous of a distro and applying updates to it, the use of a test partition may be a benefit and help reduce those doubts. "
That would give (correct me if I am wrong) , for testing:
P1 ==/ (etc, var, etc?)
P2==/usr
P3==/home
and for ordinary use, after validating and restarting:
P1==/
P22==/usr
P3==/home
Pi denoting disk portitions (/hda1 etc: nomenclature varies, I fear) and == lilo/grub "associations"
But
a) how can you be sure you have make exactly the same install in testing and use (after validating) : with a penc=il and a sheet of paper? with the infamous bash history?
b) what happens if /etc and /home are modified by config files, sometimes hidden? (that could have happened to me with wine and dosemu, who are not that strategic but it can be more destructive=> will try almost anything in qemu)....
128 • @121 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 19:02:27 GMT from France)
> "Parsix offers limited screen resolutions, not 1440x900. No way to get around this little problem that causes big frustration. No Parsi-OS on my X"
??? What? Are you crazy? Parsix has a very detailed xorg.conf with many ModeLines (,ModeLine "1440x900" is there), more detailed than many distros.
Maybe you can try to edit your xorg.conf and add your resolution "by hand".... and hop, problem solved! ;-)
129 • Too many / too much missing to be a good article about package management (by Anonymous on 2008-07-02 19:08:14 GMT from Germany)
The big distros were mentioned with some insight about how the package management works - fine. But on Distrowatch I sure expect something better than that. Too many systems are missing and what about comparing features? Looks like you can find better information by reading Wikipedia. That's not enough.
130 • Interface for old computers (by KimTjik at 2008-07-02 19:08:29 GMT from Sweden)
A contender is LXDE: http://lxde.org/
I installed it recently to my farther who wanted to get some use of an old IBM Thinkpad with a Pentium II 233 MHz CPU. It works very well and gives you a pretty standard DE experience but takes less resources. I think LXDE is available in the repositories of several distributions. As default it runs on OpenBox, but that can be changed if someone so wishes.
The laptop should be used as a mobile music-library and player using a good USB sound-card. Besides a boot partition with ext2, the rest is JFS with the elevator=deadline parameter (nothing fancy, just adding it to grub). Software include for example: mpd + sonata and a running vsftpd server (the easiest way to add music; mpd reads from the same directory as vsftpd uses as a chrooted environment). It boots pretty fast, besides udev taking maybe 30 seconds, but I leave it like that since I'm not using it myself. With all daemonds up running and Sonata playing it takes less than 40 MB of RAM (so of the 192 MB there's plenty of RAM left for Firefox and other stuff; Firefox3 runs pretty good on old computers).
OK, this was a long story, but the bottom line is that LXDE is a very good alternative. I think that both Myah and Puppy are using it on some versions.
131 • Gentoo Documentation Says they Released June 30 did they? (by Anonymous on 2008-07-03 03:04:10 GMT from United States)
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/release/2008.0/index.xml
Any updates?
What's happening with Gentoo?
This page said they were to release March 17th.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/meetings/20080123_initial_2008.0_summary.txt
Usually a missed deadline by a 'major' distribution would get some media coverage. How come not this time? Are they that far gone nobody noticed? or nobody cares anymore...?
132 • @125-126....Re...NetGear, Inc. WG111 WiFi (v2) (by Much trouble for little gain! on 2008-07-03 04:59:39 GMT from Australia)
Do you have a Windows driver disk? If you've got that, it should be easy to install using ndiswrapper.
I have Googled around and I have not seen any info come to light that indicates satisfactory performance with this particular device. It works good under XP but download speed performance drops to 1/4 of Ethernet connection when only 1.5 meters away from wifi modem.
Ubuntu is not "my distro" but one of 4 installed for testing and trial purposes but was the only one to "easily" install a "working" driver that is more a disappointment than satisfaction and an indication of the Ubuntu "philosophy" in regards to Linux users. It treats users like dummies and offers seemingly workable solutions to difficult issues that barely work, if at all. Fedora 9, Mepis 7 and openSUSE 11 did not pretend to work with this device.
OpenSUSE is my preferred distro because it works well with my Acer Laptop and I had little trouble in getting my Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Card working. I am planning to try Mobile (as supplied by mobile phone companies) Wireless Broadband around Dec/Jan and I hope Linux is ready for it by then. I know the current distros are offering support for it but using is believing! :-)
Cheers
PS: If I need working wireless for a PC that does not have support for it, I will try to buy a supported card/usb dongle for it. Paying an extra $50 - $100 Aus would be worth it and will save a lot of hassle and should work and perform much better than any bandaid solutions such as NDISwrapper, IMHO.
133 • TP-Link 54M Wireless USB Adapter (TL-WN321G) (by Is this a good linux opion? on 2008-07-03 05:27:10 GMT from Australia)
Anyone have and practical experience using this adapter under Linux?
It has a Ralink chipset and is very cheap Down Under:
http://www.shopbot.com.au/p-82570-1482083.html
Cheers
134 • RE 129 (by dbrion on 2008-07-03 06:36:35 GMT from France)
" Looks like you can find better information by reading Wikipedia."
Well, you know where the info is.... there is a world outside DWW...
As Wikipedia has no deadline, and can be cross verified at anyone's pace, that is normal.
I maintain that, except for the 4 first lines (too much information about a somewhat dangerous practice), it is one of the best DWW articles in the last 3 months....
and is it a good policy to bash one of the best articles? That would shy away people.
A better policy is to be fierce with the worse articles, though they are more numerous....
Hourrah, cornes au cul, vive le père UBU Jarry,ca 1895 La chanson du décervelage....
135 • RE: 134 (by ladislav on 2008-07-03 07:19:55 GMT from Taiwan)
Dbrion, why do you read DistroWatch Weekly? Just curious...
136 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-03 07:39:54 GMT from France)
Because it *was* interesting (the 4 first months of this year were really... And some articles remain interesting...
And why are the last month so low (saloon "psychology", inconsistent eeePC saga?)?.. Just curious... You should really reread it...
137 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-03 12:51:49 GMT from United States)
Personally, I've liked DWW in recent months. Distro reviews are fine, but with the explosion of virtualization I do a lot of my own testing anyway, so these other articles are better for me. [That doesn't mean reviews are useless: there are many who need them.]
138 • #124 & #130 - Distros for Older PC's (by RC on 2008-07-03 13:26:22 GMT from United States)
I have several friends with older laptops and it is always a pain trying to find something that will run on them that looks good, works somewhat like Windows since they are just converting, and is at least as fast as Win98.
DSL will nearly always run, but is so different and also so somber looking that no one has yet liked it. Puppy is a good choice, but still not a standard variation. Antix looks good, but I have had hardware issues in the past, not tried the new one.
I was referring to someone doing an indepth comparison of current distros and showing the strengths and weaknesses of each.
139 • #130 (by RC on 2008-07-03 13:37:01 GMT from United States)
Wow! LXDE does look good. It is a much more "standard" looking desktop than some of the other lightweights. I will have to do a little digging and see what Distros offer it. Thanks.
There are some many interfaces available and the old hands around here probably know them by heart...but trying to figure out the strengths and weakness of each, and compare how they handle things is difficult. Haven't been able to find anything on the web that does a direct comparison of the various choices.
140 • @139 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-03 17:51:09 GMT from France)
> "see what Distros offer it. "
e.g Debian Testing, Parsix, Vectorlinux Light Edition,Myah OS 3.0 Box edition (but with "Metacity instead of Openbox as the window manager"), SliTaz ("using most of the components of LXDE")...
141 • No subject (by ultrahog on 2008-07-03 18:19:05 GMT from Canada)
I use it with PCLOS 07, Works A-1 plug & play with wep 64 hex
============================================
133 • TP-Link 54M Wireless USB Adapter (TL-WN321G) (by Is this a good linux opion? on 2008-07-03 05:27:10 GMT from Australia)
Anyone have and practical experience using this adapter under Linux?
It has a Ralink chipset and is very cheap Down Under:
http://www.shopbot.com.au/p-82570-1482083.html
Cheers
142 • TL-WN321G (by ultrahog on 2008-07-03 18:24:32 GMT from Canada)
Uses rt73.
143 • @142 Thanks for feedback...What type of driver are you using (by Opensource or NDISwrapper? on 2008-07-04 02:21:54 GMT from Australia)
rt73 supports WPA-PSK with iwpriv from the Linux wireless-tools
http://mjh.name/Ralink_rt73_wpa_supplicant_rt2x00_wpa2
http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/data/drivers/ReleaseNote-RT73STA-v1101.txt
http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Linux.html
There were some typos in the original post and should read as follows:
TP-Link 54M Wireless USB Adapter (TL-WN321G)...Is this a good linux option?
Anyone have any practical experience using this adapter under Linux?
It has a Ralink chipset and is very cheap Down Under:
http://www.shopbot.com.au/p-82570-1482083.html
As a minimum, wpa-psk encryption must be supported.
144 • 101, 103 (by Craig on 2008-07-04 03:01:42 GMT from United States)
Mandriva. For a newbie or oldbie it's one of the best. In started on debian, too, but can't understand the posts on here stating "I steer clear of RPM-based distros". Who cares what package manager is used...as long as it works! Mandriva really impressed me on my Thinkpad laptop. All working. Even suspend to ram AND disk.
As a side note...today I turned on an old gateway p233 with 64mb ram running Win98SE while at work. I couldn't believe the speed of this old clunker. Why is this? Really. Hit start and BAM. Launches everything almost instantly. I wish there were a Linux distro that had as good a desktop as Win98 with comparable speed. Just for fun I launched IE5 and it was up in a couple of seconds. I had to admit that Win98SE was pretty fast and pretty enough to use. This woke me up to how bloated everything has become. Please don't think I like M$...just a comment on the leanness of Win98. Comments?
145 • PCLOS (by chezzy on 2008-07-04 03:39:20 GMT from United States)
Is PCLinuxOS still alive?
146 • @144 (by Balmer's Itch on 2008-07-04 04:05:20 GMT from Australia)
144 wrote: "..I wish there were a Linux distro that had as good a desktop as Win98 with comparable speed.."
Have you tried something other than Gnome or KDE? Something lighter but still configurable enough to be "as good a desktop as Win98"?
I'm a KDE (with some Gnome and Xfce use here and there) user but I really am not too fussed that my browser or app doesn't start instantaneously... That said, I don't like to be kept waiting for too long either but my current PC/desktop seems fast enough for my needs at the moment (Slackware 12.1).
Have a spare (but older) PC laying about? Install a lightweight distro and see for yourself - forget using a Live CD as the app start times will suffer for it unless it's one that loads completely into RAM. Maybe even create a spare partition on that Win98 PC or add a small hard disk to install onto so you can compare Gala apples with Pink Ladies apples...
As a start try Absolute Linux (Slackware based) - it's supposed to run on machines as low as P2... This snippet is taken the Absolute home page: "You CAN run Absolute on a Pentium 200 with 64 MB of RAM (although it would be really slow) -- but with a Pentium II or above and at least 128 MB of RAM you can expect zippy and stable performance."
cheers
147 • 101 Distro for beginners (by dbrion on 2008-07-04 09:19:20 GMT from France)
As teachers are not always computers science "specialists" or distro(s)hoppers , and 10years old pupils may become very wild when they see a bug, why not try a
distro meant for teachers (in small villages, they can have no help from neighbors, nor for the Web -the of course vibrant- fora can be unaccessible, due to lousy IT "service" providers).
As their computers may be old, it may not work in modern HW, but do people try on modern HW?
The install is simplified (one disk is filled up with Linux => no dualboat) and I saw no bugs in Skolelinux / Debian edu
.I know it is not high in the Holy DW mouse votes, which makes it an underdog (notion très intéressante) but it seems carefully maintained, at a reasonable pace...
148 • @145 Is PCLinuxOS still alive (by davecs on 2008-07-04 09:27:38 GMT from United Kingdom)
Er... yes.
As it's a meta distro, you can still install PCLOS2007 or MiniMe2008 and update using synaptic.
Packages are still being added to the repositories, still very much alive.
149 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-04 12:17:26 GMT from Germany)
I had to admit that Win98SE was pretty fast and pretty enough to use. This woke me up to how bloated everything has become. Please don't think I like M$...just a comment on the leanness of Win98. Comments?
Here is a comment:
All I remember from the win98 days is how the screen got frozen and how I lost lots of work and how I had to save every 5 min and how I wanted to throw the computer through the window.
With Linux you have "kill" which is awesome. Even the name is awesome.
Cheers,
Pleasure to Kill
150 • @144 re Win 95 & Win98 (by Andy Axnot on 2008-07-04 13:31:58 GMT from United States)
I have not found any GUI based OS that will run better or faster than Win 98 or even Win 95 on really old hardware. These OSes were far, far from perfect and were totally insecure, but they could be used with low resource machines. I once had an old Toshiba 200cds laptop. P100, 32 MB of RAM, etc., which ran Win95 or 98, could surf the internet on dialup and run M$ Word 6.0 and such.
Such computers are sold today at stoop or garage sales for about $5 to kids of all ages to play with, but in their time they were usable machines. I'm no fan of M$ but I have to admit that W98SE was very lean and usable -- and didn't crash too, too often. -)
Andy
151 • 144 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-04 13:38:19 GMT from United States)
I was just recently playing with Win 98 myself. I was upgrading the OS on a not quite 10-year old box and decided to see Win 98 in action.
I agree that IE launches fast, but most likely that has to do with the way that they integrated it into the OS. That is, of course, one reason IE has faced endless security problems through the years.
What surprised me the most is that there was no clear difference in the responsiveness of Win 98 and Debian Etch with XFCE. Even on that old machine, the menus open almost immediately and apps load quickly, except for the first time. With an hour or so, I installed great looking themes and icons and background and it sure looks a lot better than anything you get with Win 98.
I also tried Puppy for the first time in years. Puppy offers antialiased fonts and a decent theme out of the box. I thought Puppy looked much better than Win 98. Needless to say it was pretty fast.
152 • RE 131 @ I know it is politically correct to Gnetoo bash... mais (by dbrion on 2008-07-04 15:03:17 GMT from France)
"Gentoo Documentation Says they Released June 30 did they? (by Anonymous on 2008-07-03 03:04:10 GMT from United States)
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/release/2008.0/index.xml
"
La première ligne de ce lien malveillant (mais encouragé) indique :
"Disclaimer : This document is a work in progress and should not be considered official yet."
C'est un document de travail, et ils sont assez honnêtes pour le rendre public...
Jusqu'à quand?
Ce sont exactement les mêmes méthodes de "junk blogging" (tirer quelques phrases de leur contexte, en profiter pour règler des comptes et pour attirer des lecteurs {quelle est la traduction ?}) qui sont dans la plus pure , intègre et courageuse tradition de DWW...
Rien que pour rire, se réfèrer à
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080609
et
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20061002 ... pas de temps de chercher d'autres exemples d'un tel procédé loyal et honnête) et que le temps finit souvent par démentir.....
153 • RE: 152 (by ladislav on 2008-07-04 15:40:27 GMT from Taiwan)
Dbrion, you are fighting a lost battle. As you can see, you are pretty much the only one who refuses to see the reality.
As I've said many many times before, the only way you can make me change my opinion about the current state of Gentoo is if you write an unbiased, well-researched article with strong arguments. Yes, it would take much more work than it takes to write these petits rants of yours, but I can guarantee you that the effort will be worth it.
On the other hand, if you prefer to continue with rants, then serve yourself. But please bear in mind that they'll do absolutely nothing to make me change my view about what is so obviously one of the most mismanaged projects in the history of Linux distributions.
154 • RE 153 A new Osolaris is come... (by dbrion on 2008-07-04 16:07:11 GMT from France)
Better you buy GNUlinux Magazine France (no time to quote the page....) and post a link :
Do you really hope you will always find writers? under petty sarcasms
Pity Gentoo has a not an GREAT expert in project management......
A mon tour de jouer la mouche du coche...
BTW
In this page I see now :
Dernières distributions
07/04 Schillix • 0.6.7
07/04 Caixa Mágica • 12 (Live)
07/04 PC-BSD • 7-alpha
07/03 Mythbuntu • 8.04.1
07/03 Ubuntu Studio • 8.04.1
07/03 Xubuntu • 8.04.1
07/03 Kubuntu • 8.04.1 (KDE4)
07/03 Kubuntu • 8.04.1
07/03 Ubuntu • 8.04.1
07/03 GoblinX • 2.7 (Micro)
07/03 Greenie • 3.0.4h
07/02 Poseidon • 3.0
07/02 GParted • 0.3.7-7
07/02 Foresight • 2.0.3
07/01 Sabayon • 3.5
07/01 Granular • 1.0-rc
06/30 OpenSolaris • 2008.05
There seems to be a 4 days problem...
155 • RE: 153 (by johncoom on 2008-07-04 16:07:41 GMT from Australia)
Here, here Ladislav
Get real Ddrion you seem to be just "whistling to the wind" :-(
(especially if you keep writing in French to an English based site = silly, or can I say stupid ?)
156 • re TL-WN321G (by ultrahog on 2008-07-04 16:12:44 GMT from Canada)
143 • @142 Thanks for feedback...What type of driver are you using (by Opensource or NDISwrapper? on 2008-07-04 02:21:54 GMT from Australia)
===========================================
Not NDISwrapper. The TL-WN321G dongle is automatically picked up by the native driver that c/w O7. I only had to configure my wep security settings.
O7 also works well with a netgear dongle I tried that uses an rt73 chip.
Only on e little prob..My dongle is an earlier model (I'm assuming) than the one you are looking at & looks more like this. http://www.tp-link.com/products/product_des.asp?id=47
(vs http://www.shopbot.com.au/p-82570-1482083.html)
so..dunno if they use the same chip.
157 • Win 98 & 'zippyness on old Hardware' (by DeniZen on 2008-07-04 16:14:21 GMT from United Kingdom)
A few comments re Win 98's 'zippyness' above.
It is definitely zippy - i had an old Toshiba 2nd user Laptop that came with '98 and I re-installed, and it flew. Clearly 'zippier' in use than the Debian with XFCE that i tried.
A few peple will have to have problems with that notion - no doubt!
But ...
By the time I'd put on a Firewall (manadatory really) and anti-Vir (also pretty much mandatory) and the registry had started to get itself a bit more bunged up - as it always will, it began to slooow right down.
I cant recall using Firefox on it, but if I had, I'm sure it would have loaded no quicker than it would have on Debian XFCE.
Plus, the OS was no longer supported. And a fair few deices I own had drivers that required 98 SE or ME at least - didnt like plain old '98.
It may be a fast OS, if you are prepared to take the security risks and install very little, and you can get a Nic (esp Wi-Fi) interface that actually has drivers that install on 98.
Is it worth it? for (initially) seeminly faster loading apps?
I dont think it is!
158 • RE 155 Time can separate (by dbrion on 2008-07-04 16:17:55 GMT from France)
Junk blogging, inelegant practises and real work (not like an Australia based linux advocate site, whose sponsors had filled of viruses in nov. 2006.... it was their fault, of course, as the site manager loyally wrote...).
159 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-04 16:22:09 GMT from Canada)
145 • PCLOS (by chezzy on 2008-07-04 03:39:20 GMT from United States)
Is PCLinuxOS still alive?
=============================
Might be a better question for linspire.
============================
79 • @79 and all in general here (by Jock Rash on 2008-07-01 06:58:08 GMT from Australia)
Looks like Xandros and Linspire are one now...
http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/surprise-desktop-linux-move-xandros-buys-linspire/
And they both signed deal with Microsoft.... Conspiracy theorists must be having a field day!
The deadly machinations of Redmond are beginning to bear fruit.
he he he...
160 • @144 (by Adam Williamson on 2008-07-04 16:37:39 GMT from Canada)
It's worth noting that if you run Windows 98 on a machine connected to the internet, you should consider that machine as likely to have been compromised. If you ran IE 5, that jumps up to "very likely" to have been compromised.
Okay, so to the question at hand: like the others, what you need to do on a limited resource system is not to run the present-day 'standard' environment (which is, if you think about it, exactly what you did by running Windows 98 instead of XP or Vista). Whatever distro you go with (FWIW I think you may still be able to install Mandriva, though I'm not *sure* whether we can install into 64MB of RAM any more), I would recommend going with IceWM, LXDE or EDE as your desktop. I would recommend Dillo, links-graphic or possibly Kazehakase as a web browser. If you need a dedicated mail client, it's a bit tricky - I don't know of any actively-maintained ones based on a minimal toolkit (i.e. not GTK+ 2 or Qt - your goal should be to avoid those toolkits entirely). Claws is a relatively fast client for a GTK+ 2-based one, or you could go with one of the old school console clients like pine. For document editing, try and just use a text editor where you can - avoid word processors. nedit is a decent minimal (hence fast) graphical text editor, or just use your favourite console client.
I could make more specific recommendations, but you get the idea - aim for small, minimalist apps based on minimal toolkits (fltk, efltk, tk, gtk 1 etc). You can usually find something for any niche. Your desktop will look very different from most peoples' these days, but it will run well on your hardware.
161 • Gentoo, Dbrion and a few RE's. (by Landor on 2008-07-04 18:20:35 GMT from Canada)
First off, thank you so much for the Info Adam. I truly enjoy reading along these lines. Many forget the internals of the distros. I hope Mandriva continues to do well on all fronts. Alo, I hope you had a great Canada Day!
RE: 105, for our Aussie friends to smile over, sooner than later, I don't doubt Hockey Players will soon be wearing "floaties" instead of skates :)
If anyone discounts the intelligence of Dbrion in here I personally believe they themselves are not too intelligent themselves. The man knows his stuff, it plainly obvious. He's also extremely well versed on a variety of other topics and has made huge contributions to these weekly discussions/debates for as long as I've been here, and has helped quite a few people as well.
I decided this week I wouldn't talk about Gentoo, but as all things being equal and Murphy rears his head....
You like to say it's porrly ran Ladislav. Based on what criteria do you name it as the most ever? Seriously. Can you give me the exact model you based it on? You see where I'm going? I could think someone in a position in the community that you are, one of the defacto standard sites regarding news and such for Linux would be a bit more reserved about being negative towards any one distro especially when you cannot produce a model or benchmark other than your personal feelings.
I just read one of the key devs at Gentoo had a family crisis not so long ago, which was a large part of the delay. But here at Distrowatch that's not good enough as we can see. The old "kill them all and let God sort them out" addage.
But let's side step for a minute. I've been noticiing for some time posts here have dropped off in large amounts from what was more than common last year at and before this time. Could that man DistroWatch is not as useful or regarded as great site out of all the other sites?
Touching on that, I'll agree with Dbrion, much of the infromation found in DWW itself has been just like the majority of new realeases, ho-hum. But the core of information, and I've always considered it such, is the users comments here. What a person "can" learn here from week to week, if you put blinders on to all the BS is amazing. That's why I keep coming back anyway.
Just to finish up for Gentoo, before buring them at the stake on a blind crusadde, maybe delve into the reason why for a change, because if you did, (and I'd hope you'd have this level of kindness) you may not have judged so quickly if you had read about a key devs circumstances. The word community basically means people gathered (in whatever manner), emphasis on "people", no?
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
162 • @ 114 - oh Verndog! (by arno911 on 2008-07-04 18:20:41 GMT from Germany)
what's got into you? back in the days when you've been using sidux ( I remember you liked it, and you loved to use smxi) you didnt show such attitudes. Im tempted to call this rant, and you, characterless.
you had some trouble in the support channel, but now you are talking about sidux as if it had set your PC on fire!
I also remember the older user you mentioned. its a simple matter:
the devs are against using synaptic because synaptic aptitude and other tools with or without GUI, which are perfect for stable debian, can break a Sid install. you can believe it or not, you can use it against their advice, or not; so could he. but acting childish like he did, in telling every new user: dont believe them, it always works, and doing so after beeing asked to quit it, has to and will result in TROUBLE. thats trolling in a dangerous way.
"That brought the wrath of hell upon him. They were relentless in their pursuit to go and hang the guy."
man, are you on crack? I cant believe its you, Verndog. you really think sidux devs and users have nothing better to do? relentless to hang the guy !! come on! (I know you dont believe it, you prolly just had a bad day!?!)
and the very first rant in your series was a 100% miss:
smxi is the tool of a user, made by him for other users.
Not a part of sidux, but the users love it. and thats because its making things less complicated for the average Joe.
Nobody has to or had to use it, its never been mandatory. and as i said, youve been using it: until you left sidux because you were pissed, you ve been using it too. and the reason you left wasnt technical reason, it was a personal thing.
your rants are pointless, you are bending the truth, you are almost insulting the sidux team and the community. I would really like to know whats wrong with you, suddenly.
One day, you are using and praising it, and months later, out of the blue, you're making such a statement.
really sad.
b.r.
arno911
nauseated
163 • RE: 161 (by Landor on 2008-07-04 18:24:25 GMT from Canada)
I Love this old keyboard, but it's time to toss it I see....
164 • Re. 144 and 160 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-04 18:32:57 GMT from Canada)
You will be better off by staying with Win 98. It is faster than any Linux you can find and you can have many, many professional quality programs still working on that system. There is no point to slowly run a stripped down Linux and toy-like applications on that machine. Because if you do put Linux on that machine, then you will be really be "compromised".
Linux enthusiasts will likely to tell you that Windows is not safe and Linux is secure and stable. Really? If you visit this site often and read DWW and its comments, you probably already know that most of the Linux distros is everything but stable, if it is compatible with all the hardwares on that machine at first place. As for security, I like to look it this way. People complains about the crime rate in some US cities, but the truth is if you stay in the good areas in those cities, you will be safe. So is on the internet. If you don't visit those sites, you are very unlikely to be affected. Of course, if you need to visit those "for adults only" sites or alike, then go for Linux. They are much secure in those areas.
Another thing to consider is that the hackers are more interested in attacking new MS system than those old OSs. Because it will give them the attention and glory they are looking for or release their hate against MS like many of the Linux enthusiasts expressed in the comments on this site.
165 • Re: 101 + minimal hardware (by johncoom on 2008-07-04 18:38:46 GMT from Australia)
Try TinyMe see: http://tinyme.mypclinuxos.com/wiki/doku.php?id=minspecs
to d/l go http://tinyme.mypclinuxos.com/wiki/doku.php?id=download
I am sure there are other distros as well like Deli-Linux, you just got to try them out, most of us don't use old hardware any more (energy inefficient)
166 • @164 compromised :) (by arno911 on 2008-07-04 18:51:39 GMT from Germany)
please dont forget to add: Do NOT use Windows 98 SE, those two letters are the impersonation of evil, and such a new and highly advanced Windows like the SE will surely attract "Hackers".
You are so right, we all use Linux only for those sites beyond youporn.
im interested in having you as my teacher! not only security is at risk, no, its my soul! please save me.
###end of sarcasm###
b.r.
arno911
167 • Windows 98 (by Andy Axnot on 2008-07-04 20:02:39 GMT from United States)
Umm, guys, I don't think anybody here is actually advocating a return to Windows 98. A bit long in the tooth now. And, after all, this is a Linux (& BSD, etc.) site. Except for the occasional troll everybody here is a fan of FOSS.
That said, there's nothing wrong with noting that some other, older OSes were not totally inferior in every respect. It's just an observation, and a qualified one at that in that it does not consider the overhead of AV, malware scanners and the like. Nothing for anybody to get his underwear in a bunch about.
Happy Independence Day to my fellow gringos, eh?
Andy
168 • Hardware Compatibility (by L_L_O on 2008-07-04 20:04:16 GMT from Hungary)
Hi,
Before trying to completely write off Win95 or 98, one should recognize the fact that the drivers of the PCI Ethernet cards installed in those old computers function flawlessly through PPPoE whereas the Linux and FreeBSD driver need various system programming modifications, recompilation, rebuilding the kernel, e.t.c., before one may try to connect to the internet.
Worst of all, no reliable help seems to be available. One can find plenty of "hardware compatibility" sites. They refer to each other, refer to nonexisting sites, and some may list your unrecognized card, or its chip--that you should know--as Linux-compatible. The sites of the Linux distributions are no more help either.
Even if one would like to buy a new card that is on the hardware recognition lists of the various mainstream Linux distributions, one is equally helpless. We use phrases that no one seems to know. Now, moving on the same line of thoughts, if one tries to put together a new computer where can find reliable data. Neweggs does not have a peguin-eggs or a daemon-eggs division, and no one else advertises Linux-compatible components; so you are on your own again. Without guaranteed hardware compatibility, the whole Linux movement is like trying to grab objects from a mirage. Unfortunately, in this respect, hardly any progress has been made in the past thirteen years.
169 • First impression of Sabayon 3.5 (by Nanlee on 2008-07-04 20:23:28 GMT from Canada)
Downloaded Sabayon 3.5 yesterday and tested on several machines as live CD and installed on one. The first thing noticed was the change of color. Now, it is blue.
My biggest complaint about previous version of Sabayon was it boot too slow. So this time when I saw the announcement saying it is "really fast", I downloaded the copy right away and tested it. The result, well, faster than before, but not a lot. It is still slower than most of the distros I have tried and definitely slower than Windows XP.
For the 3 desktops I tried, it worked on 2 of them. On the P4 2.0 /512M and the AMD 3800+/1.5G it worked. But, on the PIII 700 /384M it didn't complete the boot process saying it can't find graphic server or X server (I can't remember the exact wording). This is really disappointing as Mint 5, Mandriva 2008.1, Open Suse 11.0, Fadora 9 and many distros worked on that machine. On the AMD machine, it worked only with one of the two monitors attached. This is an improvement over Sabayon 3.4f as the 3.4f could't find the video card on this machine.
On the laptop with AMD 1800+/512 M, it booted up, recognized the nVidia video card as well as the wireless connection. I installed it on to the hard drive to replace the Sabayon 3.4f on it. The reason I choose Sabayon for the dual boot on this one was for the excellent wireless support. Not only did it automatically supported wireless without my intervention, but also automatically listed all the available wireless networks in the area. No other linux distro ever did that on this machine. A big plus for Sabayon.
170 • 168 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-04 20:41:57 GMT from Canada)
You are right. The problem is that those hardwares were made Windows compatible. Remember the old days when they use the term "IBM compatible"? A few years after that, it was called "MS Windows compatible". Few, if not "none" hardware were made for Linux. Even now, some hardware manufacturers don't want provide information for Linux to write drivers. Why?
171 • RE: 148 • @145 Is PCLinuxOS still alive (by Anonymous on 2008-07-04 23:56:52 GMT from United States)
Before you try and update PCLOS 2007 through symantic be warned, I blew up symantic when I did this. I got stuck in a uninstalling beryl loop when it tried to update over a thousand packages. I had to reinsall with the mini 2008 and then I lost audio. I ended up going back to 07 and not running update.
172 • RE: 167 Win 98 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-05 00:55:07 GMT from United States)
I too love loved win 98 then I crashed a hard drive and found out that there was no version of direct X to install and run. No updates and security fixes that caused some strange usb connection issues. The DVD codecs would not work even with the software that came with the drive. Then I realized I could only install IE 5.0 and the windows media player would not create wma or wmv files any more. It seem that when I would get something and then reboot then it would not work anymore it was a big pain. The machine is currently running in dual boot with minime. If there was no opera ithe win98 side would've been unusable.
173 • Win98SE (by Jose on 2008-07-05 02:54:34 GMT from United States)
These Windows 98 posts are actually very interesting. A 10 (11?) year old OS that still runs on low ram and even looks decent. To this day, it seems I compare all the lightweight distros with W98, and they all have left something to be desired in my experience. I had pretty good luck when I tried out Vector 4.3 with IceWM a few years ago. It ran OK on an old Toshiba 166 laptop with 64mb. Actually better than OK by today's standards, if you consider it was probably faster than a 2GHz processor with 2gb ram running Vista. But it became outdated and wireless was non-existent. It still didn't run as fast as Win98 and the desktop was definitely more customizable in Win. It's really a good point to bring this out here. If the Win98 code was revamped for security, if one would use Firefox, if this and if that....Win98 would still be an alternative (if drivers were made available). I think, though, that laptops would benefit from this more than desktops. Typically, MOST people don't use laptops for anything too demanding (hence the recent mini-laptop craze). WinME was a disaster but 98 certainly was a milestone. I, too, want to say I am no m$ lover but give Win98 it's due. I use Mandriva now and am loving it.
Have a good holiday weekend, everyone.
174 • Re: 145, 148, 171 Is PCLOS still alive? (by chris on 2008-07-05 03:22:17 GMT from United States)
Other alternatives to PCLOS are:
PCLOS GNOME, needs updates but is alive.
I am writing this from PCLOS GNOME.
Granular, a new distro from India,
and has very attractive artwork.
IMHO, Granular looks better than PCLOS, Kde or Gnome.
Granular is still at the RC stage,
is based on PCLOS,
but is very usable.
Computers with only Sata drives dont work yet.
If you have to use the 'irppoll' kernel option,
the live CD will work, but after install,
the boot fails early in the boot:
can't read hard drive, ie. sata drive.
The Granular forum is helpful.
chris
175 • Win 98 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-05 03:51:11 GMT from United States)
I authored one of the earlier Win 98 posts. Here's a response to some of the posts that followed.
1. Do you really think that there is any way to compare IE in Win 98 to Firefox 3?
2. Win 98 is completely insecure.
3. I have no problem with hardware compatibility in Linux.
4. It's hard to believe anyone would consider Win 98 to be good looking.
5. A modern Linux system is a completely different animal from Win 98. And it is not slow unless you are really short on RAM.
6. There is no speed difference when running the same open source apps on Win 98. The speed difference is when you run old apps. If you installed ten-year old open source apps, they would run really fast in Linux.
7. I can live without the horrible instability that was present in Win 98.
176 • my oh my win98? (by john frey on 2008-07-05 04:10:28 GMT from Canada)
C'mon folks. If this was a Linux distro you'd be howling about it not being good enough.
Vector became outdated and didn't have wireless? How's wireless access with Win98? Lot's of drivers for the latest n cards are there?
What happens when you lose the driver disc for the onboard devices? Look all over the net and find some drivers for that old motherboard if your lucky Not to mention every ISA and PCI device and peripheral needs a driver. Take any old PC and install Win98 and then, to get it actually doing stuff like sound, video, printer, network connection... you get the idea. It was bad enough getting all that stuff all working when Win98 was current and we didn't know any better.
I heard all about how lax all these distros were for not providing timely updates for the SSL vulnerability and what about the distros running as root issue? No complaints about Win98?
Yes it might look good on an initial install but by the time your actually able to get productive with it you won't likely be singing praises. That DSL or Puppy will be looking pretty good when they install with an internet connection and all your hardware working. Might do a little more swapping than Win98 but then again, might not.
I'm not saying hacking around on old hardware with an old OS doesn't have it's rewards. Let's be realistic it's not going to be for serious work.
177 • RE 134 ...bash one of the best articles? (by dirks on 2008-07-05 12:56:47 GMT from Germany)
129 was me.
I usually check DW at least one a week, sometimes twice a day. It's THE place for me to check for any distro-news. But I rarely read DWW. Whenever I did, I found the articles of "newspaper-class": The ones I read were mostly short, without images, just some nice bits of info - grab the core of it, forget the rest. Just fine.
The article about package managers was IMHO "magazine-class": longer, more detailed and so on. And - of course - it took mor time to read. Now, since DW is the place to find something about nearly every linux distro on earth, I expected (and hoped) that the article would fit into its environment. At the end i found myself disappointed (and still am). Out of that I wrote my first comment here - merely in the hope that perhaps, some time later, another article would show up that would cover a much wider range of package managers. (Heck, if I had the knowledge I was hoping to find, I could write one.) Problem is, how can you be positive about something you got disappointed from? So much for my defense.
But I don't think that my bashing would make people shy away from DW. Why should that happen? Because someone expected an article to be better than "the best one" because it is on DW? :-) Further, do you think that people who take the time to read a specific article AND then pick all the related comments and read them would let one opinion overrule their own? I hope not!
Saying that one could find better info on wikipedia - I hereby want to apologise foe having done that: Whether an information is "better" than another depends on the reader - I didn't think of that. Sorry! (But still: My major complaint - that it doesn't cover a wider range of package managers and there is no comparison) still stands. May I hereby ask for a follow-up?)
Best regards
Dirk
178 • Granular1: computers with only Sata drives dont work yet. (by capricornus on 2008-07-05 13:12:08 GMT from Belgium)
Not true. Granular1 is the only Linux-distro that installs flawlessly on a MSI PM8PM-V with an Intel P4DC, a singular SATA HD (Samsung 160GB) and a GFX NVIDIA GForce 6200.
Like Mint is the better Ubuntu, Granular is the better PClinuxOS: it takes it user by the hand in an intuitive and adequate manner. Everything runs as it should. It pleases me much.
179 • re: 178 • Granular1 (by Andy Axnot on 2008-07-05 13:55:56 GMT from United States)
If Granular is a "better PClinuxOS" it must be very, very good.
I'll give it a try.
Andy
180 • Win98se 4ever? (by Dusty on 2008-07-05 15:18:55 GMT from United States)
No longer use it on the net. {hard to find secruity software}
But since I have a lot of hardware that only works with it, it's a keeper!
Let me point out that I have HDs in drive trays, so it's easy to change drives quickly. For the net on that machine it is only Linux.....
I seen someone say no Firefox for Win98se, WHY??? I have run it for several years, worked good. Had problems transferring large files with SE though, it would crash and trash USB thumb drives.
181 • DBrion (by glenn on 2008-07-05 15:32:08 GMT from Canada)
Hi.
I owe you a reply re my keeping a "Production" and "Test" partition. I have been overloaded with work so I have not had time to compose a proper reply. Basically, (and i will be criticized here), I keep my Linux software in a single partition rather than define multiples for VAR, HOME, etc. I do keep the Applications Data in a separate partition of course.
Using that setup I can then apply any Fixes etc and test them prior to my applying them to my Production partition. This will also apply to any scripts, variables, settings, etc. I may wish to tweak. I could be more elaborate as your question to me implies but I did not really want to spend the time get too elaborate, too complicated, and be stuck with a Monster change contol system. (I did that when I was younger and learned it was not worth the effort)
If I need to I can always clone my Production partition to a Test partition and then I can play safely. I do not use VBOX or anything like that other than to view new distributions because I found that no matter how good a VM type of system is (I am familiar with Mainframe VM also) it cannot cover some hardware idiosyncracys. I do prefer "real life" simulations. Because my application data is kept separate then all I have to worry about is the software ergo my Production and Test partitions are normally not too large. This is a simple outline of what I like to do if I am undertaking major surgery on my operating system configurations that I am using for commercial or work related purposes.
I have written and use an elaborate Change Control system which was much more complex to code (but very user friendly) however that is for a major client and for the Z/OS Operating System primarily and its workstation connections secondarily. I was paid specifically to do that so I could afford the time of course. Hmm, I've done a couple of those now that I think about it.
I am interested in this subject and if you want to pursue more please feel free to use my email address and we can exchange ideas. Just put DBRION in the heading so that I can adjust my spam filter to allow it through. I am quite tied up with work so my responses may take a bit longer than I would like but I will reply.
Glenn
182 • Does Slax violate GPL? (by Concerned Slax User on 2008-07-05 16:05:03 GMT from United States)
Dear all,
Upon reading Slax Forum, I encountered a post that slax violates the GPL.
http://www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=15492
Can anyone shed any light. For some time, they(netcops/GPLcops were after ZenWalk and ZenWalk came through. Now apparently they are after Slax. What part of the GPL does slax violate?
Many users would like to know so that we can advise Slax creator to please fix the issue. Thank you in advance for any information that can help our Slax Linux Live CD.
183 • Does Slax violate GPL? (by Concerned Slax User on 2008-07-05 16:43:50 GMT from United States)
Dear all,
Upon reading Slax Forum, I encountered a post that slax violates the GPL.
http://www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=15492
Can anyone shed any light. For some time, they(netcops/GPLcops were after ZenWalk and ZenWalk came through. Now apparently they are after Slax. What part of the GPL does slax violate?
Many users would like to know so that we can advise Slax creator to please fix the issue. Thank you in advance for any information that can help our Slax Linux Live CD.
184 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-05 19:03:38 GMT from United States)
A quick look at the post you have linked suggests that Slax does not make available the sources for all binary packages that are distributed.
Without getting into the motivation for the rule (just think about the importance of everyone having access to the source code), there are a couple of things that can be done. The source code can be made available through a repository. Or there can be a written promise to provide the sources for three years after distribution of GPL'd software.
Other distro devs have said it is not difficult to comply, it just requires a few hours of your time. Any dev will keep a copy of the sources that were used to build packages, so it is only a question of how you choose to make the source available.
You cannot point people to an external link where the sources are available. There is no rule that a public repository has to be available, the sources are required to be distributed only to someone who receives the binary, and there can be a fee to cover the cost (such as the source DVD's provided by Mepis). The FSF will be more than happy to answer questions that arise.
185 • What kind of hardware does only run on Win98... (by KimTjik on 2008-07-05 20:19:23 GMT from Sweden)
... and if so can't get replaced by some 0.2$ "junk"?
I'm not trying to be smart here, but I'm only wondering what kind of computers and hardware we're talking about? Someone mentioned some old obscure NIC, but that also made me wonder whether there's any good reason to keep on using a piece of hardware that's not really made for the Internet use we now have. There's probably something I've missed here, so it'll be interesting to here possible replies.
I've to admit that I've not been using anything older than motherboard + Intel Pentium Pro lately, but even with such hardware I've not run into any issues using Linux. On the other hand Pentium II is a better option since i686 optimized distributions work on them; the drawback is the bigger 2.6 kernel (there's a reason for DSL and DeLi to use the 2.4 kernel), which on the other hand works well with a lot of new additional stuff. Pentium III (or AMD comparable) is probably where I draw the line for a stationary PC, but for Laptops I've been using both Pentium I and II (for Pentium I a good old Slackware install is of good use).
When I suggested LXDE and described an install of it on an old Pentium II laptop, I did use Arch. Arch works very well for this purpose. It's modular like Gentoo, but you're spared the compiling, which isn't too fun on such hardware (I suppose even Landor agree with me on this :) ). Now it's difficult for me without a comparison to put the finger on why it works so well, but I was amazed at how well it worked with vsftd running; it easily made full use of 100Mbit/s both read and write. I suppose though that the optimized JFS file-system had an impact. You could of course choose one of the smaller already wrapped up distributions for old hardware, but Arch opens up a lot of options not so easily available otherwise (or why not Slackware?), like Volwheel (I just had to mention it, since it's one of those nice community initiatives this time by Olivier Duclos).
There's so many reasons for why to not run Win98, why I found some comments here intriguing. I can't agree either with the conclusion that only "adult only sites" means a risk, because the computer becomes pretty useless for a lot of tasks without good security; sometimes you wish to do serious errands and I wouldn't do that if even threatened in Win98. Even XP with or without SP1 is a terrible Swiss cheese; even with security software it seems to attract every malicious piece of code possible. On the other hand, everything has a right to get old, including Windows.
...
RE # 168: I can't agree. I've seen a lot more of this lately: http://www.zepto.se/Shop/Notebook.aspx?notebookid=673 . It's in Swedish, but you'll see the Ubuntu logo and the words "out-of-the-box". There're others as well doing this. Keep in mind also that AMD wants manufacturers to put some kind of Linux-compatible logo on their new graphic-cards; to me that's a huge improvement.
186 • @185 .....@168 has a very valid point (by Powerfactor on 2008-07-06 00:06:17 GMT from Australia)
Excluding Intel wireless support for mobile platform (generally pre-built), please point to advertised Linux supported usb addon wireless adapter/s or pci wireless card/s for desktops. Mandriva sells OS pre-loaded usb disks and why not they and other corporate-backed Linux distros not also market and sell a supported wireless usb adpter/s that will be guaranteed to work with the respective distro? A relatively inexpensive Linux supported usb adapter that offers good security encryption will be a popular hit and sell very well, IMHO!
187 • Re W98 on Old PCs (by Powerfactor on 2008-07-06 00:37:14 GMT from Australia)
I have a couple of old PCs that have W98SE on them and I can confirm that with the given apps that were designed to work with it, e.g.MS Office 97/Works 4/4.5 (and the OS interface - Windows Expolorer), it is extremely fast. Also, support from MS ended sometime in 2006 (or earlier) and IE 6.5 was the las supported version to work with it but Firefox 2 still offers support.
Firefox 2 System Requirements
Windows - Operating Systems
* Windows 98
* Windows 98 SE
* Windows ME
--------------------------
With limited hardware - CPU speed and RAM capacity, FF2 might be slow and these machines will not be much good for an enjoyable/safe internet experience and might be best utilised for word processing (basic home stuff) and running apps that will not run on other platforms or to save buying new hardware in order to run new versions of same apps. I have a P120 (in storage) with 48MB RAM that runs very well with W98 SE and Word 97. If I had a need, I could still use it for word processing and other basic stuff. I keep it because there are a few old DOS programs I have that don't like later hardware but the scrap heap is not far away.
188 • You won't believe this! (by RollMeAway on 2008-07-06 04:38:36 GMT from United States)
"Why I Still Use Windows 95"
http://www.andrew-turnbull.net/tech/windows95.html
Must be damn fast, and I'll bet the virus hackers don't know he exists! Ha!
189 • RE: 161 Gentoo, Dbrion (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 06:52:14 GMT from Taiwan)
Landor, can you please give me a well-researched, balanced article on Gentoo that explains why I am wrong? Please?
Every time I mention Gentoo on these pages, there is a crowd crying foul, bias, badly-researched story, etc, even abuse. But every time I call on one of these posters to write a real Gentoo story, silence returns. And you've been reading this publication for a long time, so you know that I've asked many many times during the past two years, yet I've received absolutely nothing. NOTHING!
I am completely stunned by this collective inability of Gentoo users/developers to put together something positive about Gentoo for publishing on DistroWatch. So what are my options? In the absence of any positive stories from the supporters and fans of Gentoo, the only thing I can do is to source my articles from whatever has been published on the Internet. And that has been mostly bad news and negative publicity, I am afraid.
190 • RE: 161 Gentoo, Dbrion (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 07:34:38 GMT from Taiwan)
As for the family crisis of a Gentoo dev, I am sorry, but that's exactly what makes me think of Gentoo as a poorly run project, managed by a bunch of amateurs. Can you imagine that a Debian or Fedora release gets delayed by months, because one of their developers had a family crisis?
I am not saying that managing a project of such a scale is an easy task and I can only imagine the amount of skill it takes to get hundreds of (mostly) young, bull-headed developers to work towards a common goal. But whoever is in charge of Gentoo should have recognised their weaknesses and handed the project back to its founder when they had a chance. At least Daniel Robbins has a solid track record and plenty of experience, and had a concrete a plan to turn things around.
I still think that Gentoo is an excellent distribution and a truly original project in the sea of copycats, but I just don't see how the current management can ever bring back the excitement that was Gentoo Linux 4 - 5 years ago.
191 • RE:189 (by Landor on 2008-07-06 07:42:47 GMT from Canada)
Ok Ladislav. I actually had hoped you would reply. I can't honestly say I could give an unbiased article or review and I'm sure some here would agree with that. But let me ask you. You are a professional journalist. You run Distrowatch for your livelyhood, and also publish, so that would make you a professional journalist.
I asked you for a benchmark and I've asked you to do further research about topics regarding Gentoo that you were completely in err over. You've fielded the query for an article to Dbrion, now to myself. You don't know why Gentoo is in it whatever state "you" propose it to be. Nobody discounts there's problems, but it's far trom the level you state. You want to be proven either wrong, or right. It does not matter which.
Here's what I propose...Ready?
You are the journalist here. You are no stranger to researching information, distro's infrastructures, dealing with various e-mails to get to the source of a topic for an article or review. Why not prove me wrong, or yourself?
You could talk to the council, you could talk to the devs, you could talk to the releng team, you could browse the wiki, you could browse the bugs, you could look at the portage tree and updates. You could scan the ofrums and maybe even field a question for help on some topic, and also for users to e-mail you their experience and feelings with Gentoo. You can go to the IRC and ask some questions or just watch, in various channels.There's also Planet Gentoo, you could talk to GMN and find out why it was released so late. You could find out what's holding up Gentoo's release, and has been (though I'd hope you'd keep anything personal of the devs out of it).
Then you could write a truly indepth article on Gentoo for a change, based on knowledge through communication and reasearch. Then do the same for say another distribution that you personally believe is a well ran volunteer project as a second article to use as your benchmark.
I'm sure you as the maintainer/owner of Distrowatch, and it's regard would be far better recieved by all the above than I, and be more worthwhile to the general Linux audience when published.
No insult here, just to coin your own phrase....
C'mon, man, don't make me beg...... :)
Keep your stick on the ice..
Landor
(P.S. We can't use the media as a measure for publicity, since we know that almost all publicity is about 99.9% negative because for some sad reason the world only want to read about woes instead of a candy coated happy world :) )
192 • RE: 191 (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 08:59:34 GMT from Taiwan)
I can't write the article. Believe it or not, I've done what I think is a reasonable amount of research and my conclusions are still negative. That's why I'd prefer somebody else to write the story.
As for contacting Gentoo, well, I believe it should be Gentoo's responsibility to improve their relationship with the media and that it's them who should be making most of the effort. The fact that they don't tells me quite a bit about the project. Most of the distributions are in regular touch with DistroWatch - they send in little corrections, email about important news, suggest articles, etc. In the good old glory days of Gentoo I received regular emails from Daniel Robbins and other Gentoo devs (who even created a package feed just for DistroWatch so that I can keep the Gentoo page up-to-date with minimum of work). Those days are gone - the package feed still sort of works, but it isn't accurate any more and, as you know, the ability to search Portage on packages.gentoo.org has been gone for quite some time. (Does anybody know why? That was a very useful feature.)
In fact, the only email that I've received from anybody at Gentoo in recent months was from a developer who expressed a strong dissatisfaction with the fact that I linked to his (Planet Gentoo) blog without asking a permission first. That was the first time anybody complained that I linked to a public domain article in the 7 years of DistroWatch! As you can imagine, emails like that are unlikely to improve my image of Gentoo as a project. I also remember reading a post on the Gentoo forum which suggested that the Gentoo PR team start a relationship with DistroWatch (and other Linux web sites), only to be rebuked by the next poster whose only line said: "DistroWatch are idiots".
And I really didn't want to bring this up again, but I still find it hard to accept that a $500 donation would prompt total silence, not even a simple thank you from anybody at Gentoo! I am sorry, but to me this says more than anything about the way the project is managed. You know, if you donate $500 to FreeBSD, they even send you a snail-mail letter of appreciation. I don't care much for that, but a little email saying "hey, thanks for the cash, we appreciate it", would go a long way to let the donors know that their money is welcome.
So all in all, I don't think the current management at Gentoo cares much about the project and the project's outside image. Gentoo is of course still fine as a distribution and it has no doubt many satisfied users, but it just isn't what it used to be and it certainly isn't what it could be. It lacks direction, it lacks excitement, it lacks innovation. Most importantly, I don't see any signs that the current management wants to fix any of these ills and to return the project to where it was just a few short years ago.
Finally - and I've said this many times before, but I'll say it again - if I write something negative about Gentoo, it isn't because I hate the distribution or the project. It's simply because I care about it and want its management to know what the project looks like to the outside world. It's up to them if they want to address the criticism or if they simply prefer to bury their heads into the sand.
193 • Landor & gentoo (by debo on 2008-07-06 10:08:15 GMT from Australia)
Landor
You obviously can talk the talk, but you seem unable or reluctant to walk the walk.
Ladislav's request and comments are spot on. Come on man, rise to the challenge & show us what you are made of.
194 • RE 193 "Come on man," Can *you *write under sarcasms? (by dbrion on 2008-07-06 13:27:15 GMT from France)
I know it is in the purest, integrest, most courageous tradition of DWW
Such an article would br redundant with serious papers, wikipedia, etc... therefore a waste of time.
And time can give all their intellectual value to petty sarcasms....
(last week, Gentoo was bashed because its monthly newsletter was somewhat delayed (w/r to what?). They obviously prefer to wait till they have something valuable to offer.... even paid people can *ask for a deadline, *multiply the delay by two or three before worrying and organize their -and others'- time not to be worried by unpleasant lags, whatever their origin. as far as I am concerned, once -last year- I multiplied by 5 and am lucky.
Gardons les pieds sur Terre..
195 • RE: 194 (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 13:38:18 GMT from Taiwan)
No Dbrion, it's your posts here that are a waste of time. Just reread some of your sentences, e.g. this one:
"And time can give all their intellectual value to petty sarcasms."
I don't know if it's you or your Google translator that puts together these "gems", but I can assure you that they make no sense whatsoever in English.
I know that some people complain if you post here in French, but at least those posts make some sense. Your English ones don't.
196 • RE 177 I maintain this weeks article is one of the best DWW (by dbrion on 2008-07-06 13:58:41 GMT from France)
articles within 3 months : as it is documented, well written enough to arouse the readers interest.
If the reader is interested by more, he may go elsewhere ... as you pointed it.
(There is a simple, but unkind/blasphematory way of knowing whether I am wrong or not : just reread every DWW since May and check them for the amount/consistency of info : they are in the public domain.....)
And I maintain that, if one wants something to improve -before finding better- one should criticise its worst, unconsistent aspects, not the best ones.
I do not know whether J.Frey wrote much nor wants to write, but it may be a nasty welcome to new (that is my assumption) writers... and readers (I do not claim to be more than a reader outside my job) can lose much at this game of "bashing the best articles, admire the integrity/courage of the worst".
197 • Were DWW last 3 months "gems"? (by dbrion on 2008-07-06 14:03:30 GMT from France)
Et le temps peut donner du sens à vos sarcasmes mesquins, votre pinaillage et vos défis de cour de récréation.
Pour votre info, je ne compte que sur moi même, pas sur un traducteur...
198 • RE: 197 (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 14:28:52 GMT from Taiwan)
Yes, my writing is not always perfect and I welcome criticism. But I am sorry Dbrion, I find it difficult to accept it from somebody whose own writing is barely comprehensible at best of times and from somebody who accuses me from being biased while your own demonstration of objectivity is reduced to nothing more that blind defending of your beloved Gentoo. That's not what I'd call good, unbiased writing. Gentoo is not perfect and if you think otherwise, then I am sorry, but you are wrong.
Look, I don't have the time to fight with you. It's 10pm Sunday night and I am busy writing tomorrow's stories, installing Gentoo, taking screenshots, preparing the layout, etc. I should be having a day off, but I am not, because I know that many people will expect their publication to arrive on time on Monday. If you don't like what I'll have to say tomorrow, tough. But at least you have a choice - you can always go elsewhere and read things that you enjoy.
199 • RE: 197 (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 14:42:52 GMT from Taiwan)
By the way, if you want to know what I am going to write about Gentoo tomorrow, then I have further bad news for you - it's not going to be good. I just finished installing Gentoo, which ended with the message "Your install has failed". The log file says that it can't find any kernel in /boot, which is true, there is no kernel in /boot. And this means that there is no way to boot the newly installed Gentoo 2008.0. Great!
So all in all, unless you enjoy torturing yourself, I don't think of any reason why you'd want to read tomorrow's DWW...
200 • RE 198 (by dbrion on 2008-07-06 14:44:48 GMT from France)
"your own demonstration of objectivity is reduced to nothing more that blind defending of your beloved Gentoo. "
You go on proving you are utterly wrong : I use Mandriva (two yeras ago, it was infamous, as it was "blowing with the wind" telling they were almost dead) and am satisfied with RedHat (and clones). But I was shocked by the DWW of oct.2006, (Mandriva anti PR policy) where you pettily picked up sentences out of not that carefully written blogs (people had other work, you know, and useful one) ... and I keep on being shocked by such "practices", whatever the distro.......
OTOH : it would be funny, as you expertly judge project management, that you became ....Gentoos Project manager (the kind of petty school yard challenge you seem to looove when you are ...short of rational arguments).....
Bon travail de mouche du coche....
201 • RE 199 : Why did you enjoy torturing yourself? (by dbrion on 2008-07-06 14:55:13 GMT from France)
"The log file says that it can't find any kernel in /boot, which is true, there is no kernel in /boot. "
Did you not mess it with the "new" Osolaris cf DW to day :"
07/02 Foresight • 2.0.3
07/01 Sabayon • 3.5
07/01 Granular • 1.0-rc
06/30 OpenSolaris • 2008.05
06/30 Slamd64 • 12.1"
the diff --binary betw. the older and the new seems null....
Why did I torture myself , on the basis of a misguiding page?
202 • RE: 200 (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 15:33:24 GMT from Taiwan)
As I said before, I can't take you seriously, Dbrion. Even in those rare cases when I don't have to second-guess the meaning of your sentences, I struggle to find enough reason in them. Maybe you are trying your honest best to point out what you consider errors in my writing. Or maybe you simply misunderstand the meaning of some of my points. Or you are just a troll that seeks confrontation. I really don't know. Sometimes I even wonder whether you've had too much wine before typing.
I don't expect that everybody will agree with the points I express in my articles and I've certainly never claimed that I am always right. Nevertheless I do expect that if a poster chooses to confront me on some stories or expresses a disagreement with what I write that at least he presents his arguments in a clear and logical manner. Otherwise you are just wasting everybody's time.
203 • RE 202 (by dbrion on 2008-07-06 15:44:42 GMT from France)
"his arguments in a clear and logical manner"
Relisez DWW du 2 octobre 2006 et expliquez en quoi :
a)ramasser des infos sur des blogs "junk blogging" (de gens qui peuvent faire un travail créatif, *eux*),
b) priver ces informations de leur contexte et
c) les publier, pour en tirer quelque profit a une valeur intellectuelle/morale (sur le long terme, ça peut être très gênant).
Ah, je sais que ce sera plus difficile qu'un travail de mise en page et des défis de cour de récréation (si tant est que des enfants soient d'une telle mauvaise foi)....
Et en quoi laisser une entrée manifestement erronée pendant 8 jours (une nouvelle sortie d'Osolaris) prouve votre sérieux...et la considération à laquelle vos lecteurs ont droit....
204 • RE: 201 (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 15:45:01 GMT from Taiwan)
Oh, that was my mistake, sorry about that.
Still, your post proves my above point. I am sure there is a simpler way of letting me know that I made a mistake. How about something like this: "OpenSolaris 2008.05 shouldn't be listed in the Latest Distributions section, because it isn't a new release."
Or is that sentence unacceptably clear and logical for your taste?
205 • RE 202 Répondez sur la valeur morale du "junk blogging" (by RE 204 on 2008-07-06 16:00:05 GMT from France)
(points a,b, c) et cessez de
biaiser.
(Vous aurez une explication du fait que certains développeurs -qui travaillent, au delà de la mise en page- protestent et ne vous fourniroont pas de renseignements, à terme) .
6 jours (30juin) pour ne pas détecter une erreur (déjà signalée en @154, il y a deux jours) vous donne tous les droits pour critiquer les autres, je vois...
Il serait plus intelligent de votre part, au lieu de vous livrer à des exercices de télé-ethylomètrie, de *vous* relire.....
206 • dbrion/ladislav (by Vinze on 2008-07-06 16:05:35 GMT from Netherlands)
Give it a rest guys!! ... time out. There are better things to talk about.
207 • RE: 203 (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 16:17:19 GMT from Taiwan)
Again, please present an argument about why what I said was wrong. The two developers might be doing a more creative and important work than I do, but that doesn't make them right. Sorry, I still don't agree with what they said. And you don't like that the quotes were taken out of context? Well, I can't publish all the blogs in full, that's why I link to them. The quotes are meant to arise interest, that's all.
208 • RE: 205 (by ladislav on 2008-07-06 16:25:14 GMT from Taiwan)
déjà signalée en @154
Dbrion, I appreciate it when you report an error. But please reread your post 154 and tell me how on earth I was supposed to understand what you were trying to say? Your post 154 makes no sense! Sorry, I had no idea what you were talking about!
That's what I've been trying to tell you all evening - write clearly and I'll take you seriously, speak in broken code and nobody is going to understand you.
Anyway, Vinze is right. I am going to call it a day.
209 • Re #186, Linux wireless USB (by Anonymous on 2008-07-06 19:35:58 GMT from United Kingdom)
It may be worth noticing that D-Link prints "Linux Support" on the boxes of several of their current wireless card models, including the DWL-G122 revision C1.
210 • recent release (by ibmorjamn on 2008-07-06 19:39:48 GMT from United States)
I just wanted to comment on the latest version of myah os 3.0 dragon.
I did the the live install and it works well all though slightly lengthy due to download speed and the live install it's still worth it. It is pretty good so far I have little to complain about.
The package installer is nice, live install and dependencies resolved and firefox 3.0 installed.
211 • Ping ladislav (by Anonymous on 2008-07-07 00:36:56 GMT from United States)
You may want to put a warning on those Gentoo ISO's. They don't seem to work - If you check out the gentoo forums others are also having problems with the 'live cd-installer' Hate to see people waste cd's and bandwidth for something that won't install.
212 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2008-07-07 00:56:13 GMT from United States)
It seems that two guys have taken to harassing Ladislav. I've said it before and I'll say it again. DWW is pretty good. It presents a lot of information and even a little bit of good discussion. I'm sure the vast majority of readers here will agree that you're safe just ignoring them and letting the conversation go on by itself.
213 • Exactly (by Warp0 on 2008-07-07 01:32:34 GMT from United States)
"I'm sure the vast majority of readers here will agree that you're safe just ignoring them"
Do doubt about that.
214 • Keep it simple ,understandable and on topic - A tall order. (by Verndog on 2008-07-07 01:42:13 GMT from United States)
Ladislav is correct regarding the translation that dbrion uses.
The problem was for a long time I tried to make sense out of it until one day someone remarked about him getting a new English-French translator.
From then on I try to avoid his comments. They just make no sense, period. I've wasted a good deal of time trying to re-translate them.
Actually I would prefer dbrion to use French. Once I see another language I don't understand I simple move on.
Also, I find it rather amusing that the first two or three days after the DWW is released, comments stay on topic. Midweek and beyond its gets unruly.
Like what happens in a local pub. From say between 6 and 9 pm, things are pretty normal. Once it gets closer to 2am all hell breaks loose!
215 • Gentoo install (by RollMeAway on 2008-07-07 02:23:04 GMT from United States)
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml
As I read the page, nothing says the live CD for i686 has an installer.
The ONLY CD available for installing i386 appears to be:
Gentoo 2008.0 Minimal CD/InstallCD
Note at the bottom:
Please consult our Gentoo Handbooks for more information on what to download and how to install Gentoo.
216 • RE: 215 Gentoo install (by ladislav on 2008-07-07 02:34:27 GMT from Taiwan)
The Gentoo live CD does include an installer, both a graphical and a console-mode one. A shortcut to the graphical installer is provided on the desktop.
217 • Quite A Few RE:'s (by Landor on 2008-07-07 05:10:00 GMT from Canada)
RE: Ladislav and The Anonymous Individual of 212 (kind've)
I can understand your position Ladislav. In some sense, you are as objective as I in this regard. I also want you to know one thing, I do agree with you on some topics, and I have stated, there are problems, just not as severe as most would think in my opinion. But we both know what opinions are worth, especially in an ever changing community & world as ours. I found the last delay in the beta with no information to the users deplorable and even commented on it in the right place, the forums, where devs did see my comments as well as others.
It's here now though, so we'll see what tomorrow brings.
Do you feel harassed Ladislav? Threatened in some way. Oh, and before I forget. Not all info in DWW has been ho-hum, only over the last few months or so, and you yourself have to admit the big release season kind've came and went with barely a fizzle, let alone anything exciting. So I'd imagine with that being the case it would be hard to find information just as exciting overall in Linux, on a weekly basis.
RE: 193, have you been into the turps? maybe tilted a few handles? :) I clearly stated why I could not, and it sort've fit with the exact same reason Ladislav did. Contradictory at best, your post was. :)
RE: 211
"You may want to put a warning on those Gentoo ISO's. They don't seem to work - If you check out the gentoo forums others are also having problems with the 'live cd-installer' Hate to see people waste cd's and bandwidth for something that won't install."
For some odd reason that doesn't inform one that you had a problem with the installer, or even tried it. I'm sure Ladislav will take as much heed to the comment as someone saying Microsoft is going completely Open Source tomorrow!
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor.
218 • RE 208 Do not hide behind my poor English. (by dbrion on 2008-07-07 06:42:38 GMT from France)
"how on earth I was supposed to understand what you were trying to say?"
En faisant *votre* travail de vérifier que vous fournissez une info cohérente à vos lecteurs (ça m'a pris 3 secondes pour le détecter). Et une vaste majorité de vos admirateurs non critiques ne l'a pas détecté ... en 7 (6 jul - 30 jun)
*
24
=168heures. Après ça, pinaillez pendant 10 ans sur des délais..... pour des choses plus sérieuses. Vous resterez bas, ou descendrez encore....
219 • A difference of opinions... (by Verndog on 2008-07-07 07:09:28 GMT from United States)
Thanksfully this DWW will end shortly.
Regarding Landor & dbrion. There's a huge difference between their posts. For one , I can understand Landor. Also, we do we intelligent opposing views as Landors has bought here.
One thing I dislike, is "Choir boys". Different points of view makes for interesting reads. Also strong opinions of users would be great feedback for any distro developer. Once you discount your user base, your screwed!
220 • Re 218 (by Anonymous on 2008-07-07 07:13:24 GMT from Netherlands)
Please post in short sentences (with (fewer (remarks (in (parentheses))))).
Please don't use your own abbreviations then other people will understand.
It is not the English.
Number of Comments: 220
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
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