 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 397, 21 March 2011 |
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Welcome to this year's 12th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Starting this week's newsletter is a review of openSUSE 11.4, a brand-new release of one of the world's oldest and most respected Linux distributions. Has the extended development cycle helped the project to deliver a better product? Read on to find out. In the news section, FreeBSD switches to "bsdinstall" as the default system installer, OpenBSD opens pre-orders for official media of the forthcoming version 4.9, Debian launched a Debian Derivatives Exchange project, and BackTrack presents ideas for an upcoming release scheduled for May. Also in this issue, PC-BSD attempts to expand its user base by adding additional desktop environments in version 9 and Ubuntu publishes a release schedule for version 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot". There is more, including an update on the post-earthquake situation of the Japanese open-source development community and a round-up of distribution project proposals for this year's Google Summer of Code. Happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (48MB) and MP3 (41MB) formats
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
openSUSE 11.4: greeting the lizard king
 The arrival of openSUSE 11.4 is the first release of 2011 to really get me excited. I see the project as an under-appreciated gem of the Linux community and, while bloggers go on about the user interface changes in the latest Ubuntu alpha or the new technology coming to Fedora, people tend to be quiet about new openSUSE releases. Which is too bad, really, because I think openSUSE consistently puts forward well engineered releases with cutting-edge software, backed by one of the most powerful configuration tools available. It's been about eight months since we saw 11.3 and I was curious to see what the developers had to offer.
The openSUSE website is one of the more attractive in the Linux community. The designers have done a good job of making things easy to find and large signs direct traffic to the download page, news, help forums and documentation. The site mentions some new features available in version 11.4. Front and centre we have LibreOffice replacing OpenOffice. KDE 4.6 and Firefox 4 (beta) also make appearances. For fans of GNOME, openSUSE includes the GNOME Shell. Less obvious changes include improved package management code for faster synchronization with the project's repositories and Broadcom wireless drivers. There are a few different ways to get openSUSE. There's a full installation DVD image available which comes with both desktop and server software. We can also choose between a GNOME or KDE live CD and there is a network install option. Each of these editions is available in either 32- or 64-bit flavours. For my trial I downloaded the 32-bit KDE live disc.
openSUSE 11.4 - showing off the new Firefox and LibreOffice
(full image size: 230kB, resolution 1366x768 pixels)
Live boot and system install
The KDE live disc weighs in at 700 MB, filling the CD. Booting from the disc brings up a menu giving us the choice to launch a live desktop session, run the installer, check the installation media or perform a memory test. Self-checking media seems to be rare these days and it's nice to see the feature included. Taking the live desktop option boots us into KDE 4.6 and pops up a welcome dialogue. The welcome screen gives some basic information on the openSUSE project and provides links to where users can get help or learn about the KDE environment. Closing the welcome window shows us a a collection of icons to launch Firefox, run the system installer, open LibreOffice and get on-line help. The icons are bright and attractive and the background is a colour I can best describe as steel green. At the bottom of the screen we find the application menu, task switcher and system tray.
Installing openSUSE is handled by YaST 2, a powerful tool that does a fine job of balancing user-friendliness with power. We start off by choosing our preferred language, confirming our keyboard layout and we're shown the distro's license. The next screen gets us to set the current date & time and pick our time zone. Next up is disk partitioning and YaST shows off a bit here. For new-comers to Linux, YaST offers a guided option that will guess what our partition layout should be, setting up a system partition, /home and swap space. Once we've been given the suggested layout we can then choose to further customize our partitions if we wish. We also have the option to set up partitions manually from the start, and openSUSE makes this easy.There are a lot of options here for different types of partitions, mount points and file systems, but they are presented in a clean manner and with sane defaults.
I think it's interesting to note that openSUSE supports a wide range of file systems and layouts, including Btrfs and logical volume management. With partitioning done we're asked to create a regular user account. The last screen shows us a list of actions YaST will perform (partitioning, location of the boot loader, and basic configuration). We're given the option to change these settings or confirm them and continue with the installation. In my case I found that YaST wanted to place GRUB on my openSUSE partition, rather than use the disk's MBR as most distributions do by the default. On my machines the entire install process took about twenty minutes and, when it was complete, I was prompted to reboot the machine.
KDE desktop first impressions
Booting into openSUSE the first time brings up a graphical display which tells us the system is going through its automatic configuration. This includes downloading some packages from the net and the whole process took around five minutes on my test machines. Most of the configuration process can't be skipped, but the downloading can, should you find yourself on a slow connection. Moving past the configuration steps, we're presented with a graphical login screen. The KDE edition of openSUSE comes with IceWM, a light window manager. This gives us an alternative environment for low-resource machines or a backup in case KDE becomes corrupted.
Logging into the KDE 4.6 desktop presents us with the same layout, theme and icons as the live disc. The first thing to grab my attention was the red Network Manager icon in the system tray which, when clicked on, told me the system couldn't find a network connection. However, opening a web browser showed I was, in fact, on-line. On my machines desktop effects were enabled by default. Nothing too flashy, just a few tricks to make the environment feel more dynamic. The latest version of KDE improves on some features, especially with activities. For those who haven't used them before, KDE activities are a bit like virtual desktops. We can create a new activity via the KDE cashew nut in the corner of the desktop, arrange our desktop with the icons and widgets we want and the desktop environment remembers that layout. We can then make other activities (with different layouts, backgrounds and widgets) and quickly switch between them. It's like having virtual desktops that are laid out for specific tasks. While previous versions of KDE had activities too, I think 4.6 is the first release to make using the feature intuitive and easy.
While I'm on the topic of KDE I'd like to stop talking about openSUSE specifically for a moment and mention a common annoyance I've been running into of late. Having my windows maximize when I move them to the top of the screen strikes me as being very counter-intuitive. If I'm already dragging a window around by its title bar it means my mouse pointer is mere centimetres (inches) away from the maximize button. Should I wish to maximize the window, I would click on the obvious button to do so. When I drag windows to the top or sides of the screen it is to get them out of the way. Having the window grow to take over the entire screen when I move it to an edge is always the exact opposite effect from what I want to have happen. Fortunately, as with almost every aspect of KDE, there is an easy way to turn off this behaviour, but I do wish they wouldn't make it a default setting.
openSUSE 11.4 - welcome to openSUSE
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Software and package management
The distribution comes with a good collection of up-to-date software. The system installs 3 GB of data on the hard drive, putting lots of useful items on the application menu. We're treated to Firefox 4 (beta), KMail, KTorrent and Choqok (a micro-blogging client). The GIMP is included, as is the ExpoBlending photo manipulation tool and LibreOffice 3.3.1. I found that trying to launch ExpoBlending brought up an error message telling me that the program was missing a dependency and the application closed. (I later downloaded the required dependency from openSUSE's repositories and ExpoBlending worked fine from then on.) Though openSUSE isn't the first distro to include LibreOffice it may be the first of the big-name projects to include the office suite in a stable release. Also on the menu we find a disc burner, document viewer and personal organizer.
We have Amarok for playing music and the Kaffeine multimedia player. There's a remote desktop client, a backup tool and the Smolt system profiler. The developers have included handy accessibility tools, a download manager and certificate and encryption utilities. For managing the operating system we're treated to YaST (more on that in a bit) and the KDE System Settings panel. On a default install neither Java nor the GNU Compiler Collection is available out of the box, but can be found in the repositories. Likewise Flash and popular multimedia codecs are not included in the default install. The openSUSE project does make it easy to add these extras -- trying to open mp3 files, for example, will bring up a prompt asking if we'd like to add the required repository and software and we're given a link to openSUSE's documentation on codecs and why some aren't included in the default install. Underneath it all sits the 2.6.37 Linux kernel.
Package management and, in fact, system management in general is handled by YaST. The YaST system administration tool gives the user easy access to many aspects of the operating system, including managing user accounts and handling software & repositories. YaST makes dealing with backups, disks, printers, firewalls and the AppArmor security utilities relatively painless. To be honest, much of YaST isn't all that attractive. It has a sort of grey seriousness about it that, when combined with the many options presented in most components, suggests a strong preference for function over form. Though the mountain of options may take some getting used to, I found YaST to be a capable and stable tool. While the package manager component in particular doesn't look to be designed with novice users in mind, I found that it worked well enough. For people who prefer to put a more friendly face on their package manager, openSUSE includes KPackageKit. This front-end takes a more user-friendly approach with software broken into intuitive categories and most of the extra options hidden or removed. Unfortunately I found that KPackageKit wasn't stable and would occasionally crash or otherwise fail to complete tasks.
When software updates are available for openSUSE a small green and silver icon appears in the system tray. This seems an odd choice since most other distributions use red or yellow to indicate new updates and green to show the system is already up to date. However, a green indicator is better than none. While I usually used YaST for package management and adding repositories, clicking on the available updates notification brings up KPackageKit. The first time I tried to use KPackageKit to install updates I was prompted for my password, the update process appeared to kick off and then aborted before anything downloaded. No error message was shown. I came back to KPackageKit later and successfully performed an update, so YMMV. I found that going into YaST and grabbing updated software from there worked properly and consistently.
On the subject of updates, the openSUSE project aims to put out a new release about once every eight months with a support cycle lasting two releases, plus two months. This means openSUSE-11.4 should be supported for about eighteen months, finishing its cycle around September 2012. Also in regards to packages, when we're working from the command line, trying to run a program which isn't installed prompts us to run an application called "cnf", which will check to see if what we typed matches any packages in the distro's repositories. If a match is found we're provided with the command line to run to install the missing package.
openSUSE 11.4 - YaST and KDE's system settings
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Hardware support
While testing openSUSE I ran the distribution on two machines, a generic desktop box (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, NVIDIA video card) and my HP laptop (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB of RAM, Intel video card). On the laptop openSUSE performed well. My screen was set the maximum resolution, sound worked out of the box and my touchpad worked as expected. However, my Intel wireless card did not work. On the desktop machine openSUSE performed very well with video and audio working out of the box. On both machines performance was good and the desktop responsive. Booting was a little slower than I would expect from Fedora or Ubuntu, but not by a lot.
When running openSUSE in a virtual machine I found that performance was a little sluggish at first as the distro enables desktop effects by default. Once visual effects were turned off, performance in the virtual environment was good. I was curious to see how the distro would function with lower resources and found that openSUSE worked smoothly with as little as 512 MB of memory. It is possible to install openSUSE and run KDE with 256 MB of RAM, but responsiveness degrades to the point I wouldn't recommend trying it. In fact the system installer warns us against installing the distribution on machines with less than 1GB of RAM.
The operating system runs a mail server and secure shell on a default install. However, the developers have also seen fit to put a firewall in place and it keeps ports closed by default. I'm not sure if this combination of running network services and blocking access to them is a sign of caution or the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Conclusions
Quite often I find the saying "familiarity breeds contempt" to be accurate. With some projects I find the more I use them the more I find bugs or design choices I don't like. The latest release from openSUSE left me with the opposite impression -- the more I used the distribution the more I enjoyed it. Though the installer and boot processes were a little slow and I found it desirable to disable desktop effects and workspace shortcuts, the more I used openSUSE, the more I grew to like it. The distribution is well engineered, mixing cutting-edge software with polish and stability to produce a combination rarely found in other projects.
The new KDE environment is well put together, the documentation is clear and I found the system balanced - being friendly with staying out of the way. The developers have squeezed a lot of software onto the CD and I was able to perform most tasks without trips to the repositories. The YaST configuration tool is still one of the best in the open-source world and performance was good. Personally I'd like to see openSUSE with a slightly longer support cycle, but the distro is in the same league as Fedora and Ubuntu in this aspect. My only serious complaint was with the instability of KPackageKit and I was able to work around that using YaST. I'm of the opinion it will be hard to beat the openSUSE experience in 2011.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
FreeBSD switches to "bsdinstall", OpenBSD announces 4.9, Debian launches DEX, BackTrack prepares for May release, Gentoo lists projects for GSoC, Japan OSS community post-earthquake update
 We'll start this week's news section with an interesting piece of news from FreeBSD. As announced by Nathan Whitehorn on one of the project's mailing lists, "sysinstall", the long-standing and familiar system installer for anyone who has installed the popular BSD operating system, has been replaced with "bsdinstall" as the default system installer: "I just committed (r219641) changes that make the release infrastructure use bsdinstall by default instead of sysinstall on install media. Along with bsdinstall, the original sysinstall build stuff has been preserved and will continue to be for the lifetime of the 9.x release series, although it will not be used by default. This change modifies the process of building releases somewhat, so I'll outline changes that people who run snapshot buildbots will have to make below, and some next steps planned with the installer. ... The new installer is feature-complete at this time, so the next steps mostly involve documentation updates to manpages and the handbook. Generation of a bootonly ISO is another thing that should happen soon." No roadmap for FreeBSD 9 exists, but the project's FreeBSD 9 Wiki page states that the release is aimed "roughly for May 2011".
* * * * *
 Continuing with BSD updates, let's turn our attention to PC-BSD whose developers have been working on version 9 for some time now (regular development snapshots are available on the project's FTP server). This will be a major update that will bring, among other features, a choice of desktop environments. Project founder Kris Moore takes a quick look at the upcoming PC-BSD 9: "Probably the biggest and most noticeable change will be the ability to select from a variety of desktops/window mangers. Historically PC-BSD has only offered KDE, starting with version 3, and later version 4 as a user's main desktop. While KDE still offers a very complete desktop environment, there are a large number of users who prefer to use an alternative on their system. In order to provide a more satisfactory desktop experience to a larger audience, starting in version 9.0, users will provided with a easy-to-use desktop selection screen, which will allow PC-BSD to be customized with the desktop packages of the users choice. Currently some of the desktops being offered include KDE, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE."
* * * * *
 One more BSD-related item - the official media of OpenBSD 4.9, which is scheduled for release on May 1st, are now available for pre-order: "What is the answer to life, the universe and everything? Naturally 42. Quite different from the answer to 'what shall I pre-order today?', as that is obviously OpenBSD 4.9, which is scheduled for release on May 1st, 2011. This new release is again packed with lots of goodies like mandoc(1) as the groff(1) replacement, TCP send and receive buffer scaling, an /etc/rc.d directory for use by the ports system and of course many substantial improvements in the various areas such as the suspend / resume department, the USB subsystem, the handling of random numbers, etc. For a very long list have a look at the plus49 page. So, grab your towel and head on over to the order page and make sure you'll get your set before May 1st! After you've placed your order, download the new release song 'The Answer' (MP3 or OGG) and sing along to the lyrics." For more information about the project's upcoming release please visit the OpenBSD 4.9 release page.
* * * * *
 Moving to Linux, the Debian project has launched a Debian Derivatives Exchange project, an interesting initiative that is meant to increase collaboration between the many Debian-based distributions and even merge some of their ideas into Debian proper: "The Debian project has taken another important step towards better collaboration with its more than 300 derivative distributions by launching the Debian dErivatives eXchange project (DEX). The core idea behind DEX is to reduce the technical differences (informally called 'delta') between Debian and its derivatives. This is mainly accomplished by easing the integration of patches from derivatives. Making available the patches from all derivatives results not only in a better system for all involved parties, but also eases the workload of the derivatives by reducing the differences derivatives have to maintain themselves." An initial DEX info page and mailing list have been set up on the distribution's Alioth server.
Still on Debian, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has announced the release of Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.1, the first official update to "Squeeze". As always, this is not a new release and the updated system does not bring any new features or package upgrades, but it does correct all security issues discovered since the release while also adding critical bug fixes. Refer to the above link for a detailed list of changes.
* * * * *
 Most recent Linux converts and novice Ubuntu users will probably be familiar with Ubuntu Manual, a comprehensive guide detailing the usage of the world's most popular desktop Linux distribution. For those who wish that there was a less beefy variant of the document, here is a new resource - Ubuntu: a complete guide by UK's PC Pro magazine: "We reveal everything you need to know - including the questions you were afraid to ask - about installing and running Ubuntu. Ubuntu is now head and shoulders above any other Linux distribution in terms of features and ease of use, but it can still appear intimidating to those who've been cocooned in the Windows world. What's the best way to install Ubuntu? How do you get your graphics card drivers working? What are the software repositories all about? And how do you cope without your regular Windows software? (Don't worry, you don't have to.) Ubuntu has become the alternative OS of choice. This feature will answer all those questions and many more as we provide the ultimate guide to Ubuntu." Chapters in this guide include "Installing Ubuntu from a USB memory stick", "How to install software in Ubuntu" or "How to run Windows apps in Ubuntu".
* * * * *
 The developers of BackTrack, an Ubuntu-based live distribution designed for forensic analysis and penetration testing, have announced the upcoming release of version 5. Features of this release include availability of source code in the repositories and a completely revamped tool list: "As BackTrack 5 development rolls on full steam ahead, we've been getting numerous questions about the future release. We thought we'd publish a blog post with general information about BackTrack 5 for the impatient. The codename of this release will be 'revolution', for a bunch of reasons. BackTrack 5 will be based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and will (finally) support both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. We will be officially supporting KDE 4, GNOME and Fluxbox while providing users streamlined ISO downloads of each desktop environment. Tool integration from our repositories will be seamless with all our supported desktop environments, including menu structure. Perhaps most importantly, BackTrack 5 will be our first release to include full source code in it's repositories. This is a big thing for us, as it officially joins us to the open-source community and clears up any licensing issues which were present in BackTrack 4." The final release of BackTrack 5 is scheduled for 10 May.
* * * * *
 With the approaching summer season in the northern hemisphere here is another edition of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a great chance for student programmers to earn money while working on open-source software projects. Gentoo Linux is one of the distributions accepted into Google's programme this year: "Gentoo has been accepted for its 5th consecutive year in the Google Summer of Code! GSoC pays college students US$5,000 to work full-time on an open-source project for a summer. Check out our GSoC 2011 homepage if you are interested in this year's GSoC for Gentoo. We particularly encourage applications from students who aren't already involved in Gentoo development -- many of our students become Gentoo developers after a successful summer. Interested students can browse Gentoo's project ideas. Student applications will be accepted starting March 28 until April 8. Developers, if you'd like to apply to be a mentor, you can do so on the webapp. Please read the mentoring guide before applying." Other projects accepted for this year's GSoC include GNOME, KDE, Fedora, openSUSE, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD and MINIX, among others.
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The recent natural disaster in Japan is starting to have repercussions in the open-source development community. The first victim of the tragedy is the Tokyo-based KDDI Research and Development Laboratories, which maintains one of Japan's oldest and best-known open-source software repositories at ftp.kddilabs.jp. Last week this useful server went off-line with the following message: "ftp.kddilabs.jp (also *.ftp.ne.jp) has now temporary shutdown. The power-supply company for Kanto area is planning a power-outage of several area everyday, because their power-plants got many damages by the large-scale earthquake in Tohoku Japan at 2011/03/11. In this situation, we decided the temporary shutdown of our servers." Slashdot Japan covers the story here (in Japanese). In the meantime, Sylpheed developer Hiroyuki Yamamoto posted the following announcement on the project's mailing list: "This server (sraoss.jp) is located at Tokyo area. Currently the area is not scheduled for rolling blackouts, but please note the service may stop temporarily when the circumstances change." Luckily, most other Japan-based distribution and free software projects seem to be functioning normally; these include the Tokyo-based Turbolinux, Vine Linux and Momonga Linux, as well as Ruby, the popular programming language.
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| Questions and Answers (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
DistroWatch visitor number growth
Curious-about-page-hits asks: I was wondering if you maintain any stats on the total number of unique page hits your site gets overall - not just for a specific distro - and how those hits have (I presume) increased over the years?
DistroWatch answers: DistroWatch.com was officially launched on 31 May 2001 (yes, we'll celebrate our ten-year anniversary in a few weeks) and by November of the following year it was running on a dedicated server. We started collecting page hit data on 27 November 2002. The data are in raw format and are not publicly available, but a few short Bash scripts can extract just about any information needed. For your query, here are the total and unique page hits numbers as recorded on the main (index.php) page. For 2002 the data are for the 35 days (from 27 November to the end of the year), while for 2011 the data represent the first two months of the year. The recording of IP addresses did not start until May 2004, so the "unique hits" data for 2002 and 2003 are not available.
| Historical Page Hits |
|---|
| Year |
Total Hits
(per day) |
Unique Hits
(per day) |
| 2002 |
6,854 |
N/A |
| 2003 |
19,828 |
N/A |
| 2004 |
42,573 |
17,677 |
| 2005 |
69,250 |
26,266 |
| 2006 |
76,188 |
31,106 |
| 2007 |
91,543 |
36,784 |
| 2008 |
98,490 |
40,171 |
| 2009 |
107,985 |
41,417 |
| 2010 |
113,533 |
40,823 |
| 2011 |
120,965 |
42,730 |
|
As can be seen from the above, the number of all visits on the front page of DistroWatch.com has increased by 1,665% since 2002, while the number of unique visitors per day has increased by 141% since 2004. Here is graphical representation of the above table:
For those who are interested in hits on distribution pages this is the page listing all active distributions and their page hit data over one, three, six and twelve months. The Awstats analysis of the web server log for the current month is available here.
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| Released Last Week |
Vyatta 6.2
Tom McCafferty has announced the release of Vyatta 6.2, an updated version of the Debian-based distribution for firewalls and routers: "I'm pleased to announce that Vyatta version 6.2 has completed verification and is now available for download. Vyatta 6.2 features package updates and major improvements to usability, quality and stability, including improved configuration management, OpenVPN enhancements, IPv6 DNS resolver and re-base to Debian 6.0 'Squeeze'. Significant branch maintenance was done by the Vyatta engineering team, including the following package updates: iptables 1.4.9, ipset 4.3, pmacct 0.12.3, Net-SNMP 5.6, ntpd, 4.2.6p2, BusyBox 1.18.0, Open VM Tools, 8.4.2, vbash 4.1." Read the release announcement and release notes (PDF format) for further information.
SuperGamer Supreme 2.5
Darin VanCoevering has announced the release of SuperGamer Supreme 2.5, the world's first dual-layer Linux live DVD packed with games: "The Supreme SuperGamer 2.5 is a update to the Supreme SuperGamer 2. This release is a 7.9 GB live DVD and can only run on dual-layer DVD drives or 16 GB Flash drives so please be sure you have a compatible drive. It includes: Firefox 4 beta; Flash 10.2; VLC and all of the additional updated packages; Linux kernel 2.6.27.57 with wireless support; NDISwrapper updated and additional Intel wireless modules; wicked updated; LimeWire removed and FrostWire put in its place, Soldier of Fortune was taken off as it didn't work with the new NVIDIA driver; IconquerU game added along with the updated NVIDIA and ATI drivers, FUSE and NTFS-3G updated; addition of Gogo encoder which is faster than LAME; Java updated to 6u23." Here is the brief release announcement.
SuperGamer Supreme 2.5 - the world's first dual-layer live DVD
(full image size: 1,515kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
UTUTO 2011
Daniel Olivera has announced the release of UTUTO 2011, a new version of the Gentoo-based distribution and live DVD featuring four desktop environments. This release comes with a multitude of improvements, including: a new Linux "super kernel" with hundreds of extra patches and modules; super-fast system boot; two supported installation methods (DVD and USB), installable live system; extended hardware support; intelligent system auto-configuration; improved network card support with 100% connection success for Ethernet, 3G, Bluetooth and wireless connection types; integrated Java support with OpenJDK; virtualisation with video acceleration integrated with the desktop; 3D desktop by default without hardware acceleration; four desktop environments to choose from (GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce).... Please read the full release announcement (in Spanish) for additional details.
UTUTO 2011 - a Gentoo-based live DVD with four desktops
(full image size: 913kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Ultimate Edition 2.9
Glenn Cady has announced the release of Ultimate Edition 2.9, an Ubuntu-based live DVD with a choice of four desktops (KDE, GNOME, Xfce and Openbox), many extra applications, hardware drivers and media codecs: "Ultimate Edition 2.9 was built off Ultimate Edition 2.8 which is built off Ubuntu 10.10 'Maverick Meerkat'. All updates fully updated / upgraded, old kernels purged, new initrd and vmlinuz rebuilt. Ultimate Edition 2.9, as with all odd release numbers, was built with KDE users in mind. Ultimate Edition 2.9 has KDE, GNOME, Openbox and Xfce environments, user selectable at login. A crisp new theme (121 to choose from) and tons of new software. LXDE was broken at time of build on the 32-bit side, so it did not make the cut." Here is the brief release announcement which includes a few screenshots.
Ultimate Edition 2.9 - an Ubuntu-based live DVD with a large number of extra applications and media codecs
(full image size: 915kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
m0n0wall 1.33
Manuel Kasper has announced the release of m0n0wall 1.33, a tiny FreeBSD-based operating system for firewalls: "m0n0wall 1.33 released. m0n0wall 1.33 adds a new image type for generic PCs with a serial console, further improves IPv6 support, includes a driver for newer Realtek network chipsets and contains various small changes and bug fixes. Changelog: updated ipfilter to 4.1.33; inbound NAT rules can now be added on the LAN interface with the WAN address as a target, this helps with accessing servers on an optional interface from the LAN interface by using m0n0wall's WAN IP address; IPv6 improvements; modified 'disable port mapping' option so that it will actually avoid port mapping whenever possible, but fall back to port mapping if another mapping for the same port already exists; added support for user-customizable captive portal logout and status page...." Visit the project's download page to read the full changelog.
Linux Mint 10 "LXDE"
Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 10 "LXDE" edition, a lightweight desktop distribution based on Ubuntu 10.10: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 10 LXDE." New in this release: "Linux Mint 10 LXDE comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. The Software Manager gives you a nicer browsing experience, with a better categorization of software and the use of application icons. If you're not interested in receiving updates for a particular package, simply right click on it and tell the Update Manager to ignore updates for this package. The package will then be added to your 'ignore' list and you won't receive any updates for it in the future. The Update Manager now also shows you the size of your selected updates, so you know how much data you're about to download." For more details please read the release announcement and the release notes.
Zorin OS 4 "Business"
Artyom Zorin has announced the release of Zorin OS 4 "Business" edition, an Ubuntu-based commercial distribution targeting desktop deployments at small and medium-size businesses: "The Zorin OS team is proud to release Zorin OS 4 Business. Zorin OS 4 Business provides all the tools needed to start and maintain a small or medium-sized business out of the box. In here you will find a wealth of software waiting for you, including accounting, bookkeeping, stock analysis, database, retail, word processing, spreadsheet and much more. With Zorin OS 4 Business you are sure to save time and money. Zorin OS 4 Business is a new addition to our Premium releases. You are able to purchase a DVD with Zorin OS 4 Business on our Store page. A download option will be available shortly." Here is the brief release announcement.
Mandriva Linux 5.2 "Enterprise Server"
Mandriva has announced the release of Mandriva Enterprise Server 5.2, an update to its server-oriented, commercial Linux distribution for enterprises: "Mandriva Enterprise Server (MES) 5.2 -- the simple, high-performance and accessible Linux server -- is now available. MES 5.2 features a broader set of drivers to support more devices during the installation process and an updated Linux kernel (version 2.6.33). It highlights advanced virtualization on top of KVM or Xen, a user-friendly software setup and configuration wizard, an easy-to-use LDAP directory management -- Mandriva Directory Server, powerful backup solutions and many other services in the fields of messaging, file and printer sharing, web hosting, network management and more." For more details please see release announcement and the release notes.
Saline OS 1.3
Anthony Nordquist has announced the release of Saline OS 1.3, a Debian-based distribution with Xfce as the default desktop: "SalineOS 1.3 images are now available. This point release brings with it support for changing the system language and keyboard layout within the installer. It also marks the first time the Saline OS user manual is available in another language (Spanish). New features and changes include: optional download of language packs for Icedove, OpenOffice.org and MySpell by hitting yes on a dialog in the installer; all updates installed from the Debian security repository since the building of 1.2; several small revisions and additions to the user manual; disabled Remastersys repository by default; discontinued the shell CD image." Read the full release announcement for further details.
Macpup 520
Johnny Lee has announced the release of Macpup 520, a lightweight, Puppy-based distribution showcasing the latest build of Enlightenment 17: "Prit and I are proud to announce the release of Macpup 520, our newest E17 Macpup. Macpup 520 is based on Puppy Linux 5.2 'Lucid', an official Woof build of Puppy Linux that is binary-compatible with Ubuntu 'Lucid Lynx' packages. Macpup 520 contains all the applications from Lucid Puppy, with the addition of Firefox 4.0rc1. Extra applications like Opera or GIMP are available for easy download from the Quickpet tool on the ibar or the Puppy package manager. Macpup 520 also includes the Enlightenment E17 window manager. The EFL libraries version 1.0.0 and E17 version 55225 where compiled and installed from source." See the full release announcement for further details, known issues and links to screenshots.
Macpup 520 - a Puppy-based distribution with Enlightenment 17
(full image size: 1,263kB, resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
Ubuntu 11.10 release schedule
The Ubuntu developers have published a draft release schedule for the project's second stable release of 2011: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot". The development will commence in early May with toolchain update and import of upstream software packages, with the first alpha release scheduled for 2 June. This will be followed by two more alpha and two beta releases before the final version appears on 13 October. For more information please see the Oneiric release schedule page on Ubuntu Wiki.
* * * * *
Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
New distributions added to waiting list
- GenOS. GenOS is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to be easy-to-use and fast.
- PUIAS Linux. Developed by Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, PUIAS Linux is a distribution built from source packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The project also offers a "Computational" repository which includes extra packages specific to scientific computing.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 28 March 2011.
Jesse Smith and Ladislav Bodnar
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • openSUSE (by Peter on 2011-03-21 09:33:42 GMT from Slovakia)
Yesterday I upgraded my LXDE 11.3 spin to 11.4. This is the only distribution that works well with my Unichrome Pro IGP out of the box.
2 • opensuse (by meanpt on 2011-03-21 09:46:04 GMT from Portugal)
A nice review. Despite not being mentioned in the review, it seems one can also get some sort of a rolling release by adding and enabling a "tumbleweed" repository. On KDE, there is also a sort of a notebook "workspace". I tested the faster gnome environment live CD and liking it a lot.
3 • openSUSE (by Stefan on 2011-03-21 09:49:12 GMT from Germany)
Thank you for review but you need to spend more time with a distro to write better reviews! you dont have mentioned or seen that:
1-update or install from repos are still(!) slow.
2-you can't find some packages from repos or search service.
3-Some fonts are still buggy!
...
But I think openSUSE is one of the best KDE distro from stability and themes and some other views.
4 • Tumbleweed (by megadriver on 2011-03-21 09:52:17 GMT from Spain)
Don't forget about Tumbleweed!
http://en.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed
I'm probably not part of openSUSE's intended audience, but Tumbleweed is tempting me to at least give it a try.
The mere existence of Tumbleweed gets a big "thumbs up" from me!
5 • Some issues with openSuse 11.4 (by Sharique on 2011-03-21 09:58:17 GMT from India)
I have installed opensuse 11.4 on my Quad core AMD laptop, I have experiencing some issues, like both graphics cards (integrated, addon) are on (hence it is heating a lot), so I have to manually turn off one after every boot using vga_switcheroo, but it is still heating more than Kubuntu 10.10, I'm using open source radeon driver, another feature missing X configuration tool, I hope in next release we will see Sax3....
6 • DEX and BSD (by koroshiya.itchy on 2011-03-21 10:31:35 GMT from Belgium)
Nice issue of DistroWatch Weekly. I found particularly interesting the Debian Derivatives Exchange project (DEX) and also learning the latest news about the BSD world.
I believe that the easy choice between desktop environments will definitively set PC-BSD as one of the leaders among the easy-to-use free operating systems. Last time I tried I felt that KDE was a bit heavy on my laptop (not to mention the several well known bugs presents in KDE versions below 4.6). In addition, I was not able to configure ZFS. However, I would be more than glad to give a new try to a lighter PC-BSD with an easy-to-set-up ZFS (or ext4 or btrfs...). In such a situation, the only remaining challenge for PC-BSD would be in my opinion a apt-like package manager with thousands of pre-compiled packages (and this is of course more likely to happen if the distribution gets more popular).
An alternative solution is Debian-kFreeBSD. The problem I found with it was building kernel modules such as the Nvidia drivers or the VBox module. Neither the Linux nor the BSD ones work for this hybrid system.
7 • SuSE (by Strutter on 2011-03-21 11:11:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
Used to like it; been struggling since decamping from the Federal Republic. Although it still smart enough to release .iso <700Mb, KDE is just too bloated. Best move yet is into Lupu/Luci; latest v256 RC is nothing short of amazing and runs on almost anything with complete Deb compatibility whilst NOT being based on Debian. [Don't call me for the first misguided soul who still believes Puppy is Debian-based!]
8 • openSUSE 11.4 Review (by Pierre on 2011-03-21 11:32:39 GMT from Germany)
First of all I liked that review. Well, as usual a really nice one.
Although I respect KDE, it's features and advantages, it's developers for the effort they put in it, I simply prefer Gnome over KDE and therefore was a little disappointed that Gnome got no more attention than one mentioning.
Although I'm currently using Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and can't think of switching to any other distro because I simply fall in love with that one, openSUSE 11.4 Gnome found it's way onto my PC and got a little attention in my Virtualbox for testing. And it was very appealing. Bleeding edge software, responsive, nice dark Sonar theme, very solid, featuring openSUSE's zypper command line package manager that still is the best one besides Debian's apt.
If I had not made my decision yet, openSUSE 11.4 Gnome would have won the race. Unfortunatly I already got to that decision, but I will definitly keep an eye upon openSUSE, maybe in some time of testing it can win my hart and convince me to replace LMDE on future machines.
Very interessting and woth testing would be Tumbleweed, that turnes your openSUSE into a rolling release distro. Nice idea.
9 • Opensuse (by Smellyman on 2011-03-21 12:25:41 GMT from Hong Kong)
Gave Opensuse 11.4 a go, but too many little annoyances got in the way.
For KDE PCLinuxOS is the best way to go for me. Rock solid with great hardware support.....and its a rolling release.
10 • openSUSE (by Mike on 2011-03-21 13:03:49 GMT from United States)
Very nice review of openSUSE. One thing not mentioned enough about openSUSE is zypper. Whenever I have used openSUSE I enjoy how powerful and feature-filled zypper is. I don't think zypper gets mentioned enough when people talk about other package managers like APT, YUM, and Pacman.
PUIAS Linux, another rebuild of RHEL sound interesting. I wonder what the differences are between PUIAS and something like Scientific Linux seeing as they share a similar goal?
11 • HPD (by zykoda on 2011-03-21 15:55:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
From which I could conclude that new users to Linux is saturated! Just for fun, I recently took all the published distrowatch stats data and did a much more versatile analysis from which one could pull by distribution(+s). Ubuntu hits was a hot event! Mint figures+!
Nothing to support any "year of Linux".
12 • PUIAS Linux as RHEL rebuild (by rrc on 2011-03-21 16:36:27 GMT from United States)
I looked at this the other day. I am not sure what to make of the fact that there is no 'distro' download (that I could find anyway) but only a very substantial package list. What am I not understanding?
13 • OpenSUSE Gnome (by OpenSUSE Gnome on 2011-03-21 16:48:33 GMT from Greece)
Despite having KDE as a default desktop environment, OpenSUSE offers the best Gnome experience in my opinion. The mint menu, the control center, combined with yast, the great theme are absolutely awesome.The only thing I didn't like is the graphical package manager, but hopefully this will change soon with the new cross-distro app-store style package manager.
14 • openSUSE (by Archetype on 2011-03-21 17:53:51 GMT from United States)
"On the laptop openSUSE performed well. My screen was set the maximum resolution, sound worked out of the box and my touchpad worked as expected. However, my Intel wireless card did not work."
Did you get wireless working eventually? Intel wireless is arguably one of the most common chipsets available. For a modern day "fire-and-forget" distro like openSUSE to fail to work with Intel wireless is really hard to accept.
In my experience, openSUSE (and SuSE before it) has always looked flashy, clean, professional and polished at first glance, yet has always been sorely lacking when it came to reliable usability.
You mention Kpackagekit failing by crashing, as though it were a minor point. On the contrary, wouldn't you say that such a failure would be an utter blunder for a supposed "final release" from a major distro like openSUSE?
Don't get me wrong, I have said in the past and continue to feel that openSUSE shows a lot of potential and I wish it the highest degree of success, but come on. Shipping with a broken graphical package manager and lack of Intel wireless functionality out of the box is unacceptable for a supposed user-friendly distro. Nevermind using YaST as an alternative.
Thank you for the time invested in the review, but consider: With all the time spent on presenting the most beautiful and intuitive website, attractive installer graphics, a huge development community and corporate backing, I expect a lot more from openSUSE and I think it is reasonable to expect such a principle to be mentioned in your article.
15 • Google Summer of Code (by Landor on 2011-03-21 18:04:05 GMT from Canada)
WoW! I was shocked to find out that the real heavy hitters of Linux won't be participating in the Google Summer of Code. You know, distributions like Bodhi, Mint, PCLinuxOS, Peppermint, Ubuntu. I guess only the 'flimsy' distributions like Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, need to work at getting better!!!! The others are so great they don't need to be part of the babyish Google Summer of Code...
Congratulations to all the projects participating in this year's Google Summer of Code. I may not like Google but I can appreciate how this helps young developers actually become 'real' developers.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
16 • RE: 15 (by Landor on 2011-03-21 18:07:35 GMT from Canada)
Correction:
-Fedora
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
17 • OpenSUSE (by Verndog on 2011-03-21 18:13:58 GMT from United States)
I've been waiting for a review of the latest opensuse. I tried an earlier build, but enjoyed using it. Even though I have mainly used Kubuntu.
I have always enjoyed opensuse, but I have in the past a few complaints. I will try again now that its released.
18 • OpenSuse Gnome vs. KDE (by Bob on 2011-03-21 18:15:00 GMT from Austria)
Tried both and figured that most of the problems seem to be KDE related. As an example: KDE is unable to connect to a hidden wireless network. The bug was probably filed a year ago, but nobody at KDE seems to be willing/capable to fix it. Gnome has no such problems (but I hear that they are working hard to get some - Gnome 3.0).
Having said that I have to admit that I am using KDE on a daily basis. Found workarounds for most annoying bugs and turned off "screen effects" like most people do after their 14th birthday. Now this buggy "Aero clone" is more or less working for me but I keep still asking myself why I am too lazy to switch to Gnome, LXDE, XFCE or whatever.
The most probable answer is that I am still flabbergasted how they abandoned a perfectly stable operating system (KDE3) and created the KDE4 bloat instead. Now we have all the features we don't need combined with all the bugs we don't want. And silly hardcore KDE users like me are waiting and waiting until the new KDE4 eventually gets stable enough to get old memories back. Whenever this might happen one should brace for an eventual KDE5 ....
19 • antiX (by Saleem Khan on 2011-03-21 18:20:54 GMT from Pakistan)
Unrelated to this week`s DW but since debian is always on DW so I thought its worth mentioning that antiX is a unique distribution for those who like their system`s to be on debian`s testing "rolling release" branch. With Debian CUT out there antiX also provides much easier base installation . The core iso ( http://www.mepisimo.com/antix/Testing/ ) is my favourite one. It would be great if Jesse Smith spares some time and review this distro for us.
Regards,
20 • Macpup (by Dan on 2011-03-21 18:25:43 GMT from United States)
Does Macpup have sudo working correctly, or does it require the user to run as root?
21 • Why not Synaptic? (by Davey on 2011-03-21 18:37:00 GMT from United States)
Surely Synaptic is available on SUSE KDE. KPackageKit seems like a strange default, since according to reviews it's not quite ready for prime time. I'd be interested in how using YAST for package management compares to using Synaptic, assuming it's available.
22 • Very nice SUSE review. (by Davey on 2011-03-21 18:38:33 GMT from United States)
Forgot to say that. Nicely done.
23 • multi-monitor (by No Name on 2011-03-21 18:50:51 GMT from United States)
Has KDE bothered fixing it's boneheaded multi-monitor support? Or are those of us using two or more monitors for our desktop still second class citizens?
Gnome is not an option, their desktop experience is soon to be worse.
24 • #15 Summer of code. (by anticapitalista on 2011-03-21 19:21:45 GMT from Greece)
Landor, I know you mentioned distros, but the mighty fluxbox will be there as well. For the first time.
http://fluxbox.org/news/
25 • #24 Summer of code (by anticapitalista on 2011-03-21 19:24:52 GMT from Greece)
Comment deleted (off-topic).
26 • UTUTO 2011 screenshot (by BlueJayofEvil on 2011-03-21 19:40:35 GMT from United States)
Did anyone else notice the Sabayon logo icon in the top of the UTUTO 2011 screenshot? Are they using Sabayon's package manager now?
27 • @26 • UTUTO (by Flip on 2011-03-21 20:08:02 GMT from United States)
Not sure but the few times I downloaded it I just figured it was a modified Sabayon anyway or that is what it looked like to me...
28 • RE: 24/25 (by Landor on 2011-03-21 21:02:06 GMT from Canada)
I read that in the list of participants. Fluxbox stood out for me in the list immediately. :) Hopefully like Gentoo and quite a few other distributions/projects, Abiword, Blender, Drupal, Haiku, VLC, Fluxbox will get to be a returning participant. I just wish it was written in pure C. :) lol
If AntiX did particpate, any ideas on what you'd want a student to do? With Warren leaning more towards a community distribution, maybe 2012 would be a good time for MEPIS to see about sending a student. I don't doubt AntiX could easily find that invite in the mail too. :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
29 • Very nice SUSE review? (by fernbap on 2011-03-21 21:04:09 GMT from Portugal)
My experience with 11.4:
Live experience:
mp3 - fail
flac - fail
flv - fail
avi - fail
youtube - fail
hmm... not good. Better install...
After install:
Install ruined my Grub 2. I have 5 partitions with OSes installed. The only one it could find was windows XP.
mp3 - "do you want to search for codecs? - yes please - couldn't find suitable codec"
flac - ditto
flv - ditto
avi - ditto
Checked software sources, non-OSS repo was enabled.
You also say that the wireless card was not recognized in your laptop.
What i find funny is how you can say what you said about OpenSUSE after what you said about Debian. Double-standards anyone?
30 • Re #28 (by anticapitalista on 2011-03-21 21:18:50 GMT from Greece)
Landor,
TBH I would encourage students to work on existing projects, whether they be applications or distros. Apart from improving fluxbox (is that even possible? :) ) I would love them to help out the folks at dillo so we can get a blazing fast and fully featured lightweight gui browser.
IMO all the others (gui) may have started out light, but have soon ended up quite heavy.
Another one would be to build on/update the Rox project.
31 • openSUSE (by yadya on 2011-03-21 21:27:36 GMT from United States)
So, a distribution backed by a company in bed with Microsoft gets a fabulous review, while the most influential distro in the world (Debian) gets slammed. Cool.
Other than the subtly broken packages and ridiculous effort it takes to get multimedia up and running, openSUSE is a decent distro. Yast2, zypper, and the professional look & feel are all appealing.
However, I choose to boycott this distro after its deals with Microsoft and Novell selling itself to Attachmate, a Microsoft-friendly company.
Individuals with the Windows/Ubuntu mindset of having your Linux distro preconfigured for you may like openSUSE. For real Linux users and champions of FOSS, there's Debian.
32 • @29 multimedia (by cba on 2011-03-21 21:30:18 GMT from Germany)
Your Grub problem would only be serious if the openSUSE installer would have installed Grub in the MBR although you told it not to do so. Is this the case?
Youtube videos:
There is a pullin-flash-player package installed which will trigger the installation of Adobes Flash Player with the first use of Yast or zypper update. So Youtube videos should be no problem.
Moreover, there is also a pullin-fluendo-mp3 package which works the same way like the flash one. Every gstreamer-based application (also via phonon-gstreamer) plays your mp3s then.
If flac does not work this might be a bug.
But if you want a free system playing all the codecs you mentioned (libmad, libffmpeg and so on) then you have to add the Packman repo in Yast and update all your multimedia applications.
openSUSE is a US-based distro, so there is nothing what can be done about this. Blame the DMCA.
http://www.opensuse-community.org/Main_Page
33 • @32 (by fernbap on 2011-03-21 21:40:41 GMT from Portugal)
Don't get me wrong. I am not trashing OpenSUSE, i am trashing the reviewer.
If OpenSUSE is destined to the desktop user, what i related is a show stopper. Most will give up after noticing they don't have multimedia from the live CD. Some will install, and still no multimedia. Automatica codec find & install works perfectly on Ubuntu, but it doesn't work on SUSE.
Heck, most multimedia even worked for me after a vanilla install of Debian 6 (except for the need to remove gnash and install the argh adobe flash plugin).
What i am trashing is the double standard used on both reviews. If you try it, you will see that Debian 6 has more things working out of the box than Open SUSE. And it doesn't trash your grub as well.
Also, we are talking about the same reviewer that trashed Debian because he would not have to read countless documentation in order to make things work.
34 • @32 (by fernbap on 2011-03-21 21:44:47 GMT from Portugal)
cont...
No, i didn't install grub on the MBR.
And yes, i know how do make multimedia work under OpenSUSE, but if i was a linux newcomer i would be clueless and would hav eno hint whatsoever on how to do it.
That, in practical terms, would mean that, as it happens for most users that download, burn and install OpenSUSE, i would trash SUSE and chose something else.
Recommending SUSE for the newcomer is lunatic, imho.
35 • @ #15 Very sad and undignified (by rrc on 2011-03-21 22:12:32 GMT from United States)
Very sad and undignified for someone to keep attacking distros that cause them no harm. Such attacks help no one, and in this example appear to be mere ego contest fluff with the use of such words as "babyish, real, heavy hitters, so great, and flimsy" and the past excess use of "kiddy" distros.
Such exercises in sarcasm and indirect gloating I find very unpleasant.
By the way 3 of your 5 sarcastically attacked 'real heavy hitter' distros are actually real heavy hitters of linux no matter what your weighing in or not implies. The other two exist and do not need your approval and certainly not your continued vendetta against!
36 • openSUSE and GSoC (by Jesse on 2011-03-21 23:06:17 GMT from Canada)
@3:
I didn't encounter the problems you mentioned. During my tests the repositories were fast, the fonts were okay (not amazing, but okay) and i didn't run into any missing packages. Not saying you''re wrong, but we had different experiences.
@10:
You're right, zypper has come along nicely. I quite enjoy it now.
@14:
I didn't spent much time wrestling with the wireless. A future Q&A I hope to get put up soon talks about why my wifi doesn't work on some distros and how to fix it.
@29, 33:
The codecs you were looking for are not in the non-free repository. If you read the documentation that's provided when you try to open an unsupported file it will tell you to add the Packman repo. There's more here:
http://opensuse-guide.org/codecs.php
Re: Google's Summer of Code projects:
I think Google tried to accept upstreams distros wherever possible. I noticed, for example, Debian, FreeBSD, PC-BSD and Ubuntu all applied. The upstream projects were accepted and downstream were not. I think it makes sense as changes are likely to flow downstream faster (and to more projects) than if they did things the other way around.
37 • RE: 30 - 34 - 35 (by Landor on 2011-03-21 23:17:06 GMT from Canada)
#30
I really like that one of their ideas is implementing the Desktop Menu Specification. That would be a huge bonus for Fluxbox in my opinion. I hope someone takes up the task.
I always like to see Abiword improved, you're right about browsers as well though. What do you think about NetSurf? I think I read in one of the magazines about it being CLI capable too.
#34
I always shake my head at comments along these lines: 'Recommending SUSE for the newcomer is lunatic, imho.' First, just to be clear, you were talking about openSUSE since SUSE proper has all the bells and whistles installed. I don't see a whole pile of button clickers making the exodus to Free Libre Open Source Operating Systems, so I'd wager that most have some technical ability and the understand that there's going to be a learning curve. Why do we keep thinking that most people coming to Linux a brainless drones? See, this is where the whole bleating/sheeple concept comes into play, everyone thinks that because other people told them it was so, and so on, and so on, and so on. If someone really wants to use a distribution they're going to use it, period. If want to eat elaborate meals I eat them, the process doesn't daunt me, because it's what I want. If someone doesn't want to use something they don't, and they move on.
#35
"Such exercises in sarcasm and indirect gloating I find very unpleasant."
That's nice.
"By the way 3 of your 5 sarcastically attacked 'real heavy hitter' distros are actually real heavy hitters of linux no matter what your weighing in or not implies."
Really? Could you tell me in comparison to say Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, how much work they do upstream? How much they contribute to the Kernel, KDE, Gnome, X, etc, etc, etc?
Can you tell me how many developers total they have in their respective communities that make them heavy hitters along side such distributions as the ones I mentioned? Hmm?
Yes, they're heavy hitters alright, and they're definitely not 'flimsy', not at all!
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
38 • @37 That's nice????? (by rrc on 2011-03-22 01:20:03 GMT from United States)
I think that someone finding it nice that they are unpleasant to others often and this deliberately as it must appear to be the case, says all that needs to be known.
Without Ubuntu, it is safe to say, the very idea of the year of linux would be ludicrous.
People upstream are just that. Upstream. Important and to be respected, but without the ones who put their efforts into the hands of the public, their efforts are pretty minuscule and would of be the subject of justifiable self congratulation of a relative few.
By your definition of heavy hitters, Microsoft, Apple and Google for three in terms of both development and production into the hands of the public, are Gods compared to Linux with the possible exception of Redhat.
Someone used the word flimsy only one time as far as I know, and used it wrongly in my opinion as regards Debian, but that was no big deal really if one thinks about it, and certainly not a reason to keep repeating the word again and again as negative sarcasm.
There is good reason to say positive things about a distro especially when it seems to offer some benefit that one imagines others might not have access to knowledge about, and good reason to criticize a distro if it has verifiable dangers. Neither Bodhi nor Peppermint are doing anyone any harm; they have not harmed me in any fashion I aware of, though they have not synced with my psyche, as is also true of Fedora, and OpenSuse, both very respectable distros and of course others of which it serves no purpose to mention or attack.
39 • RE: 38 (by Landor on 2011-03-22 01:35:31 GMT from Canada)
"I think that someone finding it nice that they are unpleasant to others often and this deliberately as it must appear to be the case, says all that needs to be known."
That's nice.
"Without Ubuntu, it is safe to say, the very idea of the year of linux would be ludicrous."
That in itself is as absolutely ludicrous as the flimsy comment last week.
"but that was no big deal really if one thinks about it,"
Problem is you're not thinking.
"Neither Bodhi nor Peppermint are doing anyone any harm"
Still not thinking.
I noticed you avoided discussing how these distributions are heavy hitters. I noticed you left out their developers, what they offer upstream, how much they do with the kernel. You pandered your paragraph with literally bullshit Windows/Apple comments which have absolutely zero bearing on FLOSS, and only do so because people like you make reference to them. You probably have them installed on one or more systems. Fact of the matter is these distributions do harm to Linux, they take away users, which equate potential contributors, from projects that actually do something upstream. You can wave the Big Brown (or Green) Flag all you want, it doesn't change the fact that these kiddy distributions don't do a fraction of what the real distributions do for the FLOSS landscape.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
40 • openSUSE forum is another big plus for the distro (by Andy Prough on 2011-03-22 03:32:55 GMT from United States)
Glad to see you are enjoying 11.4, Jesse. I was surprised - I thought I was about done with KDE, as it was simply too slow and bloated in past releases. I had gone to spinning my own openSUSE Xfce versions with the SuSE Studio. However, this is a very responsive version of KDE on my system, even with all the default desktop effects enabled.
One thing I think reviewers should take note of is the fantastic support available in the openSUSE forums. For example, in the English language forums, great people like OldCPU, swerdna and caf4926 seem to jump quickly onto any hardware or software related question and stay involved with the problem until there is a resolution. Some other popular distributions seem to have leader-less forums with a healthy serving of bad advice, misinformation, and unanswered queries. But the openSUSE forums, in the hands of the its gifted moderators and administrators, are a great tool and the first place I search for info.
All distros have trouble spots - there's just too much hardware and software in the world to expect not to have conflicts. The really good distros have a community that gets actively involved in helping users resolve those conflicts.
41 • Chris Smart (and others) & DWW (by uz64 on 2011-03-22 05:56:12 GMT from United States)
Whatever happened to Chris Smart? He used to be a pretty frequent DWW writer, writing reviews and other articles. I actually miss his writing/reviews. Apparently he ressurrected Kororaa, so that would be my guess... maintaining the distro must be pretty straining (no surprise, really).
Also, I haven't read anything from Susan Linton or Caitlyn Martin for an even longer time... they both also wrote some interesting stuff. Neither one of those maintains a distro, as far as I'm concerned, though.
42 • RE: 40 (by Landor on 2011-03-22 06:34:14 GMT from Canada)
#40
I have to agree, and OldCPU is definitely a major boon/resource to this community. Often times when I didn't have an answer to something that plagued me, I'd go to a search engine and low and behold I'd find the correct answer from OldCPU. If I'm not mistake, though I could be, openSUSE is not the only support he gives.
Here's an idea for a yearly thing Ladislav. A lot of people do the "Best Distribution of ????" every year, why not do "The 5 Most Helpful Community Member(s) of a Distribution For ????" ? You could do it once a year and I'm sure it would be a huge hit within the community.
#41
I don't know exactly why he stopped. I know he got busy in some areas. He still blogs from time to time if you're not aware. Here's the url: http://blog.christophersmart.com/
I believe he also became fairly busy in Fedora which led to bringing Kororaa back. If I'm correct of course.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
43 • re #20 Macpup and the superuser (by gnomic on 2011-03-22 08:02:06 GMT from New Zealand)
Logged on as root with Macpup 520 as I write . . . afaik the Puppy way has not changed in this regard. However I see that adduser is present in /bin.
# which adduser
/bin/adduser
# adduser
BusyBox v1.16.2 (2010-06-19 18:02:46 GMT-8) multi-call binary.
Could be something to try at home ;-)
I believe that Puppy enthusiasts have tried to create a more orthodox multiuser spin of Puppy. Personally I am not too fussed by running as root for the occasional live CD session of web browsing. As it happens this particular machine has no OS installed at present.
For Enlightenment fans who are not Puppyphobic, macpup is well worth a try.
44 • This week Q&A (by forlin on 2011-03-22 08:44:58 GMT from Portugal)
Thanks to Ladislav for the important information provided in the above mentioned section.
The most meaningful conclusion to extract from it its that Linux in the Desktop is alive and the public interest on it does not cease to increase, as I'm sure this is the place most will end to discover to be the best source of information about distro data and what distros are doing: new releases its data file info, and so on.
Looking forward for the DW 10 anniversary date release. :)
45 • Google summer of code participants (by meanpt on 2011-03-22 10:28:52 GMT from Portugal)
It seems that Ubuntu, with a tight release schedule, to which it complies professionally, most probably can't spear the short (for the task) resources to camp during the summer, as every year's season is critical and needing whoever is able and wants to join the effort. I hope some of those who participate in the gsc will further join the Ubuntu's development community after the camp, in time to help releasing another solid and innovative release, with touch screens (either tablets, convertibles and other portable devices) in mind. Most probably some will be "enlightened" enough to join the Bodhi project, and make use of the spear time that the so called "parent" distributions releasing once a year or in two years will provide.
46 • openSUSE review (by Rajesh Ganesan on 2011-03-22 12:27:19 GMT from India)
Excellent review. I just upgraded to 11.4 (from 11.3, of course). Simply a superb release. KDE/openSUSE is an excellent combination.
47 • OpenSuse 11.4 (by GeekBoula on 2011-03-22 13:16:55 GMT from Canada)
At first I'd like to say that this a great job 11.4 is really sweet.
Congratulations to the development team. After several tests on different hardware, I can say that it is generally excellent. Level design is good. Installation is a bit long but flawless.
EX: I have a friend who has an old Pentium 111 that did not work. It had Windows Millennium imagine. I just change the hard drive, upgrade the memory to 512 MB in order to install a Linux Distro. I have some difficulty to find a distro that could run properly with this limited hardware. In between all the major friendly Lamba distro, just OpenSuse 11.4 does the job without penalty (slow, screen freeze ) . I tested all the main distro.
The other problem is that I was limited in the choice of distro because my girlfriend is really a Newbie.
In conclusion, OpenSuse is installed on the Desktop and she relly impressed by what his computer just to do now for her.
48 • opensuse (by Player1 on 2011-03-22 15:53:25 GMT from Brazil)
I have used opensuse 11.3 for a while, but after a power failure, it wouldn't boot anymore. After that incident, I simply stopped "distro hopping" and stuck with Ubuntu 10. I mean, come on, windows 98 would boot after a power failure... It has happened with many other distros, but opensuse was the only one that failed. It was probably fixed by now, but I dont't feel like switching from ubuntu (at least until the push Gnome3 upon us).
@50: dude what the hell does this forum has to do with it? I have donated and posted my sincere thoughts in many other places.
49 • @47 (by Anony Moss on 2011-03-22 16:59:00 GMT from India)
A good class of distros to try on Pentium III machines is the XFCE desktop, slack-based distros.
I've had good luck with those, and they do well with hardware detection and performance. Zenwalk, SalixOS and the latest Vector beta come to mind.
Particularly, with new release of XFCE, latest 2.6.38 kernel, and Slackware itself nearing a release; this seems to be a good time for Slack ecosystem.
50 • Pentium 111 Opensuse 11.4 (by Geekboula on 2011-03-22 19:40:28 GMT from Canada)
@49 Thank for your reply and information !
You're right, I thought at first to Vector. But the problem is the user. Lamba really a beginner user. With slackware I do not think she would have been able to use everyday.
* I tried Ubuntu, MintLXDE, Debian derivate SalineOS (doest'n work properly ) for lamba use (Mandriva and PCLinuxOS boot doest'n Start the Chakra 2011.4 in live is good but after 3 tried install, the installer crash. I think his buggy. I can't do nothing with that (garbage), Vector worked well but I don't think is forthe big big Lamba user.
After several hours of testing I had to resign him install XP and that's when I thought tested freshly downloaded OpenSuse 11.4. To my surprise it is fast enough once installed. The Gnome version. KDE is too heavy for this system.
Finally she have a good Linux system for the next 2 years. After that I think are too old equipment will be.
51 • opensuse 11.4 (by Reuben on 2011-03-22 20:42:07 GMT from United States)
Just tried the opensuse livecd. Unlike most of the other KDE livecds, I think the selection of software on the CD makes sense. The inclusion of Firefox on the CD seems like such a nobrainer.
However, in just 5 minutes of using the CD I noticed 2 things. The first was that it detected my webcam, and decided that the web cam was my primary sound card. Never mind that the webcam has a microphone but no speakers.
Next I changed the default soundcard in the phonon config and fired up amarok, looking for the few audio files that where encoded in vorbis or flac. Crash pretty quickly. Not good at all.
Talking about amarok, there is one bit of behavior that is really starting to annoy me. Yeah, I get that there are legal reasons why distros can't include mp3 support. But if you try to load something in the playlist that includes mp3 files, it will try to play the file. And then it will throw up an error message. The part that really, really, really annoys me is that it will try to play the next file which is also an mp3 file. And it gives you no chance to hit the pause button. It will go through about 10 files like this until it decides that it has encountered too many errors. I hope that kde devs change this behavior.
52 • PIII machines (by Neal on 2011-03-23 02:54:27 GMT from United States)
With PIII machines I'm thinking Puppy or yes...the lighter Slackware distros but definitely not Suse but hey, whatever floats your boat..
53 • Pentium III (by Landor on 2011-03-23 03:06:32 GMT from Canada)
If I was going to run a distribution on a system that old I would most likely either build Debian from the ground up using Xfce, or put AntiX on it.
Most likely use the base instal for AntiXl and go from there, adding what I needed/wanted as I went.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
54 • New Fedora Alpha (by MC Hambone on 2011-03-23 03:17:28 GMT from Canada)
I've been a regular user of Ubuntu since the first release in 2006, although I've always played around with other distro releases here and there. I just installed the new Fedora 15 Alpha and am blown away! They are really on the right track with the "Activities" button (which takes place of the menu *and* the pager!). Everything is so accessible, intuitive and takes up less space on the screen. Anyway, just in case anybody is itching to try something new, take this one for a spin! Hopefully the next versions of Ubuntu will take note.
55 • Google Summer of Code (by GSOC on 2011-03-23 05:04:45 GMT from Singapore)
FYI - Google accepted 175 of 417 applicants for this years Google Summer of Code. Attacking any distribution or project not part of the 175 accepted is stupid.
56 • Pentium 3 (by RobertD on 2011-03-23 11:34:33 GMT from United States)
A vanilla install of Slackware running Fluxbox or XFCE would do just fine.
57 • Light distro, older hardware etc... (by Caraibes on 2011-03-23 15:41:02 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Reading some of the comments, this week and last... Over the week-end I installed Ubuntu 10.04 PPC on my older Mac iBook G3 with 384 megs of ram only... Single-boot. Installed from live-cd, then apt-get install lubuntu-desktop and apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop (that is because you don't get PPC isos for Lubuntu)
Ext4 of course...
I used Epiphany as a browser, since there is no Chromium for PPC. I used Audacious for music and installed a nice Conky display as well... Also complete updates&upgrades... PCManFM to browse files...
The system was running in the 50's of ram, after booting, and in the 70's and early 80's of ram while browsing the web with Epiphany...
I also installed Fluxbox, but didn't noticed significant improvement over LXDE once Epiphany is open, ram goes into the 70's or 80's...
I tried Midori, but it kept on "freezing", so I removed it...
Firefox 3.6 was slow as a dog, but worked ok... Won't use it...
Too bad there are no PPA's for PPC, as I am very happy with FF4 on my Lucid MacBook...
I understand I could have gone for a regular Debian Netinst, with LXDE option, but it eats up all by bandwidth (I have 10GB/month at high speed, then 384kbps for the rest of the month), versus using that PPC Lucid iso I had already...
58 • RE: 57 (by Landor on 2011-03-23 19:35:38 GMT from Canada)
There's also the option of getting the xfce+lxde iso from here: http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/6.0.1/powerpc/iso-cd/
That would enable you to install LXDE (or Xfce) without downloading anything from the internet. It does cost 700mb though, and you already have another iso handy.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
59 • #53 (by anticapitalista on 2011-03-23 20:06:30 GMT from Greece)
Landor, maybe a beter option is to use antiX-core (c115MB). It is X-less, has a very basic installer that installs in a minute or so and uses the MEPIS kernel rather than a Debian one, but apart from that it is Debian Testing. It is also 'free' in that it has no contrib firmware and has the FSF Libre-kernel available in the repos.
I'm trying to get it as free as possible for those who wish for a faster and may I say easier alternative to Debian's net-install.
60 • #59 correction (by anticapitalista on 2011-03-23 20:10:14 GMT from Greece)
I should have written that it doesn't have the non-free Debian repo enabled, contrib is enabled.
61 • Re:58 & 59 (by Caraibes on 2011-03-23 22:52:02 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Thanks for the link, Landor, I might download it somewhere else...
@Anticapitalista, I enjoy the idea of a core-ISO...
In what way would it differ from a regular Netinst ?
(Anti, let me apologize for some harsh words I had with you a couple of years ago, it was inappropriate from me)
62 • @57 Macbuntu (by meanpt on 2011-03-23 23:22:27 GMT from Portugal)
If you're thinking upgrading your ram to 512, remember this: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/macbuntu/index.php?title=Main_Page
63 • pentium 3 (by fernbap on 2011-03-23 23:38:32 GMT from Portugal)
Since noone mentioned it (i wonder why), try Puppy.
64 • RE: 59 - 61 - 63 (by Landor on 2011-03-24 03:04:29 GMT from Canada)
#59
I thought about that for the person, but I figured since they were building it for someone else they might prefer the more simple install of starting with a complete system.
That said though, your core build is amazing in my opinion. I also truly appreciate your wanting to build a more Free/Libre base. It truly is an area that is restricted to those of us that want such a system. Restricted in what options we have available to us. I commented last week about what it took me to strip down Ubuntu to make it Free, what an effort. Sure, I could have went with one of the Libre distributions but when 9.10 was released there wasn't an option for a Libre 9.10 system. Anyway, as I said, and at least from me, your efforts are appreciated. We can only hope that others take note and do similar, that's the only way things will really become Free/Libre in my opinion.
#61
You're very welcome. It's always better having more options to fall back on.
#63
In regard to the person wanting it for another person, I personally would never advise someone to use any of the stripped down distributions that are missing a lot that a full build would have. Just one example is Busybox compared to a full shell. That might not be a problem for day to day operation, but it could easily become an issue if compiling software was needed, or a driver, etc, etc. Sometimes a more simple build like Puppy isn't the most simple, or easiest of answers.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
65 • @61 - Caraibes (by meanpt on 2011-03-24 09:34:30 GMT from Portugal)
:) ... unfortunately they don't have a ppc release .... or I would recommend you Estrella Roja ... debian plus kde 3 ... with lots of leftish romantism found memories of my youth ... and keeping me smile once a week ...
66 • About G3 PPC processor (by Caraibes on 2011-03-24 11:26:13 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Friends,
Keep in mind this G3 PPC processor is very weak... It seems weaker than a PIII...
See infos here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_G3
Coupled with a small amount of ram (384 megs), that gives us a gig with very few options... HDD space is only 20 gigs...
Of course, it is PPC, so no Skype, no Flash, no Chromium, no "Ubuntu-Tweak" with all the good PPA's...
No "exotic distros"...
As of me, I am now in "slow speed" until April the 16th, that is 384kps of download... But I'll check to see if I can download Landor's LXDE Debian ISO at the school I work...
But Lubuntu has been good so far... And definitely Epiphany is profiling like the best browser for older hardware, without going to very minimalist thing like Dillo...
I don't know if Debian Squeeze still has XMMS in their repos... But Audacious is ok for music...
67 • More on lightweight G3 (by Caraibes on 2011-03-24 13:07:42 GMT from Dominican Republic)
I am observing it is difficult to use online Gmail with Epiphany/Gnash... I just setup Sylpheed for my email-needs...
Right now, I am using 137megs of ram, writing this coments, with Pidgin on, Sylpheed open...
It went up to 210megs of ram when I tried to open Gmail online... Didn't work anyway...
The PowerPC G3 cpu is idling between 20% and 35%... Not bad... It went up to 100% when the Ubuntu-update gizmo went on... This is one of the details that might make me want to migrate to Debian...
-What are your thoughts on the best lightweight email-client ?
-Sylpheed ?
-Claws ?
68 • RE: 67 (by Landor on 2011-03-24 15:39:34 GMT from Canada)
I don't really have a preference for any of the lightweight clients. The only heavyweight I like is Kmail, but when I use a lightweight one it's usually something I've either never tried before, or just grab off the top of my head, since I pretty well only want it to do basic e-mail functions.
Both of those clients will do Gmail for you though, easily. A better alternative thank using the browser to load it. The only thing I don't like about doing Gmail from an e-mail client on your system is generally the spam comes with it.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
69 • RE #61 by Caraibes (by anticapitalista on 2011-03-24 15:40:53 GMT from Greece)
Caraibes,
Here are some differences between antiX-core and Debian net-install.
According to the Debian web page, netinst CD image is generally 135-175 MB whereas antiX-core is 115MB.
antiX-core uses a 2.6.32 MEPIS kernel (486 and 686) like Debian.
antiX-core installs much faster than Debian net-install as the antiX cli-installer script is much simpler, but offers less options.
antiX-core is live unlike net-install.
antiX-core runlevels are typical of Debian derivatives ie 5 for gui and 3 for cli.
antiX-core comes with the smxi/sgfxi/inxi scripts.
antiX-core comes with other useful scripts such as a remaster script, an install2usb script and ps_mem.py
Apologies accepted.
Oh, I think sylpheed is lighter than claws (though not by much), but IIRC claws has more features.
70 • Ref#67 - claws-mail (by Verndog on 2011-03-24 16:42:17 GMT from United States)
Claws-mail is the only email client I use. Its light, fast and does everything I need. I've tried many of the others and prefer using claws.
71 • Claws... (by Scrummage on 2011-03-24 18:47:01 GMT from United Kingdom)
...I like, but unable to get it to auto-conmplete from addressbook and send email direct from a link, although I think it can do the latter? Might try the revamped EudoraOSE1.
72 • Mint Debian Xfce RC, P3 (by fernbap on 2011-03-24 23:44:52 GMT from Portugal)
Mint Debian Xfce was just released. According to what the blog post says, it should be worth a try. It is also a rolling release, based on Debian testing
73 • RE: 72 (by Landor on 2011-03-25 00:35:23 GMT from Canada)
Though it is Debian, I think it's really not a huge deal since it's not 4.8. That's the real winner here and it's currently only in experimental, it hasn't even hit unstable yet. Some pinning with apt could pull it in properly, but that defeats the purpose of someone using a pre-built Debian Variant because they don't know how to use Debian. I also understand it's broken, or was, in experimental too.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
74 • OpenSUSE and stuff... (by davemc on 2011-03-25 00:56:27 GMT from United States)
Have to agree with some of the comments in that this seemed like a very biased review, given what Jesse wrote about Debian.
http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2011/03/tiny-core-fraud-on-source-forge.html
Interesting news there.
75 • OpenSUSE 11.4 (by KevinC on 2011-03-25 04:14:40 GMT from United States)
Gotta agree w/ Jessie on this....have been using OpenSUSE 11.4 all week and the more I use, the better I like it. I dl'ed the 64 bit DVD. Installed KDE and so far so good. No flaky crashes like in the past. Took a little effort to get everything as I like it, but really no more so than Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, and so on. Good job OpenSUSE team...not a bad job at all.
76 • Gnome 3 - This is the end, it seems (by RollMeAway on 2011-03-25 05:19:33 GMT from United States)
Dedoimedo lays it out, pretty much the same way I view it all. Includes a "Comparison to Unity". My favorite phrase: Your computer is not a smartphone.
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html
77 • @Dedoimedo/76 Gnome 3 (by Reuben on 2011-03-25 09:51:53 GMT from United States)
Using gnome 3, I do think that it might be a slick interface on a tablet. But from that review, you'd think that Gnome is the only DE. It's not. The likes of xfce and fluxbox are still available.
That said, I'm not really a fan. Sure, I like some concepts, like automatically creating virtual desktops. But many things take too many clicks. I think a few tweeks to the user interface could make it usable, but why?
78 • "Your computer is not a smartphone." (by meanpt on 2011-03-25 10:07:39 GMT from Portugal)
For the time being, unity will not reach touching devices. But my computer has a touch screen and feels happier with unity than with other shells with one exception: Bodhi's Elfe; and let me tell you that I'll be using more and more interfaces with touch screens in mind. Once Opera Mobile or Firefox's Fennec get it right, I'll not be using anything else for browsing (as I get older those big icons and zooming behaviour help to overcome sight weeknesses and fat fingers) and may even change and start using WebOs once HP makes it available. But Unty still has a long road forward before providing users with productivity increase in all size of screens,
79 • Fuduntu 14,9 (by Andre Tremblay on 2011-03-25 13:38:57 GMT from Canada)
Hi every one,
Just to mention a new distribution that should have a closer look from you people, FUDUNTU 14,9. It is a distribution using Fedora 14 but with added extras. It is close to perfection as for the look, the cleanliness of the presentation and operation. It is giving us a lot of choices but with the professionalism of a Linux-Mint product and or Fedora complete care. It is the first OS that I am installing without any flaw, direct internet connect, easy printer installation, etc etc etc. I think this OS should be known by people as fast as possible in order to have the benefit of using that professional Linux product for every one. I am a Linux user since January 2009 an have tried many good and bad Linux OS, but FUDUNTU is one to be known very fast by every one, it is worthy.
I hope to see it soon in Distrowatch, Andre Tremblay
80 • email clients (by RobertD on 2011-03-25 13:39:15 GMT from United States)
I personally use mutt to send and receive emails. Its light and fast and extremely configurable.
81 • Zenwalk (by Neal on 2011-03-25 15:00:02 GMT from United States)
Wow....a new Zenwalk! Now there is a breath of fresh air....
82 • light distros (by mw on 2011-03-25 17:05:01 GMT from Canada)
AntiX, Austrumi, and SliTuz all have worked well for me on older hardware with 256mb.but...wifii and display support might be a problem depending on hardware..512mb of ram makes a lot of difference though, a lot more than cpu speed..also Lubuntu 10.04...some versions of Puppy work but some are problematic..and Puppy less standard package support than some others..
all good
83 • openSUSE 11.4 (by tdockery97 on 2011-03-26 03:04:45 GMT from United States)
After that review and the positive comments from others here, I decided to give the KDE version a spin. I find it to be very stable. So far I have not encountered some of the glitches with KDE 4.6 that I did with Mint 10 KDE. I was also able to install the proprietary ATI driver for my Radeon HD4200 easily, something I couldn't do with many distros. All in all, I think openSUSE is a well put together distro with a bright future. I plan on going along for the ride.
84 • @83 (by KevinC on 2011-03-26 06:13:50 GMT from United States)
Same experience here...it's been running more than 1 wk. and my 9 yr old (bless her heart---she could give a s--t if it's MS or Linux or BSD)...she's been torture testing for me. It flawlessly does the flash stuff she loves; Amarok doesn't crash and take the desktop. Fonts still are not up to Ubuntu/ Mint standards, however, I'm liking it the more I use it. And KDE 4.x is finally mature enough to use to actually use as an everyday system. That's the great thing about Linux tho, if Ubuntu drops the ball w/ Unity or Gnome3 sucks...well KDE4 is mature enough to use now and there's still XFCE (love the CrunchBang 64-bit iteration), LXDE, Openbox, Fluxbox...etc, etc. While Unity and Gnome3 may succeed and eventually thrive...or if they don't, we still have options. And while I like Mint's spin on Ubuntu; if these fail---Fedora 14 hit us earlier this year w/ a nice release and OpenSUSE seem thus far to be solid. If Madriva or its offshoot can come back strong; there is no lack of choice of nice, solid distros at this moment---couldn't say that as little as 6 mos. to a yr. ago.
85 • @47: PIII chipset and openSUSE (by cba on 2011-03-26 15:00:36 GMT from Germany)
The pentium III is most likely not the problem, it could be the IDE chipset.
You can verify this by asking your friend if openSUSE had problems during the boot process when trying to detect the computer's IDE-DVD-ROM or IDE harddisk.
With newer kernels a new SATA/IDE subsystem with new drivers is now used for all SATA/IDE chipsets whereas the old IDE subsystem has been abandoned. Sometimes such a new SATA/IDE module is too experimental and broken.
In this case you have to boot openSUSE with the "brokenmodules=" parameter (e.g. brokenmodules=pata_via or brokenmodules=pata_amd or brokenmodules=pata_piix depending on your chipset as well as depending on what openSUSE tells you during the boot process) at the Grub boot prompt in order to blacklist the new broken SATA/IDE module so that openSUSE does not load it.
It is a little bit complicated, but it is some kind of compromise in order to support as most hardware as possible.
86 • Kororaa & equality (by Tom on 2011-03-26 15:03:09 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi :) It is great to see Chris Smart following his dream and actively maintaining and developing the Kororaa distro. It would be quite ironic to have a review of it! ;)
@ 41 by uz64. I think Chris Smart left a long time before Caitlyn Martin. I was under the impression that she offered to continue his work here. Her articles in O'Reilly's and elsewhere are great to read
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2654
Clearly she is very busy in other areas of linux particularly in corporate circles.
I haven't really been around here much in the last couple of years so there have been a lot of good people whose posts i have totally missed out on. Linux is famous for being male dominated despite projects such as
http://www.linuxchix.org/
So perhaps we need to be better at promoting projects such as that and
http://ubuntu-women.org/
But positive discrimination can back-fire too. It is a thorny issue and difficult to put right but i get the feeling that our communities are improving in equality issues.
Healthy communities are quite fluid with people joining, becoming quite active and perhaps leaving for a while to focus on other projects and perhaps returning later.
Many regards to all from Tom :)
87 • @33 (by cba on 2011-03-26 15:37:21 GMT from Germany)
O.k., now I see your point.
Debian Squeeze provides better multimedia support out-of-the-box in comparison with openSUSE as a result of its non-enterprise and "software patent-hating" nature.
And it is a good question whether openSUSE with its more and more important Buildservice and Packman repos is a good choice for newbies provided that you have to know all these repo things beforehand in order to get a "working" distro with basic multimedia capabilities.
But what could openSUSE do?
Novell/openSUSE could try to sell an openSUSE multimedia edition with all the legal Fluendo plugins (~ 30 Euro) and a legal DVD software player (~ 20 Euro) so that it would cost around 60 to 90 Euro. But I doubt that such an offer would be an economic success, because you can get all these multimedia capabilities for 0 Euro by downloading and using free software. Almost no private user would pay for this.
The other option would be to become independent (e.g. in form of a German- or EU-based openSUSE foundation to avoid the validity of the US patent system, because most US software patents are not valid here in the European Union and Germany, if you do not sell openSUSE commercially and preinstalled on real hardware) and do the same like Debian and Ubuntu.
In my opinion openSUSE should try to become in the near future what Debian is today, with rpms instead of debs. :-)
88 • @87 OpenSUSE again (by fernbap on 2011-03-26 22:03:37 GMT from Portugal)
If you are insterested in dragging windows users to Linux, DON'T give them a live CD that has no multimedia capacity.
The most likely outcome is he tries it, tries to play a mp3 file, it doesn't work, tries to play an avi, it doesn't work. He takes the CD out, and his most likely comment will be "Linux sucks!". You will have a lot of work to convince him to try linux again.
Hence the linux distribution cathegories, novice, intermediate, expert.
You can't just say "Debian sucks" or "Opensuse is good" without specifying the targeted user, novice, intermediate or expert.
Which classifies Opensuse and Debian as distros for intermediate users. Stating that a distro is good and recomending it when you know it is not suitable for novice users, is giving linux a bad name.
Reviewers must be carefull with the consequences of their reviews. The worst thing they can do to Linux is recommend a distro that is not suitable for novice users without warning the novice users that they will have to figure things out in order to make it work.
89 • Experience levels (by Jesse on 2011-03-26 22:38:18 GMT from Canada)
@88
I think you raise a very good point. Quite often we in the Linux community get so accustomed to certain things (installing codecs, configuring X, partitioning) that we forget most computer users don't know how to do those same tasks. Many users aren't even aware of what partitioning is or what codecs are.
Visiting sites like this gives us an echo chamber effect where (almost) everyone here knows how to install and configure an OS, and we get used to that idea, forgetting we're a relatively small group of people.
Though I do think we need to look beyond just codecs to determine what category a distro fits into. There are other considerations, like the user-friendliness of the install, intuitiveness of the package manager, etc to think about.
90 • @88 (by Brandon Sniadajewski on 2011-03-26 22:42:37 GMT from United States)
You could say, based on your reasoning, that Ubuntu and its official derivatives (Kubuntu, Xubuntu) are intermediate since you may have to download the MM codecs after install, though Maverick lets you download during install as well.
91 • @90 (by fernbap on 2011-03-26 23:58:41 GMT from Portugal)
Sure. That's why ubuntu derivatives had an oportunity to appear. The reason is the same for Zenwalk or Fuduntu.
Have you ever wondered why ubuntu derivatives like Mint are so popular? The reason is simple. They cater windows users, which is where "the market is".
Those are the notice targeted distributions. Neither Fedora or OpenSUSE or Debian or even Ubuntu are.
Distrowatchers get so busy fighting for their pet distros that they tend to completely forget "the outer world".
unless you belong to those hard hard core linuxers of ythe old generation that think windows users don't deserve Linux.
92 • Codecs and such... (by KevinC on 2011-03-27 00:24:54 GMT from United States)
To be fair tho, it's not a big deal to get the codecs in almost any distro...with a bare minimum of research, Also, it is not hard to track down guides (e.g, HowToForge) that make it copy and paste easy. And, for Fedora, easyLife does all the heavy lifting. OpenSUSE has similar online one-click installers. IIRC, OpenSUSE offered to dl the proper codecs when I clicked on a particular media file and the codecs dl'ed and installed. I am using the DVD install, 64-bit, btw.
I am of the opinion that anyone serious about switching to or experimenting w/ Linux will not be averse to doing a little research---for me that's part of the fun. That being said, distros such as OpenSUSE and Fedora are not really in the same league, as far as drop-dead, work ootb, as ones like Mint or PCLinuxOS. That is reality, However, once I have either of these distros set up and running, they both have provided stable, nice experiences. I think it is really good for the Linux ecosystem to have so many good choices...it hasn't always been this way in the past. And even tho I haven't used OpenSUSE for that long, as of yet...so far, so good. No deal-breakers (as I have experienced in the past) have reared their ugly head. I have used Linux long enough to recall times when I could count on one hand the # of distros I would consider stable enough to use for an everyday OS.
The wealth of choice of quality distros also allows one not to put all of his/ her eggs in one basket. Hence, if Ubuntu or Fedora or whoever move in a direction that doesn't provide the environment you desire (i.e, Unity, Gnome3, etc)...it's not hard to simply switch to something else.
93 • @91 (by Brandon Sniadajewski on 2011-03-27 00:47:10 GMT from United States)
I agree with your point about Mint, though I don't use it now. The main reason having anything to do with multimedia codecs.
And no, I'm not an old-school Linux user with a pet distro. I've only used or "played with" Linux since 2005, having tried/used Fedora, Mandriva, PCLOS, Mint, and my current installs of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and OpenSUSE alongside Windows 7 currently.
94 • Re #87 (by imnotrich on 2011-03-27 15:36:24 GMT from Mexico)
Debian Squeeze has multi-media support out of the box? What planet are you on?
Squeeze has no multi-media support. You have to get all your codecs post install from an organization called Debian multi-media.
In the last three months Debian multi-media's website and servers have been operational about 60% of the time, and apparently there's little or no cooperation between Debian and Debian multi-media so while some stuff does work, some stuff does not.
I'm two weeks into a fresh Squeeze install and while some things went very well, other aspects remain a work in progress. Maybe next week I'll submit a review of Squeeze from the perspective of an actual user. Stay tuned for that.
95 • @94 (by cba on 2011-03-27 16:51:18 GMT from Germany)
Most common multimedia codecs come with Debian Main.
You are talking about special proprietary codecs for which no free alternative exists and/or libdvdcss2.
Please tell me what multimedia codecs you are missing in the official Debian repos.
96 • @94 (by fernbap on 2011-03-27 16:59:55 GMT from Portugal)
I'm on planet earth. You?
If you install Debian 6 DVD1, using the defaults for a desktop install, you will get support for mp3, flac, avi, flv.
Youtube won't work because gnash will not cut it, but you can get adobe flash from the debian non-free repo, that is already installed on apt, all you have to do is enable it.
And no, i never needed to add debian multi-media.
97 • @91 ferndap (by Fewt on 2011-03-27 17:05:50 GMT from United States)
Fuduntu is not an Ubuntu based Linux distribution, we are a Fedora derivative. One of our goals (which we already consider ourselves to be successful with) is to build an RPM based desktop centric Linux distribution that rivals Ubuntu.
98 • @ 95 (by Blue Knight on 2011-03-27 17:07:49 GMT from Poland)
> "Most common multimedia codecs come with Debian Main"
:shocked: Really? Hmm...
> "You are talking about special proprietary codecs for which no free alternative exists and/or libdvdcss2."
I guess (s)he talks about everything an average user can need... And please, don't speak about some crappy thing like Gnash for instance in place of Flash...
> "Please tell me what multimedia codecs you are missing in the official Debian repos."
I have another question for you: Please tell me what multimedia codecs you are NOT missing in the official Debian repos. :-D
99 • fernbap (by Fewt on 2011-03-27 17:08:31 GMT from United States)
Sorry, fernbap not ferndap lol
100 • RE: 94 - 98 (by Landor on 2011-03-27 18:04:57 GMT from Canada)
#94
Another week and you're still doing/talking about broken installs. I wonder if you're even being honest with us at times. I don't believe anyone can make that many mistakes and break that many installs right from the start.
I'm a pure Libre Stalwart (I chose uppercase for that) and I can tell you that I did not install the multimedia repositories and Debian 6 from the CD1 ISO has pretty well every codec installed. You can't have any idea what you're talking about, it's not possible. Or, all of this is purposeful.
#98
I'll ask you as question, what in the hell does Gnash or any Flash player have to do with codecs. I didn't put a question mark because it's rhetorical.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
101 • @ 100 (by Blue Knight on 2011-03-27 19:08:09 GMT from Iceland)
> "I'll ask you as question, what in the hell does Gnash or any Flash player have to do with codecs."
Well, probably you've read badly my post . I said they have to do with "everything an average user can need". ;-)
102 • @101 (by Fred Nelson on 2011-03-27 19:24:32 GMT from United States)
Since most YouTube videos have a WebM version now, Flash games don't interest me, and I don't think anyone really cares for Flash ads, I'm not really missing anything not having the insecure, buggy Adobe Flash Player installed.
103 • RE: 101 (by Landor on 2011-03-27 19:25:29 GMT from Canada)
I don't care what it has to do with supposedly an 'average' user needs (average, that's a fun one'), it has zero to do with the inclusion of coders-decoders in Debian. Adobe Flash is extremely proprietary/closed source and you made a reference to it in regard to coders-decoders. It's a container within itself, not an actual coder-decoder, though it contains such.
When the topic's about one thing, don't veer off and make demands in regard to something else that has absolutely nothing to do with the original topic.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
104 • ferndap :D (by fernbap on 2011-03-27 19:53:37 GMT from Portugal)
That was my point. Fedora is not novice friendly as well.
105 • ... before ... (by meanpt on 2011-03-27 20:04:00 GMT from Portugal)
... being worried with codecs and all that stuff, I would be more careful in providing the drivers for grapghcs and wireless; cause before that everything turns out useless :(
106 • @ 104 (by Blue Knight on 2011-03-27 20:09:32 GMT from Poland)
> "Fedora is not novice friendly as well."
Er, who said it was? Nobody, and not the Fedora people themselves... Btw, it's not the Fedora goal...
107 • RE: 106 (by Landor on 2011-03-27 20:19:34 GMT from Canada)
That's not correct. The Fedora Team does believe their distribution is user friendly (a perception) and it is a goal of theirs to continue making it so. Maybe you should spend some time discussing things with Design Team. Máirín Duffy's blog, the head of the design team, would be a good start.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
108 • Slackware (by fritz on 2011-03-27 20:34:43 GMT from United States)
Hey Patrick,
Will you be serving pi with your next RC?
/fritz
109 • RE: 107 (by Blue Knight on 2011-03-28 00:14:56 GMT from France)
I guess we have maybe not the same definition of "friendly", or maybe we're not on the same plane...
Btw, "user friendly" and "novice friendly" are not exactly the same thing for me...
110 • Give me a slice of that Slackware pi too. (by RobertD on 2011-03-28 01:07:53 GMT from United States)
IMO, its the best flavor of linux available.
RobertD
111 • RE: 109 (by Landor on 2011-03-28 02:10:13 GMT from Canada)
You're right. I don't consider the inclusion of proprietary/patent encumbered/closed source applications in a distribution novice friendly. But everyone can muddy up any term they want to make it fit what they want.
I'm sure if you actually took the time to read a little bit of Máirín Duffy's thoughts on the matter you'd find out she definitely has novice friendly in mind, and for Fedora to be that way. People just have to stop bleating what everyone else does in regard to what novice friendly means so they can actually learn what it really means. Until then, people will still be funding Kiddy Distributions to keep them 'on the path'.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
112 • Love those codecs (by Crashmehard on 2011-03-28 04:25:27 GMT from United States)
I consider anything in Linux that makes it easy for one to transition from Windows to be novice friendly.
113 • RE: 111 (by Blue Knight on 2011-03-28 04:42:16 GMT from France)
Well, to take an example, the common view is a distro like Mint is "novice friendly", but not Fedora... You can agree or not. :-)
114 • Codecs redux (by KevinC on 2011-03-28 05:10:33 GMT from United States)
My point is that installing any multimedia support, be it Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, WTF ever, is not that hard. Not really so much so than in Windows (which still doesn't come w/ much OOB). Maybe the processes are different, but jeezus...if one can't figure this out, then maybe Linux is not for them anyway. Even w/ the so-called kiddie distros, like Mint (which I use on my most of my systems as one of the multiboot options) I have done plenty of editing config files and such. It boils down to those who will pull themselves up by the bootstraps and learn what they need to make work what they wish and those that will say f'it and go back to Windows. This latter group, in all honesty, for the most part probably had no real interest in switching anyhow. They probably just wanted to take Linux for a testdrive b/c someone told them it was cool. I can honestly say that I used Linux about 99% of the time, on my netbook, desktops, my router (ASUS RT N16 w/ tomato USB thanks to Landor's guide). Granted I have to use Windows all day at work and for about 2 proprietary apps I use, I switch between several distros and any one of them work fine for all of my computing needs.
I also standby my statement that, unless one is totally clueless about computers, setting up a fully functional system (including codecs) is not that hard w/ just a little effort and research. It's no harder or easier w/ Fedora or OpenSUSE than it is w/ Ubuntu or for that matter Windows.
115 • RE: 114 (by Landor on 2011-03-28 06:33:37 GMT from Canada)
Did you end up using it for storage/back-up/file sharing? I tried everything I could and got poor transfer speeds. Samba sucks, and in all honesty, what in the hell does anyone want to use Samba for when they run Linux only.
Anyway, there's no NFS option for TomatoUSB right now, though I did read supposedly someone is working on such a beast. I'm going to put together (which I should have done in the first place) a strictly NAS box for the majority of our storage for the time being and I'll revisit TomatoUSB when NFS support gets added.
I'm glad it helped you too. So many flash stuff using DOS/Windows. There's other solutions out there for Linux users other than Windows or a DOS disk.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
Number of Comments: 115
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