 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 380, 15 November 2010 |
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Welcome to this year's 46th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The arrivals of Linux Mint 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, greeted by two very different groups of users, were the main events on last week's distro release calendar. While desktop Linux enthusiasts rejoiced over yet another excellent Mint with many subtle improvements, system administrators in large data centres were likely much more excited by the new RHEL, especially by the product's new virtualisation features. The news section below covers both releases and links to relevant articles published last week. Before that, there is this week's feature story, which is a test of Bordeaux, a commercial software product that allows users to run many popular Windows applications on Linux. The news section is then followed by a Tips and Tricks department which provides a number of useful Bash scripts that could come handy in some situations. There is more, including a big update in Slackware "Current", a critical look at the Fedora feature process, and a release schedule of Mandriva Linux 2010.2 and 2011. Happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Test-driving Bordeaux 2.0.8
 We, as computer users, run applications -- all sorts of them. We browse the web with an program, send e-mail via another, write up reports, crunch numbers, listen to music, transfer files and store contacts using a long list of different applications. There are thousands upon thousands of programs floating around the digital world and there's one problem: they don't all run on your operating system. Almost all of us, at one time or another, will come to a point where we have an operating system and matching programs that do almost everything we want and, on the other hand, a program which doesn't run natively on our OS of choice. Fortunately there are ways of dealing with this. Some people dual-boot their systems and deal with the awkward transition between platforms. Others use virtual machines and work with the overhead involved with running two systems at the same time. A third option is to build compatibility into one OS so that it can run programs designed for a different OS and that's where Bordeaux comes in.
The Bordeaux Technology Group is a company specializing in compatibility software. Specifically, they work at making it as easy as possible to run Windows programs on the UNIX family of operating systems. Their Bordeaux tool is built to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana and Mac OS X. Bordeaux is, at its heart, a customized build of Wine. They take a recent version of Wine, add some special tools and test their build for compatibility against a group of popular Windows software. They then sell this bundle (along with support) for about US$20 - 25, much less than the typical cost of a Windows license. A few weeks ago I had a chance to chat with Tom, a member of the Bordeaux Technology Group, and he was kind enough to give me a copy of Bordeaux (PC-BSD edition) to test-drive.
The provided PBI package was about 44 MB and it installed without any problems. With the install completed, two icons were added to my desktop and application menu. These new icons were labelled "Bordeaux" and "Cellar Manager". I launched Bordeaux first and was presented with a new window featuring three tabs along the top. These three tabs are called "Install Applications", "Manage Wine" and "Unsupported Packages". At the bottom of the window, regardless of which tab is selected, are two buttons called "Help" and "Install". Clicking the Help button always opens a browser window to the Bordeaux documentation website. The Install button actually performs different functions depending on which tab is selected.
Let's start with the Manage Wine tab. It provides us with a list of basic Windows software, such as Notepad, Minesweeper and the Registry Editor. Clicking on one of these items and clicking the Install button launches the program. It's pretty straightforward and I didn't have any problem using these built-in items.
Bordeaux 2.0.8 - launching Wine applications
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The Install Applications tab is a bit more interesting. This tab provides us with a list of Windows software which is supported by Bordeaux. Highlighting one of the items and clicking the Install button will perform one of two actions. In cases where the highlighted software is freely available online, Bordeaux will download and install the application. I tried this with Internet Explorer 7, Safari, QuickTime Player and Google's SketchUp. Each of them downloaded and installed without and problems and the first three ran smoothly. The SketchUp program installed on my machine, but I ran into problems running it and experienced frequent crashes. I haven't used SketchUp before, so I'm uncertain as to how much of this is a problem with the application itself, with Bordeaux, or with my hardware. There are several other programs available in the support list, many of them Microsoft Office products. Picking one of these options and clicking the Install button would kick off work in the background and install some components. Bordeaux didn't provide much information as to what was going on, but I suspect it was configuring my environment to work with the highlighted software.
Next we find the Unsupported Packages tab. It's much the same as the Install Applications tab and shows us a list of commonly used Windows software. Something I found odd about this tab is that some of the programs listed here (such as VLC and Firefox) are also listed in the Install Applications tab. This tab works very much like the Install Applications tab in that we can click on the name of an application and click Install. Bordeaux will then try to install the item. However, as the name implies, these are unsupported items and may or may not work. I selected eight items and found half of them installed and ran without any problems. I'm uncertain as to whether the remaining items I chose were unavailable for on-line downloading or if there was a problem during the install process. Unfortunately Bordeaux doesn't always make that clear and I'm not familiar with all the titles listed.
Bordeaux 2.0.8 - supported software
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That covers the Bordeaux application, now let's take a look at the Cellar Manager. All of the Cellar Manager information is presented in one small window without any tabs. Here we are shown a list of any supported applications we have installed. Now I didn't find much documentation on cellars, but it seems that Bordeaux sets up an isolated Windows environment for each installed program, sort of like a "chroot" environment. The Cellar Manager allows us to configure each of these environments (or cellars) as if it were the only Wine environment on the machine. This is particularly convenient if we want to run multiple versions of a program, such as Internet Explorer 7 & 8, and have them run using different settings. We're also able to run commands in each of the cellars and we are able to remove existing cellars from this screen.
At the top of the Cellar Manager is a menu labelled Installation which has two sub-items, Supported and Unsupported. On my system selecting the Unsupported option would open a Windows-style "run command" dialogue box. Picking the Supported item would open a new dialogue which would display a list of Windows software. Most of these are duplicates of the items found in the Bordeaux application under the Install Software tab, but some are unique to this Cellar Manager dialogue. I installed a few items from this location, including Adobe Reader and Internet Explorer 8 and didn't run into any difficulties.
Bordeaux 2.0.8 - managing Wine cellars
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There were times I was using Bordeaux, especially when installing supported software, that I found myself thinking that not only did I appreciate the power of the suite, but that I would like to see similar capability native to Windows. The ability to install free (gratis) software from a central manager is something the Linux and BSD communities do well and it would be nice to have the same functionality on Windows. I guess what I'm saying is that, in some ways, Bordeaux out-Windows Windows. I feel that the Bordeaux Technology Group has made a significant add-on to Wine and not only added some improved compatibility, but also made managing third-party Windows software easier.
Unfortunately the user interface could use some polish and it's one of those cases where the little details matter. As an example, there is no distinction on the Install Applications screen between which applications can be downloaded and installed by simply clicking the Install button and which ones require the user have a product CD. It would be convenient to have a marker next to each item letting the user know if the software is freely available. While free packages are downloading there is no indication of progress, so the user doesn't know if the process is still working. On my system the Uninstaller utility wouldn't show/remove software installed from the Bordeaux program, but it would list applications I had installed from the Cellar Manager. I'm not sure if this is a bug or intended behaviour, but it strikes me as unintuitive.
I've been using Bordeaux for about a week now and, though it has some rough edges, I'm enjoying the experience. Once I got the hang of the suite's little quirks, I found it to be powerful and it makes working with Windows software on PC-BSD a more pleasant experience. Having a list of supported software takes some of the guesswork out of running applications on Wine. Having separate cellars is also nice in that it gets around the problem of different programs having special (or conflicting) dependencies. Right now the software feels like it's aimed at system administrators who want to install and manage multiple Windows applications. Bordeaux is not quite to the point where I would suggest it for end-users, but with a few more progress bars, tool tips and (especially) documentation it can easily get there. The functionality is in place and just needs some friendly touches. This is definitely a product to keep in mind if you're trying to transition between the Windows world and the Linux/BSD community.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
Linux Mint a perfect ten, RHEL 6 feature review, thoughts on Fedora feature process, Slackware "Current" updates
 The highlight of the week, at least from the desktop point of view, was the release of Linux Mint 10. One would think that after so many successful releases the project will eventually run out of things to improve, but the first indications are that this is another excellent Mint release, a perfect ten, as graded in this review by Linux Critic. No wonder that the project's website came under a heavy strain last week: "The release of Linux Mint 10 has brought more traffic than we've ever seen before, and sadly also much more than our server is able to cope with. We've got dedicated servers for the website, the blog, the forums and the seeding of the torrents, and even with that, we're not able to face the traffic!" Of course, one of the questions many users are asking is the future direction of Linux Mint, giving the recently-announced switch to the Unity desktop by its parent, Ubuntu. Will Mint follow suit? According to a recent interview with Clement Lefebfre, the project's lead developer, the answer is no: "We're not planning to switch to Unity but to keep our desktop as similar as it is at the moment. So it's hard to say how we'll achieve this technically but we're aiming at using GNOME without GNOME Shell."
Linux Mint 10 comes with a new theme and a plethora of friendly enhancements.
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 It's not every day (or even every year) that a new major version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) arrives at the scene. In that light, last week's announcement about the release of RHEL 6 was a reason to celebrate for many system administrators who had been looking forward to deploying a more modern Linux system than the ageing RHEL 5.x series. The reviews will probably take a while to come, but The Register has run through a summary of new features in an article entitled "RHEL 6: serious Linux built for growth": "One of the main goals for RHEL 6 was to make managing virtual servers as easy as managing physical machines, which means the bulk of the new software features in this release are found in KVM. It also means that Xen is gone, though that's hardly surprising since Red Hat purchased Qumranet - creators of KVM - back in 2008. RHEL 6 builds on the KVM-based virtualization found in RHEL 5.5 and earlier releases, adding a number of performance and hardware support upgrades. Upgrading from old Xen-based disk files is also simple, just boot KVM and point to your Xen loopback disk files and reboot your virtual machines. Also new for virtual guests is the SELinux sandbox feature, which allows guest machines to run in isolated environments."
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 - a new major release from the world's most successful Linux company
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 Fedora 14 was released barely two weeks ago, but the preparations for the next version are already in full swing. Among them, the feature list is probably the most interesting at this early stage of the development process. But how does the Fedora feature process work? And is it the ideal method of providing motivation to the developers? Peter Robinson expresses some scepticism over the procedure in his article entitled "Thoughts on the Fedora feature process": "So the worst thing I've discovered with features is not really the actual process but the barrage of 'I'm right Jack' attitude as people rush to get their features marked off as 100% complete and the lack of care towards others' needs and requirements. Oh, and the flame wars on devel and the hate mail. I feel that if there's no expectation of a 'feature' being there there will be two pluses - people have no reason to flame me and if it happens to work there will also be a pleasant surprise when they discover it. The downside will be that as it's not defined it won't be there for marketing to use to promote Fedora." Adam Williamson agrees with the sentiment in a comment below the post: "I agree that the feature process is often a bit of a waste of time, especially since our policies make it easier to introduce a feature if you don't in fact denote it as a Feature. All that denoting your feature as Feature seems to bring is pain, bureaucracy, and a small amount of publicity."
* * * * *
 Finally, a quick update on Slackware Linux, the world's oldest surviving Linux distribution. Its latest development changelog, released earlier today, carries an unusually long list of changes, including an upgrade to X.Org Server 1.9.2 and the accompanying "set of X.Org packages": "Lots of updates, including a major X overhaul!" But if you follow the "Current" branch and have an NVIDIA video card then beware of the possible Mesa problem: "I was on the fence with this upgrade, and in fact it sat in /testing for days with mesa-7.8.2 queued instead. But it seems the Intel driver really does need this version of Mesa or there are major problems with compositing (most of them leading to an X server crash). If X crashes at start, try disabling compositing. The machine that had issues here was using an onboard NVIDIA 6150SE. Using the nv, nouveau, or even the vesa driver, X crashed at start unless compositing was disabled. However, everything works perfectly when using the binary NVIDIA drivers, and odds are that most users with decent NVIDIA hardware are doing just that. So, that's the situation with NVIDIA and Mesa as observed here for now. Hopefully the defaults will work better soon, but meanwhile if you have NVIDIA hardware you may have to either disable compositing or obtain and use NVIDIA's binary drivers."
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| Tips and Tricks (by Jesse Smith) |
Useful Bash scripts
This past week I spent some time digging through old shelves and boxes and found a few of my early UNIX textbooks. Flipping through them I found it interesting to see that while our technology continues to race forward, a lot of the basics have stayed the same. Much of the security practices suggested twenty years ago are still valid today. Some of the backup scripts provided in these books (one of which talks about this new thing coming out called Netscape Navigator) are still helpful. We've talked about the command line here before a time or two and this week I'm feeling nostalgic. So I'd like to dig into the scripting toy box and share a few items that I have found useful over the years.
This first script is fairly simple. It checks to see how much room is currently available on the /home partition. If less than 10 GB of space remains free, then a warning is displayed. In place of printing a warning, we can substitute sending an e-mail or other notification.
#!/bin/bash
space=$(df | grep /home | awk '{print $4}')
if [ $space -lt 10485760 ] ; then
echo "Running out of room"
fi
It works by running the df command, which displays disk usage information. The grep command then looks for the information related to our /home partition. And the awk command extracts the data in the forth column of df's output -- the forth column telling us how much space is still available. Do you have a room-mate who won't stop filling your hard drive with media files? Get cron to run this script and have it shutdown his or her favourite P2P client by running "killall" in place for the "echo" command.
Our next script was put together to get around a problem I kept creating for myself. Every so often I find myself downloading a program or performing an update only to discover that it's taking longer than expected and I'm waiting for it to finish so I can run another command. Just as an example, imagine I'm downloading nmap and, once the install is complete, I want to run nmap to scan my machine. Rather than wait around, I can use this script:
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -lt 2 ] ; then
echo "Usage: $0 PID command"
exit 1
fi
while [ -d /proc/$1 ] ; do
sleep 1
done
shift
$@
The script takes two or more arguments. The first is the process ID number of the program we're waiting for. Everything specified on the command line after that is what we want to run. Since each process ID has an entry in the /proc directory, we can see if a program is still running by checking for the existence of that directory. If we called the above script "waitfor" and our slow process-in-progress is number "24658" we could use it like this:
waitfor 24658 nmap localhost
Once program number 24658 has completed its task, the waitfor script will run nmap to scan the local machine. The "shift" command at the bottom of the script says we're done with the first argument (the PID) and it can be discarded. The following line with the "$@" means we want to run the remaining arguments (nmap localhost) as if they were typed on the command line.
Have you ever been working from a terminal and wondered if a word you were using was spelled correctly? This next script can check that for you using the "spell" command available on most distributions. What this does is take a given word and run it through the system's spell-checker. If the word is spelled correctly it gives us confirmation. On the other hand, if the spell-checker can't find a match, it will try to display a list of possible correct spellings.
#!/bin/bash
# Check spelling of a word passed on the command line
if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then
echo "Usage: $0 word"
exit 1
fi
# Check to see if the word is spelled correctly
if [ -z $(echo $1 | spell) ] ; then
echo "$1 is spelled correctly."
exit 0
fi
# Search for recommendation
echo "Could not find match. Try one of these."
grep ^$(echo $1 | cut -c -4) /usr/share/dict/words | head -n 20
I've broken the script into three chunks. The first block checks to make sure we gave the script a word to check. The second part hands the word over to the spell-checker and lets us know if the spell-checker gave us the "OK". If the script makes it to the third part, it assumes the word was not spelled correctly. It then takes the first four letters of the word we gave it (using the cut command) and uses grep to find matches to those first four letters in the system's dictionary. The "head" command at the end of the line limits the number of recommendations we get back to 20 or less, to avoid flooding our terminal screen.
This next script was born from two accidents I witnessed early in my IT days where computers caught fire. Both cases were due to hardware failure, in one case a CPU fan stopped working and the server kept going. Since it's often convenient to leave a machine running unattended, I came up with a small script that could be run from the terminal or from a cron job. Machines these days have more safety guards, but I think it's still worth looking at the script. This script checks the current temperature of the CPU. If the temperature reaches 50 degrees Celsius, a warning is displayed. Should the temperature reach 80 degrees, the machine is shut down.
#!/bin/bash
warning=50
killpoint=80
mysensor=temp1
current=$(sensors | grep $mysensor | awk '{print $2}' | cut -c 2-3)
if [ $current -gt $warning ] ; then
echo "Warning, temperature at mid-range."
fi
if [ $current -gt $killpoint ] ; then
echo "Too hot, shutting down."
shutdown -P now
fi
 The first line runs the sensors command which will display temperature information from the machine's internal sensors. The grep command will then, in this case, grab the data associated with sensor "temp1". Different systems may have different sensor names. The awk and cut commands then grab the temperature data, weeding out extra symbols, such as the leading "+" sign and trailing "C". The temperature is saved in a variable called "current", which we then compare to our warning and cutoff points.
Each of these scripts as-is are small and perform simple tasks. But in them are the building blocks for more powerful tools. As an example, the waitfor script could try to terminate the process it is waiting on after ten minutes. Or the script which checks for available disk space could be modified to hunt down large files that have not been accessed for a long time and list them. The temperature checking script could try to kill the process using the most CPU in an effort to cool things down. There are an amazing number of possibilities when using shell scripts.
If you are interested in learning about the command line and shell scripting, I recommend picking up a copy of UNIX: The Textbook. It does a great job of slowly introducing new concepts and gradually building upon existing material. I found it to be a helpful introduction to the UNIX family of operating systems. Brave souls may also want to read Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, a text that jumps into the more interesting end of the scripting pool.
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| Released Last Week |
Greenie Linux 8M
Stanislav Hoferek has announced the release of Greenie Linux 8M, an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution optimised for Slovak and Czech-speaking users: "One month after the release of Ubuntu 10.10, a new release of Greenie has arrived. What is new? From this point on, Greenie Linux is primarily a DVD, as it is no longer possible to fit it onto a CD. Among the more interesting programs included in the release are Google Chromium, GIMP, Pidgin, VLC, Moovida, Pingus, WINE, OpenTTD and many other applications and games. Greenie Center was re-built, new theme (Deepin) is used. Work from inside VirtualBox is much better, documentation was updated a bit and there is also better support for languages other than Slovak and Czech." Read the rest of the release announcement (mostly in Slovak, scroll to the bottom of the page for the brief English version).
Greenie Linux 8M - an Ubuntu 10.10 remix from Slovakia
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Clonezilla Live 1.2.6-40
Steven Shiau has announced the availability of a new stable release of Clonezilla Live, version 1.2.6-40. Clonezilla Live is a Debian-based live CD containing Clonezilla, a partition and disk cloning software similar to Norton Ghost. Some of the enhancements and changes in this release include: "The shorter boot parameter 'config' (was 'live-config') is used now; the underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded - this release is based on the Debian 'Sid' repository as of 2010-11-06; ocs-live-restore was improved to allow shutdown the machine when using Clonezilla recovery ISO/ZIP with '-p poweroff'; Linux kernel was updated to version 2.6.32; Partclone was updated to version 0.2.16; Syslinux / isolinux was updated to version 4.03; live-boot was updated to 2.0.11...." Read the full release announcement for more details.
ImagineOS 20101103
Flavio Pereira de Oliveira has announced the release of ImagineOS 20101103, a Slackware-based live CD formerly known as GoblinX: "The second ImagineOS release is finally available. This live CD, created by using linux-live scripts with few modifications, uses KDE 4.5.1 as the desktop environment and its based on Slackware 'Current' with more applications and features. Some versions of major components of the system: Linux kernel 2.6.33 (with Zen kernel patch), glibc 2.12.1. Changelog: added some small modifications to the ImagineOS hard disk installer; added the possibility to load ATI, NVIDIA and Intel video card modules before Plymouth starts; added lines inside rc.imagineos boot script to force Intel video card modules to restart using kernel modeset...." Here is the complete release announcement.
Salix OS 13.1.2 "Xfce"
George Vlahavas has announced the release of Salix OS 13.1.2 "Xfce" edition, a Slackware-based distribution: "We are happy to announce the immediate availability of the collection of Salix Xfce 13.1.2 CD images. These include both 32-bit and 64-bit standard installation images, as well as a 32-bit live image that can be used with an optical disk or a USB drive. Both the standard and the live image can be used for installing Salix Xfce to your hard drive, using a text-mode or a graphical installer respectively. The live image includes, among others, a persistence wizard, that will let the user keep changes, including extra installed packages and personalization between different live sessions. LiveClone is another tool specific to the live image - using it users will be able to easily roll their own custom build of the Salix Xfce Live." Read the rest of the release announcement for more information.
IPFire 2.7 Core 41
Jan Paul Tuecking has announced the release of IPFire 2.7 Core 41, a Linux-based firewall distribution with a focus on easy setup and high level of security: "Today, on the third birthday of IPFire 2, we are going to release Core 41.This core update has important security fixes of glibc and bzip2. The core update implicates following changes: Webinterface - fixed CGI outgoing GRP display bug, fixed bandwidth usage display with IE8, added example for black/whitelist on Proxy page, VPN pre-shared key field is now a password field; hardware - updated Realtek r8169, r8168, r8101 drivers; security - bzip2: 1.0.6 security update, closed privilege escalation hole in glibc; VPN - enabled cURL for HTTP fetching revoking list in strongSwan, added OpenVPN pam.so; firewall - fixed the feature for deactivating outgoing firewall rules; others - disabled internal TFTP Server in Dnsmasq...." Here is the full release announcement.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
The long-awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 has been released: "Red Hat, Inc, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest major release of the company's flagship operating platform, setting the scene for its server operating systems for the next decade. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat defines new standards for commercial open source operating environments. Designed to support today's flexible and varied enterprise architectures, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 delivers the comprehensive foundation customers need for physical, virtualized and cloud deployments." The press release carries general information about the product, while the release notes provide technical information and feature details, including screenshots.
Rocks Cluster Distribution 5.4
Greg Bruno has announced the release of Rocks Cluster Distribution 5.4, a CentOS-based Linux operating system for computer clusters: "Rocks Cluster Distribution 5.4 (Maverick) is released for Linux on the i386 and x86_64 CPU architectures. New features: redesign of the Avalanche installer; channel bonding for nodes is now controlled by the Rocks command line; all nodes' firewall rules are controlled by the Rocks command line; introduction of 'Air Traffic Control'; 'greceptor' replaced with 'channeld'; DNS resolution for multiple domains; login appliance support; set the name of a host based on the name of a specific network interface; easily swap two interfaces with one Rocks command; created a GIT repository for Rocks-related source code...." See the release announcement and release notes to learn more about the enhancements in this version of Rocks Cluster Distribution.
Linux Mint 10
Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 10, code name "Julia": "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 10. New features: install codecs and upgrade to the DVD edition from the welcome screen; the menu highlights newly installed applications and makes them easier to find; the menu finds and installs software from the repositories; addition of search engines to the menu's search box; Software Manager with a better categorization of software and use of application icons; update manager can ignore updates and shows download size; upload manager improvements; new look and feel featuring a traditional light theme and dark background; various system improvements...." Read the release announcement and visit the what's new page for more information about the new Mint.
Pinguy OS 10.10
Antoni Norman has announced the release of Pinguy OS 10.10, an Ubuntu-based distribution for the desktop with a number of user-friendly enhancements: "Pinguy OS 10.10 final has just been released. There are a few changes worth mentioning since Pinguy OS 10.10 beta 2: new wallpapers; replaced Vinagre with Remmina; added a script to fix Synaptics Multitouch; turned the firewall on by default; added Nautilus Easy Union; added Giver; lock keys (Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scroll Lock) NotifyOSD notifications; added Nautilus Columns (extra EXIF and FLAC/MP3 metadata in Nautilus); Granola has been added for better battery life on netbooks and laptops, should save around 10 to 15% power consumption; updated Wine to 1.3 from 1.2; added Zeitgeist data sources; installed the missing firmware packages that haven't been added...." Visit the project's user forum to read the full release announcement.
Pinguy OS 10.10 - an Ubuntu remix focusing on eye candy
(full image size: 967kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
ZevenOS 3.0
Leszek Lesner has announced the release of ZevenOS 3.0, an Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the Xfce desktop with a BeOS touch: "The ZevenOS team is proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 3.0. This version is based on Ubuntu 10.10 and has a bunch of new features and changes. The base system was updated to Linux kernel 2.6.35 which brings a bunch of new drivers. The biggest change here is the switch from the NVIDIA open-source driver nv to nouveau. Besides that, there are many updated and refreshed wireless drivers on board. Thunar has gained a new context-sensitive entry to convert images. The deskbar was updated to have a freedesktop.org-compliant dynamic menu which is editable with standard tools. Besides that the deskbar gained many contextual menus which allow access to commonly used actions, like change time & date or mute the volume." Read the full release announcement for further details and a video preview.
ZevenOS 3.0 - an Ubuntu-based distro that strives to resemble BeOS
(full image size: 167kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
Mandriva 2010.2 and 2011 release schedules
 Eugeni Dodonov has published a development roadmap leading to the release of Mandriva Linux 2011 on 30 May 2011: "After a long period of silence, I am pleased to give you some official news from Mandriva about the next Mandriva version. And, to compensate for all the time without news and announcements, I give you two releases at once. Yes, you read it right. In the coming months, not one, but two Mandriva versions will be released! First, we will release Mandriva 2010.2, with estimated release date of December 22, as a Christmas gift to you all. Mandriva 2010.2 is a refreshed look at our latest release, Mandriva 2010.1, plus all the security and bug-fix updates which were done after its release, plus also lots of improvements, stability and performance fixes in many, many packages. Besides Mandriva 2010.2 time has come to announce the Mandriva 2011 release."
* * * * *
Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
New distributions added to waiting list
- Fuduntu. Fuduntu is a Fedora-based distribution which earns its name by its design to fit somewhere between Fedora and Ubuntu. It is optimised for netbooks and other portable computers.
- LinuxLex OS. LinuxLex OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution with a number of modifications and GNOME Shell as a testing environment.
- Wolfer Linux. Wolfer Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution optimised for Indonesian speakers.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 22 November 2010.
Jesse Smith and Ladislav Bodnar
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1 • Bordeaux 2.0.8 (by arnold on 2010-11-15 10:18:02 GMT from United States)
Test-driving Bordeaux 2.0.8 - This looks very interesting.
2 • Bordeaux (by Candide on 2010-11-15 10:26:52 GMT from Taiwan)
Interesting story about Bordeaux, especially it's ability to download and install Windows software on Linux. Now if the developers could just make it work with pirate bittorrent sites...
OK, never mind.
Fortunately, I don't have a pressing need for Windows software. I wouldn't mind though if someone could get AutoCAD working under Wine, but that might be impossible without Adobe's cooperation (unlikely, I think).
Does anybody know a good Linux CAD program? I tried QCAD a few years ago and it wasn't up to the task, though perhaps it's improved.
3 • Salix 13.1.2 XFCE (by meanpt on 2010-11-15 10:48:54 GMT from Portugal)
Still testing it and founding it improves over what was already good. Despite using a virtual set up (VBox virtual machine under a pentium i686) )with only 400 MB of RAM allowed, one thing I noticed immediately was the reduced latency and improved booting times, which separates boys from men in my virtual set up. Salix is becoming the reference slack desktop against which the others will be gauged, in terms of stability and speed.
4 • Bordeaux (by Scrubby Creek on 2010-11-15 12:29:37 GMT from Australia)
I've purchased CrossOver to run some of my necessary Windows apps (e.g. Publisher). At a very basic level it runs MS Office but is unstable. It is far better for me to run MS Office as a Virtual Box guest Windows 7. I am not very happy with CrossOver because it is VERY quirky and counter intuitive. I do however, like the way it sets up in my Main Menu though. It is, none-the-less barely value for money. I might give Bordeaux a try because Crossover is a pain to use. Something that is less confusing would have to be better.
5 • Q&A - machine's internal sensors (by forlin on 2010-11-15 12:47:13 GMT from Portugal)
I appreciated this week's DWW "Tips and Tricks" section, about bash scripts, specially the part related to the information from the machine's internal sensors.
I always liked to have the information about the system voltage, temperatures and fun speeds.
After skipping windows to start using Linux, I found that Lm-Sensors and various Guis based on it, were the best tools to have that information.
The problem is that usually, after installation, the lm-sensor information is not reliable, and some tweaks and adjustments are required, to get accurate figures.
Because the information available to preform those adjustments is not easy to follow up, it would be nice if Jesse could dedicate one of the next Q&A section to that matter.
6 • @ Candide (by snowman on 2010-11-15 13:36:10 GMT from United States)
Try Eagle CAD. The freeware version might have what you're looking for in a CAD program.
7 • Greenie 8M Wallpaper (by Darren on 2010-11-15 13:41:12 GMT from Canada)
Does anyone know where to find the wallpaper that Greenie Linux 8M is using above? Thanks!
8 • CAD programs ... (by Coffee on 2010-11-15 15:29:50 GMT from France)
> Candide: Does anybody know a good Linux CAD program?
... as Snowman said, the free (but closed source) version of Eagle is excellent for small to medium size projects, if you don't mind routing your PCB by hand. But there are plenty of similar applications in the Florian/Debora/Ubriva/Mabuntu... repositories that are completely free (GPL) and open source. Have a look at the gEda suite of programs, which includes gSchem and others. There's also KiCad, Oregano, Electric Cad, Elettro, qCad ...
9 • Best Linux OS for data recovery (by Christopher on 2010-11-15 15:29:58 GMT from Hong Kong)
Can anyone recommend a good Linux Program for data recovery from a crashed laptop running Windows Vista?
10 • Bordeaux (by Jonston on 2010-11-15 15:43:04 GMT from United States)
"Bordeaux didn't provide much information"
"Unfortunately Bordeaux doesn't always make that clear"
Looks like Bordeaux is really providing a more complete Windows experience.
11 • Bordeaux vs. Crossover (by Chris Hildebrandt on 2010-11-15 16:06:40 GMT from Austria)
While Bordeaux is just a simple temporary fork off Wine - adding not much, and contributing nothing to Wine - Crossover was and is the main commercial sponsor for the Wine project, adding real value in many senses. Reviewing B. without seriously talking about Crossover is not just unfair, but also off topic.
Greetings,
Chris
12 • Regarding Bordeaux ... (by Coffee on 2010-11-15 16:08:49 GMT from France)
... an interesting product for those who cannot (or think they cannot) do without Windows applications in a GNU/Linux environment and who can't be bothered to tinker with the intricacies of Wine. Ultimately, I think, there are not too many Windows applications that really need Bordeaux to run under GNU/Linux. A simple, LGPL licensed Wine installation will be good enough for most of these programs.
13 • CAD Program for Linux (by Jason on 2010-11-15 16:15:40 GMT from Canada)
Candide, have a look at the linux version of BricsCAD. It has good AutoCAD compatibility, although it is not open source.
14 • Bordeaux contributions to Wine (by Johannes on 2010-11-15 16:47:05 GMT from Germany)
as #11, I'm wondering to which extent Bordeaux is contributing to Wine.
This could have been mentioned in the review.
Anyway thanks for this DWW!
15 • Bordeaux @Scrubby Geek (by kilgoretrout on 2010-11-15 17:10:37 GMT from United States)
I doubt you will have better luck with Bordeaux and I certainly wouldn't spend the money on it in hopes of a better experience. From what I've seen, Codeweavers Crossover Office is a more polished product than Bordeaux and they are both just user friendly front ends to Wine, or at least they aspire to be. The problems you ran into almost certainly are indicative of the limitations of Wine. As a caution to everyone, even with Crossover Office, check the compatibility chart before buying. For example, in the case of MS Publisher, they tell you to expect problems and a low level of functionality:
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name?app_id=219
You can also download a trial version of Crossover Office and test whatever windows software you want on it before buying their product which is obviously advisable. I really don't think they are trying to mislead anyone over there.
Personally, I haven't had too many problems with Crossover Office except in those areas where they tell you to expect problems. MS Office runs great for me but I don't have Office 2010 which isn't even on their compatibility chart:
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?letter=m;
If the application has a gold or silver, they run great; with bronze, expect problems and with unsupported, some work fine and some don't run at all.
Finally, the Wine project openly acknowledges the generous support given to the project by Codeweavers:
http://www.winehq.org/about/
and:
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/support_wine/
For me that was an important factor in deciding to buy Crossover Office over Bordeaux.
16 • It's alive! and about Bordeaux (by Claudia on 2010-11-15 17:48:22 GMT from Peru)
The annoucement of Mandriva 2010.2 is wonderful news. I'm a regular user of Ubuntu but I tested the 2010.0 release and it was pretty nice. I'm currently running Ubuntu Lucid but I'm more than willing to test their release. I really don't like KDE but their implementation of it is the best! It doesn't feel like stock KDE and it is pretty simple to use.
About Bordeaux I think the main problem is that Crossover Office seems more polished and easy to use. I remember that I downloaded it for free on that day it was free (28/10/08). I still have my copy and runs great even if it is two years old. My little sister uses it for Office 2007 (she needs to handle complex documents and hates logging on Vista just for do that) and I'm using it for Eviews (Gretl is great but it isn't that compatible with Eviews datasets yet) and runs great
Greetings from Peru from a long time reader but first time poster :)
17 • Salix or Mint (by TomG on 2010-11-15 18:08:37 GMT from United States)
I was all set to try out Salix myself, but the news of Linux Mint 10 being released persuaded me to return to my favorite instead of being adventurous (I've never tried a Slackware based distro).
Linux Mint does indeed merit high praise. I'm glad to hear that they don't plan to blindly follow all that Ubuntu does. Canonical has every right to try new things out, but we also can make the choice to stick with what we are comfortable with.
18 • A double standard? (by Anonymous on 2010-11-15 18:27:49 GMT from United States)
Can someone explain why no one is upset about having to purchase security updates from Red Hat? If Microsoft or Apple used the same business model, both Redmond and Cupertino would be burned to the ground by an angry mob, so why the double standard?
19 • POL (by NOYB on 2010-11-15 18:33:56 GMT from United States)
Play on Linux is a free program based on Wine that can also run Windows programs. It is not just for games.
20 • surfing on MintTen (by capricornus on 2010-11-15 18:34:35 GMT from Belgium)
Yesterday I surfed with Swiftfox on MintNine, MintMine. Today I do the same on MintTen. Everything the same. And it seems that I slow down, that it takes a lot more time to address the DNS-server and get things done. Is it me? Is it MintTen on a EeePC? What could it be? Are there others out there with the same impression?
21 • bordeaux trial (by ray carter on 2010-11-15 18:56:58 GMT from United States)
I could not find a free trial of bordeaux - does anyone know if such a thing exists? I would like to run one application - which is not all that widespread - that I've had difficulty running in WINE. Obviously, for that, I'm not going to shell out $20 just to see if it will work. The app is the latest version of Chairgun - a shooting trajectory program. I have an older version working via WINE - I'd just like to access features of the most recent one.
22 • Bordeaux and stuff.. (by davemc on 2010-11-15 19:01:08 GMT from United States)
This is a "pay for" version of PlayOnLinux imo, which is far better and much more user friendly. I have used Cedega, Crossover, PlayOnLinux and plain jane Wine, and in my experience, PlayOnLinux is your best bet, or just plain ol' Wine via cli and winetricks. Cedega at least offers extra proprietary bits and some games will only run on Cedega and not any of the others or even plain wine. Cedega also has/had contracts with some of the big name game companies out there and have specifically written compatibility code for their games which they keep locked. Also, Cedega has contributed to the Wine stack in the past, but not as much as the purists would like so they come under constant fire and slander, mostly all false or FUD mongering.
One thing is certain though. No matter what you use, running Windows programs on Linux is shoddy even at the best of times. I can count the number of Windows apps that run reliably on Linux on one hand, and even then, that number drops again at that projects next patch or release when things break again for Wine compatibility, so your pretty much stuck running an outdated version if you want to maintain that stability, and that is not an option for gaming. While Linux is just now starting to gain some native gaming app's that are not throwbacks from the 1980's, any Linux using gamer is still chained to Windows for the far foreseeable future. Everything popular from MMO's to RPG's to Strategy games are all based firmly in Windows/DirectX and its there that the future of gaming will be unless there is some tidal shift in demand, which is not likely. Its a real pity, because OpenGL is so much more feature rich and powerful, although I have heard that the Developer tools out there for it are sub par.
23 • @9 (by Josh on 2010-11-15 19:02:06 GMT from United States)
Is the drive dead or just windows? For my needs, I've used parted magic. I've never encountered a dead drive, though, just computers that wouldn't boot and I needed quick access. Looking up recovering from dead drives, there are a few ways and parted magic was mentioned a few times. Parted Magic runs in ram so you can use the usb stick to save data if needed, or if using a livecd then that frees the cd drive. I'd suggest you give it a try and see what it can do.
24 • @9 (by Josh on 2010-11-15 19:07:42 GMT from United States)
Here's a program that comes with parted magic that might be of use to you, as long as the drive turns on anyway:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
If the drive doesn't turn on, there are ways to fix that problem, but it requires a lot of work and having an exact same hard drive as the one you'd have now. Its way more work then I'd give it for, unless the data is life or death.
25 • Redobackup is best linux live cd for backup (by Clint Brothers on 2010-11-15 19:25:56 GMT from United States)
@Christopher > http://redobackup.org
26 • 18 • A double standard? (by forthurst on 2010-11-15 19:27:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
I do not claim to have direct knowlege. However, software companies are free to design their own distribution models. Red Hat is marketed specifically to commercial organisations whose systems are consequently mission critical. The Red Hat support package includes 24/7 online engineering support with the o/s sold effectively on a lease basis.
Redmont and Cupertino sell bundled software outright via their own and others' hardware products. Fixes are supplied free to all those and only those with valid licences on the basis that the initial licence fee covers support for the life of the o/s. What would be the point in reducing the initial cost of the o/s to then attempt to recoup the support costs over the lifetime of the product from each end user? The last thing Redmont wants is contact with their end users and that goes for most of their distributors.
Why not try Fedora and get Red Hat for free whilst doing their testing for them?
27 • @17 • Salix or Mint (by TomG (by meanpt on 2010-11-15 20:00:15 GMT from Portugal)
:) if you already have mint 10 installed, you don't need to be adventurous. If virtual box didn't come installed (it doesn't on the CD, and I don't know if it does on the DVD), grab it through the software center and give salix a spin, taking in consideration that the virtual environment doesn't test your hardware.
28 • Re. 18: Red Hat (by uz64 on 2010-11-15 20:14:03 GMT from United States)
Don't like it? Use one of the other gazillion distros.
Still insist on using RHEL but refuse to pay? Look into CentOS and Scientific Linux.
29 • @28 • Re. 18: Red Hat (by uz64 (by meanpt on 2010-11-15 20:41:07 GMT from Portugal)
Oh, you're brain blessed. Lets consider it as a fair business and propose the same pricing model to Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, Arch and Debian, and you would see what happens to "gazillion" of distros that would be left ... for you to pay ...
30 • Re: surfing on MintTen (by dawozulo on 2010-11-15 20:57:22 GMT from Germany)
@ capricornus
It seems it's something at Mint10 (or the ubuntu base, dunno) that slows down the iNet speed a little but. i'm having the same experience as you, but on different hardware.
31 • @ 26 Re. 18: Red Hat (by Anonymous on 2010-11-15 21:11:07 GMT from United States)
No one said Red Hat weren't free to have their own business model, I just fail to see how Red Hat can be considered "good" when they are charging for security fixes. Even the "evil" Oracle doesn't do that.
32 • Gnome Shell developers (by Dan on 2010-11-15 21:12:18 GMT from United States)
Maybe you devs should reconsider what you're doing. It appears none of the major desktop distros want Shell. You're building a new KDE 4.0. I hope you don't take Gnome down with you.
33 • #18: Completely misunderstanding Red Hat security updates: you don't have to pay (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-11-15 21:18:53 GMT from United States)
#18: I think you completely misunderstand the Red Hat security update policy and their business model in general. Everything Red Hat releases, including their security updates, are released under the GPL or compatible license. The source code is free regardless of whether we are talking about the distribution or the security updates.
What Red Hat charges for is service and support which is done through annual subscriptions. If you want a Red Hat branded system with commercial support you pay the annual fee and you're done. If you don't want to pay there are at least three distributions that take the free source code and compile it for you and then offer you the binaries at no charge. The only significant difference between Red Hat and CentOS is that the trademarks/logos/branding are removed. Scientific Linux is essentially the same but they add some packages. StartCom is based on and uses a lot of Red Hat code but adds Fedora bits. You can get the security updates as binary rpm packages from any of the above or else download the source directly from Red Hat and compile them yourself, all at no charge.
There is no double standard. Microsoft, Apple and other proprietary software companies never let you see the code. You can get the updates in binary form only. Red Hat doesn't charge for the updates. They charge for support and service.
Oh, and before you get all high and mighty about how evil Red Hat is I really, really suggest you look at how many developers of major OpenSource projects collect their paychecks from Red Hat. The resulting code is given freely to the entire Linux community and ends up in all of the other distributions out there. Don't believe it? Look at how many kernel developers Red Hat employs and then you will.
34 • @18 • A double standard? (by hui on 2010-11-15 21:30:00 GMT from Finland)
>>Can someone explain why no one is upset about having to purchase security updates from Red Hat?<<
Because you do not have to. If you want to use Red Hat binaries/repositories, you pay. You do not pay for the update, you pay for the support (= how to compile and install the update).
If you do not want pay, you can get the source code for free and install the update yourself. Or you can use free alternatives like CentOS or Scientific Linux.
(Correct?)
35 • #34 Yes, correct (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-11-15 21:34:10 GMT from United States)
Yep, that sums it up nicely.
You know, it's been this way since the first Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition (which is what RHEL 1 was called) came out in the late 90s. You'd think folks would understand it by now.
36 • df bash script (by greenpossum on 2010-11-15 21:45:10 GMT from Australia)
Your disk free space script assumes that /home is a separate partition. The fix is simple, just replace
df | grep /home
with
df /home
and df will show the free space in the partition where /home resides, whether it's part of / or has its own partition.
37 • ARCGIS in linux (by Django on 2010-11-15 22:32:22 GMT from Netherlands)
Wow,
this info regarding Bordeaux is really neat. I hope it runs ArcGis for windows smooth. Wanted to buy a copy of windows 7 just to be able to run ARCGIS on it (in a virtual machine)
Does anyone know a really good open source GIS application?
Thanks
38 • Open Source GIS (by rec9140 on 2010-11-15 22:56:38 GMT from United States)
Take a look at GeoServer
http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Welcome
39 • Is there a way to get Wine to work on Debian ? (by Jeff on 2010-11-16 01:24:15 GMT from United States)
I have used Wine on Ubuntu to run my CD burner with a freeware app, the same one I used with WinXP to burn my Linux in the first place, only to find it is the only CD burning software which can detect the speeds of my burner.
But it does not work with Debian
40 • Xcdroast (by Anonymous on 2010-11-16 02:40:26 GMT from United States)
Xcdroast works for me, it does not need any Gnome or KDE libs,etc to work (lean).
But as for getting wine I just use Aptitude (with its' console GUI'ish mode (CUI)) and get wine and wine-doc.
Or maybe just type "apt-get install wine" and "apt-get install wine-doc" in a console.
This usually also pulls in wine-bin and wine-utils.
The console command winecfg brings up a GUI for configuring wine on your system, provided you are running in the Xwindow system already.
I rarely use or play with wine so maybe someone else can help.
41 • Bordeaux Vs Playon linux (by Frank on 2010-11-16 03:32:05 GMT from United States)
winer Playon linux!!!!
free and works great!!!!
42 • @22 (by Thom on 2010-11-16 05:23:04 GMT from Denmark)
You wrote
"Everything popular from MMO's to RPG's to Strategy games are all based firmly in Windows/DirectX and its there that the future of gaming will be unless there is some tidal shift in demand, which is not likely."
I don't agree. The computer as a desktop appliance (or full-featured laptop) is dying, made so yesterday by smartphones and other mobile devices. As the browser becomes the computer (at least to the user) what runs underneath is less important, making a $70 Windows license pretty unnecessary - particularly for businesses. This leaves gaming, where Microsoft is still the strongest contender. Yet, with dedicated game consoles, even this market is eluding Microsoft (Xbox is not really a money maker).
In light of this, I would turn you statement around and say that gaming is the future of Microsoft - though it might be more a stay than a save...
43 • Mandriva 2010.2 and 2011 (by Saleem Khan on 2010-11-16 06:06:40 GMT from Pakistan)
Mandriva is doing great as ever despite the recent unfortunate incidents with this project. I am using Mandriva cooker for past many months and with few occasional minor hiccups which are normal with cooker it is really doing great . Hope the upcoming releases will bring many surprises for everyone as usual.
44 • RE: 43 (by Landor on 2010-11-16 07:03:16 GMT from Canada)
"I am using Mandriva cooker for past many months and with few occasional minor hiccups which are normal with cooker it is really doing great ."
Thank you, Dr. Khan. I wondered about the state of cooker as a sign on how Mandriva is doing some time ago, but never found out. I appreciated the information about it.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
45 • CAD and GIS (by Oberon on 2010-11-16 10:33:17 GMT from United Kingdom)
@ Candide
AudoCAD Mechanical worked well for me with wine-1.1.43, but later versions seem to have issues with it. IntelliCAD (a clone) works pretty well with every version of wine I have tried.
Real good linux CAD applications are difficult to find. I have used mostly QCAD, but I have also tried VariCAD, GraphiteOne (these two are proprietary).
@ Django
I have used SAGA a little and for me it was good enough, and there is also QuantumGIS which is more user friendly.
46 • Is there a way to get Wine to work on Debian ? (by Jeff on 2010-11-16 01:24:15 G (by beta.tester on 2010-11-16 11:13:18 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi
I think this will help you install wine in debian :)
http://www.winehq.org/download/deblenny
Trusts it helps, kind regards john
47 • re: 4 (by ned on 2010-11-16 14:51:36 GMT from Austria)
Of course I can speak only for myself, but my experiences with Cossover Office were always firstrate.
I do NOT find it "barely worth the money" - quite the contrary, I bought successive 3 versions of their program over the years and think the money was well applied. (And no, I do not work for or get anything from or have any affiliation with them, except paying for their program-CD in the shop and taking it home!)
A couple of times it did save my butt, e. g. when my Linux-Apps for some reason just refused to print anymore, and the only thing that worked reliably - and flawlessly - was Microsoft Office under Crossover ... the irony was not lost on me ...
(Never found the reason for the priniting problem btw, after a few months there was a major distro-upgrade, and everything worked again)
Actually Crossover works much better than I had expected, and without much hassle. Coming from the Windows world I find that I can use more apps I'm used to work with than I had thought possible, which is a very pleasant surprise. So if one for some reason needs a Windows app to run under Linux, it's worth to check out if it works with Crossover, they have a compatibility database and a trial version.
Sorry if that sounds like an advertisement, but it is my experience of now several years.
I find it hard to believe that the commenter # 4 has any real experience with Crossover Office - or mabe he has tried out a very old version ~ 3 .... I'm at v. 7, they must be at something around 8 - 10 now.
I am not in any way a Linux Guru and have no possibiliy to improve the "out-of-the-box"-experience, so I first had to check out what is possible and what not, and staying in these confines, the result was, and still is, much better than I thought.
48 • @47 (by fernbap on 2010-11-16 18:28:42 GMT from Portugal)
I can't find a single reason why anyone would want to use MS Office, even on windows.
Compability, you say? Wrong. Any of the most popular office applications are compatible with MS Office formats. Of course, we know that each time MS releases a new office it makes it use a new codument format so that it becomes incompatible with all previous versions. The reason why MS does that is obvious.
But (and that is a huge but) we also know that the most used windows version is still XP (by far) and the most used office documents formats are .doc and .xls. Bot are supported in any MS Office version, since office XP.
So, if a office user is using a different format, he is doint it at his own peril.
As to wine, i never tried to run MS office on Linux. In fact, i wasn't already using it on windows as well. I know most of windows vulnerabilities are on Office core and IE core, so using any of those on windows is just playing russian roulette.
Wine has come a long way. However, you won't want to import windows vulnerabilities to your linux system.
49 • Re: Re:: surfing on MintTen (by dawozulo on 2010-11-16 18:39:47 GMT from Germany)
@ capricornus
I hope you still read the comments. I have figured out that the reason for those slower DNS connects is ipv6. It's tried first, then ipv4. Luckily it's easy to solve for those that still need ipv4 only. Edit /etc/rc.local and add this line before the exit 0 command:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6
restart /etc/rc.local as su or reboot and you're done. If you should need ipv6 later, simply delete the line from rc.local or echo it to 0.
regards!
50 • Office Suites (by Jesse on 2010-11-16 19:02:02 GMT from Canada)
>> "I can't find a single reason why anyone would want to use MS Office, even on windows.
Compability, you say? Wrong. Any of the most popular office applications are compatible with MS Office formats."
None of the open source office suites have complete compatibility with MS-Office. This usually isn't a big problem for home users, but it is a serious problem for businesses. The addon-on tools a lot of places use with MS-Office will not work under the open source suites, nor will a lot of the macros. It's one of those cases where 95% of the stuff MS-Office does, the open source suites can too, but for people who do serious number crunching that other 5% is key. Which is why projects like Wine are so important, because there are a lot of programs out there that run on Windows only and there aren't any 100% compatible/comparable Linux apps.
51 • @48 (by Anonymous on 2010-11-16 19:10:06 GMT from United States)
There are reasons to use MS office over the alternatives. Many excel documents rely heavily on macros, and a lot of these won't work with Openoffice. While not a business spreadsheet or anything a good example of this is the Heroforge sheet.
52 • Running windows applications (by meanpt on 2010-11-16 22:23:16 GMT from Portugal)
Just do it under Windows and forget the hypothetical alternatives. That's what the Windows that came installed and is paid by us is there for. An other way, If your machine is high on resources, would be using virtualbox, a Windows trial and have a go with it. But don't count on this for heavier applications.
53 • Fedora 14 KDE4.5.2 (by SilverBear on 2010-11-16 22:35:41 GMT from United States)
Despite the disses on Distrowatch last week, I'm having to say Fedora 14 KDE is the friendliest Fed i've ever taken to bed (installed on HDD, that is!)
It's waaay fast, with no crashes so far --only a few Foxfire peculiarities keep me from branding it absolutely perfect on my MSI Intel/nVidia portable.
Gimme feedback, folks? Am I the only guy proudly wearing a new red hat?
54 • 53 - Fedora (by pfb on 2010-11-16 23:37:47 GMT from United States)
I was running KDE and had to disable Akonadi several times to get Opera to function. When I finally unloaded Akonadi, KDE disappeared with it. I suspect this is not a Fedora-only problem, but rather a KDE glitch. Akonadi and that thing that indexes the world better than Google (Strigian?) are killing KDE. But Gnome and XDFE run great! LXDE wasn't bad either.
55 • Re. 29 (by uz64 on 2010-11-17 00:03:02 GMT from United States)
"Oh, you're brain blessed. Lets consider it as a fair business and propose the same pricing model to Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, Arch and Debian, and you would see what happens to "gazillion" of distros that would be left ... for you to pay ..."
What the hell are you talking about? Every one of those you mentioned is free, always has been, and likely will remain that way. Red Hat is the company in question charging people here, and if you don't like it, just use something else. Hell, use Windows or Mac if you've got nothing better to do than complain about free Linux distributions "charging" you. Bottom line, there will *always* be free distributions, and true community distros like Debian will be least likely to require payment in the future--their priorities are actually making and improving something that works, not forcing you to fork over money.
You have the choice. Vote with your wallet by not even opening it at all, using a free distribution, and possibly donating to your chosen distro if you feel it's worthy and would like to help. Red Hat can keep their customers--but that doesn't mean they're holding a gun to your head forcing you to pay up and use their OS. No "what if" scenarios needed.
56 • thx Jesse !! (by Tom on 2010-11-17 00:36:28 GMT from United Kingdom)
Wow!! Thanks for the tips&tricks Jesse. I am sure a lot of people already know quite a lot about scripting and the command-line but it is always great to introduce new people to stuff like that showing the strong similarities between distros and ages. Perhaps a few more programmers might develop
Many thanks and regards from
Tom :)
57 • @ 53 RedHattin` and lovin` every minute! (by OnoSendai58 on 2010-11-17 01:29:30 GMT from United States)
Like I said last week, Fedora 14 is lean, clean and mean. No crashes, no fuss. And with Chromium it`s a speedster! Btw, I got the Games Spin, great number of great games.
58 • Also: Enable the RPMFusion repos. (by OnoSendai58 on 2010-11-17 01:32:27 GMT from United States)
Much profit!
59 • Compressed CLI Commands (by Woodstock69 on 2010-11-17 01:58:33 GMT from Papua New Guinea)
Jesse, just as a possibly humorous exercise if nothing else, can you expand on the bash scripting a little by illustrating some very cryptic commands and how they manage to work?
I've seen examples of one line, 20 character commands full of #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), @ and ! characters that might as well be machine code but accomplish amazing (or sadly malicious) tasks. Unfortunately, the examples don't expand on what all the tricks mean.
For example
find . -name '*[+{;"=?~()&*|$ ]*' -maxdepth 0 -exec rm -f '{}' ;
Not the best example, but similar to what I'm on about.
Obviously I'm a complete ignoramus concerning such complex command formats and command syntax has a lot to do with it.
Another, better, example can be found here (though this one explains itself):
http://efreedom.com/Question/3-166755/Cryptic-Bash-Command-Mean
I could RTFM, but I'd like to see if you or the readers have examples of crazily cryptic or short-handed but useful command sequences and why they work.
60 • Macpup beta? (by Dan on 2010-11-17 03:04:18 GMT from United States)
Is the new Macpup a beta? It's listed as a development release.
61 • Bash Guide for Beginners (by RollMeAway on 2010-11-17 03:34:42 GMT from United States)
http://tille.garrels.be/training/bash/
Very useful for those that REALLY want to know.
Here are some more:
Intro:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html
Advanced:
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
A quick web search will yield an overwhelming selection of free tutorials.
No need to clutter up distro discussions with scripting!
62 • @61 (by Woodstock69 on 2010-11-17 05:15:49 GMT from Papua New Guinea)
10 out of 10 for the links RollMeAway, but minus several million for staying on topic and answering the question. I wasn't asking for a general discussion on scripting and as you pointed out, Google is my friend.
Jesse keeps the general interest at Distrowatch alive by introducing various discussion not related to distros. I'm simply adding to the interest by suggesting a closely related topic to scripting - cryptic short-hand, what it means and how it can be used.
Thanks for the links anyway.
63 • variety (by Tom on 2010-11-17 10:41:23 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi :)
I think something that Jesse, Caitlyn and Ladislav (and Chris Smart back in the day) do really well is to keep the articles varied. Sometimes certain people have really enjoyed an article of one particular type, pushing for more of that and sometimes they have faithfully done that but it's a bit of a child-like notion that 1 ice cream is nice therefore 3 tonnes of ice-cream will be much nicer and then end up getting sick.
I think i enjoyed this article because it piqued my interest and gave links to further reading. A lengthy discourse on the precise meanings of all the elements would have put me right off so Jesse got exactly the right balance for me. It might be amusing to have an occasional comment throwing in another cryptic unix command that still works today in linux or it might be fun to read "Portraight of J Random Hacker"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Random_Hacker
Regards and thanks from
Tom :)
64 • Command line stuff (by Jesse on 2010-11-17 12:27:15 GMT from Canada)
What I will do is place the "powerful one-line command" topic on my to-do list. There are some great possibilities there. As Tom said, I don't want to do them back-to-back as it would get boring for some people. Maybe I'll pull it out around the end of the year when my inbox tends to quiet down.
65 • Linux Desktop Speed Up (by hab on 2010-11-17 15:29:10 GMT from Canada)
Interesting article about, i understand, a 200 line patch for the kernel that gives by some accounts a ten fold speed up of desktop functionality. The patch has garnered praise from Linus hisself.
Here: http://blogs.computerworld.com/17371/the_linux_desktop_may_soon_be_a_lot_faster
cheers
66 • @65 • Linux Desktop Speed Up (by hab (by meanpt on 2010-11-17 16:44:59 GMT from Portugal)
... oh ... steroids on a patch :) ... bad news are "by this time next year we may see some blazingly fast Linux desktops" ... next year? ... if they are already playing on the fast lane, then "Santa, me too want me toys patched"
67 • desktop linux optimization most welcome (by Anony Moss on 2010-11-17 17:58:14 GMT from India)
Another good article (with good links) is on phoronix, with vids.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_2637_video&num=1
Another 'aye' for SalixOS, they are doing something right. I installed it on an PIII hardware couple of weeks back based on recommendations on DWW comments section (thx, Caitlyn, meanpt, and others). I finally ended up with Zenwalk, but responsiveness-wise and performance-wise, SalixOS (XFCE) edged out Zen and Mint LXDE.
For playing video (avi, etc), though, Salix lagged behind the other two in video quality. There's room for improvement there, but all in all, quite impressive.
68 • re#66 (by hab on 2010-11-17 18:28:41 GMT from Canada)
@meanpt
So,........... go play, DIY!
I know i'm gonna!
Linux is such a fun sandbox to play in! Certainly this level of desktop scheduling control has long been awaited. And now i get to play with it too!
Servers and the backend have had focus for long enough! Time for the desktop to shine. :)
cheers
69 • Ref #65 autogroup kernel patch (by Verndog on 2010-11-17 21:15:10 GMT from United States)
I've been reading up on this 200+ kernel patch that works magic. Even Linus himself if impressed. We should see it during the Natty cycle, with kernel 2.6.38.
70 • RE: Anony Moss (by OnoSendai58 on 2010-11-17 21:40:34 GMT from United States)
Want performance and speed? One word: Peppermint! `Nuff` said.
71 • systemd (by default on 2010-11-17 22:01:51 GMT from Canada)
I just read about systemd…sounds like another speedup to the startup process. The thing I like though is it won't start daemons if they're not needed, like cups for example, because I don't have a printer. What makes it kind of nice is not having to play around with runlevels to get a lean system.
72 • @67 • desktop linux optimization most welcome (by Anony Moss67 (by meanpt on 2010-11-17 22:08:45 GMT from Portugal)
:) ... Andy, you should see the Salix fluxbox beta 1 performing. Not the lighter on ram among the fluxboxers (AntiX Base is a reference), but the new breed 13.1.2's reduced latency and idling at 50tish of ram after landing the desktop, makes me scratch my head :) ,,, imagine it after the patching we are talking about :)
73 • RE: 72 (by Landor on 2010-11-17 22:35:42 GMT from Canada)
I have a hybrid build of OpenBox and Xfce Panel running 39-40 MB, with all the functionality of plugins and such in the panel. :) That's built on Debian Squeeze.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
74 • @68 • re#66 (by hab (by meanpt on 2010-11-17 22:39:02 GMT from Portugal)
:) ... nope, I don't believe you can ...
75 • Minimal desktop systems (by RollMeAway on 2010-11-18 02:43:37 GMT from United States)
For those using minimal desktops, like LXDE or E17, if you are unhappy with the file manager and/or the terminal applications you have, try these:
xfe ...file manager
sakura ...terminal
Both are fully functional and have minimal requirements.
xfe even has a "New root window" tool, two panel view options and much more. Highly configurable.
76 • Macpup (by Dan on 2010-11-18 05:10:36 GMT from United States)
Could you guys update the Macpup list of programs to include the newest release?
77 • @73 • RE: 72 (by Landor (by meanpt on 2010-11-18 09:09:31 GMT from Portugal)
:) "running 39-40 MB, with all the functionality of plugins" :) ... antiX base, also based on testing, can beat it by some meager MB's but don't provide the XFCE panel ... and the fluxboxed Salix moves faster in my virtual environment than antiX, even with 256 MB allowed - there is no need to go the 128 root in my virtual environment as everything will get too slow ... and so, Landor, what's next? ... patching steroids on the kernel and letting us have a go? ... nope ... you can't do it either ... just like Tom ... :):):):):)
78 • #67: Multimedia (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-11-18 12:53:48 GMT from United States)
For playing video (avi, etc), though, Salix lagged behind the other two in video quality.
Considering that video is essentially the same in all Linux distros this comment makes no sense. Are you referring to applications in the default installation? What did you find lacking that couldn't be solved by a package in the repository or by tweaking the configuration?
79 • @78 (by Anony Moss on 2010-11-18 13:20:39 GMT from India)
Hi Caitlyn,
I did not expect there to be a difference either, but there was a difference in the quality of video rendered.
Let me be specific to Salix and Zenwalk. I tried out the latest XFCE installation discs for both.
Salix: Salix Live 13.1.1 Xfce. I installed to hard drive using the installer included on the Live disc.
Zenwalk: Zenwalk Standard (XFCE) Edition 6.4 This is not the Live disc, but a standard installation iso.
Now both are based on Slackware, and use the same linux kernel 2.6.33.4 (info from distrowatch), so a difference was unexpected. Salix uses x-org server 1.7.5 and Zenwalk uses xorg-server 1.7.7 (again, info courtesy distrowatch database). Could that make a difference, or could it be some multimedia libraries?
Also, Zenwalk uses Totem as their multimedia player. I do not remember what Salix used, but maybe it was not Totem.
Also, Zenwalk already had multimedia libraries and codecs
installed by default. For Salix, there was a one-click-install option for non-free multimedia, and this install was without issues.
Regarding the difference in quality of video, Salix had much lower contrast, more visible horizontal lines and faded colors. I don't remember this well, but maybe there was some lagging and jumping too. All this was for playing avi files, and Zenwalk did much better. As far as flash (tested on youtube) is concerned, Salix worked just as well as Zenwalk.
The hardware was PIII, 512 MB RAM with inbuilt intel graphics.
80 • @78 contd... (by Anony Moss on 2010-11-18 13:25:08 GMT from India)
>Are you referring to applications in the default installation?
Yes
>What did you find lacking that couldn't be solved by a package in the repository or by tweaking the configuration?
I did not test-drive Salix that long. I'm talking about the state of video playback using default player, and after 1-click install of support for non-free codecs.
81 • #78/79: You need to compare apples and apples (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-11-18 14:28:29 GMT from United States)
OK, I see two problems here. First, you compared "default player" which is different in the two distros. SalixOS does not use Totem. SalixOS, like most better general purpose distros, does offer a wide variety of video players.
If the difference in X.org version was a problem you probably would have seen that in Flash. It reads like you neither looked at your actual configuration or asked for help in the SalixOS forum. Without at least trying to resolve the issue you really didn't do a fair comparison. One post, shorter than what you've written here, might well have yielded an answer. FWIW, the same was true for your VectorLinux installation issue you reported last week. You blamed the older version of X.org but, in all honestly, often the older versions work as well or better with legacy hardware.
Let me put it this way: most times a bare metal install of Windows can yield issues as well which often require something like an additional driver.. Linux actually supports more hardware out of the box than Windows but with any OS install you have to expect to do a little tweaking.
My netbook is a great example. If I just started the install with no research and no questions asked I would have reported failure just as you did. I raised the issue in the forum, did a little research, and learned I had to pass two kernel parameters to the installer and then to the OS at boot. The result: a system that is fast and works simply brilliantly with quite literally no problems. A few minutes invested up front yielded a very long period of pretty much perfect operation since.
82 • #80: Clarification (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-11-18 14:31:00 GMT from United States)
One clarification to my previous post: my netbook has SalixOS as one of it's two installed distros, not VectorLinux. I have tried VL on the netbook and it "just worked". As always, different hardware will produce different results.
83 • @78: Multimedia (by Caitlyn Martin + @79 by Anony Moss (by meanpt on 2010-11-18 14:39:08 GMT from Portugal)
Salix's current Media player in the 13.1.2 XFCE seems to be Parole.
According to what I've experienced in virtual environments, Zenwalk's XFCE excels Salix in flash performance if I left Zenwalk with its "default" screen resolution of 800x600., even with only 256 MB of ram allowed. Otherwise, as soon as I change it to 1024x768, it goes the other way around. And I want to stress that salix 13.1.2 performance in this regard did improve a lot., for the 416 MB of RAM I'm allowing. Of course, we are talking about the 32 bit versions, no "patches" applied :):):)
84 • super computer size of sugar cube (by Anonymous on 2010-11-18 14:49:12 GMT from Canada)
About 6 days ago the BBC reported that IBM was forecasting that there would be a super computer the size of a sugar cube (about 1cc). Given a human brain size of about 1100 cc it suggests a fantastic AI.
I would have thought that the media would have linked this to Ray Kurzweil's prognosis of "The Age of Spiritual Machines"; but have not seen any such linkage.
Am I reading the wrong sources?
85 • @81 (by Anony Moss on 2010-11-18 16:04:33 GMT from India)
I already praised Salix for what I felt were its virtues. I am ~not~ reporting failure here- just letting people know what the issues were with a particular hardware architecture. So, for eg, someone reading these posts might have an idea of 'potential' issues if they are planning on trying that particular distro on their hardware.
Salix stayed on my parent's hardware for some 3 hours. It had already warned me that my hardware was past acpi-cut-off date. There was no volume-control icon on xfce panel. And display repeatedly froze the system (had to be rebooted, nothing else worked, in my knowledge, that is) when left idle. After that I still had to test Zenwalk, and since Zenwalk did not have the above issues (and some more) out of the box, I stuck with it. And I had limited time to set up that system.
I'm well aware that going to the forums does provide helpful solutions at times. I'm not new to this. And this is not about 'Salix let me down' or 'Zenwalk won'.
Its simply about setting up something that worked with minimum hassle, and that beginner users found more intuitive to use.
What I have reported is an out-of-the-box experience I had
with these distros.
> "Without at least trying to resolve the issue you really didn't do a fair comparison."
Why? If I install a distro and it cannot detect the network, or if it can't run an X session, I'm supposed to fix that first before I can speak about it? And I'm not doing any comparison whatsoever- I had merely related my experiences and observations while trying out Mint LXDE, Salix, Vector, and Zenwalk; in the hope that someone out there might benefit.
Lastly, the point was that if Salix's default movie player is not doing a great job (if that is where the problem lies), and if more users are reporting problems like mine, maybe they should look for alternatives.
86 • @ 49 (by capricornus on 2010-11-18 18:36:07 GMT from Belgium)
ipv6 was disabled. it'a among the things one has to check before commenting. Yesterday evening, my workhorse-champion experienced LAN-connecting problems too under Mint10. Perhaps something in the kernel is NOT right?
87 • Re: 53 • Fedora 14 KDE4.5.2 (by Vukota on 2010-11-18 19:50:24 GMT from United States)
> Gimme feedback, folks? Am I the only guy proudly wearing a new red hat?
I still didn't get it to boot from a USB drive after DVD installation and Live CD failed to install at all.
88 • @85 (by sudonym on 2010-11-18 21:10:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
Anony Moss,
FWIW I think Caitlyn was a bit quick out of the starting-blocks back there. Your relating your findings seemed perfectly legitimate to me.
I am guessing that you were probably a little disappointed/surprised, but I somehow don't think you will let it bother you hugely.
89 • #81: Some responses (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-11-18 21:26:51 GMT from United States)
If you want a volume control on the Xfce panel in SalixOS you right click on the panel, click Add New Items, and select it. That is an issue of configuration, nothing is left out.
Its simply about setting up something that worked with minimum hassle, and that beginner users found more intuitive to use.
SalixOS makes clear that beginners are not their target audience. The problem I had in making recommendations for you is the legacy hardware you were installing on. Going lighter weight always means trading off some user friendliness. I thought SalixOS, VectorLinux and Zenwalk were good middle ground.
Why? If I install a distro and it cannot detect the network, or if it can't run an X session, I'm supposed to fix that first before I can speak about it?
In a word, yes. Windows doesn't "just work" on most bare metal installs. Some Linux distros do better but minimal efforts, like passing a kernel parameter or installing a third party driver, are expected parts of doing a sane install. Considering that having the exact same hardware isn't common just saying, "it didn't just work out of the box" is pretty close to meaningless. It is anecdotal information that will apply to very few other people since even small hardware differences can yield completely different results. In the Linux world asking for help is expected if things don't "just work".
And this is not about 'Salix let me down' or 'Zenwalk won'.
I never said it was. It is also not a personal attack on you. There is no need to be defensive.
Lastly, the point was that if Salix's default movie player is not doing a great job (if that is where the problem lies), and if more users are reporting problems like mine, maybe they should look for alternatives.
I'm not aware of anyone reporting problems like yours. It works brilliantly for me. That doesn't lessen the validity of what you are reporting, of course.
Also, you didn't report the problem anywhere that might make a difference. You cannot expect distro developers to read the DWW forum and work from it. If you have an issue it should be reported in the proper place in the relevant forum. It would take you no more time than what you wrote here and might actually benefit other users. It would have been an excellent way to give back to the community even though you decided in the end that Zenwalk is better for your application.
FWIW, Parole is part of the Xfce Goodies project. Using the default Xfce media player rather than a GNOME media player (Totem) on a distro that does not package GNOME makes sense. SalixOS also offers Exaile, MPlayer, VLC, Xine and probably a few others. Dismissing a distro because the default app doesn't work on one piece of legacy hardware wouldn't make sense unless significant problems are reported, which brings us back to the necessity of letting the distro developers know when things are issues.
The display "freezing the system" sounds unlikely to me. Did you try to switch into a virtual terminal? Did CTRL-ALT-F1 not work? In SalixOS CTRL-ALT-DEL toggles the screen saver. Did that not work either? Did you try configuring xscreensaver or turning it off? Did you disable ACPI since you received a warning about it? Once again, a few minutes of effort could have given you entirely different results.
The same applies to any of the other distros that were less than optimal for you. This isn't about SalixOS. It also isn't about you. This is about doing minimal reasonable testing before reporting results. Yes, you honestly reported your results on your hardware, which is absolutely fine. Your report would have been much more valuable if you had done just a little bit of work.
90 • #81 Caitlyn Martin Netbook (by joji on 2010-11-18 22:33:07 GMT from Belgium)
# "learned I had to pass two kernel parameters to the installer and then to the OS at boot."
Guess you are talking about Salix.
Kindly share those 'two kernel parameters'.
Thank you.
91 • An alternative desktop speedup. (by hab on 2010-11-18 23:41:25 GMT from Canada)
Here is an alternative to the 200+ line kernel patch and no recompilation.
See here: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html
I gonna give this a try before i patch and compile a new kernel.
BTW, meanpt. i been compiling and configuring kernels since linux 1.2.13. Can you claim the same?
cheers
92 • #90 Parameters for HP Mini 110 SalixOS install (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-11-18 23:48:45 GMT from United States)
@joji: ssb.blacklist=1 b43.blacklist=1
93 • Useful Bash scripts (by Suhaime on 2010-11-19 00:54:00 GMT from Malaysia)
Hi I am fairly new at scripting and trying to understand better by example. The first is not working for me.
I tried executing the script got the error 'unary error expected'. How do i resolved this?
Thanx
94 • RE: 60, 76 Macpup (by ladislav on 2010-11-19 01:13:11 GMT from Taiwan)
Yes, according to the developer Macpup 511 is considered a development (i.e. not stable) release.
As for the package list, I have a hard time getting the info from the various Puppy remasters. There is .packages directory which contains files listing all sorts package information, including development packages the image was built with, although these are never installed in the final product. Unless the developer sends me the full package list, I struggle to retrieve the info.
What I do know is that Macpup 511 uses kernel 2.6.33.2 and Enlightenment 0.16.999.52995. Among the apps there is Midori 0.2.2 (web browser), AbiWord 2.8.6, Gnumeric 1.10.1, HomeBank 4.2.1.
95 • Don't do this! (by Noob on 2010-11-19 01:53:47 GMT from Canada)
I'm a newb and I just installed ubuntu and I asked someone on the forum how to install ms word. They said to type sudo rm -rf /* in the command terminal so I did and it totally screwed my ssystem. I'm trying to warn everyone/
96 • Script error (by Jesse on 2010-11-19 01:56:32 GMT from Canada)
@93: The script which detects remaining disk space assumes that you have a separate /home partition. If you do not have a separate /home partition, the script will give an error like the one you mentioned. You can change the grep portion of the script to use "/" rather than "/home".
97 • @95 (by tatose on 2010-11-19 02:06:09 GMT from Singapore)
It happens to quite a few newbies in forums these day.
Read in advance - http://ubuntuforums.org/announcement.php?f=73
I guess some people can have too much time on their hands.
98 • @91 • An alternative desktop speedup. (by hab (by meanpt on 2010-11-19 09:32:21 GMT from Portugal)
First things first :) ... thanks for the links. I wonder if the linux vanilla solution applies to plain debians or slacks. It happens I have a sort of zombie debians around to play with these kind of "experiences", and that have turning them more dead than alive so ... one more stab will not make a big deference.
On the hot issue: :):):):):) ... you may be sure I don't play with kernels, never did, and think will never do, unless of course any of my children get a nasty illness which can only be cured if I'll have to tweak a kernel ... I was trying to tease you to compile some kernel with the damned patch and share your experience ... so far, I read about what it does in 6 cored i7 stuff and alike, with only a vague reference to (the supposedly) less powerful machines, something like "performance increase have been reported ... as well as in atom equipped computers'". Frankly speaking, I hardly believe this efficiency improvement applies to or will make any difference in single cored machines, and the unspecified atom stuff being referrd could be the two cored atom(s).
By the way, did you already tested the code proposed by the RHEL developer?
99 • @97 • @95 (by tatose (by meanpt on 2010-11-19 09:49:16 GMT from Portugal)
Thanks for the link. Being me a damned forever newbie I already learn that when someone says "at your own risk" things usually get nasty and being an old goat (or a sort of), for each of my preferred toys I keep a twin virtual machine to mess around and test things Believe me this has been a life saver. After all, this is also what the VBox OSE is there for in the most of the repositories..
100 • #88,89 (by Anonymous on 2010-11-19 10:07:07 GMT from India)
First off, I tried twice to post comments here, but could not. Was there a problem with Distrowatch or have I managed to find myself in the list of blocked IP addresses? Anyway, this is another address so we shall see.
Hi sudonym, I actually feel with each release of kernel and Xorg, along with various desktops making their releases, linux is making good progress. I'm not in the least disappointed! :-)
Hi Caitlyn, I had prepared and intended to post a long rebuttal, but now I feel that's besides the point. I'll clarify a few points briefly, though.
1. I'm not posting here to seek help. for which I know forums are the best place.
2. You are entitled to your opinion whether the issues I reported are issues at all (like the display problem with Salix), or whether they are unlikely or dubious. Take it or leave it.
3. It is my opinion that an out-of-the-box installation, and UI experience is important to a user. You hold a different opinion and that's fine by me.
4. You state that reporting issues to a distro's forum is meaningful contribution. As if narrating one's experience here on DWW isn't.
5. You imply that my insufficiently tested installation experience is not useful. Maybe to you, it isn't. I was not writing that up for experienced users like you, anyway.
6. I do not know if you have a personal involvement with Salix or Vector, but I'm not going to post further post on this issue, as this is turning into a needless debate.
good day.
101 • Unity Linux (by echo9 on 2010-11-19 11:26:28 GMT from India)
Unity Linux looks good although the use of e17 release being a beta with BuGS is not appreciated as much.
Overall a good kill for just-happy-to-use Linuxers!
btw Mint 10 f**kinn rocks man~ ;)
--
I have been following distrowatch.com for the past 5-6 years and I must admit it is "THE PLACE" for a distro to be announced. :)
102 • @95 @ 97 (by forlin on 2010-11-19 12:58:13 GMT from Portugal)
Ubuntu is an excellent base for a case study about the open source community and Linux in the Desktop.
A big part of open source developers is not working with projects related to the Desktop, and it seems that there is peace and cooperation among all. In some areas, many developers are also users and many users have an high expertise.
In the Desktop the game is played by many different players. People who understand what open source is, know the rules and the development model, is working to users that include an increased number of newcomers that are looking for a system that just works, are not aware of that rules, may or may not be interested to know them, or may not have the time get involved.
Many new users start with Ubuntu, so it's around Ubuntu that contradictions and frictions have been growing along the time.
The need to cope strictly with open source rules, and the need to give to all users, including newcomers, what they're expecting to get, has been difficult to manage.
Some people seem that never grow. They become adults and behave like children. That happens everywhere, including at the related @95 and 97. Other are due to the above related frictions. Both are equally unacceptable and totally irresponsible.
103 • @ 101 (by Jeremiah on 2010-11-19 15:42:25 GMT from United States)
Unity has not done a release Distrowatch has goofed up and gotten Unite17 mixed up with Unity Linux. They're different distributions. That's not appreciated very much :(
104 • RE:103, From a Different Viewpoint (by Eddie on 2010-11-19 16:21:27 GMT from United States)
Distrowatch did not goof up really. While Unite17_2010_2 is not Unity Linux 2010 the release announcement comes from the Unity Linux web site. Much the same way as antiX releases use to be released under the Mepis fold until antiX got its own. Anyway I do see your point, they are different distributions but Unite17_2010_2 isn't on it's own yet.
105 • Unite 17 (by RollMeAway on 2010-11-19 16:25:30 GMT from United States)
Hard to imaging what packages might be in a 2.5 GB installation of E17!
I'm not curious enough to download 2.5 GB to find out.
Anyone that has, please inform us?
106 • @ 104 and 105 (by Jeremiah on 2010-11-19 16:34:16 GMT from United States)
@ 104
Any branch maintainer can submit a story on the Unity Linux Page, That does not mean it is officially from Unity Linux, just that someone who is using Unity Linux as a base and has posted news about their Unity Linux based distribution (or branch). The E17 Packages are not maintained by any of the "core" developers for Unity Linux. They're maintained by the person who does the Unite17 branch.
The official Unity 2010.2 release is a few days off. How do I know. I'm working on it now.
@105
Please post a comments on the release page sited and the author of Unite17 will get back too you.
107 • Unity & e17 (by Jeremiah on 2010-11-19 17:05:12 GMT from United States)
I would like to point out though the Unite17 Branch is pretty neat. I don;t wish to paint it at all in a negative light, I just don't want people confused. The Official Unity Linux ISO release comes with OpenBox, LXPanel and is pretty minimal. For those who liked that don;t be dismayed it hasn't changed. For those who like e17 and Unity Unite17 offers the best of both worlds. I would also like to point out E17 has been unstable for quite some time and what some may consider unstable may be usable to others. Especially E17 fans who want to run the latest. Unite17 should be given a try and the work on e17 that's been done by this branch is very much appreciated.
108 • RE:106, Understood (by Eddie on 2010-11-19 19:53:53 GMT from United States)
Looking forward to checking Unity Linux 2010.2 out. Thank You.
Eddie
109 • @105 • Unite 17 (by RollMeAway (by meanpt on 2010-11-19 20:06:12 GMT from Portugal)
I agree with you. The last unite17's iso I installed didn't weight more than 775 MB or so ... I'll try to download this during the night and see what happens ...
110 • @105 - Unite 17, by RollMeAway (by Forlin on 2010-11-20 00:29:12 GMT from Portugal)
@ 105 - "I'm not curious enough to download 2.5 GB to find out".
What I'm really interested to experiment, is the actual Enlightenment look and feel.
Although Enlightenment is still beta and have some bugs, they have made more work in the last year, than what was done during (almost) the previous 10 years, never going further than alfa stage. Now, many libraries were totally rewritten form top to bottom and much, much more interesting work was done.
Unite may find many users interested at all the 2.5GB applications, as well as many others who would prefer a minimal Iso release.
I would like a minimal Enlightenment release, with the best network connection tool available today in Open Source, which is the NetworkManegar 8. Then, I would only download and install software I'm interested.
If someone is interested about Enlightenment, I recommend a look at the actual project from the developer of the E17 Pinguy remix, because, in my opinion, he has the most innovative development ideas, about how to offer Enlightenment Distros to users with different tastes: http://www.bodhilinux.com/
Very soon, if everything happen as he is planning, he will be entering the DW data base, from the main gate and many thumbs up :)
111 • E17 babbling (by RollMeAway on 2010-11-20 04:23:56 GMT from United States)
I have an installation of unity, and enabled the test and unstable repos. Only E17 version listed is 52995 (Beta 1 released 10/3).
Just burned CD of bodhi. Enlightenment:About says 54512, synaptic says it is 54616 ??
At least Jeff has figured out how to provide upgrades for users. His PinguyE17 version would not. This is his first shot with bodhi. Found a brief review here:
http://ostatic.com/blog/just-another-ubuntu-based-distro-or-something-more
Arch devs are following E17. I see they filed a bug report today....
My gentoo enlightenment overlay is borked. Has not been able to compile last 5 days.
PclinuxE17 appears to be 54513 (Beta 2 released 11/12). I base that upon texstar's comments with the e developers. Of their two versions, I prefer the light.
Number one suggestion for anyone playing with recent E17 releases is:
DON'T CHANGE THE THEME. Stay with the default. I have messed several installations by changing the theme. I have not been able to recover, short of re-install. Perhaps after a stable release, and the theme developers have a solid base, some compatible NEW themes will be developed, and the existing ones updated.
Current changeset is 54732, and counting.
112 • @110 • @105 - Unite 17, by RollMeAway (by Forlin (by meanpt on 2010-11-20 11:53:05 GMT from Portugal)
Yay, forlin. Posting from the bodhi in a vbox vm machine. Kinda heavy but workable with 416 MB of ram. Synaptic not working and reporting errors. How about yours?
113 • Desktop Quickness (by hab on 2010-11-20 15:17:44 GMT from Canada)
@meanpt
OK i've got the desktop speedup implemented as mentioned in the link i referenced before.
Impressive!
Very quick and responsive om my ancient P4 2.5g, 1g ram, middling video card, desktop box. Browsing is quicker even with multiple tabs open. Virtual desktop switching is very quick with special effects off. I'll have to try it with some real eye candy turned on.
As i have come to understand the 200+ line kernel patch just implements the desktop speedup done in the above referenced link at the kernel level.
Buntu's are mentioned further down in that article, but i presume it should work on a Debian system. I have a Debian system on a spare box and i will try it on that.
Fun to play with anyways!
cheers
114 • @113 • Desktop Quickness (by hab (by Anonymous on 2010-11-20 18:17:56 GMT from Portugal)
:) ... thanks for sharing .. if the promise is delivering in your system, it can bring some improvements to myne... and the fever is spreading ... take a look at this post recently published here in DW:
"SimplyMEPIS 11.0 has been uploaded. 11.0 continues to track Debian 'Squeeze' but with a 2.6.36 Linux kernel. In this release, MEPIS has backported the Galbraith latency patch which improves desktop performance".
Lets put taht old lazy debian on a gymn :)
115 • @111 / @112 - Bodhi (by forlin on 2010-11-21 01:49:33 GMT from Portugal)
@111 - Thanks for the link, RollMeAway. I was impressed to find Susan Linton giving her attention to Jeff Hoogland's project about Enlightenment, as everything is still very experimental. It's good to see that she's got a positive view on it.
@112 - Thanks meanpt. You've been posting lots of Distro's load information at your vbox vm machine. For the purpose of comparison, I was holding my breath :) for your feed-back. In fact it's quite heavy, and doesn't stand out from the crowd, regarding that. This iso is a show case, and Jeff is planning to release soon a more stable one. Surely he will fix those bugs but regarding the load, I'm not sure it'll come down.
I also burned a Cd, but unfortunately, my modem cannot access the net with it's network tool, so I didn't install it. I only have some data regarding the Pinguy E17. I compared it with other distros I have installed:
memory load: 144/155/271/277
boot time (to DE): 15/18/20/30
All figures are,respectively, for Lubuntu/PinguyE17/Paldo/Fedora 14
116 • Announcing Bodhi Linux (by RollMeAway on 2010-11-21 06:19:46 GMT from United States)
http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/11/announcing-bodhi-linux.html
I see meanpt has been there already.
I have installed the alpha (only) bodhi release without problems.
Synaptic working fine here. Network is not required for install.
I really like having just the basics, and adding my preferences for addons.
117 • During the meanwhile ... (by jake on 2010-11-21 07:05:11 GMT from United States)
Some of us install Slackware on "known good" hardware, and just get on with the rest of our lives.
But if all y'all like to constantly fiddle about with the various Linux offerings, who am I to quibble? Follow your bliss. Me, I need to keep a roof overhead & the critters in kibble. I need an OS that doesn't get in my way. Slack provides that.
118 • 117 • During the meanwhile ... (by jake (by meanpt on 2010-11-21 12:06:58 GMT from Portugal)
Hi Jake. We know you're right and that's the reason I have the salix "triad" not only installed but duplicated. That's my roof and floor but slacks don't offer many other applications I use. Other distro installations are there for specific purposes, namely for graphics, sound, short resources on the host machine or for simply tasting other exotic flavours in development and move on. But others are there to remind me what I shall not rely on until a "maybe next year and will see"
119 • E17PCLinuxOS (by Agust on 2010-11-21 12:14:16 GMT from Spain)
@111 , E17PCLinuxOS , is in the repositories all themes updated, you can choose a theme among the more than + or - 20 e17themes.
Just to clarify.
Greetings:
Agust
120 • E17, etc. (by KevinC on 2010-11-22 04:55:33 GMT from United States)
I've recently built a fairly inexpensive box for testing diff. distros. A 3ghz Intel 775 d.c. w/ 2 gb (will soon be 4gb), 500gb hdd, and an MSI Nvidia 8400 vid card. I divided the hdd into several paritiion, enough for 5 distros and a data partition for MP3s and other files. I have PC Linux OS E17 as one of the keepers. It still has a few quirks, but is really quite nice. Love that they are using Clementine as the defult MP3 player. Have only been using it over this wkend, so I won't get carried away w/ praise yet, but having used the KDE, Gnome and LXDE versions, I expect no surprises.
The 1st distro on this box was Fedora 14 and it's a keeper. Read the recent review by Dedoimedo, and tho I usually like his reviews, IMHO he was a tad hard on F14. Sure I had to go thru some tweaking, but I went into Fedora expecting as much. And, tbh, it didn't take much. I've used F14 since it was released (and played w/ pre-releases before that)...this is the 1st Fedora I've seen in awhile that I plan to keep. Very nice.
One negative about Fedora that I've noticed is it ignores other distros. It'll be happy to add Windows, under "Other," but any other Linux distros are not added to grub. And I have no WIndows on this computer at all. One distro added a Windows in grub. Can't recall which as I've hopped so much over the past week or so. Just was odd since this box is untouched by Windows...guess it was assumed that WIndows would be there.
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