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1 • Absolute Linux 12.2.5 (by Redy on 2009-06-08 15:22:35 GMT from Indonesia)
Hmm, actually i want to download Absolute 12.2.5, but after reading review above perhaps later, waiting for more stable..
The changelog http://www.absolutelinux.org/changelog.shtml also has wrong version listed there.
2 • Mandriva 2010.0 Release Schedule (by Shashwat on 2009-06-08 15:32:32 GMT from India)
Please add mdv 2010.0 is the distro release schedule http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2010.0_Development#Planning
Thanks for another cool DW weekly :) Looking forward for another fascinating issue :)
3 • Slackware based distros (by Jose Mirles on 2009-06-08 15:39:39 GMT from United States)
I have tried Absolute Linux before, but found VectorLinux to be better for me.
I was wondering if GoblinX will be reviewed anytime soon. I have always wondered about that distro.
I like itthat you test on a Netbook as well. I am in the market for one and do not want to go with a 'buntu or anything heavy. I was hoping for VectorLinux or a Slackware based distro.
Thanks for making Mondays enjoyable!
4 • Sourcemage Linux (by FredSanford on 2009-06-08 15:43:25 GMT from United States)
I remember trying SMGL a few years back and it wasn't too bad. In fact, I liked it better than Gentoo, since both are source based distros. At the time its installer was better than Gentoo, IMHO.
I also wish someone would write a review about it sometime soon.
Keep up the good work Distrowatch team!
5 • Absolute Review (by Jose Sanchez on 2009-06-08 15:44:50 GMT from United States)
Nice job Caitlyn. That was a very nicely done review. I have been wanting to try Absolute and was wondering if it would be worth wiping my current os to give it a try. I think I will pass on this release. Thanks for the "heads up" I'm sure Paul S. will have the bugs fixed shortly. It would be nice if he went with LXDE.
Now about this PUD distro, it's, um...well...different. Not necessarily in a bad way but it is a bit unique. I can see a market for it somewhere. Maybe kids, Linux noobs, and older folks. This is going to be a very good week on DW, I can already feel the love...hmm...well I feel something anyway.
6 • Absolute Linux & Hymera (by IMQ on 2009-06-08 15:47:30 GMT from United States)
Absolute Linux:
Thanks for the detail review.
I was tempted to download the recent release for a test spin, but holding off for a little longer to make sure no follow up correction within a few days.
It may be best to wait a couple weeks before scratching the itch.
Hymera:
I also install Hymera Open (even though I couldn't read the Italian instructions, it was pretty easy to guess) on my old Omnibook 6000 --P3 700MHz with 512MB RAM-- for a test drive but it failed to boot, twice, after the installation was complete.
So I moved on to test Dreamlinux 3.5 GNOME. It worked as LiveCD so I installed it and now in the process of installing additional packages.
7 • Absolute Linux Review (by Adam Drake on 2009-06-08 15:48:33 GMT from United States)
Thank you for the review, Caitlyn. It was very informative and held my attention well (especially considering I've never ran absolute and hardly dabble with Slackware or its derivatives). A lot of flamers will be disappointed that you did not use the U word in this article, but I'm sure they'll find something else to cry about.
I totally agree on the issue of no desktop icon for flash drives. It's one of the things I now very much dislike about my Windows work laptop. I would consider the broken Python-based GUI admin tools a show stopper. The last thing I want to do when trying out a new distro is to get out an old book or search online for ways to do everything from the command line before I can even create the first non-root user.
It also sounds like compiling your own binaries is the way to go when looking for applications not found in the absolute repository. I just don't get the lack of dependency checking in the Slackware package manager.
8 • Fedora 11 (by Jason on 2009-06-08 15:56:44 GMT from United States)
Hey all,
I have been a Debian user for several years now, but am considering a switch to Fedora when F11 is released tomorrow. My only real concern is the stability of Fedora. I know it is cutting edge, but just how stable is it for cutting edge? A must have is being able to run Win XP inside a Virtualbox VM or some type of VM.
9 • MilaX doesn't use WindowMaker (by Felix Pleşoianu on 2009-06-08 15:57:05 GMT from Romania)
A little correction: I tried MilaX earlier today, and it appears to use FVWM. It definitely isn't WindowMaker - I used that one for years and it has a very specific look&feel.
And since I jumped in... yeah it looks nice. Rather slow under VirtualBox, but definitely nice. The software selection is decent for a 100-MiB LiveCD (though Puppy Linux this ain't). I don't quite see why I would choose it over Linux, but more diversity is always good.
10 • OpenSolaris 2009.6 (by Alfred on 2009-06-08 16:20:29 GMT from United States)
In my opinion, OpenSolaris 2009.6 is very very very ....... slow. Some people may say it is my computer too slow, but I would disagree. My computer is Celeron 600 with 512MB RAM. It runs Ubuntu 6.04~9.04 without problem. The system monitor shows it only uses less than 258MB when running Firefox, and no swap file needed. Everything responses fairly quick under Ubuntu (also OpenSUSE). But under OpenSolaris, it responses everything almost unbearably slow.
11 • Fedora drops Mono (by Muhammad Fahd Waseem on 2009-06-08 16:31:55 GMT from Germany)
Fedora drops Mono from default install. Looks like SUSE is my only real option for MS compatibility now...
12 • @5 xPUD (by PCBSDuser on 2009-06-08 16:35:50 GMT from Canada)
xPUD does look interesting. The home page has a link to this youtube of it booting rather quickly. Does anyone have any experience using it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY1xAiNnPTc
13 • the Absolute review (by Sean on 2009-06-08 16:36:17 GMT from United States)
Well, the name "Vectorlinux" was not in bold and did not have < blink > or tags, but it sure was there in that review of Absolute linux. And in a favorable light. :)
We use Vectorlinux on three machines now and have come to the conclusion that it is the most "hard to break" of the distros we've tried, especially on out crappy nVidia fx5200 graphics card Gateway pc.
I'd like to see Vectorlinux featured someday in this site from the standpoint of the history of the distros derived from Slackware; it's been here for quite some time and has perennially been solid.
Not so with many final releases of other Slackware based distros.
14 • A few responses (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-06-08 16:49:27 GMT from United States)
#11: Fedora did not drop Mono. All they actually did was replace Tomboy with gNote so that the live CD will match the default install. The live CD doesn't have space for Mono. Mono is still in the Fedora repository as are apps that depend on it. You're exactly one trip to the package manager away from all the Mono you want.
#13: Vector Linux is 10+ years old and is well established but it's hardly the only Slackware based distro worthy of consideration. I'd include Zenwalk, Wolvix, and GoblinX on that list for sure.
#3: GoblinX has various versions in alpha or beta right now. I'd like to wait for a final release of a 3.0 version before doing a review. You are absolutely right that they deserve to be featured on DWW. GoblinX also has some of the best graphics I've seen in any Linux distro. I realize that's just eye candy but it's very special eye candy :)
Thanks to everyone for their kind words. I submitted my review with some trepidation. Nobody likes to post a critical review like this, least of all me. It's certainly not what I expected to end up with.
15 • RE: Fedora drops Mono (by Muhammad Fahd Waseem on 2009-06-08 16:55:44 GMT from Germany)
There's exactly one problem with going to the repositories and getting it: In Pakistan, internet connections are pathetic. It takes ages to download anything. Even downloading distros takes a special touch...
16 • No Mono? (by Anony Moss on 2009-06-08 16:56:18 GMT from India)
Thanks for the links on the risks of Mono- the articles were a wealth of information. Here's another reader getting off the Mono bandwagon. Surely, GNU/Linux has to be kept free of the clutches of software patents. There is music and there are books that are decades old but still not in public domain (read free) - let this not happen to software. Interestingly, one of the linked well written articles was authored by Chris Smart (our own?) Sigh, OpenSuse has some redeeming qualities though.
This weekly edition came as opinionated as they come, and its a good thing! Tell us like it is, now and in the future. Can we hope for an OpenSolaris review in the future, after the Fedora 11 review, of course.
17 • Looking for pclinuxos 2009.1 torrent (by Anony Moss on 2009-06-08 17:10:48 GMT from India)
Off topic, but would appreciate any pointers. Where can I find a legitimate torrent for the 2009.1 kde edition? PCLOS download section does not list any, and neither does the distrowatch page for PCLOS (although torrent for the gnome edition is listed).
thanks.
18 • DW should maybe provide more Distro comparisons (by Udo on 2009-06-08 17:15:28 GMT from Germany)
These articles about some distro that a few people use are nice, but what I would like to see is more high value data.
For example: I would like to know how long CentOS takes to provide the RHEL updates (I heard it sometimes takes months.)
Or how fast distros patch security bugs.
Or how long distros provide updates and how many have been shipped.
And maybe have an activity index for distros. Maybe just how many releases a year or how many releases so far etc.
Those infos would really help to weed out the show offs from the hard workers IMNSHO.
I think if somebody would be able to pull this off, then it's Ladislav.
How about some nifty yum, apt, zypper,etc grabber/analyzer thingie. This would be the place that data should reside.
Encourage competition & quality!
That would be really a great service and contribution to the distro world and FOSS.
BTW: I like the Fedora bits about Mono.
19 • RE: Fedora drops Mono (by Muhammad Fahd Waseem on 2009-06-08 17:15:28 GMT from Germany)
No, I don't like Mono. In fact, I use KDE4 most of the time (which doesn't have Mono based apps). But there are mission critical apps out there (unfortunately) that need C#. Sad, but true.
20 • Germany? (by Muhammad Fahd Waseem on 2009-06-08 17:19:57 GMT from Germany)
BTW, DistroWatch shouldn't list user locations. Case in point:
"(by Muhammad Fahd Waseem on 2009-06-08 17:15:28 GMT from Germany)"
I'm not from Germany. Am using Tor to bypass bandwidth issues.
21 • @8 - Fedora 'stability' (by DeniZen on 2009-06-08 17:27:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
Jason,
I'm also a debian user in the main, but I have been running Fedora 11 Preview since Alpha, and not noticed any stability issues.
Hardly an exhaustive test, and its not even release yet.
I did have to re-install, but that was a HD problem on my aging Laptop - nothing to do with Fedora.
I really like it, has a solid, grown-up feel about it (tho' it is funky too), but it does take some getting used to if you are really long-term Debian user.
If you do install Fedora, install the presto-plugin for the yum package manager as soon as poss. presto plugin for yum (not 'Presto' - thats a different package) enables 'delta rpms' once installed - i.e. just the 'difference' in the updated package rather than the whole package.
Seems much faster at least, maybe I'm imagining it! - though still not quite like apt ;) . Still.. no biggie.
Couldn't comment re VM and XP on Fedora, but I'm sure its do-able as with most major Distros and I think the Fedora devs seem to keep the Xen VM fairly well integrated with the Distro. Again, not familiar, I've not looked at that.
22 • Nice review, and StormOS sound interesting. (by Davey on 2009-06-08 17:37:50 GMT from United States)
The Absolute review was excellent -- thorough and user-centered. I wouldn't have tried it anyway, but it's great to have such clear looks at what's going on with Linux and FOSS.
StormOS sounds kind of interesting, at least in concept. What would be the benefit of using the OpenSolaris kernel on top of an Ubuntu? Where would you see the difference from using the Linux kernel?
23 • Fedora 11, stability and VM (by Jesse on 2009-06-08 17:47:49 GMT from United States)
I have used VMs to run Windows, other Linux distros and such on Fedora. It works very well, no complaints here. Fedora tends to be a bit unstable (in my opinion) right after a release, though it generally improves over time. If you're used to using Debian (stable) you might want to wait a month before installing Fedora. Give the developers a chance to fix any bugs that show up in the first few days. Or maybe try CentOS, which uses the same sort of base, but with a stronger aim at stability.
I'm glad to hear the Fedora Project is looking to open things up to more people. I've considered becoming a packager for Fedora for many years, but the hoops to jump through are a big barrier. That may explain why some of their packages are so out of date for a "cutting edge" distro.
24 • #16: Future reviews, #20 tor, #18 comparisons (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-06-08 17:54:48 GMT from United States)
#16: I do believe that reviews of non-Linux FOSS distributions, including the BSDs and OpenSolaris. should be included in DWW. If I'm writing reviews I'll be sure to include them at some point. I can't promise when. You correctly surmised that a Fedora 11 review is pretty much obligatory. If they release tomorrow expect a review in two weeks.
#20: @Muhammad: I was wondering when someone would point out that the country of origin isn't always accurate. Anyone who uses tor to browse anonymously or, as you do, to bypass bandwidth issues is going to end up with a false report. As someone who used to travel all over the world on business I can commiserate with your bandwidth issues and download problems.
#18: I like your suggestions. There is material for a number of articles there, some of which I don't exactly feel qualified to write. Maybe you'll inspire Ladislav or Chris to write an article or two on those topics. The only problem I see with comparisons is that with 500+ distros you have to be very selective in what you include and someone is always going to feel left out.
25 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-06-08 17:59:49 GMT from Portugal)
Caixa Mágica is not the most widely used Linux distribution in Portugal, not by a long shot. That is Ubuntu. Caixa Mágica tries to be "the Portuguese Linux distro", but the quality of it is quite poor. They are forcing it upon our children, who then turn away and say "Linux sucks". That is a shame.
26 • Absolute (by Fernando Gracia on 2009-06-08 18:00:43 GMT from United States)
I spent my Sunday testing Absolute 12.2.5 and I got some problems, same as you I did install to my hd, so the first boot was as a root then I clicked many times the user manager and nothing happen, so I open a therminal and I create the user account with the command adduser. I wasn't hard. The system seems fast and stable, my Xmms worked great but Lilo doesn't reconigzed my other partitions; Debian 4.0 and Vector 5.8 which is my main system since its release. So today, after work I will try to boot my other systems or Absolute may be out of my Black box.
27 • Solaris / Fedora 11 (by Shrek on 2009-06-08 18:05:46 GMT from United States)
OpenSolaris does function much slower on my laptop. Dual core pentium, 4gb memory. Otherwise it worked ok. Slight problem with connecting the wireless, but it did connect.
Fedora 11, so far with the release candidates, has been very stable. The only problem I have had was it didn't seem to work with my cheapo DVD Drive on my test computer. On the laptop it works just great!
Shrek
28 • Fedora 11 (by Phillip Chandler at 2009-06-08 18:09:40 GMT from United Kingdom)
Cant wait for fedora 11 to be released. I tried the live preview and it found my wireless card, and even connected to my wpa2 wireless without problems. So if the installable is as good as, then Im switching.
29 • PCLOS torrent (by Captain Nilsson on 2009-06-08 18:55:00 GMT from Sweden)
Good luck
30 • PCLOS torrent - Linux Tracker (by Tervel on 2009-06-08 19:05:24 GMT from Austria)
#17, Pclinuxos 2009 can be found on http://linuxtracker.org
Pclinuxos Torrents
http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrents&search=&category=262&active=1&tracker=0
31 • Absolute Linux (by aGreg on 2009-06-08 19:05:38 GMT from Greece)
I always had a question about Absolute that AFAIK isn't answered in the documentation in the site.
Say i have an installation of 12.2.4 which was released only 1.5 month ago.
And as far as ive noticed, releases are much more frequent than Slackware's or Ubuntu's.
How do i upgrade to latest version 12.2.5? Is Absolute a "rolling release" distro?
32 • 31+ (by Greg on 2009-06-08 19:11:07 GMT from Greece)
Also i dont see an UPGRADE.TXT on the source tree either
33 • #12 xPUD (by Xtyn on 2009-06-08 19:12:42 GMT from Romania)
I'm on xPUD right now and it's really interesting. It booted very very fast and it looks great. It's not meant to be a full distro but for browsing/watching a movie/looking at pictures and listening to music it's good. It's got Firefox 3.5 beta.
I'm really impressed with it.
34 • #31: Updates (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-06-08 19:13:04 GMT from United States)
Absolute is not a rolling release distro. Each version has a fixed section in the repository. Having said that, gslapt and slapt-get, by default, use the absolute-current as their source. So long as you keep that setting you should be able to automatically get updates (with the exception of the kernel, of course) with gslapt or slapt-get. This, of course, assumes the repository is setup and working properly. It wasn't on either Saturday or Sunday and that represented the most serious bug I found. Without a properly working repository there is no way to get security updates and patches let alone newer versions of everything else.
35 • Hahah (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-08 19:14:15 GMT from United States)
I called it - Absolute got a review!
I can't say I'm surprised that Absolute might have some issues in this release. Considering Absolute is a one-man show and just went through a very drastic change, I can give it some slack (heh, pun) in the long term. It's a pity this review caught it with its pants down; most of the time this is a very stable, well developed distro.
I really do like Absolute. It has a great mix of apps on top of the best IceWM implementation this side of rolling one yourself, and I enjoyed the pre-12.2.5 releases immensely. I prefer it over Vector Linux Light.
Oh, and I was throwing around an article idea for discussing Absolute's peers, like VLL, AntiX, Puppy, etc. Maybe I'll get to work on that.
36 • OpenSolaris Slow (by JD on 2009-06-08 19:17:16 GMT from United States)
Hmm... though i have experienced similar issues with OpenSolaris being slow the new release has been overall a lot faster! provided you disable services you don't need. Linux is still way faster! I love when people say "hey this OS ran slow on my Celeron!" thats when they realize "hey i have a Celeron"! no wonder!
37 • #35 No you didn't ;) (by anticapitalista on 2009-06-08 19:29:26 GMT from Greece)
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090601&mode=67 post 203
I liked the review of Absolute as well.
38 • xPud (by Tervel on 2009-06-08 19:32:08 GMT from Austria)
I played with the Xpud yesterday and I see a lot of potential in it.
Tried it on 2 pc-s - pentium III 800 mhz (fast) and amd sempron 3200+ (lighting fast).
Booting was not so fast - in my case above 20 sec( i burned the iso on cd) . The UI is intuitive and fast.On the one pc lan card was found, on the other - not. However I did not used the extra drivers( xPud provides them as separate file).
The website of xPud is in my opinion very well made and informative.
39 • xPUD (by Michael Fox on 2009-06-08 19:40:24 GMT from Canada)
I tried xPUD 0.89 on my MSI Wind and found it very interesting for its fast boot, wireless out of the box and its unusual tabbed interface. I wouldn't use it as a "full service" distro, but if it had an email program (or a way to add one to its apps), I would install it on my HD and use it in preference to Ubuntu whenever I just wanted to check my email and surf. That would have me using it a lot because those two functions are most of what I do with a netbook. Unfortunately, version 0.90 doesn't seem to add an email program to the mix.
40 • xPUD 0.9 (by PiEp on 2009-06-08 19:42:03 GMT from Netherlands)
I installed xPUD 0.9 on my Acer Aspire One (512MB, 8GB SSD). It boots SO MUCH faster than Ubuntu NBR and all I do on the netbook is browse the web anyway. This will make me use the AAO so much more as I was reluctant to boot it because it took so long...
41 • Hymera Open - a new desktop Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux (by Dr.Saleem Khan on 2009-06-08 19:42:23 GMT from Pakistan)
Ref:6
Hymera:
I also install Hymera Open (even though I couldn't read the Italian instructions, it was pretty easy to guess) on my old Omnibook 6000 --P3 700MHz with 512MB RAM-- for a test drive but it failed to boot, twice, after the installation was complete.
The story is same here too:: although the DW Hymera page says it is multilingual including en but they installer is only italian and all you have to do during installation is to do a guess work plus the installer is not easy at all as compared to what Hymera people say, and after installation the system refuse to boot at all beyond GRUB:::something related to kernel???
I adopted a different method for installing Hymera:::grabbed a lenny netinstall cd:::installed base system and added hymera repo ( http://mirror.hymera.it/standard/ ) removing lenny official repos and installed full hymera system maintaing ext3 file system instead of ext4 and lenny kernel . You can see my Hymera installed system in these screenshots.
http://img200.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot1lep.png
now the repository from hymera has huge packages available but lots of packages are still missing and you have to re add lenny official repos to get a working system despite the warning from hymera team to use only their own repos. Also you have to set keyboard ley out from italian to en.
This distro has potential but needs lot of work and despite the adds given by hymera at DW this distro is not yet ready for its claimed potentials and I am sure not everybody would either think of or adopt an alternate method of installing this distro as I did.
Still wish best of luck to Hymera team .
Regards,
42 • Same results with Hymera (by Shawn on 2009-06-08 20:16:51 GMT from United States)
I had the same results with Hymera. The first thing that surprised me was that it wasn't a Live CD but instead an installation CD. I was hoping for an alternate language selection in the installer, but I guessed my way through it. Hymera looks promising, but I'll be sticking with the "other" Italian distro (Sabayon) for the time being.
I've never tried Absolute before. I might give it a try eventually. I'm glad Caitlyn told it like it is so I know what to expect. As far as Slackware is concerned, I use Slackware, Zenwalk or Vector to get the "Slackware experience". I want to definitely check out the newer Slackware (13?) when it comes out and the new compressed packages. I'm glad it's down to 1 CD again. I remember linuxiso.org and having to download multiple CD's when I wanted Fedora and Slackware.
43 • @37 (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-08 20:30:28 GMT from United States)
Oh, you were first, but I got there eventually.
I like AntiX, too. ;)
44 • wrong debris-link in feature story (by Anonymous on 2009-06-08 20:32:45 GMT from Germany)
The Debris-link in the feature story is wrong.
45 • Absolute and @26 (by stuckinoregon on 2009-06-08 20:42:19 GMT from United States)
Spent the weekend also playing with the new Absolute. Had high hopes due to the fact that it runs on current. Ran in to exactly the issues already discussed. Also had issues trying to install slackbuilds. I use MPD on my main machine so I tried to install the slackbuild fo sonata. I've done this before on my machines that are running slackware-current so am familiar with the process. It first threw a gcc unable to build executable error that I resolved by installing binutils. Then it started in squawking at me about cpp errors. Still working on this but I'm losing patience. With Wolvix and the others out there I fear I don't have much desire to beta test what was supposed to be a full-fledged release.
Looking forward to the arrival of Leonidas. Have been running the prerelease for a while and find it fairly easy and pleasant to work with as was 10. Props to the Fedora team for their strides towards perfection. Really nice to see that all coming together. I wouldn't want to chuck in my Debian though.
46 • RE: 41 (by IIMQ on 2009-06-08 20:51:04 GMT from United States)
Can you tell us if there is anything unique about Hymera? Does it have its own tool for administration and configuration?
The screenshot shows what looks like a normal GNOME desktop with the menu at the bottom.
It looks interesting to me because it's based on Debian, but your comment about its repository makes me think that it is kinda like Ubuntu: based on Debian but with its own package repo.
It will be interesting to see how far it will go.
Just a side note: I wonder if the problem I had with booting had to do with the fact that it is not the only OS installed. In other word, the bootloader was not installed to the MBR?
47 • @8, @21 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-08 21:03:22 GMT from Canada)
Running VirtualBox on Fedora isn't quite as straightforward as on some other distros, as we don't have it in our repos (because we don't allow external kernel module packages, and won't put the VirtualBox kernel modules into our official kernel unless there's a serious chance of them getting upstreamed in future, which at present there isn't). You certainly can run it, though, you just have to download it from an external source (like the VBox home site). However, the shiny Fedora way of doing things is to use virt-manager, which is a GUI frontend for the Fedora virtualization stack (which runs through qemu, libvirt, and kvm). It's actually surprisingly smooth and easy-to-use for anyone who's been burned by the early days of Xen and KVM - virt-manager is now at the point where it's almost as straightforward as setting up a VM in VirtualBox, it's just a step-by-step, graphical, wizard-based process. It's pretty neat. I haven't tried running Windows in a Fedora VM, though, only other versions of Fedora, and other distros.
48 • Hymera Open (by Dr.Saleem Khan on 2009-06-08 21:06:39 GMT from Pakistan)
Ref 46:
To be honest and not too critical it doesn`t have something really exciting except some latest packages e.g Open Office which is again broken, ext4 file system and latest kernel which gives problem after installation .
the boot loader gets installed to mbr: i checked grub menu to confirm but something is wrong with the kernel that prevents system to boot at all and many has reported this issue on their forum.
If one would something stable and pure and stable then there is no match to official debian lenny or if you want a fully customized debian with almost everything work out of box then I would recommend Tony`s Remastersys LXDE Lite or RevLinuxOS about which you can read here
http://geekconnection.org/remastersys/forums/index.php
http://www.revlinuxos.com/
Tony aka fragadelic is the guy who has done a great job making remastersys for ubuntu and debian and now he is doing real great job making these two distros. Remastersys LXDE Lite is the best LXDE lenny distro with everything coming out of box .
Regards,
49 • xPUD on my eeePC (by Zoltan on 2009-06-08 21:16:51 GMT from Hungary)
I have tried out, and works really well, any for me most importantly - in quiet. Two thing is missing from this distro: UTF-8 & lang support, and more apps possibility to change - but really worth it!
50 • distro's (by tuxhelper on 2009-06-08 21:17:58 GMT from United States)
I think it is interesting that xpud, slitaz and tinycore are doing so well and lasting as long as they have.
xPUD interface and netbook support is interesting, maybe a distrowatch donation contender ?
51 • Whither Absolute (by grindstone on 2009-06-08 21:20:16 GMT from United States)
To Caitlyn's Q about selecting Absolute vs. others, it just has that feel of a work of love...like dsl used to & like puppy still does... The little things/touches that are apparent that the dev(s) _use_ the thing every day...
I choose it for old boxes (read: ISA, adaptec, ppp) and it always boots & loads (vs. other things like ZW & VL--which are great btw--that do not).
52 • xPUD mail (by qwerty on 2009-06-08 21:29:24 GMT from United States)
For those wanting email in xPUD it can be had be easily installing the simple mail firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5593
53 • re #11 Muhammad Fahd Waseem (by corneliu on 2009-06-08 21:41:30 GMT from Canada)
In response to Fedora drops Mono from default install. Looks like SUSE is my only real option for MS compatibility now...
No, you are wrong. Your best option is Windows. And just FYI you can install Mono in Fedora extremely easy, although Mono should be avoided at all costs. Like I said you'd better go back to Windows.
Cheers,
Corneliu
54 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-06-08 22:32:20 GMT from United States)
Why encourage the use of Windows. This is FSS afterall.
55 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-06-08 22:39:01 GMT from United States)
Comment deleted (off-topic).
56 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-06-08 22:40:01 GMT from United States)
Comment deleted (off-topic).
57 • I Make $5000 a Month Posting Links on Google (by I Make Thousands of Dollars a Month Posting Links on Google from Home on 2009-06-08 22:45:06 GMT from Canada)
Comment deleted (off-topic).
58 • re #52 xPUD mail (by Michael Fox on 2009-06-08 23:12:26 GMT from Canada)
This simple mail looks interesting. How do you install it? The link you provided downloads a file. Does clicking on the file install it on a Linux version of FireFox?
59 • re #11 Muhammad Fahd Waseem (by corneliu on 2009-06-08 23:13:42 GMT from Canada)
Sorry, I stopped at comment #11. I haven't read the subsequent posts. Now that I read them I realize my comment was a little bit hash, but your comment #11 sounded so much like a troll. And I tend to answer trolls with trolls. Still Mono is one of the worst things that ever happened to Linux.
60 • Fedora and Mono (by Anonymous on 2009-06-08 23:18:49 GMT from United States)
Fedora /is/ dropping Mono from the default install on all installation media for Fedora 12. Yes, it will be available in the repos, but dropping it from the install media is a Good Thing, IMHO. Make it available to those who want to use Mono-based apps, but don't force its installation on those that don't. Unfortunately, it looks like Ubuntu is going the other way, with strong indications that they are going to remove Rhythmbox and replace it with Banshee as the default media player in GNOME.
61 • Who is your target audience, anyway? (by Nate C. on 2009-06-08 23:22:21 GMT from United States)
Ever thought about doing a DWW without a Distribution review? We hop and hop and hop and review and review and review, but this model it getting a little long in the tooth. It's like your rehashing the first 3 months of my gnu/linux career, over and over again. What about the freakin' software that's on these distributions. Screw the 'distro' people will find what the want and use it reguardless of packaging format, hwdetect scripts, etc... How do you expect to gain credibility. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Can we focus on the programs for once. the ones an average user would actually you know USE. Here's an example. I have younger siblings and they have been bitten by the free software bug because that's what I use and they have started to notice that I don't have to pay to do what I need to. They want to use what I'm using but I'm not going to hand them an Arch disk and point them at the wiki. No I set them up with custom audio workstations like mine but based on something a little more debian'ish. They use the software I select and almost never have to ask me questions about them. At times they have done there own evangelizing asking me for live cds to give to friends. And of course most people think an OS is supposed to be a traditional one size fits all shrink wrapped swiss army knife of a product (isn't that the way we've been marketing gnu/linux, badly), this causes confusion. Case in point, the youngest gave a copy of MEPIS to her b/f. He said he liked it but it didn't have a movie maker like windows (I know, I know but choice can be a barrier too and synaptic sucks). Her responce. "It didn't have Video Editor (PiTiVi)?" She shows off her setup, how you just drag your clips over, arrange then render. Yada yada yada. He doesn't understand why more work is needed to have a complete operating system AFTER it's installed. Of course all of this kind of stuff has been debated and rehashed over and over again. My point is maybe we need to stop looking at the BIG picture all the time. From the perspective of the audience we want to reach it doesn't matter anyway. Average Joe doesn't usually install and config his own OS. Should we not start being a little more focused on the needs we are trying to fill on an app by app basis. If Joe wants a simple non-liner video editor" why do we talk about kdenlive and cinelerra when the right one for him is PiTiVi. Maybe just maybe we could influence the list of default apps (and other list of inferior software ala Add/Remove) included in *most* desktop distros targeted at average users and in turn help make that first step a little easier.
62 • Hmm. (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-08 23:44:14 GMT from United States)
Interesting range of comments above.
Posting from Windows; Absolute was unable to do wireless (though that seems to be the case with any wicd distro). And I can back up Caitlyn's claims in the review.
@61: Synaptic does not suck.
I like the idea of discussing programs rather than distros. Maybe you should write an article on that topic and submit it to DWW.
63 • RE: 48 (by IMQ on 2009-06-08 23:44:34 GMT from United States)
Thanks for the response about Hymera.
And thanks for the interesting link on Remastersys. Maybe I give a spin. :)
Regards,
64 • RE: 62 (by IMQ on 2009-06-08 23:57:33 GMT from United States)
"... Absolute was unable to do wireless (though that seems to be the case with any wicd distro)..."
I have to disagree. I have distros with wicd like CrunBang, DreamLinux, etc. with no problem with wireless.
wicd is just a convenient tool for making connection, be it wire or wireless.
The problem with wireless not working is usually with the (firmware) drivers. Some distros include them; some don't. Assuming, of course, that the cards are supported under Linux.
Wireless under Linux is getting easier and easier but it is still nowhere near the support it get under Windows.
65 • #37, 35 (by AI on 2009-06-09 00:01:57 GMT from United States)
Sorry, I must modestly point out that it was me who called it first. I was attempting a indiscreet modicum of discretion, check #202 (http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090601&mode=67). Caitlyn has a easily researched pattern. It was a "no brainer". I would actually like to see her review something a little different like a PUD, Kongoni or BSD. I must admit (reluctantly), that the Absolute review was adequate when compared with the recent Ubuntu pablum.
66 • @64 (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-09 00:06:20 GMT from United States)
I know. But even when I have the firmware loaded, it still doesn't work. Maybe I'm just not smart enough for wicd.
67 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-06-09 00:11:14 GMT from United States)
+1 Kongoni
68 • Absolute (by 1369ic on 2009-06-09 00:15:36 GMT from United States)
In the last week I've had Zenwalk, Vector, Slackware and Absolute on this laptop, as well as Mandriva 2009.1, AnitX and the latest Ubuntu. There was another one in there, but I forget, because it wouldn't install.
I was hoping Absolute would be a little less in-your-face than Vector, which makes some odd choices in themes, terminal settings and whatnot. After installing Vector I went straight to Slackbuilds and didn't encounter any build problems while compiling Openbox and OBConf, among other things. I also threw in the latest Fluxbox from the Slackware repository and tint2 and conky that I had compiled on my previous Vector 6.0 installation. Everything works fine. Well, everything except the repository and wicd. For some reason Absolute does what Slackware64 -current does on my desktop, which is make about a 2-second attempt to get an IP address, then just sit there. I can get the network going from the command line, however.
In the end I agree with the review: Absolute is nice, but I don't see why anyone would pick it over Vector or Zenwalk. Not that it can't be their equal, but they have a big mind share head start.
And for real newbies, it was no contest: Mandriva. It's a tick or two slower on this machine, but flawless. I use Slackware on the desktop and (usually) on this laptop because it makes the most sense to me internally, gets out of my way and is speedy. But if I had to recommend a distro to a real newbie I'd probably recommend Mandriva. Then, once they were better at Linux I might urge them to try Slackware.
69 • Fedora 11 (by Pumpino on 2009-06-09 01:27:01 GMT from Australia)
I've been running Fedora 11 final on three boxes for a couples of days now. It's rock solid and runs faster with ext4 than F10 did on ext3. It boots in about 25 seconds. I love having the latest kernel, OpenOffice, Firefox 3.5 beta and Thunderbird 3 beta out of the box. Fedora 11 is more cutting edge than Ubuntu but is just as stable.
70 • DW is for Distros (by Jose Mirles on 2009-06-09 01:27:22 GMT from United States)
@61 Distrowatch is for distros not programs. You can get information on the different applications at freshmeat.net or sourceforge.
Applications have their own websites. Tons of them. It is nice to have a site that focuses on the different distros, not the individual programs that make it up.
Try the following for applications
freshmeat.net
sourceforge.net
http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/
http://www.gtk-apps.org/
http://kde-apps.org/
There are others, but these should provide you with just about any application you want.
Let's keep DW for Distros!
71 • @47 VirtualBox vs virt-manager (by Jesse on 2009-06-09 01:38:38 GMT from United States)
It had been a while since I looked at Fedora's VM manager and I decided to give it another try today. Compared to Sun's VirtualBox, I found it much more arcane and difficult to set up. Virtual Box can be quickly downloaded and installed without any serious dependency problems. A VM can be set up and running smoothly with a few mouse clicks even if you're not familiar with VM technology. The virt-manager required a larger download with more components, still uses a very crude, un-user-friendly interface and gave cryptic error messages when starting up. I would definately not recommend it unless you're already comfortable with programs like VMware and/or VirtualBox.
72 • Distros vs. Programs (by Gene Venable on 2009-06-09 01:46:25 GMT from United States)
Other places for reading about programs were listed, but they are not colorful and objective like DW at its best. I see what those who want lots of distro reviews are saying, but I still would like to see occasional program reviews from time to time. I get tired of distro reviews sometimes, and I bet the reviewers do too!
How about a round-up sort of article, such as "top ten most interesting program developments so far this year" or something like that? Or "cool new educational programs?" if there are any!
73 • Distros vs. Programs (by Shawn on 2009-06-09 02:13:56 GMT from United States)
I can see the point of trying to educate the names programs or software that comes with the distributions. I know Xandros and openSUSE are making their menu structures just for this reason. I've been using Linux for about 7 years now and I still have to look up the names of programs for anything I haven't done yet. Cinelerra was one of those programs and it's new to me because I'm not into video editing or posting videos on YouTube.
If there was a sister site to DistroWatch called SoftwareWatch (or something of that nature) someone should create it! By the way, Synaptic is a good way to find out what the software does as well as look for it by its specific name.
74 • Programs vs Distros, Absolute Rerun, Distro Requirements Bloat (by RO on 2009-06-09 03:21:27 GMT from United States)
1. Programs vs Distros reviews: I see the validity of both points of view on this, but I would like to add the observation that there are SO many F/OSS programs in a lot of common categories, which I have not experienced, that is hard to tell how they compare to others, provided there is some clue included as to their purpose - the weird names often give no clue ("conky"? Say what? That's about as helpful as expecting everyone to keep track of all the funky names for the Ubuntu releases instead of providing the numbers which are a much better clue as to when the release came out in relation to others - I am still waiting for "Goofy Guppy"...).
As it is, I do find most modern "full" distro's have lots of decent, usable programs, once I get past the names (and those ever so "intuitive" icons) to what they actually do. So much so, that now that I have Win 7 RC1 loaded on a partition of my EEE, I dread looking for the essential freebies (yes, there are Windoze free programs), like the mandatory anti-malware (Avira/Spybot Search&Destroy/ZoneAlarm/etc), Firefox/Seamonkey, Open Office, 7zip, Foxit Reader, yada-yada), whereas in a Linux distro, if it is not already there, it is usually a matter of a package installation from the distro's repository. In that respect, Windows has become much more of a chore to set up than Linux (for me at least).
2. Lighten up on Absolute, y'all. It's a 1-man show, and you are picking on him when he had a bad release day. Give him a week or 3 to get it together, then test/review when it is ready for primetime.
3. I am glad to see improvement in progress towards a long-standing need of mine in getting info on the machine requirements for distros since I mess with older (cheaper) hardware. On the downside, why is it each new version of most distro's seems to keep increasing the RAM and CPU requirements? I was hoping to give a "stabilized" SliTaz a shot on my old Fujitsu Lifebook P1120 with its Crusoe 800 Mhz CPU (effectively equivalent to an Intel 400 Mhz) and 240 MB of RAM (not upgradeable) to see if it would be any more useful than Puppy, which is ok, but I am always looking for that better distro, as many DW readers are I suspect. Tiny Core, and its precursor DSL, and Puppy seem like the rare exceptions (although, as I recall, TC can balloon out quickly with the add-ons?).
It makes me roll my eyes (figuratively) when Linux zealots like to trot out that old anti-MS argument about extending the life of older PC's - yeah, right, if you stay with old versions or the occasional exception like DSL (older versions at that) or Puppy.
Oh, hey! Keep up the good work, DW, and thanks!
75 • @Caitlyn (by Anonymous on 2009-06-09 03:22:17 GMT from United States)
Caitlyn, if you are going to do a Fedora review sometime, let me make two recommendations: once you get the system installed, before you do anything else, install the yum-fastestmirror and yum-presto plugins. They will dramatically increase yum's speed, through the yum-fastestmirror plugin, and significantly reduce the size of you downloads through the yum-presto (DeltaRPM) plugin. Fedora 11 is amazingly solid and fast and yum's clean output is *nice*.
76 • Fedora and VM's (by Scott at 2009-06-09 03:26:01 GMT from United States)
There is a VirtualBox rpm for F11 already. On one machine (which has other problems) it didn't work that well--however, using the VirtualBox generic tarball (vs. the rpm) worked perfectly.
This is for the non open source edition.
Although, as Adam says, not quite as straightforward because it's not in a repo, I've had almost no problems with it and have been using it since Fedora 7 or 8.
(I strongly suspect the problems I mention above have to do with some oddity or another on that particular machine.)
I've also run VMware server 2 on it. Absolutely no issues there.
77 • VirtualBox in Fedora (by Felix Pleşoianu on 2009-06-09 04:48:25 GMT from Romania)
What do you mean, VirtualBox is not in Fedora? I just installed it a couple days ago. Maybe it's in rpmfusion? I didn't pay attention during the installation, and I do have the rpmfusion repo enabled.
78 • Another good DWW! (by latte on 2009-06-09 08:38:32 GMT from New Zealand)
Another good edition of DWW - thanks all!
Given the huge amount of competition from the various distros, it can be very hard for smaller ones to make an impact - they have to be truly excellent and offer a real "point of difference". I agree with Caitlyn that Absolute doesn't seem to really do that - at least not yet.
Two new-ish distros that *have* done well are Slitaz and TinyCore. They've nailed the "small and easy-to-use" area and have done very well because of that.
79 • Comparison of Linux distributions (by Alexio on 2009-06-09 08:56:54 GMT from Romania)
@18: Anyone can try to discuss and improve the comparison available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions
To gather all the required information in a table format there is a new approach that can be used, just use Google Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=linux+distributions
One can add more columns to the Google Squared search results, by clicking on the "Add columns" field on the right and by selecting all the suggestions or by typing a custom keyword.
80 • @47 virt-manager (by john frey on 2009-06-09 09:00:46 GMT from Canada)
Thanks Adam for pointing me to virt-manager. Unfortunately the implementation in Mandriva is buggy. I've added to an existing bug report and probably have at least one new one to create. So far I'm unable to install an OS using it.
As someone else pointed out, compared to Virtualbox it's just not as complete or polished. Perhaps now with Fedora focusing on virt-manager, development will take off. For a project that has been around for several years it's still pretty crude and functions like a beta release at best. I only say beta because I'm assuming the Fedora implementation is functional.
81 • Misc : Fedora stability, applications vs distributions, xPUD (by db on 2009-06-09 09:20:33 GMT from France)
12 : "xPUD does look interesting" It interested a Chinese internet coffee landlord, and VBox worked well under XP when I showed him (as it has a tiny R§AM greediness, it is not that astonishing)
@62 : ".I like the idea of discussing programs rather than distros. "
DWW did it in 2004 and
maDe
me discover very useful apps such as "antiword" I had not thought of.....
What would be a supermarket without wares?
And produces are in a very good state, even without a supermarket: if 90% of the GNUlinux distributions disappeared, it would have almost no consequences on their applications they ship/modify/{up|down}grade.... Some free applications, such as fltk or g95, have statistics about their use (whether it is the XP port, the GNUlinux one, which is the most used, etc...). One can conclude that, if 100% of the GNU distributions diappeared, free open source applications (that is what users .... use!!) would remain as XP (or even Vista) "ports".
"My only real concern is the stability of Fedora. I know it is cutting edge, but just how stable is it for cutting edge? A must have is being able to run Win XP inside a Virtualbox VM or some type of VM.
"
Fedora can be used for training, and it has already been used in a semi-professional context-training- (I saw a demo of a slow -linked with simulations- appplication running under Fedora, and 20 people tried to break the OS, while waiting for results- without success).
I bet wine can be installed under Fedora (it has been working under my CentOS for 2 months and is satisfying for me at work, on the PC I generally use for developping (in case I would be flamed for using a W$$$$$$$$ PC for browsing): I suppose Fedorians are less conservative than Centos users.
qemu is very easy to compile, can I bet Fedora has SDL and gcc......
82 • @ 75 - prospective Fedora 11 review / Fedora on a Toshiba (by DeniZen on 2009-06-09 09:32:43 GMT from United Kingdom)
Part of me wants to agree with your observation.
However, the yum plugins yo umention are not enabled by default.
They are mentioned in the release notes - AIR.
Should a review incorporate planned 'system tweaks', or review the install as it would be for most people on first boot.
This is not quite the same consideration as the old chestnut - 'reviews from a newbie perspective'.
If Fedora enabled presto-plugin and fastestmirror by default in Release 11, then that would be a different consideration.
As it stands Fedora does not.
So, where does a reviewer draw the line between what is actually presented, and what is ultimately achievable.
Just a thought.
With regards to my current Fedora 11 experience, I'm still struggling to get suspend and resume sorted on my Toshiba Satellite Lappy.
I want that feature, it is a high priority on a Laptop for me.
So, I've been awaiting the pre-built 'Tux on Ice' for Fedora 11 by Mattias Hensler:
For reference - http://mhensler.de/swsusp/
I spent half of last evening trying to get resume sorted, but its not going well at all. I have tried all the 's3_bios' kernel line permutations also.
I may have to consider, on that particular hardware, Fedora 11 is not going to be the natural choice.
(Suspend/resume works perfectly without any need for tweaking on the same Lappy, with 'a certain popular, brown coloured distro'.)
Shame, if so, as I like most everything else about Fedora 11 !
I'll wait until final release/updates and give it another good shot before to making my mind up.
83 • 'Reviewers' (Wolvix sillyness again!) (by DeniZen on 2009-06-09 11:19:54 GMT from United Kingdom)
Just read the 'Extreme Tech' review of Wolvix beta 2 that is listed in the DWW 'Latest Reviews' section.
made me titter!
Unless something has drastically changed (and I'd absolutely bet it has not!), when you boot a Wolvix live CD, there is a clear Reccomendation to press a key to *read the boot instructions*.
Its clear, and in CAPS as I recall.
If you were 'reviewing' the product you would look at that , wouldnt you? ...
Right there, at boot you are asked to look at some info, and given the Live CD login details. A great way of doing hings TBH.
So here is another 'Reviewers' marking Wolvix down by suggesting that 'there is no indication of what the login details may be', and I had to go hunting round Wiki etc etc ..?!!
No ;) just look and read, Reviewer buddy!
And .. yet another Wolvix review that suggest that the HD installer is 'not easy'
Well it is, IMO, but in any case -
Show us an OS where HD install options are a total no-brainer?!!
Should it be a no-brainer? Not really - people should expect to use their heads just a wee bit if they are going to install an OS from scratch.
(and .. whats the benchmark in this respect ;) )
Anyways, I will leave feedback on the review website, but I will need to sign up, so will do so later.
84 • Great Review - Caitlyn! (by Leo on 2009-06-09 12:29:34 GMT from United States)
I think I'll take the time to say it. Too many times, so-called reviews are either a kissing up exercise, so that nobody gets upset, or a random collection of unarticulated thoughts, or worse, inflammatory (with the obvious intent of getting some extra page clicks).
This was a very nice example of how you can, without any obvious bias, give a distro a run, look at the pros and cons, and then make an informed conclusion, and based on that a recommendation. Beautiful work. Thanks!
85 • #83: Discussion of ridiculous Wolvix review; Kongoni, Apps vs. Distros (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-06-09 12:33:05 GMT from United States)
@DeniZen: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I also think judging a distro, any distro, by a beta is intrinsically unfair. I've started a discussion thread on this review on LXer.com and made many of the same points you made: http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/29156/
For those who want a review of Kongoni, I'll remind you that it's in alpha. It would be seriously unfair to review it at this time. Taking an exploratory look and writing about it is possible, certainly, but a review isn't just yet. Kongoni is a very interesting project and its definitely on my radar. I may write an article about it but it would be more like my Debris Linux article than a true review.
On the request to review applications rather than distros... If Ladislav wants articles like that I'm sure Chris or I would be able to write them. As I understand it this is DistroWatch so the focus, unless I'm told otherwise, will be on distros. Reviews make up around half of the articles, maybe a little more than that. Next week's DWW article won't be a review. I can point to many others than weren't. OTOH, the focus is and probably will continue to be distros.
There are a number of excellent Linux aggregators where you can find interesting and informative articles about Linux apps:
http://www.lxer.com
http://www.tuxmachines.org
http://linuxtoday.com
Someone complained about covering "distros hardly anybody uses". One of the things that attracted me to DistroWatch was that the site let me learn about distros that I wouldn't have found out about otherwise. DistroWatch always has had excellent coverage of the major distros and probably always will. I think that spending some time and space on lesser known distros is one of the great strengths of what Ladislav has built here.
We've mainly had really good comments and debate this week. Keep it coming!
86 • Open Solaris (by LxUser-120 on 2009-06-09 12:56:40 GMT from United States)
I have tried Solaris and Open Solaris! Each time it has made WinXP un-bootable?? It says windows will not boot, winsystem32hal.dll is corrupted! Has anyone else had this kind of a problem, when installing these two distros.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you for a great web site. Your reviews and comments are appreciated..
Best Regards.....
87 • (part of)#85 (by Sean on 2009-06-09 13:07:28 GMT from United States)
I discovered Distrowatch several years ago and have been glad ever since.
But it was not the first site I found when searching for a "complete list of linux distributions" in Altavista way, way long ago; that site was "http://www.linuxlinks.com/," listed then as "Linux Links."
It is now deep and extensive in scope, but then was just what its title says; a list of linux distros, about 12 then, about 800 now.
That was how I discovered Vectorlinux after struggling with Red Hat.
88 • Agree with poster #61 and stuff (by davemc on 2009-06-09 13:21:46 GMT from United States)
Hi. I do agree that perhaps too much emphasis is spent in reviewing distro's, which tend not to be much different from the parent projects in general. I really do not think I have ever seen a review just on a specific major project, and that is a real shame! Projects like MythTV (and other media suites), OpenOffice (and other office suites), Amarok (and other multimedia suites), K3B (and other CD/DVD burning suites), GIMP (and other graphic editing/creating suites), GParted (and other partitioning suites), etc. etc. These are the apps that truly make GNU/Linux a success on both the Desktop and the Enterprise and so much more review emphasis should be placed upon these than the underlying distro that is really just a kernel and a bunch of init scripts and a package repo under a window manager (GNOME, KDE, JWM, etc). Another thing is that quite alot of these FOSS apps have Windows ports and these make so much more of a dent in general public use than just Linux does. Apps like Firefox now command a very large user base, and the vast majority of it are strictly Windows users. Ultimately, these are the apps that carry the lions share in spreading the news about FOSS, and they should be accorded the lions share of attention, IMO.
89 • replies (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-09 13:23:22 GMT from United States)
@83: I agree with you that the ET review was extremely poor. His main point was that it wasn't intuitive like other distros, which I found to be a bunch of horse pucky. No OpenOffice? Does he understand what Wolvix is trying to do? My first distro I ever tried was Slax, but the second was Wolvix 1.1.0. Never had an issue, speaking from a newbie's point of view. I haven't tried the beta, but I look forward to giving the thing a spin once it hits RC.
The problem I see with a lot of reviews outside of the Linux hobbiest circle is a confusion as to what they should be reviewing. It's difficult to know exactly how to review an OS, especially a free one. You fall into a lot of traps if you're not careful, especially in the mainstream technology press.
The simple trisector I enjoy seeing is stability, performance, and programs. If a review touches on those three subjects, I usually can gleam the information I need.
The bigger annoyance is a reviewer trying to critique it "from a newbie's point of view." New Linux users come in all shapes and sizes. Some will take the time to learn as they go, while others will blaze through and hope something falls into place. Some have guidance, while others self-teach their way through (like I did two years ago). While "newbie friendliness" is a noble effort, I feel it comes naturally if the above three are already solid.
@74: I have to agree with your discussion on performance. There are very few easy-to-use, high-performance distros. Puppy is sort of there, but I don't see its success until the whole Ubuntu compatibility shakes out in Puppy 5.
If you want anything else, you're going to need to crack your knuckles and get to work, configuring Debian or Slackware. For extremely old computers (>7 years old) there's work involved.
90 • @86 (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-09 13:25:59 GMT from United States)
You may be better off posting on the (Open)Solaris forums.
I ran into that problem when a GRUB installation went bad. To fix it, reinstall the Windows boot loader with your installation media (if you have one) and then reinstall GRUB using any major Linux distro's disc.
91 • Reviewing smallish distros (by Leo on 2009-06-09 13:37:06 GMT from United States)
I strongly disagree with everyone saying "why review small distros". The Free Software world is rather evolutionary. A small distro can become huge. Mandriva (ex Mandrake) become very popular a few years back out of nowhere, by adding a lot of desktop-usage common sense to (the server oriented at that time) Red Hat. Debian grew to being "the mother of all distros" out of nothing, when we were all using Slackware. And popular distros also lose some of the spotlight, like Mandriva, which has a great product but has had (IMHO) management issues and poor decision making as a result.
Reviewing a small distro gives it 10 minutes of fame, and perhaps can help it become the next big thing if it deserves it. Also: there are niche markets that are covered by specific distributions, and it's good to know about them. Say, a forensics distro. Etc.
92 • Leonidas (by stuckinoregon on 2009-06-09 13:46:34 GMT from United States)
15 minutes and counting...........
93 • # 88 and 89(the trisector) (by Anonymous on 2009-06-09 14:01:08 GMT from Canada)
i second those opinions
94 • CentOS update speed (by MRaugh on 2009-06-09 14:08:41 GMT from United States)
@18: I use CentOS 5 and RHEL 5 side by side (CentOS for testing/development boxes and RHEL for production) and I've noticed that on things like kernel updates and major packages (core apps and utilities like httpd/openssl/pam, for instance) the lag time between Red Hat releasing a patch and CentOS picking it up tends to be around a week. Other packages may take longer, I imagine, since CentOS is a volunteer community and resources tend to get thin for things that are less commonly needed/used, but I'm not in a good position to speak to that because my test boxes tend to have short lifespans and minimal configurations.
After the last couple of reviews I think I'm becoming a Caitlyn Martin fanboy. ;^)
95 • Re 92: F11 is out (by Sertse on 2009-06-09 14:17:22 GMT from Australia)
Check the website. :)
96 • Fedora 11 download site (by Sean on 2009-06-09 14:25:52 GMT from United States)
"You don't have permission to access /pub/fedora/linux/releases/11/Live/i686/Fedora-11-i686-Live.iso on this server."
Nice.
97 • HELP: Live distro with chinese support (by koinsky on 2009-06-09 14:28:18 GMT from Portugal)
Hello!
Can anyone recommend a good live distro with chinese support?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am trying to help a chinese friend whose Windows system died on him yesterday.
I am looking for a live distro that would him to boot from a CD and work on his files
until his return to China (in about 3 weeks) where he can find support for his system/laptop.
I've looked on the ones listed here -- Everest, Hiweed, Magic, Red Flag -- and
picked the latter as it seems to be the most recent (2008) but I don't know whether
it is a live distro. As I can't read chinese it was even hard to get to the download page! Download started about 13 hours ago and is unbearably slow -- still at
170MB (DVD iso ~ 950MB). I only hope it is indeed a live distro!
Thanks for your help!
PS:
Of course it doesn't have to be one of the above "chinese" distros.
Any distro with out-of-the-box chinese support would do.
98 • @77 - VirtualBox on Fedora (by Jesse on 2009-06-09 14:49:49 GMT from United States)
Poster 77 is correct, the VirtualBox application does show up in the RPM Fusion repo. Most Fedora users will be able to install VirtualBox using their regular package manager. However, they do have to have that repo installed, the default install of Fedora won't have it.
99 • Re: 97 (by Leo on 2009-06-09 15:04:06 GMT from United States)
When you boot off the Ubuntu CD's there are a bunch of options for language, did you check if Mandarin is supported?
100 • RE: 97 LiveCD with Chinese support (by IMQ on 2009-06-09 15:12:23 GMT from United States)
Have you looked at Mandriva One LiveCD?
Mandriva One comes in both KDE and GNOME flavors. More, both come with more than one edition. Take a look to see if there is one for Asia that include language like Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
Take a look at this link:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1#Managing_Languages_in_Mandriva_Linux
Good luck!
101 • @100: LiveCD with Chinese support (by Anonymous on 2009-06-09 16:09:02 GMT from Portugal)
Thanks for the tip!
I've just finished downloading the chinese "flavor" of Mandriva One (2009.1).
Took less than 10min! :) Will try it this evening.
102 • @71 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-09 16:30:44 GMT from Canada)
Yeah, I did say 'almost' :). Did you hit the problem where you get an 'arcane' error message unless you've installed some package it needs to actually interface with qemu? I think it's not a dependency because there are several different possible methods it can theoretically handle.
Once you have the right packages installed, though, I found the wizard creation process pretty easy (and I'm no virt expert, I couldn't do this stuff by hand).
103 • @80 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-09 16:35:03 GMT from Canada)
Yeah, the whole stack is fairly complex - virt-manager is just the GUI cherry that sits on top - and AFAIK no-one is really working on making the whole thing work on Mandriva, so I'm not at all surprised it doesn't work.
It isn't quite as polished / finished a product as VBox / VMware, no, but then it's something of a different effort: the intent is to build a generalized and abstracted virtualization stack, rather than a single integrated application. The goal is to have a system whereby you can have VMs implemented with several different technologies (KVM, Xen etc) managed with the same set of tools, whether GUI or command line, or through the libvirt control library - every layer is abstracted and separated from the next. So it's a considerable engineering effort, but it's making great strides. It's already got from the point where I wouldn't have had a chance at getting it going to the point where I can, so it's doing pretty well :)
104 • @80 (by john frey on 2009-06-09 17:40:24 GMT from Canada)
That's interesting. I had assumed the utility was building on top of existing tools. In the case of qemu those tools should be pretty mature by now, less so for Xen and KVM of course. I have a much better appreciation for what is being done after reading your expalanation.
Will UML, vserver and openvz all work with this as well at some point or is the focus strictly on xen, kvm/qemu? Some of those other virtualization technologies are not hypervisor based so I'm sort of thinking virt-manager is probably focused on hypervisor virtualization only.
105 • Chinese Live CD (by RollMeAway on 2009-06-09 20:15:52 GMT from United States)
Check out CDlinux
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=cdlinux
106 • @104 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-09 20:42:19 GMT from Canada)
Not sure about those. If you look at libvirt in particular, it's designed as essentially a virtualization abstraction layer - it's designed so you can work with many different virt technologies using the same interface. Presumably it would be possible to write libvirt interfaces for those technologies, if someone wanted to, and then anything based on libvirt could work with them relatively easily. I don't know if RH plans to write those, though.
107 • Paul's response to app issues (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-09 22:06:21 GMT from United States)
http://absolutelinux.org/forum/index.php?topic=336.msg842#msg842
"Was dysfunctional because I had neglected to update "xdialog_py""
It's now updated in the repos, he says.
108 • Mandriva 2009.1 (by Frisco on 2009-06-09 22:29:51 GMT from United States)
This is a nice distro. Very substantial, so to speak.
Going to have to head to the forums though; runs hot on this laptop and also the screensaver will not invoke.
Easy to cure I am sure.
It is just nice to see one of the old pioneers of linux still kickin'. :o)
Toshiba Satellite A205 (2008).
109 • #107 Absolute corrects error (by anticapitalista on 2009-06-09 23:28:02 GMT from Greece)
Great and I'm sure the next version of Absolute will be well worth trying out.
Caitlyn's review did say how good the previous version was:
"I had found the previous version, 12.2.4, to be quite solid. Bugs were relatively few and quite minor."
and
"My original review of version 12.2.4 would have been more favorable, of course. I assume there will be quick fixes for the bugs I've come across and version 12.2.6 will be along shortly."
and yes the fixes arrive a few days later.
So, I hope people will give Absolute a try. It is IMO pretty good.
110 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-09 23:55:38 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #97
It is not a live DVD...which is a pain 'cos, on occasion, I like to take a gand at how other folk sort out their "national distros"...for no other reason than, "well, why not?"
To my mind I feel it is the height of folly NOT to release one's own distro as a live CD/DVD on the simple premise of "try before buy" so to speak...and if a distro can't be installed off the alternate iso image you have to tiddle around reloading what you did have originally PLUS all the tweaking that went with it.
Ref the "packages" debate...a nice idea, but who would write a review? The top three folk on this forum have to earn a crust and some have a wife to keep, LOL.
Which segues into...another nice review Caitlyn...write it like it is...as in, "OK ish, but could do better."
111 • #74: No excuses, no rerun, #110 putting words in my mouth, #107 only one bug dow (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-06-10 00:40:55 GMT from United States)
Before responding to comments about my Absolute Linux review, I'd just like to let y'all know that I won't be the one writing the Fedora review. Y'all can decide whether that's a good or bad thing.
#74: I won't lighten up and the fact that Absolute is a one man show is not an excuse for a buggy release. Slackware is pretty much a one man show, a much bigger distro in terms of number of packages maintained, and the quality is consistently excellent. I've found Slackware to have the closest thing to bug free distro that I've ever used. There won't be a rerun on this release. Future releases are another matter.
#110: I never said Absolute Linux was "OK ish". There is nothing OK about this release. If you read the part about Absolute being "not compelling" you'd know that I don't particularly like it. There's normally nothing wrong with it but it also is anything but special. In any case I judge a release by the way it works, not by past or future releases.
#107: The xdialog package fixes the problem with the Python apps and tools. It doesn't help with the QT issue or the repository issue. I don't know if those are fixed or not. I actually consider the repository issue to be the most serious. In any case the iso still contains the bugs. It will take a new release for me to reconsider Absolute Linux.
112 • @111 (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-10 01:08:19 GMT from United States)
The big problem for Absolute is that it doesn't have the fun and games known as "pre-release testing," aside from Paul's solo probes. Slackware does. This is the issue small distros run into sometimes, which is unfortunate.
Why are you getting angry at the comment above you (110)? They're just complementing you on your review, and commenting on what they interpreted as your general tone. They did nothing wrong, and frankly, you're overreacting.
I agree with you - this release was not up to Absolute's usual. There are further issues. I'm creating some bug reports for Paul as I type.
113 • #111: I'm not angry (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-06-10 01:19:20 GMT from United States)
I'm not angry at forest. Not at all. Just setting the record straight...
I also agree that the likely source of the issue was lack of testing. Absolute doesn't seem to do beta releases. That might prevent problems like this from ever happening again. In a beta something like this is definitely understandable. In a final release it isn't.
114 • hoo boy *rolls eyes* (by Sean on 2009-06-10 01:26:06 GMT from United States)
You're over reacting, Caitlyn.
Isn't that what they're notorious for over at the Vectorlinux forums and why those of us using Vecorlinux get our answers elswhere?
Please.
115 • @114 (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-10 01:35:44 GMT from United States)
Oh, stop it, Mr. Sean. No need to be a Distro Bigot.
Vector's forums' are fairly nice, actually. I haven't posted, but I've searched it a few times.
116 • @4 • Sourcemage Linux (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 02:17:42 GMT from United States)
I think that would be a great idea! I started working on Sorcerer right before Source Mage and Lunar Linux forked back in 2002. I even helped build the setup scripts for the other two for a while then became a full time tester and script builder for Sorcerer for a year.
It would be great to have a writeup from a historical perspective of how three distros with the same roots carved out a niche for themselves.
You are right of course about being far easier to install than Gentoo back in those days. I haven't even tried to install Gentoo in almost three years (in this economy who can afford the therapy?)
Got to love it though, after all the fireworks all three distros are still giving the geeks and the tweekers the ultimate thrill. Damn, that brings back memories..
117 • Slitaz -- a Second Look: (by RollMeAway on 2009-06-10 02:21:16 GMT from United States)
Prior to last week, I thought slitaz was just another cute little live CD, useful for rescue work.
After a closer look, I did a "hand install" on an old Fuji Lifebook 270x. It has a pentium 200 Mhz and is maxed out at 96 MB ram. No CD drive. I used the lowram iso.
I had to remove firefox and install midori for the web browser, and it works well without using any swap! Hard disk space is up to 378 MB ! I added several apps from the repository of around 1400 packages.
I completely missed this intro on DW:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080331
I've also installed 2.0 on a 2 Ghz P4 with 1 GB ram. Lightning !
Turned off animation, and I've never seen a quicker distro. Boot and shutdown takes about 12 seconds.
I'll be watching this one. It DID roll me away, HA!
118 • Caitlyn: I Was Asking the Rest to LIghten Up (by RO on 2009-06-10 02:45:50 GMT from United States)
... as in don't pile on once the issues were spelled out in your review. You called it as you saw it, and I have no problem with that, but the rest of the comments echoing yours were just not necessary. Looks like Paul may be on to a key fix already, so those still interested could be giving it a shot. Move on to the next review by all means, and see who else you can stir up ;-}
PAX
119 • Re @82 prospective Fedora 11 review / Fedora on a Toshiba (by Finalzone on 2009-06-10 03:20:35 GMT from Canada)
I made installation on a Toshiba Satellite without issues with suspend. Perhaps a particular model is the problem.
120 • Fedora 11 installation still buggy? (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 04:31:44 GMT from United States)
I got a chance to download the Fedora 11 Live KDE desktop. It runs live very well. I have not yet had a chance to install it. Throughout the Alpha and Beta testing, I could run the Live CDs but even on systems where Fedora has ALWAYS worked - and really well, too, never any issues before, I had a LOT of trouble during this test cycle. I did my best to report on what I saw.
Tonight in another forum, one of my forum pals mentioned not being able to install Fedora 11, only able to run live. Workaround apparently is to install 10 and upgrade. Too bad; I thought the release delay was to sort out these kinds of issues. Hope this release is not a complete bust. Perhaps those mid release remix CDs that the Fedora project has used recently will be really critical in this release. I'm a bit disappointed; the Alpha tests started out so well that I thought this was going to be another great release! Maybe it still will be; we just need a few more installation work arounds!
121 • @ Ms. Martin (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 05:00:22 GMT from United States)
If you successfully configured your Absolute 12.2.5 installation with tools that were included in Absolute 12.2.5, then you can't really say that the release is broken, just the gui tools included in the release that appear to have already been fixed.
Heaven forbid someone should learn about the tools that every GNU/Linux install has or have to put forth the effort to fix their own X configuration from the command line, because it is not like every monitor out there reports correct EDID information.
Just sayin'
122 • Fedora 11 (by Verndog on 2009-06-10 06:06:23 GMT from United States)
I just downloaded Fedora 11 live Gnome version. The live works very well. I will install tomorrow and see what issues , if any, I have.
I'm a long standing Ubuntu user, but willing to give Fedora a go. I've heard good things about this release. Like most other distros, your hardware is the main ingredient..
123 • #121 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 07:31:42 GMT from United States)
Burn!!!
124 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-10 07:47:01 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #111, 112 et al.
I think it must be a semantics thing here...I read the review as Absolute HAS been good...THIS particular release was not so good...and HOPEFULLY the next release/version/edition will be back UP to par.
Hence MY own particular take that Absolute was OK ish. It might pertinent to add that a/any review is, inevitably, going to be interpreted uniquely in every situation...regardless of what the reviewer intended...no slur intended BTW...
Judging by the comments on another very recent release, Fedora 11, I infer the same sort of thing. I note also some folk are querying hardware issues...which as Caitlyn has been at pains to stress is/was an all too real problem in the past, present and doubtless the future.
Again, from my own particular take on the whole Linux distro issue, some folk are looking for a stable OS, to replace MSxxx...or a different distro, and can't be doing with bug hunting and eradication so to speak...whereas other folk positively thrive on/relish the opportunity to deconstruct a distro into command/terminal functions line by line and come up with a fix (of any particular prob say).
I believe that owing to these two (and doubtless more) different approaches to Linux sometimes causes the odd point of "friction" or "misunderstandings" in the comments section. And, if anyone has read other forums, THIS forum can be consider (in MY opinion, LOL) the epitome of refinement...
125 • Source Mage GNU/Linux (by tonttu on 2009-06-10 09:39:30 GMT from Finland)
comment 4:
"I also wish someone would write a review about it sometime soon."
Agreed, it would be really nice to read about some reviewer's impressions of the current state of SMGL. But it seems that these days reviewers don't have time to build a GNU/Linux system from source and customize everything as they wish. Or maybe they just lack the skill to do that? Instead, reviewers seem to prefer to spend their time installing a dozen or so ready-tailored binary distros, none of which really suits their needs.
I use Source Mage and I like it, but I don't have the time nor the energy to write a full-blown review. The thing I love most about SMGL is its intuitive package management system that is quite easy to learn and use. Another positive aspect is that there are lots of packages (over 5000, I think) that can be installed with the package manager, and the packages are also very up-to-date.
Source Mage developers don't like to add any distro-specific patches if they can avoid it, so users get applications that look and behave like their original programmers intended. Slackware has a similar policy.
A negative aspect in any distro where the package manager builds applications from source is that installing packages can take a lot of time. And although the SMGL package manager (called Sorcery) handles automatically all the necessary build-dependencies and prompts you about the available optional dependencies, picking the optional dependencies that you really want requires some knowledge. You don't usually want to include all the possible optional dependencies because they add to the time you spend installing packages, and they can make your system unnecessarily bloated. On the other hand, using Source Mage is a learning experience that teaches you about the inner workings of the GNU/Linux system -- quite like using Slackware.
One could summarize SMGL by saying it's basically Linux From Scratch with an advanced package manager.
126 • "Easy" Source Distro? (by Sertse on 2009-06-10 09:50:36 GMT from Australia)
While we're on this topic, what's a good source based distro to start out on?
I always to try it, but it seems so foreign...
127 • @126 : good source based distro to start out on? (by db on 2009-06-10 10:23:26 GMT from France)
Try to _read_ the LFS book
(and its sucessors Beyond Linux From Scratch)
which gives tons of useful tips and estimations of the time spent (it is much slower than bin install, the results are likely to be the same but it can be done while you sleep if scripts are carefully written).
Before visiting a foreign country, you should know
about its climate and this book was very useful for me
to add applications to preexisting linuxen....
BTW do not use gcc-4.4.0 to compile :
it is buggy (tested with hdf-5-18) and its severe (>4G for
a fifteen years old library) memory leaks
cannot be detected by automagically downloading binaries
(cf last weeks DWW which recommands downloading new versions of softs as a way of "testing"
"Running openSUSE "Factory"
(.....)
":Once you are done and everything went as planned, you'll be running a system with Linux kernel 2.6.30-rc6, glibc 2.9, GCC 4.4, X.Org Server 1.6.1, KDE 4.3-beta1, GNOME 2.28-beta1, Firefox 3.5-beta4 and many other applications in their latest versions!
"
"
128 • Future reviews (by Jose Mirles on 2009-06-10 14:32:53 GMT from United States)
I was wondering if Chris could do the reviews on the larger distros and Ms Martin on the smaller more specialized distros. I like it that Ms Martin tested the distros on a Netbook as well as a laptop.
A couple of suggestions were brought up on a review on a few of the source based distros. Perhaps a review on how they compare to Gentoo as well?
Maybe a review on Slackware and its derivatives. Debian and its derivatives, and so on. Did the derivatives really bring anything to the table that the parent didn't already offer? Which has better package management? Smaller footprint? Better suited for server? Desktop?
Ms Martin can probably do that right now with Slackware and its "babies."
129 • Fedora 11 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 14:45:34 GMT from United States)
I really would like to give Fedora a fair chance. I am mostly a debian user, so i am not as familiar with fedora, but I tried the 64bit livecd last night and could not get wifi to work with wpa2. it worked with unencrypted networks but not with my wpa2.
I would have thought Fedora would have wifi working by now. It makes me feel justified for not giving it a home on my spare partition.
130 • Fedora 11 (by mika480 on 2009-06-10 14:52:09 GMT from Italy)
I have a LiteOn 15 inches flat monitor...no way to see anything on the screen.
Fedora...hmmmm....back to my Sidux!
131 • @130, 129 was me (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 15:11:13 GMT from United States)
Funny you say that, I am glad i tried the livecd out before I blew away my sidux install
132 • Fedora 11 (by mika480 on 2009-06-10 15:35:28 GMT from Italy)
Just wanted to try and install on that specific pc...
the 3 other boxes running Sidux.
Must admit Fedora 11 live worked flawlessly on
a t3200 intel
Hope they fix some bugs,always liked Fedora.
Do not touch your Sidux if you are happy with it!
133 • RE: 130 / Fedora 11 LiveCD KDE (by IMQ on 2009-06-10 15:35:53 GMT from United States)
Just curious. Why would you want to *blow away* your sidux install?
It didn't work for you? Or you just wanna play?
:)
BTW, sidux has worked well for me on a number of machines. I, therefore, given enough temptation, would likely blow way one of my sidux residences :)
134 • Release Fedora 11 (by RayRay on 2009-06-10 15:37:01 GMT from United States)
Another disappointing release from Red Hat, it shows the lack of serious pre-release development. The live CD is useless. I would stay away from fedora for those who need a stable desktop.
135 • Please, give details. (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-10 15:44:21 GMT from Canada)
Well, 120 through 134, a bunch of pretty useless comments: I'd like to help each of you, but not a single one of you provided any kind of detailed information at all that would give anyone any kind of clue what went wrong.
The install didn't work? Okay. What went wrong? What system was this on? What options did you choose?
WPA2 problem? What's the configuration of the router? What's your wireless card / driver? What did you do to try and set it up?
"Can't see anything on [your] monitor"? What's the monitor exactly? What's the graphics card? Did you try any of the workarounds for common cards noted on the common issues page? https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs And where's your /var/log/Xorg.0.log ?
And 134 takes the cake, since it gives no indication whatsoever of what actually went wrong.
Look - bugs happen in software. Here's how they get fixed: when you encounter them, report them accurately with the necessary amount of detail. Then someone can help you to find a fix, and then that fix will be integrated into the software, and then everyone benefits. If all you do is try it and then post a message saying "it doesn't work, onto the next one!", then there's no way we can help you.
136 • Fedora 11 (by Squalphin on 2009-06-10 15:56:01 GMT from Germany)
Fedora works great for me :)
I like this new release. There are only a few bugs which might get fixed soon. But I haven't seen any serious bugs until now. The installation was quick and easy without any problems for me and the performance is great.
I just had a small problem with my Graphics-Card, a GeForce 8400M GS. The Live-CD wouldn't boot until I added "nouveau.modeset=1" to the boot arguments. After that booting the live-cd worked :)
The only thing I don't like is KPackageKit. But yum alone works great enough. And the delta RPMs finally keep updates small.
137 • @133 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 16:20:00 GMT from United States)
Boy am I glad you asked me that. I have been struggling trying to get help on the sound. Basically I only have control of master and PCM. no headphone or mic, and I have webcam but no control for its mic either...I posted in sidux forum and checked irc, no one helped me. this is on a laptop.
Oh and just to clarify, I have sidux on two partitions on this laptop, 64bit one is kde4 the other xfce edition.
Trust me no one likes sidux as much as I do, but the sound thing is bugging me so I was willing to get rid of one of the installs if another distro was working with my hardware....
I will say fedora sound controls look very confusing as there is only input and output.
Plus sound plays from both headphones and speakers when headphones are plugged in.
Though I am finding out that this is a intel-hda card issue. But nonetheless no wpa2 is a show stopper for me.
138 • @135 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 16:29:10 GMT from United States)
Thanks for your response Adam. I appreciate the offer, but do understand that to me not having wifi working out of the box is enough to dump the distro. To me proper working connection is vital.
As i stated earlier I am partial to debian based distros, but was very excited to give Fedora 11 a go mainly because of the great things you guys have done with virtualization (kvm, virt-manager, etc..)
I have vostro 1520 laptop,
intel 5300agn shiloh card
router is dlink dir655,
I can confirm the router and card work fine using wpa2 no problem with sidux, or any other distro i through at it.
I choose connect to hidden wireless network.
plugged in ssid
choose wpa &wpa2 personal
then put in key. it just tries to connect for a minute or two then fails.
And as I stated it works with open networks but not my wpa2 network.
139 • @137 (by Jose Mirles on 2009-06-10 16:43:31 GMT from United States)
Not sure what you mean by keymap and the US dollar being so cheap. But yes, I think how many languages the distros supports is something that should be in every review.
Smaller footprints to me are a pretty good indicator on how well tweaked the distro is. The Xubuntu vs Debian XFCE is a good example. Plain old Debian has less crap coming up right off the bat than Xubuntu. More unneeded stuff running, more security risks. Some of the stuff may be needed, but they could do like Mepis and ask you during the installation process if you wish to run whatever.
Some distros just tend to make themselves better suited to servers. You could run them as desktop distros, sure, but with less work, they would be perfect for servers. Debian comes to mind. Sure it is a great desktop distro, but God, you have to add everything! CentOS is another. Mepis, Ubuntu and others make Debian perfect for the desktop. As Fedora does for CentOS and Redhat.
140 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-10 17:09:07 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #135
I daresay it is disappointing/disheartening when some folk are not too enthusiastic about the results of hard work...that said...it is equally disappointing for folk who try out a distro and it does not "just work out of the box". The perception is, "Other distros do, so why not x, y or z?"
I suspect all distros are compared with one's own particular favourite and if a new distro fails to behave as expected, or live up to the "prehyping" (sic), promulgated by its disciples before a distribution release, then it is inevitable comments are passed. Some laws in life are immutable, LOL.
What might be an issue here too is that if a distro's release is delayed...and some folk still have problems...
Unless a person is into the intricacies of code, or work rounds, say, then it's onto the next distro...without the slightest reference to a help forum or passing on perceived problems to folk such as yourself.
I recall last week when I posted a query, which you kindly responded to, reference ext 4, which might, conceivably, be a sticking point for some installations, hence the delay in release.
Your response mentioned the problem(s) were not related to ext 4 but something else. Personally I would keep an open mind on that issue if only on the grounds you cannot have tested every combination of hardware installed on "a" machine...let alone any extra hardware installed post purchase.
I don't think for one moment it's a serious dig...I just believe folk can't be arsed to get something to work...when they are spoilt for choice...of distros that DO work on their machines out of the box.
141 • @137/138 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-10 17:21:44 GMT from Canada)
Volume control - see the release notes. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/en-US/sect-Release_Notes-Multimedia.html
On the WPA thing - ick. I don't know what would be the problem there, off the top of my head. My home network's on WPA, but I know WPA2 is supposed to work. It would be really nice if you could file a bug report on this, with the full description from 139 and including /var/log/messages and lspci -nn output, but I understand if this is too much trouble.
142 • Mandriva 2009.1 "One" (by Jerry B. on 2009-06-10 17:31:43 GMT from United States)
I came in this morning and there was a new operating system installed on our "throw around" laptop here at the school (the laptop that gets carried to the coffee shop by various members of our faculty).
It is obviously a very solid and well thought out distribution; I am therefore not angry that our Mint 7 hard drive is for the moment sitting on my desk.
I've posted a problem at the Mandriva forums about a minor sound issue at only one website as far as I can tell: www.pogo.com. Sound works fine at CNN, Fox News, CBS News, YouTube, etc, just not there at Pogo for some reason (I have flash and java installed, so that is not it).
Congratulations to the Mandriva team for a great release.
143 • Fedora - intel driver (by Xtyn on 2009-06-10 17:53:56 GMT from Romania)
As far as I could tell from the list of bugs for Fedora 11, the intel driver problem that affects Ubuntu 9.04 and Mandriva 2009.1 also affects Fedora 11.
I have two computers with different intel cards and both work fine on Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11, didn't try Mandriva 2009.1.
Can someone confirm if the intel driver problems are in Fedora 11 too?
144 • @141 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 17:58:24 GMT from United States)
Thanks again Adam for the reply, and I have no problem filing a bug report cause at the end of the day its about bettering the community and the products we produce. And your right complaining is senseless if you don't try and find solutions, though sometimes it takes someone as generous as yourself to point in the right direction. So I will be sure to do that when I get home.
I really want to give Fedora a place on my box, but I need certain things to work without to much fuss.....
Thanks for the link to the sound section in the release notes. I will give that another go and see what success I may have.
145 • Review of Absolute?? (by Anon on 2009-06-10 18:10:29 GMT from Norway)
This week we could read a review of the Absolute distro and I, for one, totally agree with the forthright conclusions. Good.
However, given the sad state of the distro, why waste everybody's precious time by publishing a review?
Would it not be both more interesting and worthwhile to publish a review of a *functional* distro? How about a review of AntiX, for example, instead?
Personally I wonder why somebody would bother testing Absolute at all, but that's me, of course.
146 • Fedora 11 (by mika480 on 2009-06-10 18:47:22 GMT from Italy)
In Italy we say
"il buon giorno si vede dal mattino"
for non italian speaking...the sense is
"When it rains...if You do not have the duty to save the world...remain home"
so it is what I have done...keep my Sidux on that machine.
Be rich or poor it's just a question to own you time or not...glad i do!
;)
147 • @143 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-10 19:03:53 GMT from Canada)
That's a bit of an absurd question. There are several different issues that may affect different Intel adapters in different versions of the driver. You can't treat them all as a lump, as if they're either all there or all not.
Fedora 11 has fixes for several issues in the Intel driver (including font corruption on various chips, missing cursor with modesetting on i8xx-era chips, and GL rendering problems on i8x5-era chips) which were added late in development, after other distros had shipped. So other distros would not have shipped with those fixes, though they may have added them in post-release updates.
Fedora 11 is using version 2.7.0 of the Intel driver, with several patches from 2.7 development or that are currently unique to Fedora and need to be upstreamed (see the spec at http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/xorg-x11-drv-intel/F-11/xorg-x11-drv-intel.spec?revision=1.20&view=markup , but some changes are in the kernel or Mesa / libdrm, as that's where modesetting and DRM are handled). I believe Ubuntu 9.04 shipped with 2.6.x, so that's another difference.
Basically, it's impossible to answer your questions. Fedora 11 has some bugs with Intel adapters. Many are described on the Common Bugs page - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs - others are tracked in Bugzilla. Some may be the same as in other distros, some may not, some problems present in other distros may not be in Fedora.
148 • #145 antiX review (by anticapitalista on 2009-06-10 21:45:51 GMT from Greece)
CM is boycotting antiX, so someone else will have to do it.
149 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-10 21:49:01 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #147
You said it Adam..."Basically it's impossible to answer your questions, etc, etc", ad nauseum.
Plus the fact...by starting off your response..."That's a bit of an absurd question." sort of alienates you from folk who did NOT think it was an absurd question.
If you had said straight off..."There are one or two issues not resolved as yet...but we are working on said issues...and we thank you for your comments"...most folk would have let it go at that...but by suggesting the questioner is asking dumb questions...you see where we are going on this?
The impression folk have got, rightly or wrongly...is that F11 is NOT quite ready.
150 • To 135 re:Fedora Release (by RayRay on 2009-06-10 21:58:09 GMT from United States)
My friend this is not a Development release, it is a Distribution Release. It is not ready. It has huge bugs which is typical Fedora. It is undercooked in other words not ready for consumption. If a distro needs to be around at least for a month before it is useable, it should provide a warning in the release announcement. We are not talking about a small project, it should be more polished (and I'm not talking about the artwork).
DSL, PUP and other smaller projects can release when they are ready. Why can't a project with the resources of Red Hat pull it together.
151 • RayRay's #150 about Fedora 11 (by Jerry B. on 2009-06-10 22:13:17 GMT from United States)
That has been my feeling about every distro that I tried and could not get configured on a particular machine.
I'm not so sure I was right about that every time. Example: PCLinuxOS would not install at all on our Gateway 2000 old machine with its nVidia 5200 graphics card. Black screen. No go at all and we plagued the forums with queries for weeks about it back then.
Then one day I saw a co-worker using PCLinuxOS on her Acer Gemstone. It was beautiful and fast and she still has it and would not change for any other distro or OS.
I'm wondering if Fedora 11 is similar. I know that Mandriva's newest release is running fine on an old laptop, because I'm using it now, having been surprised to see it here after using Mint for a while on this machine. But according to two co-workers who were here all day yesterday trying to get Mandriva to install on our Thinkpad it just would not connect to wireless and had other "big issues."
Machine specific linux. Also true of many who've tried Vista on various hardware with nothing but problems. I know all about that; that is what drove us to linux. :)
152 • @119 - Fedora resume on 'a Satellite' (by DeniZen on 2009-06-10 22:20:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
Well, thats good news regards resume on Fedora 11 on your Satellite.
I am sure you are right. Some kind of specific hardware vs specific Distro issue - even though mine is a Satellite also. But hey, no doubt we may have two very different Laptops, that share only a model naming convention ;)
Resume works fine on Ubuntu 9.04 on the same Laptop. In fact U9.04 is entirely without any issue or problem on this machine. It all works - well. I guess I'm lucky enough there then, particularly as I read accounts from folks who have apparently had all sorts of issues with U9.04 . It's the first/only Ubuntu release that I have taken any kind of liking to, or has been 'good to me' / my hardware . Just goes to show.
So, It happens. I've tried hard to fix resume in Fedora. No point in me whining, or spending toooo muuuch more time with F11 (shame, I rather liked it!), though I will submit summary to Fedora before I free up the disk space.
153 • Fedora 11 install woes (by stuckinoregon on 2009-06-10 22:49:10 GMT from United States)
I admit I have not read the release notes and that this may be a known issue. However, I still find it a MAJOR showstopper.
Attempted install on both a T41 and T42 from the LiveCD. Everything appears to go fine until I hit partitioning. On both machines I receive the same error (which since I'm at work currently I don't have the exact verbiage.) Basically it boils down to me selecting EXT3 for / and then EXT4 for /home. At this point I get an error saying that the / does not match the live CD and must be formatted to EXT4. ???!!! Ok, maybe this is a change, so I go back and try and format it with EXT4 and it squawks that boot partitions cannot be EXT4. At this point I wonder what changed between 10 and 11. Then after the short delay I go looking for my Debian or Slackware disks.
154 • ready or not.... (by mika480 on 2009-06-10 22:50:06 GMT from Italy)
I think the main problem is that they fix a day,and that day the iso has to be released...
Why?...release it when it is ready!
That' s applyes to fedora,ubuntu and others...
Rolling distros....release a snapshot from time to time....and you will (ever) have a working system!
I am not a beta tester...for red hat neither for canonical !!
I would like to use a WORKING distro...
Woww..i just told why I am using sidux...kernel 2.6.30 and not a glitch...
Still waiting for a new release,i upgraded mine from kde 3.5...
but i do not care...i will have it WHEN IS READY...
I Like that way....
155 • @133 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-10 22:59:10 GMT from United States)
nevermind smxi the box today and all is well with the new .30 kernel.
All hail the new kernel. It includes the latest alsa o it supports the card flawlessly.
sidux FTW!
156 • @149 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-10 23:19:27 GMT from Canada)
Dumb and absurd do not mean the same thing. "Dumb" has negative connotations. "Absurd" does not.
And I don't know why you say "ad nauseam", when I said the thing you quote precisely one time. "Ad nauseam" implies I said it many times, which I didn't.
157 • @ 153 Fedora Partitioning (by DeniZen on 2009-06-10 23:47:28 GMT from United Kingdom)
Yep. I recall something similar occuring ;)
Fedora 11 needs the /boot partition to be ext3
Apparently theres a big patching job required for grub otherwise, though I guess Ubuntu must have applied that as it boots from ext4.
Anyhow,
what you could try is:
/boot = ext3 (200mb ought to be fine)
/ = ext3, or ext4 if you get the same error as you noted above.
/home = ext4
I guess you will want swap of course so you will likely have to set one or more of those as logical partitions - you may even already have other partitions on the same box perhaps.
Otherwise, you could make all of the three partitions above as primary partitions, and a logical partition for just the swap.
D
158 • #148 (by Little Snob on 2009-06-11 00:38:51 GMT from United States)
Ok, here's a short one. It's really fantastic and anyone who would boycott it for imaginary political goofiness is someone whose reviews should be taken with a large grain of salt.(for those not familiar with the expression it means, "with some skepticism"). It is also beneficial to evaluate the educational level of a person who is doing a review. There are some people who position themselves as voices of authority but actually have very spotty or questionable credentials. I have seen one very outspoken person here who has no other qualifications other than work experience and a Red Hat certification. Not to diminish a Red Hat certification in any way but it's not a college degree. Also not trying to diminish work experience but it's still not a degree.
159 • @158 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-11 00:41:13 GMT from Canada)
I'm not sure I care much about what college degree anyone has (mine's in history, in case that makes you want to ignore everything I say from now on :>). I tend to decide how much faith I put in what someone says by trying to judge how much they seem to know what the hell they're talking about, and I wouldn't necessarily think a college degree would prove anything either way when it comes to most Linux topics :)
160 • @157 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-11 00:42:10 GMT from Canada)
It's not that it's a big patching job, but it was proposed quite late in the cycle for Fedora 11, and the patches are quite invasive (they touch the codepath for ext2 and ext3, so the changes wouldn't be restricted to the 'new' code for ext4). So the grub maintainer decided against including them in the F11 cycle. They'll go in for F12, though.
161 • #159 (by Little Snob on 2009-06-11 01:02:31 GMT from United States)
I'm afraid you missed my point. I have actually enjoyed reading your posts history degree or not. I am not talking about simply discussing Linux. I am saying when politics and Linux become entangled then you have a different animal best left to the educated.
162 • RE: 155 (by IMQ on 2009-06-11 01:16:03 GMT from United States)
Glad to hear that!
smxi is, again, proven to be an amazing tools for keeping sidux going and going.
BTW, I rarely doing anything with the sound controls except adjusting the main volume switch up or down.
163 • No subject (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-11 01:58:27 GMT from United States)
@148: I'd volunteer, but some of AntiX's functionality doesn't work on my exotic hardware without a bit of Debian hacking. That doesn't sound like a fun review.
@158: Whether or not you think there is a political message that you are offended by or whatever does not mean that nobody else will. There is no reality, only perspective.
164 • Doubke post (by Anonymous on 2009-06-11 02:01:53 GMT from United States)
@145: It had an "off" week. It's never had a slip-up this bad. 99% of the time, Absolute Linux is stable, fast, and filled with goodies. I used it for a period of time.
As to what it accomplishes, it makes Slackware easier to install without changing too much. It's kind of like sidux/Debian and their relationship.
165 • @161 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-11 02:57:13 GMT from Canada)
Ah, sorry, you're right, I did miss that - don't mind me, then :)
166 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-11 07:23:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
Then this arrives...
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62054922,00.htm?scid=rss_z_nw
Feeding time for the lawyers?
167 • Great Information Every Time (by kiwimonk on 2009-06-11 09:08:48 GMT from United States)
Just wanted to say I'm a big fan of not only the website in general, but also the weekly overviews like this. It's always a great wealth of information.. and tackles all the fast happenings in the linux world, as its just being released. Most excellent and Thank You!
168 • "boycotting antiX?" (by Sean on 2009-06-11 10:53:10 GMT from United States)
A reviewer/writer here at Distrowatch is boycotting a distro here?
Reading that up there was the first real belly-laugh I've had at this site, although I do remember coming close to that reaction reading BLAG's blurb about "overthrowing" something or other in their mission statement.
169 • @162 Sidux is the shiznit (by Anonymous on 2009-06-11 11:26:22 GMT from United States)
Your right smxi really is such an incredible tool. Thanks again to h2 and all the sidux folks.
Well I only noticed the sound issue when I went to connect headphones to listen to music, and then it was like wait a minute, is it the headphone jack or something with the sound driver.
But .30 kernel seems pretty darn smooth.
@boycotting antiX,
If Distrowatch will allow it, I will install and do a review of antiX and submit for possible inclusion. Ladislav?, let me know.....
170 • Fedora 11 Installation Guides - What's Available (by trotter1985 on 2009-06-11 12:46:47 GMT from United States)
In any earlier post, I reported that I typically run a customized version of
RHEL 5.3 with multimedia software and scientific stuff, like Maple and
Mathematica, added upstream. The drawback is
that much of the software is dated (e.g. KDE 3.5.4) ... so I like to experiment
with Fedora and openSUSE as alternatives. In the last couple of releases,
openSUSE has provided a "one-click" approach to adding features not included
on the installation dvd. Meanwhile, for Fedora, there are a couple of web sites
with helpful installation tips:
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f11.html
http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Main_Page
Are there better sites out there?
On a second subject, it's great to read Adam Williamson's posts for Fedora.
Mandriva's loss is our gain.
171 • @166: The power of the $...or €, in this instant... (by Kevin on 2009-06-11 13:51:25 GMT from United States)
Does not bode well for the small/ independent distros. I know if I was developing/ maintaining a distro on, for the most part, my own dime and sweat equity, I would be hard-pressed to actually shell out for any type of liability coverage. Unless it is really cheap for said insurance. Personally, I am employed as a health care provider and I have to carry malpractice. Whereas, this used to be the sole providence of physicians, the federal government now places liability on pretty much all licensed persons involved in patient care (e.g., physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists, etc, etc). However, the coverage is actually pretty cheap (circa $100 US per year) so it's really not that big of a deal. I suppose if one was actually involved in a lawsuit and damages were awarded then the insurance could be prohibitively expensive or unobtainable...so, there's always that scenario. How this relates to FOSS would be, if I'm reading the article correctly (am I am no legal expert) one can imagine a hypothetical situation...for instance suppose Joe Businessman upgrades to the new release of Absolute and finds his work-required computers no longer operational, such that he can securely carry out his day-to-day business....it seems by this law that the developer or company that releases said distro would be open for liability and could very well be sued. I'm sure this will be written off as some kind of MS scheme to weaken FOSS, but in actuality it seems that, the prima facia benefit would go to the big distros (e.g., Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, and so on).
172 • Stuff (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-11 14:40:50 GMT from United States)
For those who are wondering about a boycott:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090420&mode=68
See comment number 85. There's further discussion after that about the topic. I questioned exactly why she felt the way she did (as you can see in the link), and received a very satisfactory answer (comment number 95).
Like I said above, there is no right or wrong about this. It's not worth dwelling over.
@166: That is an extremely interesting development. What can software companies be liable for? A newbie formats their hard drive and blames it on the software? It seems like a bomb just waiting to be dropped.
173 • @172 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-11 15:16:06 GMT from United States)
Satisfactory answer.... that's just the silliest answer i have ever heard.
How can you say software and politics shouldn't mix yet you make your software choice based on a political opinion?????
laughable
I think I understand anti's frustration...
174 • @170, 172 (by Kevin on 2009-06-11 15:19:47 GMT from United States)
@170: those 2 guides appear to be complete, but this link, posted on DW Weekly has the 25 Fedora-related sites recommended by Fedora:
http://www.2indya.com/2009/06/04/25-sites-about-fedora-you-cant-miss/
Can't vouch for these as I've only perused them rather quickly...may be a lot of helpful info though.
@172: Yeah, the liability thing is really concerning. I also wish to clarify that I wasn't picking on Absolute in particular---I'm sure it's a great distro that suffered from a hiccup and will be back in the saddle soon....was just an example. To take this further, I can see that even the liability could be extended to home users. If said user runs a business from home (i.e, a EBay shop), the argument could be made that broken software (including but not limited to the OS) could adversely impact revenue, thus creating liability. This law could have a chilling effect on the industry as a whole. As I previously stated, being in the health care industry it's made evident practically everyday how lawsuit-happy people really are. For example, a patient can just claim to have fell...with no evidence of the claim (e.g, apparent injury) and we have to document everything (using certain guidelines, file an incident report, call the physician...and if he or she desires the patient can have a battery of tests ordered, such as x-rays, CT scans, MRIs, etc. And this all costs money and somebody has to pay.
175 • oy vey (LOL) (by Sean on 2009-06-11 15:20:18 GMT from United States)
If www.distrowatch.com is not "boycotting" Linux XP and others, then how can a writer/editor/reviewer who contributes to that site say they are doing that?
It's a silly issue here, because of the inclusive nature of Distrowatch wrt the list and availability, via links at this site, of the distros in question.
It is not a silly issue in other places, I'm sure.
176 • TeenPup (by capricornus on 2009-06-11 15:45:18 GMT from Belgium)
Waw. TeenPup even impressed me, a 53y-old nerdy dad. Except for the browser, because no add-ons are possible. But really, a lot of people can learn from the layout, it looks like...dynamite. And it runs like it.
177 • this is political (by john frey on 2009-06-11 15:52:13 GMT from Canada)
I admire Anticapitalista. He quietly prepares his distro and uses it to advance his beliefs without getting hysterical or defensive or (to the best of my knowledge) posting irrelevant and inappropriate comments here.
Free Software (not open source) is revolutionary.
What does that mean? Corporations and the business ideology are inherently proprietary and and secretive. Business will continually try to proprietize Free Software because they want to take something for no cost and sell it, while preventing you or me from doing the same. That behaviour is predictable and expected. Corporations have a long history of taking from the commons for their own profit.
The BSD licenses allow corporations to take software that was developed freely and make it proprietary. That is regularly and incorrectly portrayed by many to be non-political/non-ideological. Once the software is proprietary any openness or collaboration will swiftly die out along with innovation.
Free Software licenses prevent anyone from turning the software proprietary by insisting the software remain free. Free Software is maintaining freedom, openness and collaboration in the face of a continual assault by proprietary interests. That is revolutionary.
178 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-11 16:51:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref the liability thing...I gather here in UK (and almost certainly elsewhere) you cannot be obliged to sign your common statute legal rights away in a contract.
So any attempts by free software folk to say "use [distro] at your own risk" may be a bit tricky if EU legislates for more controls on software.
And, if a free distro contains packages which are free or non free, or if they were written in EU countries...crikey it sounds like a legal minefield.
The more you think about the "what if" scenario the scarier it becomes. You could have business folk alleging all sorts to cover any of their duff decisions, or malpractice or attempts at fraud say, and blaming a distro for loss of data...then claiming damages from software writer.
If you were in business you might think twice about the whole notion of free software for the desktop and plump for MS, Mac or paid for Linux services.
You might find it sticky if you were a "one man band" writing code for fun, or for the edification of the community, trying to insist their work was not for commercial use.
This is definitely one for the legal bods...who can be trusted to make money out of thin air and for MS who could claim, probably quite rightly in some instances, there is no comeback or compensation available if you used "free" software.
179 • @170 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-11 16:52:51 GMT from Canada)
What's available? Why, the Fedora 11 Installation Guide, of course :)
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f11/en-US/html/
and the two specific pages I'd always want to have for any distro release, the Release Notes:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/
and the Common Bugs page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs
180 • @166 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-11 16:54:35 GMT from Canada)
That's another silly article that singles out open source for no particular reason. The source of the code has nothing to do with the situation, only the size of the publisher. The article says it could 'split open source', being good for Red Hat but bad for one-guy-in-a-garage operations. How is the situation not exactly the same for closed source? It'd be good for Microsoft, but how would a one-guy-in-a-garage closed source operation (and yes, there are millions of these - there's all sorts of little apps for Windows developed by one guy who charges $10 a pop) do any better than a one-guy-in-a-garage open source operation?
181 • @157 (by stuckinoregon on 2009-06-11 17:44:42 GMT from United States)
Thanks DeniZen. I had thought about doing that been then questioned why I should really need to. If I was really compelled to switch and determined to run Fedora then I probably would, but as it is it's just a lark. Just it would seem reasonable to expect to NOT have to go to so much trouble on a gigantic release such as this. Especially after having not one stitch of trouble with 10. I don't know why I ever stray from the Debian flock, it almost always leads to disappointment.
182 • #173, #177 (by Jon T. Jagoffalope on 2009-06-11 17:54:01 GMT from United States)
#173
I agree. It would be funny if it didn't get so annoying.
#177
"I admire Anticapitalista. He quietly prepares his distro and uses it to advance his beliefs without getting hysterical or defensive or (to the best of my knowledge) posting irrelevant and inappropriate comments here."
I agree with you 100%. I would continue to use and promote AntiX for this reason alone even if it wasn't one of the best distros in it's "class"(?). However it is one of the best distros I have ever had the pleasure to use. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that it is based on Mepis. I keep hearing about Mandriva, Fedora, Suse, but the real winner in my book is Simply Mepis.
183 • @182 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-11 18:00:11 GMT from United States)
I agree as well so as I stated before, If ladislav is accepting, I will do a review and submit it for publication here? just need Ladislav to give me an okay here.
184 • Fedora 11 (by rob.zanella on 2009-06-11 18:04:40 GMT from Belgium)
Got stuck installing it. / ? not / ? /home ? not /home ? well, that's the question, my dear Watson. I did not resolve the problem. I did not have the pleasure having it installed, my dear.
185 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-11 18:09:18 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #166
There were other links you might have seen...one of them dealt with a UK House of Lords committee about 2 years ago, almost to the day, where folk from Red Hat were invited to persuade the powers that be why free software writers should not be held responsible for cock ups...he made also a case for closed source software, see here:
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,61983185,00.htm
You perhaps might think it silly but if the EU mob get their hooks into software, you might not feel the same way...any probs you might be experiencing with F11 will be as nothing if the legislators get their way, LOL.
Of course, given your views on the subject perhaps you might make a case to the EU...I should imagine you telling them they are being a bit silly might make all the difference, LOL.
Seriously Adam, we in UK have lived with all the crap from the EU for years, they will swallow software folk for breakfast...whole.
And of course they are a legislative body and have given themselves pretty impressive powers.
186 • @183 (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-11 18:36:37 GMT from United States)
That's not how publications work. Type it up, fix it up, make it nice, and submit it. You don't get people knocking on your door asking for stuff.
187 • @180 (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-11 18:39:24 GMT from United States)
Well I'm sure the reasoning behind that is that Open Source has less money behind it, than, say, the mega-corporation like Microsoft or kinda-mega-corporation Apple. Would mormal, everyday distros release if they knew they were liable for damages caused by bugs in he software? That's where the worry comes from.
You might see MS or Apple ruffle a bit or adjust their ties, but it's the open community that really would be more worried than those two.
188 • Giants vs. Ants (by Shawn on 2009-06-11 19:40:32 GMT from United States)
I never understood why (well, I do actually, it has to deal with money and marketing purposes) in big business, corporations trust their data with the Linuxes/BSD's but on the desktops they use MS. Then we have these questions about free software and patent issues (thanks, Mr. Ballmer) that scare people into spending money just to be "safe". Linux and/or BSD will never be a threat to MS on the financial standpoint, but when more people adopt and look for alternatvies to the powers that be, the questions amass over what loopholes and landmines one would step on if either MS or Apple start to investigate and look for patent infringements. So much for democracy and freedom of choice. I suppose it's all an illusion.
That being said, I downloaded Fedora 11 and am anxiously awaiting to test it on my MSi Wind (that triple boots Leopard, openSUSE 11.1 and Windows Seven).
189 • The liability issue redux... (by Kevin on 2009-06-11 21:30:57 GMT from United States)
It's as I've previously stated....I cannot see how MS has a dog in this hunt (or Apple for that matter). Liability coverage would be of no consequence for either of these companies...they probably spent more in a day on their toilet paper budget. It will be the little guy/ hobbyist who releases a distro that will be hammered. And big business probably would not be involved as litigants in any lawsuit either...they would not be using any small/ 1-man band type of distros to start with. It would be small business owners and SOHO users who would be apt to file any lawsuits and I can only see this as a means to stop the small distros from flourishing. I posted a link awhile back that showed the developer of Google Chrome complaining of Linux' lack of consistency with the API and about the GTK toolkit. Adobe has voiced similar complaints in the past. This, IMHO, all smacks of a desire of av"one Linux to rule them all," ideology. For me the success of Linux on the desktop will probably further this position & I'm sure we'll see more of it in the near future.
190 • The liability foofarah. (by Rich at 2009-06-12 00:32:55 GMT from United States)
Not really seeing how it would or could be implemented. Is the liability for the alledged damages? For the "purchase price" of the software? Is it everyone who ever coded for that project or for whichever dev would be unlucky to be within reach of that particular law(so they nail the poor guy who coded the log in splash screen, but not the guy who coded the backup feature)? Would it affect a developer in China(not likely)? Russia(Not likely depending on closeness of winter)? Taiwan(unlikely they'd want to open a can of worms for this)? Slovenia(probably)?
I can see maybe an aggrieved EU company goes after a Developer resident in the EU...maybe. Then the settlement is for a requirement to fix the flaw and a nominal sum or is it for an uncollectable massive fine? Is the court action only permissible IF the dev refuses to fix the flaw? What if it is an open source ap? Would the user have an obligation to attempt a fix first before seeking damages? does the user have an obligation to back up valuable data or no?
I'm sure I'm missing a lot of obvious things, but it just seems like the type of law that never gets enforced in any way that benefits the authority who passes it.
191 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-12 01:00:01 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #190
As mentioned above...a job for the lawyers...but as you say how would it work in practice? Think Pirate Bay or the three strikes and you are out rule, in France, for d/l of copyright material...or are you? LOL
192 • @185, 187 etc re liability (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-12 02:41:08 GMT from Canada)
@185 I said the article was silly for singling out open source, I didn't say anything about the proposal. I can see where the proposal's coming from, though it probably wouldn't work out too well in practice. BTW, the EU is not a legislative body. You're thinking of either the European Commission or the European Parliament, either of which are constituent components of the EU that could be described as legislative bodies. Neither can give themselves power, power can only be granted _to_ bodies within the EU _by_ national governments.
187 etc - well, I can't find the actual proposal to look at, but from all my readings of articles about it, it seems to apply only to cases where software is *sold* (the articles always use some key word like 'purchaser' or 'customer'). If that's the case, it'd be more of a problem for closed source than open source, because relatively speaking, much more closed source software is sold than open source.
193 • Fedora 11 i686 Live KDE CD (by RollMeAway on 2009-06-12 02:44:42 GMT from United States)
Tried it on an old AMD AthlonXP 2100+ with 512 MB ram.
Took about 10 minutes to boot. Slow motion operation.
Opened 'System Settings', 'System Monitor', and terminal.
Took about 20 seconds for terminal to open.
>free showed 20 MB of swap already in use.
Booted same on a 2 Ghz P4 with 1 GB ram.
Opened same apps as above.
>free showed 1011 MB ram in use, no swap yet.
Response was acceptable, yet still slow.
Fedora's live gnome version performed ok, on both machines.
Other vendors KDE4 works fine on both machines.
I checked nepomukserver, strigi, and akonadi BS. All were disabled.
Could not determine why system was like molasses in the snow.
Any ideas?
194 • re: 193 (by Anonymous on 2009-06-12 03:41:54 GMT from N/A)
Truly dude, instead of trying to keep up with the Jones's on your old AMD system, you should consider one of the many fine low resource distros. Fedora is rather on the power user's side. For optimal performance with reasonable features and better compatibility for your older systems, I'd try the TEENpup ISO or another non-XFCE distro that use Ice-VM or LXDE for a desktop. Although Fedora should run reasonably nice on your older systems, it may be painfully brutal and frustrating if you insist you got to run Fedora on your old hardware, just switch to a low resource distro since there are so many good choices out there and call it a day.
195 • Fedora 11 i686 Live KDE CD (by RollMeAway on 2009-06-12 04:37:44 GMT from United States)
Update:
I've checked around, and discovered KDE4 is not installed on any of my computers with only 512 MB ram. All installations have 1 GB or more.
Guess the conclusion is that KDE4 has progressed to the vista bloatware level and climbing. My guess is Fedora has a few more services running, that other live KDE4 distros don't.
@194:
I have 8 computers to play with. Most are older. None have multi core processors. Most were discarded by someone else.
The busiest one has 37 distributions on it, but another with a 500 GB HD is approaching that number, and will surpass it. I have tried easily the top 100 linux, many not even listed. Also have BSDs and Solaris.
It is a disease, I know!
Whenever I repair someones computer I always try to slip in a linux disto to dual boot with. Then, I tell them to give linux a try when the 'other' OS craps out again.
With this practice, I need to know which distro will work on what hardware.
Good excuse?
196 • @195 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-12 05:27:53 GMT from Canada)
512MB does seem to be a bit borderline for KDE 4, which is a bit sad, frankly. Well, the last time I tested was 4.1, so they could've got better...but at that point, it took 250MB all by itself on a clean boot, so by the time you load Firefox, a mail client and something else, you could get over 512 for sure. If it's slow right from startup, though, that's a bit surprising, 512MB should be enough for a clean desktop at least. Did you try a resource monitor to try and figure out what's wrong? I like htop...
197 • Alpha release (by Azzorcist on 2009-06-12 06:08:28 GMT from Indonesia)
Do we really need to have alpha release shows up in the frontpage?
It's annoying for me.
I think only when in beta state developer will welcome user to try the product.
But, Ubuntu always show up even in alpha state. (Trying to get attention I guess).
198 • Re 193 - 196 Fedora 11 on 512mb (by Anonymous on 2009-06-12 09:22:43 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'd agree that the machine specs are a little low , and thats a bit sad, but I guess the baseline shifts. There are leaner alternatives ;)
I accept this doesnt address your question, but out of interest, I have had Fedora 11 KDE and also I tried F11 Gnome running on a Mobile Celeron 1.5 Laptop with 512mb, and I had plenty free memory in each instance.
(And thats with integrated graphics eating a bit of ram also).
I'm not near the Laptop to paste exact output, but AIR, F11 gnome took up about 130mb. I cant specifically recall - but about that.
It was usable, and in fact fairly snappy. Much much snappier than F10 for me.
No swap was being used in 'normal' use, and CPU usage barely registering in htop at idle.
So,F11 ought to be more than usable in 512mb, or at least i can vouch that it _can_ be.
It may be asking a bit much, but all the same, there may be something that is simply not happy between F11 and that specific rig of yours.
I also pulled down the F11 XFCE Desktop to rake a pee - nice job, and that went well, though not appreciably 'better' than the standard Gnome.
Both installs were made from live media.
Just an observation I guess.
199 • LOL! (by DeniZen on 2009-06-12 09:26:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
"rake a pee" ?? wtf?!
I meant to type 'take a peek'
I must slow down ..;)
200 • Alfa releases... (by mika480 on 2009-06-12 10:42:45 GMT from Italy)
I agree...alfa releases are to young to mention...
How can Canonical syncronize Ubuntu...Xubuntu...Kubuntu and many others...release in alfa stage?
It's a mystery...
201 • Fedora 11 initial reaction (by MRaugh on 2009-06-12 11:19:21 GMT from United States)
As a gory experiment I put Fedora 11 on my Dellbuntu (Latitude 1420 that originally came with Ubuntu) as a dual boot with Hardy.
Wireless, audio, video (Intel 945 chipset), bluetooth all worked out of the box, no fiddling required. Compiz installed smoothly and video performance was quite good, so apparently at least a few of the Intel fixes did make their way into the F11 release.
I've played with Gnome and XFCE so far (with and without Compiz/Emerald) and will likely play with KDE 4.2 and LXDE over the weekend. So far though Fedora's performance compares well to the same machine booted into Hardy. I'm impressed.
202 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-12 11:34:57 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #192
Adam the EU description thing was about as tight as was needed for the forum. Apart from yourself, nobody noticed, cared or bothered to reply. And, judging by the comments most folk are not the slightest bit interested in specific EU crap anyway. I imagine they have more things to think about nearer to home which is only to be expected.
The link(s) was/were only for passing interest. I daresay we (meaning distro developers, whatever) will all be a lot more interested when and if legislation is passed and if there is a test case...and if a precedent is set.
However, that said, a prudent man, or woman, would be wise to bone up on legal stuff...just in case...
203 • Re #202 (by DG on 2009-06-12 12:38:04 GMT from Netherlands)
The link(s) was/were only for passing interest. I daresay we (meaning distro developers, whatever) will all be a lot more interested when and if legislation is passed and if there is a test case...and if a precedent is set.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm
Not really related to a distro, nor to the discussion about liability legislation as such, but whether you agree with this ruling or not, maybe the EU isn't quite so toothless.
204 • @199 Rake a pee (by stuckinoregon on 2009-06-12 12:42:57 GMT from United States)
That't great!! I read that and thought, "Hmm??? Must be some arcane British colloquialism describing a task that's repetitive and or appears to be pointless or futile." I expect to hear that in regular usage from now on. Sheer brilliance.
205 • Alphas (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-12 14:00:15 GMT from United States)
Maybe Distrowatch could only post the even numbered Ubuntu Alphas. If there are six alphas, then we'd see 2, 4, and 6. I can't say it really "clutters up" the front page (I mean, DW isn't *that* busy) but if people want to complain, it might be a solution.
I personally start testing the next Ubuntu release at Alpha 4. The more bug reports, the better!
206 • Open Source Liability (by piensa43 on 2009-06-12 14:53:53 GMT from United States)
The Solution is for the smaller distros to only go as far as beta stage. They can provide a warning to the effect that the last beta release although very stable can only be released as a beta due to the legal liability impositions of the EU.
We know that Government and Freedom are opposites. They will always say they are for freedom and that is true, they accumulate freedoms in a little black box, the freedom which they take from the rest of mankind. This is of course not political, well that is what a politician would say.
207 • re#206 liability (by hab on 2009-06-12 15:54:06 GMT from Canada)
It is axiomatic.
It's all governments against all peoples.
Just remember that the first task/purpose of a politician is not to represent their constituency or any other supposedly higher purpose.
It is to get (re)elected!
cheers
208 • #175 (by Counter Intuitive on 2009-06-12 16:41:15 GMT from United States)
Can someone please explain what GoblinX is doing? Are they trying to go commercial? Why would anyone download a distro that is going to be discontinued in the future? From what I can gather they are working on the final release of the smaller GoblinX's and then they are going to discontinue them. This is an excellent distro, I hope they don't spoil it.
When are we going to see review of Puppy Linux? In spite of the reported "infighting" and the fact that some people refuse to acknowledge it as the masterpiece it is, it has consistently been in the top ten on DW. There is nothing out there that can compare to Puppy. It runs on equipment that other distros won't even boot up on. Now that DSL is dead, it is really the only viable option for very old machines and it's super fast on newer machines.
#175
On a related issue, I have read that some people are boycotting Puppy as well as AntiX. Apparently someone in the forums hurt their feelings. Well, newsflash, the world can be a cruel place. However, a distro is NOT the community. Some argue that if the forums are not to their liking then the distro is not worthy. Windows, the number one OS in the world has no "community". It's a ridiculous assumption to make that a distro must have a nice, loveable, warm, cuddly, community to make a distro. Communities are very nice and they are something that give Linux a special uniqueness. I have obtained help from various forums and I try to help when I can BUT, just because they are nice does not mean they are a necessity.
209 • dsl? communities? (by Tom on 2009-06-12 17:46:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
Damn Small Linux doesn't seem to be dead but we now have Tiny Core that goes even further which has allowed dsl to bulk up a bit. There are plenty of distro's that cater for the low-spec end of the market and some of these are amazing when run on a top-end machine. I think one of the main reasons some distros are so high in the listings is because they are practically unusable unless you keep popping back to their various pages. DW pages are great for keeping track of the various download mirror sites and community forums. Also some distros are widely touted almost everywhere and talked about 'ad nauseum' because simple things like re-theming and adding packages is such a difficult nightmare - again more reason to have to visit their various web-sites. Yes please lets have an article about something that already over-hyped rather than something decent like sliTaz that just quietly gets on with it.
At the other extreme i think it's great to have something as fully bloated as KDE and the way Gnome is heading because many people do have decent machines and do enjoy a lot of eye-candy and for the basic multimedia type things to be easy to use - it's good to have choices between things that are quite different rather than all being aimed at low-end machines and noob but 'wannabe techie' users.
I think anyone that really genuinely believes 'community' to be about 'love peace for all mankind' is extremely naive, ignorant or a fool. I love the linux communities because we manage to work together despite (or because of) our differences. We are all different, our aims, aspirations, motivations, desires, understanding, knowledge, background, history and all make us very different and yet this produces some very vibrant communities and some great coding :) If we all got along fine then there would be nothing to talk about and the community would die.
There's no reason we all have to use all the distros, especially when so many have such a large overlap in the market they are aimed at. If you really want to see an article then get one written and tout it around the various places to see if someone will publish it, like most writers do.
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)
210 • oops (by Tom on 2009-06-12 19:54:23 GMT from United Kingdom)
That sounded a bit 'hate-filled' but it wasn't meant like that. The original puppy is brilliant but limited in a different way from most other small distros in being so compacted, which is one of it's strengths. Very rarely we see something like TeenPup emerge but even the work done on TeenPup is hardly on a par with the work done to produce TinyCore or sliTaz, both of which are very impressive and add considerably to the strength and diversity of gnu/linux along with AntiX and a whole slew of other genuinely original distros
211 • betas, etc (by Adam Drake on 2009-06-12 20:07:10 GMT from United States)
My impression is that a distribution isn't really "tested" until it is released. Many people (including myself) stick to final releases and don't bother testing (or reporting bugs on) testing versions. Then, when the distro is released, an exponentially larger number of users start trying it and uncovering hidden bugs that take a few weeks or so to iron out so the distro is "production ready". This is when respins should be distributed. I guess I should start running only beta version of my favorite distros and submitting bug reports. Trying to squash all the bugs before you release a software end item is like trying to rake pee if you know what I mean. :)
212 • Fedora 11 Samba (by Paul B on 2009-06-12 21:21:49 GMT from United States)
I found that the graphical setup for Samba in the KDE Live CD installation for Fedora 11 has this cute little glitch. When you set up a shared directory, say "/share". The Samba setup lists the path as "file:///share". This is similar to those godawful mail programs that save e-mail addresses with the "mailto:" prefix. In the case of Samba this is fatal. It doesn't work! For those who are setting up Fedora 11 to use Samba, you need to edit smb.conf by hand to delete the "file://" extra garbage.
And Adam, I went looking at the Fedora site to see about reporting this, but it began to look like another long day finding where to send in some info. I have spent way too much time on this problem already. So I decided to drop a note here instead.
213 • Poor DeniZen ( NOT!) LOL! (by Eyes-Only on 2009-06-12 21:28:59 GMT from United States)
Let's face it DeniZen: You've sparked/coined an entirely new slang word here! Isn't that cool? :-D And we're never gonna let you live that one down either! ( Even I, who has always rather fancied himself as being "in the know" over British colloquialisms, did a triple-take upon reading THAT! )
Ah yes! Years from now we'll see this ( or rather some of our children shall ) in the pages of that definitive work upon the English language: The Good Ol' "Oxford's Dictionary". No home should be without one, eh? ;)
Thanks for the laugh and spot of levity DeniZen - you took it well! And thanks for the new phrase. :-D
Cheers mates!
Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge"
214 • #210 (by Counter Intuitive on 2009-06-12 21:47:50 GMT from United States)
I didn't think it sounded hate filled. I think it sounded nice and normal. You have state previously that you don't care for Puppy that much. That's ok. Barry K. is out there doing what he does and breaking new ground. Tiny Core is fantastic, as is Slitaz but they won't run on a really old computer. I have a computer that has 75 mhz. Puppy will allow me to surf the net. I can do it with Tiny Core but it crashes. I used to be able to do it with DSL but it's dead. DSL also has Firefox as a browser which makes no sense at all. AntiX does not yet support that old of hardware. I stand by my statement that DSL is dead. There is nothing new for long time on the website other than I think we will make it larger like 100 mb and that was over a year ago.
215 • elive (by Bugger on 2009-06-12 21:53:07 GMT from United States)
I'm sorry but elive pisses me off. Get this piece of shit off of here. Who wants to download the unstable edition? You have to "donate" to get the real version. Heads up, it's a piece of crap anyway, don't waste your time with it.
216 • re#215 elive (by hab on 2009-06-12 22:11:36 GMT from Canada)
You have heard perhaps, of torrents. A quick search will get you the stable version!
I have elive stable on an old 500mhz 384m ram box. It is quite stable, usable and it looks very nice. The control panel, i don't like so much but what the hey it works. Wired and wireless networking worked flawlessly, it has firefox and other stuff. Plus it is after all .........linux!
Whats not to like?
Oh, and btw, the only things that piss ME off are the things i LET piss me off.
cheers
217 • @212 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-12 22:31:11 GMT from Canada)
Bug reports go to http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ , it's the fifth results for 'fedora bugs'. The first is the BugZappers team page (hah! result!) which has a link to the Bugzilla primer right there.
I always find it a bit tricky to wedge a prominent link to Bugzilla into the main pages for a distro, actually. I mean, where would you put it? It's a bit clunky to write "...and if it's broken, tell us about it here!" Anyone got any bright ideas?
218 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-12 22:46:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #215
LOL, on the new topic of UK slang... "rake a pee" which REALLY is new...perhaps I should mention the "BUGGER" word is NOT one of those expressions which travels well...ahem...and it is certainly NOT new...the b word is in fact UK slang for sodomite. And, for those caught practicing this heinous activity, the punishment could indeed be a real pain in the a@$%. I think it was King Charles 2nd who discovered the term "do as you would be done by" anything but sobering...(pun intended...)
Ref your views appertaining to "Elive", I feel you should speak as you find and not equivocate...you have of course no choice but to issue a writ against "Elive" on the very reasonable grounds you find it's release, being in the unstable category of Linux, beyond the pale and the very foundations of your existence feel threatened. I estimate you are in for damages of at least 4 or very possibly 5 cents...easily!
This is offset by the fact that any lawyer taking up your case would demand upwards of 100000 Euros upfront, purely as an incentive against you withdrawing your claim...on the return of your sanity, LOL
As it happens I did in fact try Elive in a previous incarnation and it was OK. perhaps I could ask what sort of kit you were running it up on?
It would not be unreasonable to suggest that, rather than slag off a distro, it might be better to review the vintage of your machine.
You might have noticed the odd "anti" comment now and again reference F11. What nobody appears to have mentioned, in any real detail, is the kit they are attempting to run it on.
Adam W is working very hard (no, he is) trying to help those who really want to install and enjoy the distro and I would have thought a thorough description of what one is running would be useful to him.
i have my own pet theory that devs prefer to use the latest kit they can get their mitts on and test their code on those machines. I think provision for legacy hardware is more by luck that intention.
219 • @218 (by Adam Williamson on 2009-06-12 23:45:23 GMT from Canada)
not really. most developers I know run pretty old hardware. I have a fairly tricked out system just because I've been a hardware geek for years and I felt like it, but that's kinda an exception. a lot of guys at Red Hat just run thinkpads most of the time.
220 • Re 217 Bugs (by Paul B on 2009-06-12 23:58:19 GMT from United States)
Thanks Adam. I found it. Wow! There is a lot of stuff there to wade through. I don't have time tonight, but maybe later this weekend I can see if it has already been identified.
221 • Suse Studio (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-13 00:55:34 GMT from United States)
I don't know if it's a public beta and everyone's off testing it like I just did, but I was just playing with the beta of the Suse Studio (which is bound to create a million su-su-su-su-suse studio! jokes), Suse's new platform for making custom distros. The EULA might tell me not to disclose this sort of thing to others (I don't know, I didn't read it), but they can't track me down, now can they? That's the great thing about being Nobody.
It's got a few beta issues to work out, but there are some AWESOME ideas here. You just select what you want from an interface; all kinds of options. I'm still digging around to see if it's deep enough to mess up your custom distro, but it sure works well. Just a few Beta-ish issues which I can look over.
I tried adding a custom wallpaper to a mostly unchanged IceWM install, added a user, a gag EULA, and a single program. 210 MB total. It's downloading now. I'll just say now that available space dries up really, really quickly. You have to give credit to Fedora, Ubuntu and all the other one-CD distros for making these decisions on what to keep and what to throw away. It sure isn't easy.
You can preview your distro in a browser-embedded flash interface, which didn't work for me. I have very slow internet, however. They did mention you can ssh into your custom builds before downloading, I think.
It's sort of like NimbleX's custom system, but multiplied by seven or eight (and updated!). If you have the chance, I suggest you "rake a pee" at this thing. It's definitely in Linux's future.
222 • Elder Citizen (by Old-Man-News on 2009-06-13 01:54:08 GMT from United States)
People here keep thinking that if a distro is small or tiny or mini it can run on older machines. Nothing could be further from the truth! I even think Tiny Core states it isn't for older pc's. Parted Magic, to name one, is running the latest kernel. Try to get an older pc to use that..
Deli Linux among a couple of others work with older pc's.
223 • More Studio (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-13 02:22:49 GMT from United States)
I booted up my custom distro without a hitch. Looks great.
The "Created with Suse Studio" logos everywhere are going to get old really fast, though.
224 • Fedora 11 i686 Live KDE CD (by RollMeAway on 2009-06-13 05:26:35 GMT from United States)
Update, again!
Seems the slowness I experienced is quite common, and not related to 512 mb ram.
Anyone with an nvidia AGP card!
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs#Graphical_desktop...
That covers all nvidia machines I own, and where I work!
Draw your own conclusions.
225 • Re: 221 (by Sertse on 2009-06-13 08:52:53 GMT from Australia)
Way to get us all excited then kill it at the same time!
Limited beta? =(
226 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-13 09:09:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re machines and their vintage thereof...it seems that from what Adam W mentioned, ie. devs using oldish kit and the subsequent comments...kernels and cards, etc perhaps it might be a notion for a "standard" to be organised so to speak, for what machines get used for development.
That was a slightly tongue in cheek comment, but I was "quite" surprised, amused even, to learn, from Adam W remark, that devs were using older kit, yet his kit was tricked up as an uber machine, verging on AI... (LOL).
If devs are not using identical kit and are not necessarily close to each other, in physical terms, I can see this "might" be problematic in testing "runability" (sic).
Perhaps this might be a step on the road to enlightenment as to why some distros work and some don't...? We all know it very much depends on the machine a distro user manque installs to...or at least tries to...
Possibly the devs might mention in their release announcement what sort of machine their distros were evolved on, briefly of course!
Personally, I find all this install/can't install topic quite fascinating...more especially as the arch enemy OS ran (without any real probs at all) on your machine, prior to your attempt to install (a) Linux,
I think also it would be useful to remind folk that the aim of Linux is for it to run, out of the box, without tinkering, on any machine, so as to allow folk in general a chance to get away from MS.
I am aware the hobbyist lobby loves to get into the nitty gritty aspects of Linux...but I can't believe LT really intended for Linux to stay on the back burner for ever...
Now, with apologies to Adam W, hands up anyone who got F11 running first go...and what did it run on?
227 • Elive - yep I once err.. 'raked a pee' at it too.. ;) (by DeniZen on 2009-06-13 10:57:24 GMT from United Kingdom)
@ 'bugger' ! - # 215
I'm not defending the Elive 'donation' scenario, it could be seen as very much contra to the spirit of things, but ..
It is fairly clear that no-one is being asked to pay for Elive.
Just to donate towards the costs for the dev to host.
i.e. 'post&packaging'.
In the days before Broadband I used to occasionally send off for BSD or Linux CD's. I had to pay a nominal cost for them, and the postage.
I didnt pay for the OS, but I paid for the associated on-costs.
It could be argued that Elive is no different?
Anyhoo, if one doesnt like the notion, fair enough, ignore it - there are a gazzilion other choices.
228 • Re 226 F11 (by Paul B on 2009-06-13 11:38:49 GMT from United States)
I loaded F11 from the live KDE CD, with minor speed bumps. The need for an ext3 partition for the boot sector wasn't terribly obvious, but I figured it out rather easily. The Boot management part of Fedora doesn't allow adding other boot choices and I had other problems with trying to modify the boot menu. So I, reinstalled grub from the Mandriva system. (The computer is a triple boot system.) Pulse audio seems to be less user friendly than in F10, but I eventually got the sound working. I also had some heartburn over Samba, but we are talking about Fedora. Fedora requires extra effort during setup because of "free" and deprecations.
So, I had to search and find Awesfx to get my midi on my Creative Soundblaster working. I had to find Xvkbd to set up my side button on my mouse. But these things that some distros (notably Mandriva) seem to do automatically are not done by Fedora. That doesn't mean it doesn't run. On my AMD 1600 w/1M ram, it ran just fine, surfed the web, and read my e-mail right out of the box.
229 • Elive (by Coy Mac on 2009-06-13 11:42:48 GMT from United States)
Still unstable? It ran ok back in 2005 (version 17 of the dm then too) on a then new IBM pc but was considered "clunky" with "unnecesary panel movements" by a lady who I was trying to convert away from Windows. I thought for sure the "prettiness" of Elive was tops in the linux world and would impress her greatly.
She wanted "something as fast and efficient as XP."
#215 by Bugger is pretty close to my thoughts about Elive after all this time it has been in development; they've improved a big shiney, rather strange linux distro from a 1958 Buick to a 1959 Buick.
All that useless chrome. Yuck.
But it's there, representing another side of linux, one that some seem to enjoy.
230 • Re: 228 Oops! (by Paul B on 2009-06-13 12:00:32 GMT from United States)
Correction on the machine, it has 1G of ram, not 1M. And two 80 G hard drives.
231 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-13 13:11:28 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #228/230
Cheers Paul B, for your comments on F11, particularly info on the kit.
I note from a brief survey of the link in #224, info on "a" machine is not always reported. Given that it is common knowledge distros can be fussy where they live, I find that is the sort of info which could be crucial.
232 • I judge distro on installer (by Bee on 2009-06-13 13:44:02 GMT from United States)
>153
I couldn't install Fedora using custom layout with purely EXT3. Something about not matching LiveCD. Unless they reissue ISO, I don't see the point of it.
233 • @217 (by john frey on 2009-06-13 15:29:43 GMT from Canada)
Well Adam, I suggest that a link to bugzilla go in the menu along the top of many web pages. You know where is listed
Home | About | Download | Documentation | Help | Contact Us
In the case of the Fedora web page you have a nice short list along the right side of the page. Some have it on the left. Folks know what bugzilla is mostly so just list it as that. The link should lead to a page with an explanation of what bugzilla is for and the procedures for filling out a bug report. Bugzilla could also be listed under the Help section or whatever part of the web page lists resources like forums, documentation, wiki, etc. I really don't see the clunky problem at all.
In my early Linux using days I had a hell of a time trying to fill out bug reports. Talk about clunky! I often gave up half way through the process. I came up with the theory that it was made that way purposely to prevent bothersome bug reports over silly issues from newbies. I still kind of think that. Bugzilla is not the place for issues that should be handled in the Fora or by RTFM. On the other hand I don't think developers are so machiavellian they make a system purposely arcane to lock out the newbie. That just happens, it's not planning:)
234 • ooops (by john frey on 2009-06-13 15:33:30 GMT from Canada)
Fedora has the menu on the right, others have it along the left. I'm a little bit dyslexic this morning, I guess.
235 • still can't overcome that dyslexia. Sheesh. (by john frey on 2009-06-13 15:35:02 GMT from Canada)
Fedora has it on the left, others have it on the right.
236 • re#235,4,3 & 229 (by hab on 2009-06-13 15:55:32 GMT from Canada)
@john frey
Coffee first.
Then dww!
@229
I find your somewhat disparaging comments about elive a little puzzling. It is debian with e16/e17, no compiz, no 3d, no weird effects out of the box. Just an other take on what somebody thinks looks nice for a linux distro! I just can't find all that yucky, useless chrome that you refer to!
cheers
237 • right (by Coy Mac on 2009-06-13 18:01:13 GMT from United States)
Seeing my remarks as "disparaging" does reveal you are "puzzled."
The "chrome" you can't find, well, if it has to be explained then the concept is lost on you.
Just enjoy, man.
I disagree with the stated notion earlier that it doen't belong here, but I do think that Elive is an example of what can happen with a linux concept when it's overdone to the point of loss of what linux is about, which is a streamlined operating system. However I also feel that linux is about anything anyone wants it to be about.
Not for me at all. But obviously for somebody, otherwise it would not exist.
238 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-13 18:30:02 GMT from United Kingdom)
Well I dunno about GNULinux being streamlined...I do know it can be a bit fussy on what it runs on tho', chrome or no chrome, LOL.
And I don't know whether it being fussy about what it runs on with respect to ext 3 or ext 4, as described above, for example, could properly be described as a bug or simply an incompatibility with the hardware, in the same way you could not run petrol cars on diesel oil...but if you tried it would be a right bugger...
239 • re#237 rightness (by hab on 2009-06-13 19:18:50 GMT from Canada)
@Coy Mac
Your antagonistic posture is noted and revelatory.
I have had elive 1.0 on an antique box for about 2 weeks now. I have played with a smidge and i find it does look nice and work decently on the old box. It is however, quite a ways from what meets my requirements/needs in a day to day desktop. I am running it merely because it happened to install faultlessly on the dusty hardware. A feat many/most other 'modern distros' can't achieve. At least easily! A salient feature!
As to my understanding of chrome, my aesthetic has shown a predilection for black chrome. Rather than that bright glittery stuff! You know that stuff that attracts crows and such!
Under stated is preferable to overstated.
cheers
240 • So much for cds acting the same. (by Bee on 2009-06-13 19:20:03 GMT from United States)
Does Fedora still offer the choice of Ext3?
Yes. The regular CD/DVD install or network boot images still lets you choose either Ext4, Ext3 or XFS. The Live CD/DVD images however use Ext4 (except for /boot formatted as Ext3) and essentially transfer the entire image into the hard disk as part of the installation process and does not offer the ability to format the hard disk with any other filesystem. If you must choose a different filesystem, the regular DVD install or network boot images are the recommended alternatives.
People like me who don't want to test EXT4 or use seperate /boot partition must use another installation medium than LiveCd. Not using the "real" installer was a poor choice by the Fedorans.
241 • Fedora beats Ubuntu in hpd/7days! (by Tom on 2009-06-13 20:08:05 GMT from United Kingdom)
In the 7 day listing Fedora is the top linux distro with 3063 hpd and Ubuntu a measly 1830! Omg, is this a momentous day, will it stay this way? Should i rush to switch over to Fedora? lol
242 • Re 226 (by DG on 2009-06-13 20:39:40 GMT from Netherlands)
Personally, I find all this install/can't install topic quite fascinating...more especially as the arch enemy OS ran (without any real probs at all) on your machine, prior to your attempt to install (a) Linux,
But you aren't comparing like with like here. The version of that OS that comes with the hardware has been tricked out by the OEM with specific drivers, tweaks and goodies relevant to that hardware. If you were to try to install the vanilla version you would likely have problems.
I speak from experience. I bought an HP Pavilion with the Dutch version of that OS on it from a consumer electronics shop, with the English vanilla version on CD. When I tried to install the vanilla version, most of the additional drivers were missing. What was worse was that I could not easily download the drivers from the HP support site because they were "not available in your region", which might have been due to a difference in motherboards between the Dutch and UK/US models.
On the other hand, many of the smaller Linux distros are build by geeks on hardware that's probably been home build for other geeks who have cannibalised or rescued hardware and need something free to run on it...
243 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-13 21:21:19 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re #242
Even more amazing! I too had an HP Pavillion 710: 1300MHZ Celeron on 128MB ram...rpt 128MB, running XP pre SP1. (then upgrade eventually to SP2...then SP3...or lack of, thus precipitating migration to Linux...U7.4).
The machine worked fine (what else would I know? LOL). I think it was the incessant attack of stupid, stupid viruses etc that cheesed me off most. I mean what f'ing right have people to mess around with a person's machine with malware because they are too flippin' sad to get a real life and spend time messing up others...just 'cos they can?
Anyway, this machine ran all the stuff supplied by HP without issue, hence my comment. I learned that HP needed a different version of SP2 (for HP kit) but nevertheless I had no probs until SP3 and the increasing need to run anti this, that and another. You could spend ages just "wasting" time running AVG etc, and it REALLY .
244 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-13 21:30:52 GMT from United Kingdom)
ref #243
ooops,
...was wasting time.
So to me, it was comparing like for like...I confess i had no idea there would have been/was a difference in versions of different language OS.
Why oh why do companies do this? Too much red tape and petty regs...see my comments re EU crap. If these Eurocrats had half a brain they'd be lethal...as it is with a single neuron orbiting near vacuum...I can almost believe they think to themselves, when not being inventive with expenses...I f@£$ things up...'cos I can.
245 • OpenSolaris still lacks drivers (by Ned on 2009-06-13 21:44:12 GMT from United States)
Too bad Sun's management de-emphasized supporting x86 platforms years ago. Hardware support is still very limited. For example, Sun still has not managed to bundle drivers for Realtek NICs or peripherals routinely supported on Linux distributions. Having to search for third party drivers and learning how to add the driver post install is not what first time users should have to experience. Imagine trying to show off OpenSolaris using the live-CD and not be able to surf the web.
246 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-06-13 23:43:35 GMT from Canada)
>In the 7 day listing Fedora is the top linux distro with 3063 hpd and Ubuntu a measly 1830! Omg, is this a momentous day, will it stay this way? Should i rush to switch over to Fedora? lol
Omg? lol? Please, no! Stay with Ubuntu!
247 • In some ways... (by Sertse on 2009-06-14 00:01:28 GMT from Australia)
Fedora (and Debian) are the only major "desktop-linux" distro you can use and sleep well at night. =P
Ubuntu: Apparently evil for not contributing enough upstream, and generally helping itself rather than "Linux"
OpenSuse: Apparently evil for having anything to do with Microsoft
Mint: Apparently evil for political comments.
Mandriva: Unstable company future
PCLOS: Unstable future
These generalisations are what I've seen and not necessarily my own opinions.
248 • @247 (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-14 00:47:27 GMT from United States)
Yeah, we need to make up things to make Fedora and Debian undesirable.
Fedora is run by the Illuminati and Debian supports eating cats.
249 • Solaris 10 migration from the opensoalris (by Anthony on 2009-06-14 03:24:28 GMT from New Zealand)
I hope they will put more testing into the thing...
dladm is completely broken on my system
MCP57 network card (had to add a alias for)
Disabled the auto configure re enabled the physical:default
created the hostname.aggr1
Still the dam thing wouldn't plumb on boot
DHCP wasnt working with the Nividia NIC so maybe thats why its not working.
Why isnt networking like routing anyway everything stuck in dladm including the IP configuration on boot?
Yep I hope the GA release isnt as rough...
Maybe I have just been stuck in the dark ages by using GA for the last few years but stability wise with my hardware this release is a step backwards...
250 • #241 (by Albert Hall on 2009-06-14 04:07:35 GMT from United States)
Hey Tom, look at Wolvix, (7 day view) it is 60th on the list below RIPLinux. What's up with that?
251 • Oh no .. (by DeniZen on 2009-06-14 11:33:44 GMT from United Kingdom)
As a Cat eating member of the Illuminati, I'm really stumped now...
;)
I'll have to stick with the ancient, and beleived lost, secret system of Fedorbian.
Must go, Tiddles is nearly done, and the High Priests are coming over for Lunch.
252 • @247 (by Jerry B. on 2009-06-14 12:02:49 GMT from United States)
Flaw in your logic.
What's so undesireable about "evil?"
Evil is necessary, otherwise we'd have no heroes and saviors to help us choose the other path.
Such as Mac.
;o)
253 • Pulse Audio (by Paul B on 2009-06-14 12:35:10 GMT from United States)
I have two computers. One with a Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1 sound card, the other with a Creative Soundblaster Live Value card. I have never been able to get Pulse Audio to work with these cards. I have used a number of different distros, although not all of them. Some parts work, but typically midi and/or video fails. Has anyone been able to use Pulse Audio with Creative Live! cards? If so, what distro did you use?
254 • #247 (by River Rat on 2009-06-14 13:42:20 GMT from United States)
#253
Have you tried any Slackware based distros? I have the same problem, different card. Anything Debian based won't work on my machine. I recommend:
Wolvix 2.0 Beta 2 (make sure to upgrade Gslapt - http://forums.wolvix.org/index.php/topic,1361.0.html)
Zenwalk - Installation can be troublesome (very good if you get it installed).
Vector - Sound is not as good as Wolvix (on my machine)
Pardus - may work
Puppy - A must try
255 • Fedora net install is no bed of roses either (by PrinceD on 2009-06-14 15:29:42 GMT from United States)
Fedora is a world of its own (post-apocalyptic). A Fedora11 'sda2' net installation won't boot from using grub chainloader found on Debian primary OS using 'sda1'. Its free as in free to think "WTF" after having success with Gentoo and Arch, and not getting this lump of coal to burn.
256 • Fedora must be installed their way. (by Frenchman on 2009-06-14 17:29:51 GMT from Germany)
If you unplug extra HD and let Fedora wipe the single HD (MS Windows style) and use main install disc, it will probably work. It probably put bootloader on wrong drive (just like MS often does).
257 • Off the wall (by RollMeAway on 2009-06-14 17:49:42 GMT from United States)
I seem to have misplaced the article:
"How to install Fedora on a Dead Skunk"
I know it started out with ..
get a large clothes pin, and a powerful fan ...
258 • wow (by Joy on 2009-06-14 18:41:00 GMT from United States)
Fedora sure is popular.
259 • the myth of linux (#253) (by Anonymous on 2009-06-14 19:59:44 GMT from Canada)
There have been some posts recently showing that the majority of the kernel developments are created by commercial developers. AFAIK most of the commercial users of linux have no use for sound( just imagine the noise with hundreds of cubicles belting out music)
This, perhaps, accounts for the disastrous state of audio in linux.
But there are said to be thousands of amateur linux developers; why is sound still a problem?
If the amateurs cannot do the job and the paid developers are not going to be paid; what future ?
260 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-14 21:22:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
re #259
probably consulting their lawyers/legal advisers on the liability aspect, now the EU is sticking its snoot in...
261 • @260 (by J.B. on 2009-06-14 22:19:02 GMT from United States)
Oh forest forest forest, FUDdy duddy forest. :o)
It's about drivers, in any OS, including Windows.
This discussion could morph from sound issues to internet conectivity issues to display issues, etc. It's all a moving target and the various developers move along with it for the most part as best they can.
262 • re#259 (by hab on 2009-06-14 22:22:30 GMT from Canada)
What you say is true, but perhaps a bit incomplete. Commercial interests are providing code that extends the system to serve THEIR requirements/wants/needs and those do not necessarily coincide with desktop requirements/wants/needs. It detracts from linux only in that these coders are not working on desktop stuff. The upside of course is that it does advance linux in general. And linux sub rosa adoption/uptake appears to be doing quite well, possibily in part due to this kind of code being available.
As to sound, i think we are at the end of alsa and looking for a satisfactory solution to the transition problem. Complicated in part by the LARGE assortment of hardware out there.
In my experience, fwiw, a modicum of patience is prolly a good thing!
cheers
263 • #251 (by Deckard Tannhauser on 2009-06-14 23:40:19 GMT from United States)
Why cats? Why not dogs, humans, Alien Jeff, or just plain bread?
264 • No subject (by J.B. on 2009-06-14 23:49:51 GMT from United States)
I just wanted to wish all of you here waiting to be the first post in tomorrows comments the best of luck.
May the person without access to Distrowatch server logs win. ;>)
265 • No subject (by RAT on 2009-06-15 00:28:01 GMT from United States)
J.B./A.J. How's that Arch working out? Do I dare make the transition? I would have to wipe my hard drive to do it. Not sure if it's worth it unless I can get a bare bones speed demon.
266 • Eh? (by Nobody Important on 2009-06-15 03:00:25 GMT from United States)
@265: Just VirtualBox it. I was able to figure that out, and frankly it was fairly straightforward. Just find the manual on their website and follow it down the page.
@264: I don't think I've ever gotten anything better than 20th place or so. I always lag before I remember DWW is on its way.
267 • Re: 264 (by Sertse on 2009-06-15 06:34:48 GMT from Australia)
The best I've managed is somewhere in the top 10; Being in Australia helps. We are usually in a sane hour when DW arrives.
Anyways trends! Puppy will take over PCLOS sometime, I reckon.
Will Fedora overtake Mint? The 7 days day chart is very surprising for Fedora, but that chart has always been volatile
268 • No subject (by forest on 2009-06-15 07:09:06 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #261
Of course the hobbyist devs out there won't take the legal bit seriously, LOL.
It's a hobby to them, until some person decides to make a blame...if you follow, which perhaps you don't? I'm not entirely sure hobbyist folk realise the implications involved with legislation seen from eyes other than their own.
From all the comments, not just on this forum, it's clear that the reason behind Linux's lack of real progress in becoming a global desktop, so to speak, is that it is, mostly, chaotic in Linux land.
It is demonstrable not all distros run on all machines and your talk of drivers etc is just part of it. That being the case then it is hardly surprising non Linux folk are wary about how Linux will run on their machines.
Linux is no longer just hobbyist. Very few forum members ever bother to remark on the various "regional" distros Ladislav showcases here. The comments seem to ignore those aspects and concentrate on the minutiae of just a few "populist" distros which "always" seem to have a problem with this, that or another.
It's "Distrowatch", not "how I got round this package problem watch"...but I have to say it is all to easy to fall into the trap...
Number of Comments: 268
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