 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 408, 6 June 2011 |
 Welcome to this year's 23rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! This week we start with a detailed review of Fedora 15, the latest version of the widely-used Linux distribution and the first major one to introduce its users to the radically-redesigned GNOME desktop. Has the GNOME 3 revolution arrived too early for most desktop computer users or is it the beginning the most exciting evolution in desktop computing? Read on to find out what we think. The feature article is then followed by the regular news section which presents the inaugural stable release of Mageia and compares it with Mandriva Linux from which it was forked, summarises some common criticisms of Ubuntu's latest version before providing a quick feature list of the project's upcoming release, and recounts a current dilemma of Slackware developers who are considering the removal of the KDE desktop from the distribution. Also in this issue, a quick Questions and Answers section that deals with file permissions, and the usual sections, including a list of new distributions submitted to DistroWatch last week. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com May 2011 donation is the RIPLinuX project, the producer of the highly useful data and file recovery live CD. Happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (25MB) and MP3 (41MB) formats
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
|
| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Trying on a Fedora that gives a new look
 The Fedora Project, always looking to push the technology frontier, has released Fedora 15. Looking over the release notes for the latest version of the Red Hat-sponsored distribution shows that the developers have been aggressive in adopting new features over the past development cycle. Some highlights from the release announcement include the inclusion of the new GNOME 3 desktop environment and a new dynamic firewall tool, which is available in the repository but was considered too experimental to include on the installation media. The systemd session manager makes an appearance and, if the hype is to be believed, it will offer a new way to get the operating system up and running quickly. This release comes with LibreOffice and some security improvements, such as the removal of most setuid permissions and stronger compression of the install media. This last feature is immediately obvious as the download ISO for the Fedora GNOME live disc is under 600 MB in size.
Installation and first impressions
I started my journey into Fedora country with my HP laptop (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB of RAM, Intel video card). Booting from the live disc proceeded normally, showing me a graphical screen with the Fedora logo before loading the GNOME 3 environment. This release features a soft blue background with a lot of vertical lines and an image of two blue birds. Personally this look isn't to my taste, but to each their own. The new GNOME is fairly sparse, there aren't any icons nor is there a task switcher at the bottom of the screen. At the top-left corner we find a button labelled "Activities", there's a clock positioned at the top-centre and we find a system tray over in the upper-right corner. The Activities button takes the place of the old Applications menu and clicking it alters the screen somewhat. With the Activities button activated a quick-launch bar appears on the left side of the screen, and any open windows are shown in the middle of the screen as miniature versions of themselves. Near the top of the screen two buttons ("Windows" and "Applications") appear. Clicking the Applications button brings up large icons for installed programs and displays a series of categories (such as we'd usually find in the application menu) down the right side of the screen. Clicking on a category filters down the icons. In the upper-right corner of the screen we find a search box and typing key words will also help us filter the application icons we're shown. We'll come back to GNOME later, but right now let's move on to the installer.
The Fedora installer can be found on the Activities quick-launch bar and launching it takes us down a familiar road. The installer hasn't changed much in the past couple of releases and, for the most part, I think that's good. Fedora's installer walks us through selecting our keyboard layout, setting the time zone and creating a root password. We're then taken to the partitioning screen and I think Fedora has one of the better layouts for partitioning. I find the partitioning screen intuitive and the layout gives us a good visual indication of how the disk is divided. Fedora supports regular partitions, LVM and RAID systems and supports encryption on its partitions. Most partitions can be made to use any of the ext2/3/4 file systems or XFS. According to the release notes Btrfs is available on the project's DVD, but not on the live discs. I think it's also important to note that when installing Fedora from a live disc the root file system must be formatted with the ext4 file system.
Our last task, after carving up the disk, is to set any options for GRUB and then the installer goes to work copying files. The install went quickly on my laptop, but then when I went to reboot I noticed that the GNOME environment doesn't appear to have a restart/shut down button. There's a logoff button on the user's account menu, but no power option. According to this bug report, the GNOME developers expect people to log out and access the shutdown option from the login page or learn to hold down the ALT key while accessing the account menu to make the shutdown option appear -- a move which has generated a lot of "Where is the shutdown option?" questions on forums.
Fedora 15 - web browsing and backups
(full image size: 115kB, screen resolution 1024x768 pixels)
Booting into my local install of Fedora 15 for the first time brought up the first-run wizard. We're shown license information, asked to create a regular user account and set the system clock. We're also given the opportunity to send a hardware (Smolt) profile to the Fedora project. With those steps completed, I was brought to a GNOME login screen. Though GNOME has gone through a big change, the login screen is much the same as before with the user/password prompt in the middle of the screen and option buttons at the top. Once I got logged in I decided to make some minor adjustments. The default theme features a lot of white/bright-grey and I wanted something less washed out and some new wallpaper to match.
Desktop and applications
Unlike its predecessor, GNOME 3 doesn't feature a System menu, just an Activities button so I decided to start there. Since under GNOME 2 the application I wanted was called "Appearance", I decided to make use of the new GNOME search box. Well, the keyword "appearance" didn't yield any results, nor did "look", "feel" or "theme". The term "system" got some results, but not what I wanted. Searching for "settings" gave me a "System Settings" icon and I took it. (Later I found a System Settings link on the user menu when I went to logout, so it's not hard to find again, once one knows where to look.) The System Settings tool is basically a control panel, similar to the one found in Ubuntu or the KDE settings panel. Here I found a way to change the background, but I couldn't find anything for adjusting the theme, fonts or colours. Deciding to change course a bit, I turned to the buffet of applications.
Fedora 15 - application menu
(full image size: 603kB, screen resolution 1024x768 pixels)
Fedora comes with a fairly standard supply of software, including Firefox 4, the Transmission BitTorrent client, the Empathy instant messaging program, and Evolution for e-mail. There's a document viewer, Shotwell for dealing with image files, a CD ripper, disc burner and Cheese, the webcam tool. We're provided with a few games, the Rhythmbox music player and a movie player. We're given the handy backup tool Déjà Dup, and the Orca screen reader. Fedora has a good supply of administration tools and there are applications included to manage user accounts, set up the firewall, configure network connections and trouble-shoot SELinux. I didn't run into any SELinux problems, so I can't comment on how well the trouble-shooter works, but the rest of the system configuration tools functioned smoothly and I found them straightforward to use. Though the distro comes with multimedia programs, codecs for playing popular video formats and MP3 files were not included, nor were Flash, Java or the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Underneath it all we find the Linux kernel, version 2.6.38.
Managing software packages and updates on Fedora 15 was, at first, a trying experience. Upon logging in for the first time I noticed that no update notification was displayed in the system tray and so I turned to the application menu to perform a manual check. The first quirk I imagine will catch novice users is that there is one utility called "Software Update" and another called "Software Updates". The latter allows users to set automatic checks for available updates and, optionally, have Fedora install those new packages. The "Software Update" tool is a program which allows the user to manually check for updates and install the ones they want. Or it would if it had been able to download package information. The first time I ran the Software Update tool it froze while trying to download information from the repositories. I closed the application, did some other tasks and came back to it. It froze again. Turning to the command-line YUM package manager I was able to download repository information in a few seconds and download the available 84 updates. Delta update packages are enabled by default, allowing us to download only the pieces of updates we need. During my trial I found that this reduced my download sizes by about 60-70%. Later in the week, after using YUM, I found that the Software Update program worked smoothly and I was happy to find that more information had been added to the interface, keeping the user in the loop as to what is happening while updates are applied.
The graphical Add/Remove Software program (or gpk-application, if you prefer), was a mixed experience. After confirming that the YUM command-line tool worked, I turned to the GUI interface and performed a few searches for packages and installed them. Things went smoothly. I then decided to click on some of the available pre-defined software categories to see what administration tools and office applications were available. Clicking on any category brought up a message "No results were found". But searching for packages by name continued to work. I performed a manual refresh of the repository information and, from then on, filtering software by categories worked.
Fedora 15 - package manager
(full image size: 166kB, screen resolution 1024x768 pixels)
After trying Fedora 14 last year I made some complaints about the update GUI and the package manager front-end and I'm happy to see that progress has been made on both applications. Despite my early problems, I found that both GUIs have improved. They may still be slower than their counterparts in the Ubuntu distribution, but progress has been made to make them smoother and more intuitive.
Hardware support
Fedora 15 did a good job of detecting and using my hardware. When running on the laptop my screen was set to a good resolution, GNOME 3 effects worked, audio worked out of the box and my Intel wireless card worked without any problems. My touchpad worked and scrolling was enabled, but detecting taps as clicks was turned off by default. Things went smoothly on my desktop test box too with my NVIDIA video card working well with GNOME 3 and audio functioning out of the box. When running in a virtual machine, where 3D effect were not available, I found that the GNOME environment would smoothly fall back to using a GNOME 2.x style interface and the system ran smoothly with 512 MB of RAM. One quirk I kept running into was, often, upon logging in, I'd see a notice telling me that gvfs (GNOME's virtual file system) had encountered an error, followed by a warning saying that my hard drive had failed a health check. Closer examination of the drives didn't turn up any issues. The people who put on the Linux Action Show ran into the same warning and also didn't find any errors on their hard drive so it's apparently not just my equipment that triggers this behaviour.
The GNOME 3 desktop
Regarding GNOME 3, the flagship feature of this release, we all have our own workflows and style preferences, so opinions will differ. Personally, I was put off by the design of the new interface. The code quality appears to be good and the environment was stable on my machines, so I think the developers' decision last year to push the 3.0 release back six months was a good move. However, the style of the desktop didn't suit me at all. Mostly I think this is because of the extra movement required to get to items. For instance, under GNOME 2 launching an administration tool on my laptop required moving the mouse a few hundred pixels and two clicks. To do the same under GNOME 3 requires moving the mouse over 2,000 pixels and four clicks (or a move to the keyboard to type search terms). The minimize button is something I use frequently and it's not available under the new environment. Right-clicking on the desktop and task-switcher entries no longer works. Basically, even once I knew where things were, most tasks took twice as much effort to perform compared to the GNOME 2 way of doing things.
The application search function usually works, but sometimes seems overly picky. As an example, searching for "console" doesn't return anything, but "terminal" does. A search for "package" doesn't return any results, but "software" and "install" do. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it does mean that the user needs to learn new habits. I find the display changes when bringing up the Activities menu and the dynamic appearance of panels more distracting than helpful. One thing I admit I didn't like at first, but found it growing on me later, was the manner in which GNOME 3 handles workspaces. At first I thought it was weird that I could only have one more virtual desktop than applications open, especially after getting used to KDE's Activities. However, I did learn to appreciate the way applications could easily be moved between workspaces and the workspaces themselves could be reordered.
The new GNOME environment feels like it was heavily influenced by smart phone displays where screens are small and people can touch/click various places on the screen quickly. If I were using a touch-screen tablet, I think GNOME 3 would be a good fit because my fingers could reach various parts of the screen quickly and it would be easy to touch the large icons, but for a mouse/keyboard arrangement on a screen larger than eight inches I don't see the appeal. Using the new GNOME is a bit like going to a nice restaurant where the waiter brings just a plate and a single spoon instead of an array of forks, spoons and knives. Technically, yes, it avoids the question of "which fork do I use for this dish?" and, yes, it makes the table less cluttered, but it's awkward being forced to eat one's salad and steak with a soup spoon.
Fedora 15 - GNOME's Activities View
(full image size: 463kB, screen resolution 1024x768 pixels)
Conclusions
As quite often happens with Fedora releases, I think version 15 is great in some respects and falls behind in others. Take, for instance, YUM -- it's probably faster than it has ever been and I was quite impressed with the command-line program, but the GUI front-ends still lag behind their counterparts in performance. This release handled my hardware really well and comes with some interesting technology previews -- whether you are a fan of GNOME 3 or not, I think we can agree it's nice to see a distribution offering it for people to try and, on cards/drivers which don't support 3-D effects, the display "falls back" nicely to the classic theme. I think it's good that the developers have managed to increase compression on the live disc without negatively impacting performance, but I wonder why they didn't use the opportunity to add more software as there is about an extra 100 MB of space available on the CD.
The installer continues to be solid and the installations on both machines went faster this time than I think they have in the past couple of releases. At the same time I think it's a shame that Fedora continues to be one of the few distros not to support non-default file systems during the install from live media. They're also one of the few freedom-focused distributions not to include MP3 or Flash/Gnash support. It seems more and more that Fedora is interested solely on being a test bed for technology and not the "operating system for everyday use" the project's website declares it to be. And if that's what you're looking for, a distro from which to test drive new technology, then Fedora is a good option. But for regular, general-purpose use, I found Fedora 15 to be lacking in features and consistency.
|
| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
Mageia versus Mandriva, Ubuntu's "sins", Slackware's KDE headaches
 Ever since the first release of Mandrake Linux 5.1, this popular distribution, later renamed to Mandriva Linux, has been through so many major highs and lows that its continued existence is nothing short of a miracle. Last week's release of Mageia 1 is an indication of this enormous resilience that has brought us so many great releases. Although Mandriva Linux is certainly alive and kicking, right now Mageia seems to be a more genuine "Mandriva" than Mandriva itself, a distribution built largely by the same well-known team, now united under an umbrella of a non-profit organisation. Mandriva, on the other hand, has started to diverge dramatically from its roots, especially now that much of the code is written by new developers mostly located in St Petersburg. That's not necessarily a bad thing, so it will be interesting to witness the duel between these two distributions in their quests to retain users (in case of Mandriva) and gain converts (in Mageia's case). Right now Mageia holds the upper hand as it has a stable release available for download and it even provides an upgrade path from Mandriva Linux 2010. Moreover, the Mandriva developers have yet to announce the new release date for its upcoming version 2011 after missing the original target by some margin. Once it arrives, it should be exciting to compare the two releases.
So what's new in Mageia's inaugural version, in relation to Mandriva 2010? Not all that much really, says Pascal Terjan on his personal blog, as the project's main goal to-date was to set up the infrastructure and deliver a stable release: "Given the amount of work to get everything in place, don't expect much bleeding-edge stuff in version 1. No GNOME 3, no switch to systemd... The goal was to have all the infrastructure and teams set up, and have a strong basis for a great version 2, and I think the result is quite nice!" The author also provides some interesting statistics and comparisons with the current state of Mandriva Linux: "Then the massive work: importing RPM packages, fixing them as quite a few did not build, and cleaning them. The result is 7,389 source packages (Mandriva has 12,390, Fedora has 10,283) and Mageia 2 will probably have much more as only packages needed/requested by packagers and early testers were included. More than the number of packages, the interesting data is that they all got built recently, and there are 0 broken dependencies or orphan binary packages! For comparison Mandriva currently has 4,059 source RPM packages that are older than six months, 1,065 binary packages without matching source, and 4,756 binary packages with broken dependencies."
Mageia 1 - the inaugural release of the community fork of Mandriva Linux
(full image size: 1,175kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
* * * * *
 Several weeks after the release of "Natty Narwhal", debates over Ubuntu's recent changes rage on. Howard Fosdick from OSNews has taken the time to put together an interesting article entitled "The Sins of Ubuntu", analysing many of the common criticisms of Canonical's flagship product: "One obvious response to anyone who criticizes Ubuntu is to say to them: why don't you just run another operating system? There are so many competing Linux and BSD distros out there. True. But there is a larger issue here. Ubuntu's great popularity means that it represents Linux to many people. It's the distro vendors pre-install. It's the distro the mainstream media always review. It's the one distro everybody's tried. It's been ranked #1 in DistroWatch's yearly popularity ratings for the past six years. Fair or not, Ubuntu reflects on the Linux community as a whole. How well Ubuntu meets criticisms matters even to Linux users who don't use it. So what are common Ubuntu criticisms? Here are those I often hear...."
With the release of the initial alpha build of "Oneiric Oncelot", many Ubuntu users are turning their attention to the distribution's next stable release and its planned features. Michael Larabel has a nice summary of these in "The Key Features For Ubuntu 11.10": "Here are the key areas to be worked on during the Ubuntu 11.10 development cycle: integrate GNOME 3.2 / GTK+ 3, Unity will continue to be the default, but GNOME 3/GTK+ 3 will be available from the universe repository; Unity 2D as the default desktop fall-back, the Qt-powered Unity 2D desktop will be used (rather than classic GNOME) in cases where the system's drivers / hardware don't support a 3D-accelerated Unity desktop; LightDM will be the default log-in display manager / greeter, it will replace GDM in Ubuntu and also KDM in Kubuntu; simple back-up support via Déjà Dup; better tools to create localized versions of Ubuntu for different regions; updating the Gwibber user-interface; further compress the live CD space as it's approaching the 700 MB limit and there's still new packages that need to be squeezed in (e.g. Qt for Unity 2D); Mozilla Thunderbird as the default e-mail client, GNOME's Evolution mail client will be ditched; adapting to the more rapid release cycle of Mozilla Firefox."
* * * * *
 GNOME is not the only desktop environment that continuously introduces radical changes; it seems that KDE also makes it hard for some distributions to adapt to the rapid pace of evolution in the popular desktop environment. The latest one, affecting Slackware developers, is the decision to split up some of the bigger KDE packages into several smaller ones. Eric Hameleers reports about the dilemma, even suggesting a possible removal of KDE from future releases of Slackware Linux: "The new KDE series 4.7.x proves to be a bigger challenge for Slackware. We saw that the 4.6. series moved away from HAL and instead requires udisks/upower (which was the reason for sticking with 4.5.5 in Slackware 13.37). The KDE developers have now finalized their move from CVS to GIT as the source control and version management system. The result is less than optimally arranged for packagers. The old 'monolithic' source tarballs are now being split into many additional tarballs for individual applications. This means that we have to rewrite our scripts and possibly add a lot of packages. After talking to Pat Volkerding, I announced on the KDE packager mailing list that we are considering the same solution as was chosen for GNOME in the past: remove KDE from Slackware if it proves to become a maintenance burden. I can not yet say anything final about this. For the time being, I have decided not to create Slackware packages for KDE 4.7.x."
|
| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Restricting commands to specific users
Locked-down asks: How can I restrict commands so regular users can't run them?
DistroWatch answers: One thing to consider if you're planning on keeping your users from running commands that are normally available to everyone on the system is that users can usually run anything they can download to their home directories or to /tmp. So if you're trying to secure the operating system, you might first want to block executing programs in those locations.
Whenever I hear of someone trying to lock down their security, especially restricting users who already have local accounts on the system, I automatically think of SELinux. The Fedora Project has some good documentation on using SELinux and I recommend the chapter on Confining Users.
Another possible solution is changing the file permissions on the commands themselves. It's important to be careful when doing this as you could accidentally take away access to something you need, but let's look at an example. First we look at the existing permissions on a program file:
ls -l /usr/bin/yelp
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 266556 2010-05-01 07:56 /usr/bin/yelp
Notice the "rwxr-x-r-x" at the beginning of the line. This means the owner of the file (the root user in this case) can read, write to or execute the file. People in the "root" group can read and execute the file, but not write to it and the same applies to everyone else on the system. The trailing "r-x" means everyone can read and execute this file. We can take away that ability for people, other than those in the root group, to execute yelp by running chmod as the system administrator:
chmod o-rx /usr/bin/yelp
The above command removes the ability for most users, those who are not root or in the root group, to read or execute the file. Trying to run "yelp" will result in the error "Permission denied". But what if you want to let some people access the yelp command and not others? Create a new group and place people you want to have access to the command in that group. In this case we'll create a new group called "special":
addgroup special
Then we add existing users, susan and bob, to the special group:
adduser susan special
adduser bob special
Finally, we change the ownership of the yelp command so the root user still owns the file, but people in the special group can run it:
chown root:special /usr/bin/yelp
Now let's look at the yelp command again:
ls -l /usr/bin/yelp
-rwxr-x--- 1 root special 266556 2010-05-01 07:56 /usr/bin/yelp
The root user and people in the special group (susan and bob, in our example) can read and execute the yelp program, but other, regular, users cannot. Again, while this can be useful in some situations, it's important not to restrict too many programs or you might block access to important functionality.
|
| Released Last Week |
Kororaa Linux 14
Chris Smart has announced the release of Kororaa Linux 14, a Fedora-based distribution with extra applications and user-friendly touches, available in KDE and GNOME variants: "Kororaa 14 ('Nemo') final been released for download, in 32-bit and 64-bit variants with KDE and GNOME. This version is recommended for all new installs; however, existing beta 6 users need not reinstall. Given that there were no major bugs in beta 6, this month's update brings the first final release. Work will now begin on a beta 15 Fedora remix. New features: update to KDE 4.6.3. Bug fixes: nothing noteworthy. We'd love to hear your feedback on the forums, so download it today! Here is the brief release announcement.
Kororaa Linux 14 - a Fedora-based desktop distribution
(full image size: 849kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Oracle Linux 6.1
Oracle Corporation has announced the release of Oracle Linux 6.1, a distribution built from source packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1: "Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 6.1 for x86 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) architectures. Oracle Linux 6.1 ships with two sets of kernel packages: Unbreakable Enterprise kernel installed and booted by default, and Red Hat compatible kernel installed by default. Oracle Linux 6.1 includes both a 32-bit and a 64-bit Unbreakable Enterprise kernel. By default, both the Unbreakable Enterprise kernel and the Red Hat compatible kernel are installed. Unbreakable Enterprise kernel shipped in this update has following driver updates: updated tg3 to version 3.113; updated bnx2 driver and firmware to version 2.1.6; added support for bnx2fc (version 1.0.2).... See the release announcement and release notes for further details.
Netrunner 3.1
Clemens Toennies has announced the release of Netrunner 3.1, a Kubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution and live DVD with a customised KDE desktop and integrated GTK+ applications: "We updated Netrunner 'Chromatic' with a maintenance release to 3.1. Changes from version 3.0 include: updated KDE from 4.6 to 4.6.1; updated Firefox from 3.5 to Firefox 4; replaced the default KDM theme with a customized one; fixed the plasma-netbook mode to the default plasma-desktop; changed the desktop theme to a transparent one. Netrunner comes with VLC media player and extended codec support for many proprietary formats such as MP3, QuickTime, WMV, DivX, Xvid. Version 3.1 comes pre-installed with Linux kernel 2.6.35, Firefox 4.0 with Java 1.6 and Flash 10.1 plugins, WINE 1.3.12, Audacious, OpenOffice.org 3.2.2.... Here is the brief release announcement.
Netrunner 3 - a Kubuntu-based desktop distribution
(full image size: 66kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Mageia 1
Version 1 of Mageia, a Linux distribution built and maintained by many former developers and contributors to Mandriva Linux, has been released: "We are the Mageia community, and today we are happy to tell everyone that our first release, Mageia 1, is out and available for download. Mageia began in September 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux. It is supported by a not-for-profit organisation, governed by a body of recognized and elected contributors, and made by 100+ people around the world. Our work adds to the excellent work of the wider Linux and free software community. We aim to bring one of the best, most stable, reliable and enjoyable experience and platform we can make; for a regular user, a developer, or a business. Read the release announcement and release notes for more information.
Legacy OS 2
John Van Gaans has announced the release of Legacy OS 2, a Puppy-based distribution for older computers: "After 9 months of development, today sees the release of Legacy OS 2. With this release comes a host of improvements over Legacy OS. The focus was to look at all aspects of Legacy OS and make improvements. We started by looking at the default desktop and the GTK+ and KDE themes it used. It was decided to create a pleasant neutral look to tie all the included applications together. A desktop environment that was easy on the eye and usable every day. The look had to be usable for those who want or need to use Legacy OS 2 as their main operating system. While the GTK+ and KDE themes share common elements, there are differences by design. You'll only find one window manager (IceWM), One IceWM, GTK+ and KDE theme. The goal was to keep it as simple as possible. We didn't want to confuse new users with multiple options. Next was the look and feel of the applications." Read the full release announcement for further information about the release, list of the main packages included, as well as download links.
Legacy OS 2 - a Puppy-based distribution for older computers
(full image size: 539kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
NuTyX Pakxe
Thierry Nuttens has announced the release of NuTyX Pakxe, a highly customisable French Linux distribution designed for intermediate and advanced Linux users. This is the project's fifth stable release, but the first one which includes support for 64-bit architectures. All packages have been compiled with GCC 4.6.0 and against glibc 2.13, and the entire backend which builds binary packages has been re-worked to better identify the dependencies and to build high quality packages ready for installation. Desktop environments include KDE 4.6.3 and Xfce 4.8, but GNOME is no longer available due to lack of a package maintainer (volunteers are welcome). Visit the distribution's home page to read the detailed release announcement (in French).
NuTyX Pakxe - a French rolling-release distribution
(full image size: 1,752kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Linux Caixa Mágica 16
Linux Caixa Mágica 16, a new stable version of the Portuguese desktop Linux distribution, has been released. This is the project's first version based on Ubuntu (previous releases were based on openSUSE and later on Mandriva) and it comes in separate live media with GNOME and KDE desktops. Other new features and applications of the release include Firefox 4.0.1, LibreOffice 3.3.2, Caixa Mágica software centre, Shotwell photo management program, Banshee media player, automatic detection of proprietary firmware, new package management formant and system, and simplified system installer. Read the release announcement (in Portuguese) for further information and links to documentation files.
Linux Caixa Mágica 16 - a Portuguese distribution based on Ubuntu
(full image size: 791kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
SystemRescueCd 2.2.0
François Dupoux released an updated build of SystemRescueCd, a Gentoo-based live CD with a collection of utilities for data rescue and disk management tasks. Version 2.2.0 comes with a long list of updated packages: "Updated standard kernels to Linux 2.6.38.8 (rescuecd + rescue64); updated alternative kernels to Linux 2.6.39.1 (altker32 + altker64); updated 'Offline NT Password & Registry Editor' ('ntpasswd' boot entry); updated NTFS-3G to 2011.4.12 (driver that provides read-write access to NTFS); updated Python from 2.6 to 2.7; updated Gentoo Portage to 2.1.9; updated GParted to 0.8.1; updated Samba to 3.4.12; Updated Perl to 5.12.3; added xfce4-session package (new menu entry to leave Xfce)." Read the full SystemRescueCd changelog for more information.
Zorin OS 5
Artyom Zorin announced the release of Zorin OS 5, an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution: "The Zorin OS team are proud to release Zorin OS 5 'Core' and 'Ultimate' which bring a lot of new and enhanced features to Zorin OS, our operating system designed specifically for Windows users. This release uses the GNOME 2.X classic environment instead of Ubuntu's Unity shell. We have included new features such as an installer welcome video, a new theme and updated artwork, simplified application names, updated software and many program changes to improve and simplify the user experience. We also include our innovative Zorin Look Changer, Zorin Internet Browser Manager, Zorin Background Plus (Premium versions only) and other programs from our earlier versions. Both Zorin OS 5 Core and Ultimate versions are available in 32-it and 64-bit editions. Zorin OS 5 'Lite', 'Educational', 'Business', 'Multimedia' and 'Gaming' editions will be released over the next few weeks." Here is the brief release announcement.
Zorin OS 5 - an Ubuntu-based distribution for Windows users
(full image size: 628kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
- Pardus Linux 2011.1-beta, the release announcement
- SliTaz GNU/Linux Cooking-20110531, the release announcement
- Mandriva Linux 2011-beta3, the release announcement
- openSUSE 12.1-milestone1, the release announcement
- Scientific Linux 6.1-alpha1, the release announcement
- Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu 11.10-alpha1, the release announcement
- FreeNAS 8.0.1-beta1, the release announcement
- Salix OS 13.37-beta1 (KDE)
- ALT Linux 6.0.0-20110531
- Ylmf OS 4.0
- Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04-r1-rc2
- RIPLinuX 12.8, 12.9, 13.0, 13.1
|
| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
|
Summary of expected upcoming releases
|
| DistroWatch.com News |
May 2011 DistroWatch.com donation: RIPLinuX
We are happy to announce that the recipient of the May 2011 DistroWatch.com donation is the RIPLinuX project, a specialist Linux distribution containing a collection of utilities for system and file recovery. It receives US$300.00 in cash.
RIPLinuX, which started originally as R.I.P. (an acronym for "Recovery Is Possible"), is a utility CD that serves as a tool to recover data from crashed hard disks. It ships with many popular file recovery utilities, such as TestDisk (to recover deleted partitions), PhotoRec (to recover deleted files), fdisk, cfdisk, parted, GParted (partition management), ntfsprogs (to resize, backup/restore, schedule a CHKDSK at Windows boot-up), GNU ddrescue (to recover data from failed media). The project's website is one of the least "flashy" of all Linux distributions, but the product certainly has a power to put smiles back on users' faces after failed hard disks and other heart-stopping computing disasters.
RIPLinuX 13.1 - a simple Fluxbox desktop with a well-organised menu hierarchy
(full image size: 43kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Launched in 2004, this monthly donations programme is a DistroWatch initiative to support free and open-source software projects and operating systems with cash contributions. Readers are welcome to nominate their favourite project for future donations. Those readers who wish to contribute towards these donations, please use our advertising page to make a payment (PayPal and credit cards are accepted). Here is the list of the projects that have received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme (figures in US dollars):
- 2004: GnuCash ($250), Quanta Plus ($200), PCLinuxOS ($300), The GIMP ($300), Vidalinux ($200), Fluxbox ($200), K3b ($350), Arch Linux ($300), Kile KDE LaTeX Editor ($100) and UNICEF - Tsunami Relief Operation ($340)
- 2005: Vim ($250), AbiWord ($220), BitTorrent ($300), NDISwrapper ($250), Audacity ($250), Debian GNU/Linux ($420), GNOME ($425), Enlightenment ($250), MPlayer ($400), Amarok ($300), KANOTIX ($250) and Cacti ($375)
- 2006: Gambas ($250), Krusader ($250), FreeBSD Foundation ($450), GParted ($360), Doxygen ($260), LilyPond ($250), Lua ($250), Gentoo Linux ($500), Blender ($500), Puppy Linux ($350), Inkscape ($350), Cape Linux Users Group ($130), Mandriva Linux ($405, a Powerpack competition), Digikam ($408) and Sabayon Linux ($450)
- 2007: GQview ($250), Kaffeine ($250), sidux ($350), CentOS ($400), LyX ($350), VectorLinux ($350), KTorrent ($400), FreeNAS ($350), lighttpd ($400), Damn Small Linux ($350), NimbleX ($450), MEPIS Linux ($300), Zenwalk Linux ($300)
- 2008: VLC ($350), Frugalware Linux ($340), cURL ($300), GSPCA ($400), FileZilla ($400), MythDora ($500), Linux Mint ($400), Parsix GNU/Linux ($300), Miro ($300), GoblinX ($250), Dillo ($150), LXDE ($250)
- 2009: Openbox ($250), Wolvix GNU/Linux ($200), smxi ($200), Python ($300), SliTaz GNU/Linux ($200), LiVES ($300), Osmo ($300), LMMS ($250), KompoZer ($360), OpenSSH ($350), Parted Magic ($350) and Krita ($285)
- 2010: Qimo 4 Kids ($250), Squid ($250), Libre Graphics Meeting ($300), Bacula ($250), FileZilla ($300), GCompris ($352), Xiph.org ($250), Clonezilla ($250), Debian Multimedia ($280), Geany ($300), Mageia ($470), gtkpod ($300)
- 2011: CGSecurity ($300), OpenShot ($300), Imagination ($250), Calibre ($300), RIPLinuX ($300)
Since the launch of the Donations Program in March 2004, DistroWatch has donated a total of US$28,080 to various open-source software projects.
* * * * *
New distributions added to database
* * * * *
New distributions added to waiting list
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 13 June 2011.
Jesse Smith and Ladislav Bodnar
|
|
| Tip Jar |
If you've enjoyed this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, please consider sending us a tip.
(Tips this week: 0, value: US$0.00) |
|
|
|
 bc1qxes3k2wq3uqzr074tkwwjmwfe63z70gwzfu4lx  lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhhxarpw3jkc7tzw4ex6cfexyfua2nr  86fA3qPTeQtNb2k1vLwEQaAp3XxkvvvXt69gSG5LGunXXikK9koPWZaRQgfFPBPWhMgXjPjccy9LA9xRFchPWQAnPvxh5Le paypal.me/distrowatchweekly • patreon.com/distrowatch |
|
| Extended Lifecycle Support by TuxCare |
|
|
| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Restricting commands to specific users (by Béranger on 2011-06-06 09:18:23 GMT from Romania)
I thought the right answer (not SELinux/RedHat-specific) was ConsoleKit/PolicyKit.
2 • Zorin OS 5 32 bit from Zorin OS 5 RC (by Roy H Huddleston on 2011-06-06 09:27:03 GMT from United States)
Nvidia graphics driver works better. Google Chrome is pinned down. It is a wonderful operating system. :)
3 • pekwm (by bronson on 2011-06-06 09:38:25 GMT from Australia)
nice to see a distro featuring the pekwm desktop.
4 • Slackware (by RobertD on 2011-06-06 09:42:45 GMT from United States)
The possible removal of KDE from the official release of Slackware comes as a surprise to me. It seems Eric Hameleers has decided not to build packages for the time being.
Being a user of Slackware this does not bother me in the slightest as long as there is a mechanism to get it installed painlessly. Something like slacke17 comes to mind but I would not be opposed to building it from source either.
RobertD
5 • Slackware & KDE (by mjjzf on 2011-06-06 11:03:10 GMT from Denmark)
Interesting suggestion that it might actually be a consideration to remove KDE from Slackware. As an Xfce user it would only make the difference that it would slim down the installers (make room for LibreOffice, perchance?), but I do get the impression a lot of Slackware users still find KDE usable.
6 • Slackware drops KDE (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-06-06 11:10:21 GMT from Spain)
First of all: KDE is still being an official Slackware desktop. Thet are considering dropping it, but haven't done it... yet.
It is not a surprise at all. The increasing complexity of KDE, the rising of udisk and other facts have been around for a long time. I remember Eric saying two years ago that big desktops were becoming very hard to mantain. This, added to the fact the same desktops bring no good improvenments as a trade off, is what has made many users (and now, distros) to get rid of KDE and Gnome.
They are no good news, but I always say that a project should no try to mantain something if it is a hindrance, or there are no resources enough. I am sorry for KDE users, but (I am going to be damn selfish here) KDE is big, complex, and slow. If they take it away, then good rid of it. If every distro droped software because its low quality, compexity or lack of fitness for a purpose, then we would have better mainstream software.
I wonder what would take KDE's place. LXDE would seem a good option, but PCmanfm needs some gnome components or udisk for volume management, so I guess Slacware's team is not going to like the idea. ROX-Desktop is surely out of the question. XFCE is nice, but I think is unwise to ship only a desktop environment. Slackware comes with tons of Window Managers (I use Fluxbox in Slack), but I understand some people needs a full-featured desktop.
I hope someone gathers an unofficial team and continues KDE support for Slacware if it is taken out of the official release.
7 • Gnome 3 in Fedora and Ubuntu Unity (by rich52 on 2011-06-06 11:49:30 GMT from United States)
I've tried both distro's and have come to the same conclusions about Gnome 3 and Fedora as in the article above. Biggest dislike was the fact that 3D with ATI video showed the program panel at the top of the screen as a inconsistent rainbow blur of color not a solid black as it should be. I'm no longing using Gnome. Especially 3.0.
Unity worked a little better and my hopes are that 3D video will be in cooperated much more. I've got the 2D version on a laptop with crappy Intel graphic chipset. No loss there. But on a Desktop Computer and a Descent video card I want to see and use much more because of the card. It took is lacking a lot of good features and doesnt' seem to give me the advertised better results on my 23 desktop screen. For now I'll wait and see on them.
I'm running Kubuntu 11.04 with 4.6.3 KDE and loving it because it hasn't yet been destroyed or re-invented. It works very well and now meets my needs.
Rich
8 • Slackware and Kde (by Rudolf Steiner on 2011-06-06 11:53:36 GMT from United States)
I think slackware should take more of the OpenBSD approach and ship with only a minimal selection of DE's. This could free up room on the disk but more importantly not install so many dependencies by default.
Of course there are many derivatives that satisfy this need currently.
RS
9 • RE: Desktops and such. (by Eddie on 2011-06-06 12:12:18 GMT from United States)
So much change is taking place and it's happening so fast. Some change is needed in order to stay ahead of the game but it can come at some price. For example we have Unity, Gnome3, the ever changing world of KDE, Xfce, and several other different menu layouts and desktops and they all seem to work a different way. I've been using Unity, or let's just say trying to use it, and I've had several good comments from people who say that they really like it. But I have found myself logging into the Gnome classic system more and more lately. I'm sure that won't last long tho because I won't have the option. People say to try another distro but that really is no solution to the problem. Every mainstream distro will have to go through some change in order to stay usable. Even Slackware. The changes don't affect those of us who have been using Linux for many a years because we can take care of ourselves. The new ones it will hurt somewhat. Distros like Mint will have to come to a decision on what to do. Even tho popular they are not big enough at this time to be self sufficient. What this has taught me is that while change can be exciting it can also be dangerous. Then again, new ones who try some Linux distro for the first time don't know anything else, so it may work for them.:)
10 • Fedora 15 (by Bill Julian on 2011-06-06 12:26:42 GMT from United States)
Good review by Jesse Smith. I ran Fed15 for approx one week. Very smooth installation. Gnome3 OK if a person agrees with the "do it our way" design philosophy. Forum has a suggestion for putting Max/Min buttons back on upper right of windows.
I did not have the software update problem when I ran the system. That all seemed to work smoothy.
Installing Nvidia driver was a nuisance. I could not get the "how to" on the forum to work for me. Meanwhile nouveau driver does not permit proper power management, which is a large problem for those of us on laptops.
I suspect Gnome3 is going to be smoothed out quickly and then it becomes each user's decision as to how they like it. Suffice it to say I just finished installing Arch with Xfce.
Bigger problem, it seems to me, is with video cards. FOSS drivers that do not allow power management are not satisfactory.
11 • ZorinOS 5 (by ceti on 2011-06-06 12:27:45 GMT from Brazil)
Just took notice of this distro. It's great, much better than Mint. The artwork is superb, Compiz works out-of-the-box, the general look is professional. A pleasant surprise. The next big thing?
12 • gnome3 shell (by mandog on 2011-06-06 12:39:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
I've used gnome shell since it updated in Arch Linux and although my 1st impression was not favorable it has now changed it is now customizable I have most of the functionality I need back window switcher yes, 3 buttons yes, Alt menu yes, Gnome dock yes, switchable user shells yes.Icons on desktop drop files yes if you want clutter, Nautilus compact yes if that way inclined, Show all running apps on desktop yes press ALT, Desktop switcher in top panel yes, open/close/eject removable devices on top panel yes, Nautilus as desktop yes, gnome printer manager finds printer and sets it up in a couple of clicks. My USB microphone headset is now plug and play that a Linux 1st for me. All this is vanilla gnome3 and in 14 days imagine the function-ability in 6/12 months unlike KDE its still got a lot of work in progress 2 year on but now starting to shine.
13 • @ 10 • Fedora 15 (by flip23 on 2011-06-06 12:51:14 GMT from United States)
Try EasyLife for Fedora I am not sure they are up to the 15 release but i think it is it will instal nvidia flash and most other things you need with one click. Just checked they do have a 15 version.
14 • @ 10 • Fedora 15 (by flip23 on 2011-06-06 12:55:23 GMT from United States)
By the way you will have to do a search for it easy life is not on the Fedora website.
15 • Mint Debian (by Jaan Sass on 2011-06-06 13:23:35 GMT from United States)
I loaded LDME and I am definitely amazed a rolling distribution with drivers and codecs that just work no need for extreme hunting. the only issue that I have found ( it includes all the newer distros that I have tried) is my Celeron 64bit chip and embedded intel graphics card seem to be unable to run the latest linux kernel. the easy fix was to remove the new kernel in favor the older current one. Other wise I am impressed with LDME.
16 • @#9: Desktop Changes (by dragonmouth on 2011-06-06 14:06:48 GMT from United States)
"Some change is needed in order to stay ahead of the game"
What game? What IS the game? Sounds like a semantically null marketing term. From where I sit, it looks like Linux developers have gone down the same road as M$ developers - features for features' sake and change for change's sake. Old, useful features are being removed and are being replaced by esoteric ones, and/or eye-candy and glitz. All this "to stay ahead of the game".
17 • KDE & HAL (by Leo on 2011-06-06 14:12:58 GMT from United States)
Wait, the move away from HAL is not a KDE thing, but really a global decision of kernel + freedesktop, right? I don;t see why they blame it on KDE
The repackaging of the source, yes, it is annoying, and KDE seems to be always experimenting. The plasma shell is a beauty, and I run Kubuntu so I obviously like it. But things like Akonadi, Nepomuk, these are all great concepts but they have produced all sorts of weird login errors and what not. I think simpler but slicker, more stable and complete, would be a lit better. Think Android :)
Cheers!
18 • Synergy Linux Website (by JMiahMan on 2011-06-06 14:13:42 GMT from United States)
Right now the Synergy-Linux website is down :( it will be up in the next few hours. Picked an awful time for server maintenance.
19 • What game? (by megadriver on 2011-06-06 14:17:01 GMT from Spain)
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
20 • @ 17 (by JMiahMan on 2011-06-06 14:22:04 GMT from United States)
Yes pretty much everyone is attempting to move away from Hal as it's deprecated. At least with Fedora there were some bumps in the road, some apps like fedora-liveusb still needed HAL but didn't have it as a requires, at least for this application it was fixed with Fedora 15.
Speaking of Fedora 15, I would like to point out really the slowness of the yum frontend is due to the packagekit backend and not yum itself. There's been an interesting development called zif:
https://github.com/hughsie/zif/blob/ed7d89737ebe7978a1570a9ceb83b54152cab3bf/README
Which is kinda a yum replacement written for Packagekit (kinda backwards) however it is not supported by Fedora and caused issues if you still wanted to use yum. It's rather temping though for me doing a respin of fedora.
21 • Ubuntu's "sins" (by sfn on 2011-06-06 14:30:59 GMT from United States)
"Fair or not, Ubuntu reflects on the Linux community as a whole."
The notion that distro X should be held responsible for the wants and needs of people that don't even use it is ludicrous. The argument that this was meant to counter ("why don't you just run another operating system?") is completely on the mark.
If someone is going to bitch about what comes pre-installed on a machine, go whine at Microsoft's door.
22 • kde (by neeraj on 2011-06-06 14:33:15 GMT from India)
given a decent hardware, KDE is simply great...for those saying its slow just try to open a heavy folder with nautilus as well as dolphin, dolphin does the job much faster...check it yourself.
Zorin is nice, however, given the gnomenu is not actively developed by its developer with ubuntu adopting unity, it needs to be seen how the distribution goes for its future release.
23 • KDE should still have a future on Slackware (by otho on 2011-06-06 14:40:22 GMT from United States)
It should be noted that Slackware's BDFL uses KDE and wants it to remain in the distro:
http://slackblogs.blogspot.com/2011/06/kde-future-on-slackware.html
Also of note.. Hameleers (author of the DW source blog) comments on the linked blog stating his support of KDE.
24 • Re: #22 (by Leo on 2011-06-06 14:41:27 GMT from United States)
I agree. KDE is really fast and really responsive. I can't really tell the difference with the light DM's (such as LXDE) in any of my hardware. I am sure there is some, but it must be evident with legacy iron.
25 • @ 22 (by JMiahMan on 2011-06-06 14:44:35 GMT from United States)
KDE is slow running Nepomuk, Akonadi and Stigi. Thought the Moderators on the KDE forum seem to not think so, however Akonadi runs mysqld in the background that alone takes up 30+ Meg running Idle add the Mysql daemon also running in the background Strigi indexing and the 10-15 Meg Nepomuk takes up you have over a 100 Meg taken up at idle and 200+ when something like a Strigi index is going on. It's slow. Don't get me wrong though I Love KDE however I still feel a little force fed with some of these "Features" however I have found ways to turn them off and in fact do for Synergy-Linux by default.
26 • Slackware & KDE (by Johnathan on 2011-06-06 14:47:40 GMT from Canada)
Before we get into a DE war:
Eric's comment was pretty much a signal (some might say threat) to the KDE developers that their code should be easier to package. Eric and Pat V both love _using_ KDE and are happy with the direction of the finished product ... but they find packages hard to maintain now that the sources have been reorganised.
From the messages I saw on the KDE mailing list it looks like the KDE devs were fairly responsive to this, and my prediction is that the world keeps on spinning and Slackware remains a KDE distro.
27 • Re:24 (by Leo on 2011-06-06 14:50:45 GMT from United States)
I should have added that the embedded space is now looking at light environments such as enlightenment, etc. It only makes sense, and it brings new life to all these projects. Nice!
28 • Gnome 3 (by Carl on 2011-06-06 14:55:54 GMT from United States)
I have tried the Gnome 3 GUI and found it very awkward when I tried Fedora 15. I am using Linux Mint 11 now in 64 bit. I downloaded and installed XFCE4 through the software manager. So I am now using Linux Mint 11 with XFCE4 because gnome is very unstable on my laptop. Linux Mint should come out with a 64 bit version of Linux Mint LXDE and make it a high priority to do so. As a matter of fact the Lubuntu developers should make a 64 bit version of Lubuntu. Just imagine the performance you could get out of an AMD dual core laptop with a 64 bit version of Lubuntu. Then while you are running it you can run VMware player or VMware Workstation and run Windows XP 64 bit in the virtual machine without the computer overheating, freezing, crashing or even straining in any way.
29 • MAGEIA (by GodTux on 2011-06-06 15:02:04 GMT from France)
Please do a full on review of Mageia next week !
30 • RE:22 kde & Ultimatums (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-06-06 15:37:44 GMT from Spain)
naaraj wrote:
------------------------------------------------------
given a decent hardware, KDE is simply great...for those saying its slow just try to open a heavy folder with nautilus as well as dolphin, dolphin does the job much faster...check it yourself.
-------------------------------------------------------
No one has said Dolphin was bloated. It has been said that KDE, as a whole, weights too much. I think Gnome is worse. Look, Distrowatch is not a good place for a Desktop War, so we'd better remember that the only movement you need to win is not to play : ^)
Further research has shown that Slackware's Ultimatum was exactly that: an Ultimatum. This is what free software has been lacking all theese years: someone stubborn enough to shout "I am not accepting your chumsy way of doing things! Build something decent, or prepare to be taken out of our major distribution!" Many apps deserve this kind of treatment.
Nort to mean this Ultimatum wasn't a serious threat.
31 • Easy Life (by Scott on 2011-06-06 15:45:16 GMT from United States)
If you go to Fedoraforum.org and click the yellow setup guides link, one of them is to easylife. (Another is to autoplus which is similar)
32 • Fedora / Gnome3 (by Brian on 2011-06-06 15:55:06 GMT from Canada)
I have Fedora 15 running with all major desktops. Aside from a bit of menu clutter, given today's hard-rive sizes, there's really no reason not to try at least a few unless someone is running some old flea market box. While I find Gnome3 a pleasure to use for day-to-day tasks and looks very nice, it is not without problems. Full screen gaming crashed the desktop on Gnome, while KDE had no such problem. KDE can also toggle desktop effects. Bluetooth set-up was impossible on my box from Gnome. Again, set-up from KDE , but still problematic. These are pretty big oversights - we're not talking about running some obscure task here, people game and use Bluetooth every day. No fault of Fedora here, their execution of an incomplete DE is awesome, and installing KDE, LXDE, or XFCE via a much improved package manager is painless.
33 • Beta Releases Much Better Then Final Releases (by LinuXFroG on 2011-06-06 16:38:09 GMT from United States)
I have never been a Fedora fan, until the release of 15 beta. I have to say, it just works. Which I am still using. I have had 0 issues with it, except for the ones I caused myself.
But, something has me perplexed. No matter WHAT distro you choose, why is it that lately, the betas are much better then the final? Are the devs doing this on purpose? Are they losing their touch? Really, I want to know.
Recently I installed Fedora 15 Final and within a few minutes, there were issues. LOTS of issues. Every thing was crashing. Can't keep music playing for any length of time without my music sounding like a fart factory and then crashing.
I am now back on the Beta release of Fedora 15 and will stay there.
~ LF ~
34 • KDE in Slackware (by JK Wood on 2011-06-06 18:05:31 GMT from United States)
I believe that Eric's comments towards KDE accomplished the mission they needed to. I also believe that KDE wants to keep Slackware around, if only for the fact that it's the purest example of the software collection around. When Slackware users find a bug in KDE, there's no question of the packager futzing with the source.
35 • FEDORA latest software but with an lame archaic package manager (by MacLone on 2011-06-06 18:30:21 GMT from Mexico)
I really don't know why FEDORA always use the same lame archaic package manager GUI. If they love to live on the edge with the latest greatest software... why still using this sh...t.. software manager? You can do better than this... you have the manpower but you don't have the will ... why? Even openSUSE made it much better with yast2 GUI, why you don't?
36 • Poor Slackware fans (by MacLone on 2011-06-06 18:34:27 GMT from Mexico)
Stuck with older software because its benevolent permanent leader don't want to look for more help.
37 • P@xtreme Lightweight Linux (by Ralph on 2011-06-06 19:06:11 GMT from United States)
P@xtreme Lightweight Linux looks very nice, and I'd like to use it. I don't suppose there's an English language version...
38 • gnome3 and fedora (by meanpt on 2011-06-06 19:40:29 GMT from Portugal)
I'm a pretty recent linux user, my main distro is the enlightened bodhi and I do like the gnome3 - easy and intuitive. It only lacks a suitable and better onscreen keyboard complying with my chosen country's qwerty keyboard layout. On the other hand I've found some gnomish applications may not work anymore, For instance, onboard isn't displayed. Despite these flaws, anytime I want to use my convertible in tablet mode I switch to fedora 15, where gnome 3 works fine on fingers. It has nothing to do with smartphones, but with touchscreens that have been around before the breed of smartphones and smart tablets. I never opted or considered using fedora, until now.
39 • Fedora 15 (by JR on 2011-06-06 19:53:11 GMT from Poland)
1st thought on Fedora 15 ? Not bad, but why there's no btrfs for / partition ? And Anaconda without NTFS support, but still mantaining weird ReiserFS ?
Great job guys, reeeeeeeeeeeeally good job considering most people in the world use NTFS based partitions.
40 • KDE packages and Slackware (by dialup on 2011-06-06 19:57:23 GMT from United States)
It would be regretable if subdividing packages causes Slackware a serious problem. Otoh, for me it would be a plus to no longer have to install a half-dozen applications I care nothing about to get one must-have. (I never used Gentoo but iirc, they broke at least some of the individual apps out of the KDE packages.)
41 • Gnome Shells (by Mike Thomas on 2011-06-06 20:56:55 GMT from United States)
The 'Gnome 3 shell' and Unity are both shell environments over the Gnome 3.x/GTK+ 3 libraries. Doesn't this imply it would be possible to create a Gnome 2 style shell in lieu of these others? What would such a project entail?
Cheers,
Mike T
42 • Fedora 15 (by arnold on 2011-06-06 20:57:44 GMT from United States)
I can't abide by Gnome 3. However, I installed the KDE live CD and then installed the Gnome apps that I wanted to use. Fedora 15 then works fine.
I have been a Gnome user exclusively since the first Ubuntu. However, again, Unity drove me off. I just needed to find a desktop with the OS for me. I think Fedora 15 may just fit the bill.
43 • Donation to RIP Linux (by Jan on 2011-06-06 21:13:50 GMT from Netherlands)
I agree this donation. RIP is nowadays very active in updating and correcting.
RIP, and a few other bootable CD tools, are really essential for distrohoppers.
You first need to have this tool ready on a CD, before starting to fiddle with a new Linux-distro.
Jan
44 • Mint, Mageia (by fernbap on 2011-06-06 21:26:02 GMT from Portugal)
I know i'm not the typical desktop user, but i keep at least 2 different linuxes on my computer, besides a small XP one just for experimenting.
I always the desktop i use for my work, and a cadidate one i can switch to in order to compare the usability of both. Had Mint 10 and LMDE until i decided for LMDE.
When Squeeze came up, i also installed it,and experimented with lots of stuff. Using it for multimedia, mostly.
Meanwhile, replaced Mint 10 with 11. I didn't take long to realise that 11 is the first Mint release that i will never use, because of its many issues coming from the Ubuntu 11.04 base. Better stick with 10 or even the LTS Mint 9.
Mageia is an interesting project, worthy of support. I was very curious, and decided to replace Mint 11 with Mageia.
Unfortunately, i couldn't give Mageia a chance, because the installer didn't allow me not to install the (grub legacy or lilo) bootloader.
Is that so hard to add an option in the installer NOT to install the bootloader? Sorry, Mageia, that is a no go to me.
45 • As I said late last week... (by Joker's Wild on 2011-06-06 21:55:20 GMT from Canada)
What are these perceived needs to develop a different desktop paradigm like gnome 3? Are people so ADHD these days that they think they need a "fresh new look"™ to keep everyone happy and loyal to their cause. Really, there is only so much you an do with a keyboard, mouse and monitor. Other than the cool effects, the same thing is accomplished…a window is opened on the screen.
What they should really be doing is nothing. Then users would get bored enough that they turn off their computers and go outside and get some fresh air and get a life.
As with most anything, if Gnome 3/Unity/etc. is such a pain, people will seek out an alternative like Xfce or LXDE and development and improvements will increase on those DM's. Hopefully then the Gnome 3 folks willsee the exodus of users and re-engineer their product.
46 • Slackware and the impact of dropping KDE (by Radicoil on 2011-06-06 23:23:46 GMT from United Kingdom)
One thing that no one here has mentioned so far is that KDE is the only desktop environment supplied with Slack that is decently multilingual. So if Slack drops KDE it will become a purely anglophone distro.
47 • @44, Mageia (by Stan on 2011-06-06 23:36:40 GMT from United States)
Just install the bootloader to the partition, not the drive as a whole. Worked perfectly well for me, for the betas at least, and I can't see why they would remove the option in the final version. Then you can chainload even, instead of having to manually update your main GRUB on every kernel update.
48 • @47 (by fernbap on 2011-06-06 23:54:42 GMT from Portugal)
Installed the bootloader in the partition. Grub 2 was unable to boot it, and so i manually edited grub.cfg, to no result as well.
However, if i had the option not to install the bootloader, grub2 would be able to boot it.
Didn't try installing lilo instead of grub legacy, though. Will make that attempt....
49 • @48 (by Stan on 2011-06-07 00:08:39 GMT from United States)
If it helps, here are my GRUB lines for Mageia:
title linux
kernel (hdX,Y)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=(uuid) nokmsboot resume=UUID=(uuid) splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hdX,Y)/boot/initrd.img
Which in GRUB 2 would translate to:
set root=(hdX,Y+1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=(uuid) nokmsboot resume=UUID=(uuid) splash=silent vga=788
initrd /boot/initrd.img
Replace X,Y with your real partition numbers, and (uuid) with the partition's UUID (or simply use /dev/sd* instead). To chainload instead (what I would do), use:
set root=(hdX,Y+1)
chainloader +1
Hope this helps!
50 • Gnome3 and Unity (by bam on 2011-06-07 00:21:35 GMT from United States)
The Linux community is complaining about Unity and Gnome 3. The interface of computing is Unity and Gnome 3. Microsoft is already ripping off Gnome 3 for it's Windows 8 interface.
Heck, they ripped off KDE to implement Win7 start menu. Sure Gnome 3 and Unity have some bugs or getting use too, fact of the matter is Gnome and Ubuntu are ahead of the curve. Read PC magazine and others magazines and you see the point of view I write from.
Gnome and Ubuntu are making user interfaces for the masses.
Bam
51 • Re: 50, Gnome3 and Unity (by Coffee on 2011-06-07 01:36:53 GMT from France)
> The interface of computing is Unity and Gnome 3.
What a silly statement. Thankfully there are a lot more desktop environments than these two. Gnome3 and Unity are in my opinion dumbed down desktops for icon clickers who can't have enough bells and whistles, preferably of the animated 3-d variety. I much prefer simple, more functional and therefore more attractive DEs like Xfce or Lxde.
52 • @29 (by Ron on 2011-06-07 02:57:13 GMT from United States)
""29 • MAGEIA (by GodTux on 2011-06-06 15:02:04 GMT from France)
Please do a full on review of Mageia next week !""
I agree with this. I am using Mageia right now and I really think this is going to be great once they get moving in their own direction. They have done a great job with getting things started. I am impressed.
53 • KDE and Package Management in Fedora (by Pumpino on 2011-06-07 04:08:06 GMT from Australia)
Does anyone else find that while KDE is responsive once it's been up and running for a while, there's an initial delay to launch applications immediately after the desktop has fully loaded? If I click on Dolphin, Konsole or Firefox, for example, there's a significant delay in Fedora and Kubuntu before programs appear. However, in Arch, any of these applications launch instantaneously.
In relation to a graphical package manager in Fedora, yes the default gtk-based offering has always been overly simplistic. However, I actually find KPackageKit to be perfect...not only in Fedora, but in Kubuntu and Arch, too. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the program worked fine in Arch.
54 • re:51 (by bam on 2011-06-07 04:16:00 GMT from United States)
Please read the entire paragraph. Most user ARE icon clickers.
>I much prefer simple, more functional and therefore more attractive DEs like Xfce or Lxde.
You and a few other people will be using Xfce and Lxde.
Gnome 3 and Unity are here to stay! Silly or not!
I Install Ubuntu on my clients desktops, 100 and growing.
Icon clickers like the new interfaces. Commercial distros will have Gnome 3 or Unity, Open Suse. Ubuntu and Fedora. It's here and not going away.
No more complaining about this I/F or that I/F. This needs to be looked at from a business prespective.
55 • @49 (by fernbap on 2011-06-07 05:40:05 GMT from Portugal)
Thanks a lot.
Managed to make it work, it seems it somehow becomes confused with the UUIDS, only managed to make it work by using the device names.
Anyway, it would be VERY simple to add an option to the installer not to install any bootloader, in which case an update-grub would set everything right. Had no problem at all with slackware derived distros like Salix, by simply not installing the bootloader.
Mageia looks good so far, but after installing you have to do several tasks, like removing the DVD as repo and adding the mirrors, if you want to install anything, including multimedia codecs.
56 • Zoryn OS (by Edwin on 2011-06-07 05:43:50 GMT from United States)
Zoryn Os is quite good. It has all the bells and whistles and developed by one person, just as the Crunchbang. It is better than Mint and better than Ubuntu too in responsiveness.
The only problem it will have in the future is when Zoryn has to embrace either Unity or Gnome3, it will lose the bells and whistles of Compiz.
Maybe we have to be ready for the time without Compiz type bells & whistles, and the time is catching up with us very quickly!
57 • @55 (by Stan on 2011-06-07 05:48:48 GMT from United States)
You're welcome!
I agree that there's really no reason to not install any bootloader at all, but the real problem is that, for whatever strange reason, Mandriva/Mageia requires such complicated kernel command-lines in the first place. In most other distros, something as simple as "kernal /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdXY ro" is enough, perhaps with an initrd, even if it forgoes some fancy features. Not so with Mageia.
58 • Correction to 57 (by Stan on 2011-06-07 05:51:39 GMT from United States)
...there's really no reason to not give the option to forgo installing any bootloader...
59 • Linux Action Show (by DigitalVampire on 2011-06-07 06:32:42 GMT from United States)
I hate that the Linux Action Show was used as a reference in a Fedora review as they are notoriously anti-Fedora (especially the loud one, I forgot his name, but he's always pushing his software project that is supposed to make 'programming' easier for idiots).
60 • Adobe Flash support for 64-bit Linux has disappeared again... (by Caitlyn Martin on 2011-06-07 07:10:59 GMT from United States)
A bit of shameless self-promotion: My latest article for O'Reilly Broadcast on Adobe quietly dropping 64-bit Linux support again: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/06/one-year-later-adobe-abandons.html Enjoy!
61 • Unity, Gnome 3 and Ubuntu, also Zoryn (by Edwin on 2011-06-07 12:00:56 GMT from United States)
After sometime having Gnome 3, Unity broke. I had to shutdown and get back to Gnome 3. At the beginning Unity & Gnome 4 worked well.
Later, I downloaded Ubuntu again and installed it to another partition, so I could play with Unity too, but I got so used to Gnome 3, I simply didn't go back to Unity after 2-3 times.
Now, that Zoryn 5 had come in with Gnome 2 and all the bells but no & whistles, there'll be a competition between Gnome 3 & 2. Linux Mint didn't give that competition, but Zoryn 5 would. The other distro that might give a competition would be Macbuntu.
With Ubuntu around, only Fedora could be distro I'd use, and Bodhi, Zenwalk, Archbang, etc in other partitions just idling around, I may simply format those partitions and use them for storage.
It looks like it would be Ubuntu and flavors for me in the near future!
62 • Multilingual Slackware (by mjjzf on 2011-06-07 12:01:52 GMT from Denmark)
As one of the translators of Xfce I would like to say that a lot of work goes into that one, too.
63 • @60 Flash (by JW on 2011-06-07 12:03:02 GMT from Canada)
Since the Chrome browser ships with built-in Flash, does the 64-bit browser version use 32-bit flash technology?
64 • hopping about - some data points (by gnomic on 2011-06-07 13:50:59 GMT from New Zealand)
Some observations whilst hopping to and fro . . . .
zenix was seen to boot on a 600Mhz PIII Compaq laptop with 320MB RAM and function in an adequately responsive fashion under a light load.
Legacy OS 2 also ran on this machine after a few hiccups around video and was capable of running Opera 10.10 on the web via a PCMCIA 3Com ethernet card. Armada E500.
The near invisible paldo distribution has Gnome 3 in its latest releases. In a careless moment I closed the lid of a ThinkPad and was astounded to see that a web browser was still alive and able to switch tabs on some pages saved for reading offline when the laptop resumed. It wasn't all good of course; the rest of the system seemed to be borked (couldn't issue commands in a terminal) and when the screen blanked after inactivity resumption was not found.
And what exactly is up with the power options in this Gnome 3? Where is my Do Nothing?!! And where exactly is the ability to change the look and feel to Aging Gorilla? I need my Aging Gorilla! Bring back 'Appearance' now. That's immediately please. What planet are these devs on?
And finally there was mini Pinguy. This suspended when the battery was near used up on the same ThinkPad Z60m and incredibly resumed and was able to carry on the session without bleating about squashfs errors, whatever they may be. Indeed it is still alive at this moment after a couple of hours. How do they do that? Some other distros should try to find out. So far this seems to be a worthwhile reworking of Ubuntu.
65 • Fedora 15 (by dc on 2011-06-07 18:56:51 GMT from United States)
I have been using Fedora 15 for over a week now and I like it quite a bit. It is now my primary desktop OS. The only real issue I've had with it is that if I have 3 separate X sessions all running Gnome Shell or KDE with desktop effects enabled attempting to suspend will fail and require a hard reboot. If I have 3 sessions all running KDE with desktop effects disabled I haven't had any problems. I prefer KDE 3.6 over Gnome (especially over Gnome Shell) anyway and I don't care about desktop effects, so it isn't much of an issue for me.
66 • Fedora 15 (by dc on 2011-06-07 18:58:54 GMT from United States)
In the previous comment I meant KDE 4.6, not 3.6.
67 • pekwm (by DrCR on 2011-06-07 22:09:34 GMT from United States)
pekwm window manager -- that's an interesting looking bit of kit.
http://pxtreme.hu/
Too bad Wikipedia moderators are so ... well, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, so on that note I will make no comment. :
68 • Regd: Linux Mint (by kvv on 2011-06-07 22:12:42 GMT from United States)
"Now, that Zoryn 5 had come in with Gnome 2 and all the bells but no & whistles, there'll be a competition between Gnome 3 & 2. Linux Mint didn't give that competition, but Zoryn 5 would. The other distro that might give a competition would be Macbuntu. "
I haven't tried the latest Zorin, but I agree that it looks really good. However, comparing it with the latest Linux Mint is not really fair. What LM did is keep the desktop consistent, while providing the latest packages. Any other way would be a paradigm shift, which will happen by LM12 or LM13 anyway, when they switch to gnome3 or something totally different.
Currently, it seems as if the folks at Mint are being conservative in making changes, which suits me, and I think many other people, seeing the influx of users.
However, I suspect that other spinoffs like Zorin, Elementary, Xubuntu etc will be seeing similar increase in userbase.
69 • Fedora 15 review (by mf90 on 2011-06-07 22:28:08 GMT from United States)
The review was spot on - in both Gnome shell and Unity you have to move the cursor all the way across the desktop to do anything. This is progress?
Not having a customizable 'Start' menu like interface will not be popular with corporate IT departments who must deploy a simple, standardized desktop and limited app suite across the enterprise and support it. Yeah, let's make it harder to migrate from Windows XP.
Given the recent lack of priority to end user customization (see grub2 and gdm for instance) in these newer DE's I'm looking a lot closer at LXDE and XFCE. Unfortunately the latter team may have to pick up maintenance of some Gnome 2 code that will be deprecated in short order.
70 • RE: Catching up (by Landor on 2011-06-08 02:11:00 GMT from Canada)
gnomic:
First, I couldn't find a problem with Xubuntu at all ( I didn't forget eh :) ). Well, I did find one, the screensaver would crash periodically during the one where it displays the kernel, but it would still continue on its cycle. I never investigated why though.
Also, booting Fedora to RAM, I don't know if this still works, but here's how: When it boots and is counting down hit esc. Now highlight which boot option you want with the arrow keys and once you made your choice hit tab. Add live_ram to the end of the line and press enter. If it's still the same you should be good to go for booting the LiveCD to RAM. Also, you need to have at least 1 GB of RAM.
Pinguy. I find it a desktop that he just doesn't know what he wants with it. There's so many docks and panels, and click this, and that, you know? It's way too busy in my opinion.
--
Adam Williamson:
I was shocked to see your reply about Gnome 3 and 3D. Meaning, the reference to a PCI-E video card that would handle Gnome 3 easily. Reason being, unless I miss my mark here, and I'm more than confident I haven't, any system that supports a full PCI-E card would already be capable of supporting 3D either via a chipset, or stand alone card installed. It also kind of insults others who have older hardware and projects a 'if you want to use our system you need to be able make use of this level of technology'. Meaning, because you've upgraded your disribution, people who could have happily continued to with the Gnome 2.XX series are shutdown unless they run out and buy newer technology just to continue using what they had before.
That kind of logic from Gnome, Red Hat, and Fedora, alienates a large portion of their respective user base, even more so with a less functional fall-back system.
One last thing. I'm also surprised at the cost you threw out there. I would have showed a link to Memory Express for an ATI Radeon HD 5450 (which is better supported by Open Drivers to say the least) for $14.99 CDN after a MIR (forget how much now). If I was going to try to sell someone on upgrading, even just and example, I'd definitely offer up that instead of your card to lessen insult to injury on the cost outlay of the people I'm trying to get to my of thinking.
---
Ladislav:
Congratulations! 10 Years! How do you feel?
I have a question that I truly hope you answer. Out of the 10 years, what is the biggest thing that stands out in your mind from it all? It could be to do with a distribution, some even in the community, something with the site, anything you learned or got good at because of all this, what was it?
I'm really curious to know, and I think some others would probably enjoy knowing that answer too.
Oh, and I really hope someone interviews you for this milestone. In case others haven't seen me comment about this before, you're a historian for some much in this community in my opinion, you deserve the interview for a decade of work done.
Congratulations again Ladislav. I for one appreciate how you follow the packages, the newsletters, the podcasts, reviews, newsworthy items, DWW (with this comments section), and of course the distributions, their individual pages, release announcements, etc. Thank you.
----
I have some more but that will wait until later.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
71 • Parted Magic, my favorite (by RollMeAway on 2011-06-08 03:06:18 GMT from United States)
Glad to see donations to help any project. Rescue disks are a major part of distro hopping.
I'm sure the RIPLinux project has a little more motivation now.
My personal favorite, and the only one I have contributed to, is Parted Magic.
I keep a copy always handy, and frequently use the "Extras Menu", grub1 and/or grub2 utilities to install/repair installations.
I like the "Runs from ram", and it boots into gui (openbox). Multiple boot options and languages.
Check it out.
72 • Ladislav interview. (by Antony on 2011-06-08 11:48:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
Landor said: "Oh, and I really hope someone interviews you for this milestone."
Excellent idea. I second that.
73 • Sins of Ubuntu article (by mpadair00 on 2011-06-08 12:28:42 GMT from United States)
I've seen the complaint of "I have to install adobe, codecs, drivers, etc" on a lot of distros and I don't quite understand it. Last time I installed windows ( a couple months ago), I had to install all of that. Why is it any different. Get over it, quit whining, and do it...
74 • Stable and enjoyable AVLinux on dwatch (by NarratorJay on 2011-06-08 13:20:50 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'm impressed by how far Linux baby distros have come. I installed AVLinux while waiting for 64studio and have merrily been slicing/ equalizing/compressing old audio files and it's done everything I've asked and it even found my M-Audio 24/96 card oob... and then I realise it's just made it into distrowatch. Even the stuff that's on the fringes of distrowatch works!
75 • Comparing DW's reviews of Debian, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora (by Andy Prough on 2011-06-08 21:51:23 GMT from United States)
Four big distros released this year, and four reviews by DW. How did they stack up?
Here are highlights in chronological order:
1. Debian - Disappointing, failure to excel: "My first reaction to Debian's latest was one of disappointment.... I found that, once it was up and running, Debian was all very satisfactory -- stable, useful, fast, accessible -- but by being so general, so universal, I felt Squeeze didn't excel at anything."
2. openSUSE - Enjoyable, hard to beat: "the more I used the distribution the more I enjoyed it.... I'm of the opinion it will be hard to beat the openSUSE experience in 2011."
3. Ubuntu - Buggy, missed the mark: "Ubuntu aims to be novice-friendly, but this release is buggy and I think they missed the mark this time around. I'm limiting my recommendation of 11.04 to people who want to play with an early release of Unity."
4. Fedora - Lacking features, inconsistent: "It seems more and more that Fedora is interested solely on being a test bed for technology and not the "operating system for everyday use" the project's website declares it to be. And if that's what you're looking for, a distro from which to test drive new technology, then Fedora is a good option. But for regular, general-purpose use, I found Fedora 15 to be lacking in features and consistency."
76 • @70 - Ref Landor's comment on to Adam W.'s post (by dialup on 2011-06-08 22:13:53 GMT from United States)
It was my question Adam W had replied to. His post was responsive to the specific question I asked. It was me who had - incorrectly as it turned out - decided that the on-board graphics would not be sufficient to run Gnome 3 To his credit, he didn't try to second-guess me.
Incidentally, vanilla PCI Express goes back to 2003, so it's not a good indicater of whether a board's graphics will run Gnome 3. Also, I wouldn't consider a dime a day for a year an excessive amount (to pay for a card) to be able to run a distro I liked.
To get back to F15/G3, I decided to wait to order a graphics card until after I'd gotten/tried the LiveCD with the 945GC on-board graphics. It not only ran; it ran well.
77 • DistroWatch Reviews (by tdockery97 on 2011-06-08 23:38:46 GMT from United States)
I thoroughly enjoy each and every review, and have been prompted to try different distros as a result. While I have to agree that Ubuntu 11.04 is "Buggy, missed the mark", I think it would be worth your time to review Kubuntu 11.04. It is in my humble opinion the best implementation of KDE at the present time, and does not suffer from the bugs plaguing Ubuntu 11.04. openSUSE 11.4 is very, very good, but Kubuntu 11.04 sparkles.
78 • re #70 Landor's observations (by gnomic on 2011-06-09 02:58:04 GMT from New Zealand)
OK, thanks for getting back with your findings on Xubuntu - will have to try a desktop or two, have a couple that have been standing idle for a while which need the dust blown out of them. The problems I saw were on a couple of laptops. I did suspect this might be a video problem and have had freezes previously that seemed to involve screensavers, including the one you mention iirc.
Will try the Fedora in RAM option - have managed to scratch together 1.8 gigs of RAM for a couple of machines which should be enough for the live CD.
The recent CD sized version of Pinguy is the only one I've tried as a daily data cap prevents me from d/ling DVDs. I've only had one session with it so far, and was initially favourably impressed by the look. Coming back from suspend always rates extra points. After closing the laptop lid for a second time, the result was not so good on trying to resume, a black screen still adorned by a mouse pointer. I was able to switch to a console and the X apps still seemed to be running somewhere in the darkness. Was able to shut the machine down from the console at least, so the system was still somewhat functional.
79 • gnome 3 (by Anon on 2011-06-09 02:59:38 GMT from Australia)
I really don't see what all the fuss is about with moving the mouse across the screen.
In classic gnome 2 to open a program one has to move the mouse across the screen to the applications menu click then move down to said application folder then move the mouse to the required program and then click again.
With gnome 3 move to top left or hit win key, 1.start typing name of program hit enter or 2. move mouse to applications, click, select program and click again not so hard.
And anyway to move the mouse across my screen i only have to move my wrist about 1" anyway
Another alternative is to have short cuts on the desktop.
80 • Four Reviews (by Joseph on 2011-06-09 03:08:05 GMT from United States)
>Four big distros released this year, and four reviews by DW. How did >they stack up?
Sadly, no matter the review's conclusions, everyone will continue to use Ubuntu by default. It's the Apple of Linux (minus the evil).
"...but Kubuntu 11.04 sparkles." Is Kubuntu the Twilight respin? :-) :-) :-)
On another note, why is it that Slackware can't handle KDE but everyone else can, such as the aforementioned Kubuntu and openSUSE, the undermanned Sabayon, Pardus, etc.?
81 • @80 (by Kailash on 2011-06-09 04:44:04 GMT from Singapore)
Good that you find ubuntu so useful ... well some prefer to use stable distros and some to enjoy the beauty linux is all about.
82 • Response from Adobe, article on virtualization and the cloud (by Caitlyn Martin on 2011-06-09 06:35:30 GMT from United States)
Earlier in the week I posted a link to an article I wrote for O'Reilly on the lack of a native 64-bit Flash Player. I actually received a response from Adobe so I had to write a follow up at: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/06/adobe-64-bit-flash-player-late.html I also read an incredibly ridiculous article on virtualization and The Cloud claiming that physical servers, as in all of them for every possible purpose, are now as obsolete as the horse and buggy. I wrote a response at: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/06/the-most-ridiculous-article-iv.html Oh, and yes, I'm working on a review for Ladislav as well and doing my regular work on top of all the writing. Busy week...
Oh, and yes, Jesse did an excellent review of Fedora this week.
83 • Fedora, GNOME3 and things... (by davemc on 2011-06-09 07:15:36 GMT from United States)
Fedora is Fedora. Nice to see that has not changed. TBH, I have not really liked a single release of theirs after Fedora 10, but they are always interesting. How do they do that? I guess Jesse summed that feeling I have up nicely in his conclusion. Kind of neat and the preview tech is fun to play with and try out, but I just don't get that "warm fuzzy" feeling from Fedora for a daily use system that I do from Debian or Mint.
IMO, the GNOME project is taking the wrong approach. Their new DE is probably awesome for Tablets, Laptops, and Smart Phones, but its wrong to shove that off on Desktop users as their only choice for future use (as I understand it). Ubuntu is doing the same thing with Unity. To be fair, KDE sort of did the same thing too.
Sure, users have the choice to switch to XFCE or some other DE that has some or most of the functionality they loved in their old DE of choice, but its not the same thing, and none of them asked for these changes to be made. I think in GNOME's case, they made these design decisions without seeking the input from their userbase at large via polling or other means. So are the the reasons for these changes really for the greater good? Was there a definitive purpose for this new UI revamp or was it just a wild idea that the dev team felt compelled to scratch? I don't get it. Really, I do not see how this new design improves upon the old one. I don't see how it does anything to improve the user experience over the old. I do not see any gains here, and apparently, I am not alone in feeling this way. To me, this is change for the sake of change, and in this case I think the wise old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" has a lot of relevance.
84 • re #83 what he said (by gnomic on 2011-06-09 13:26:53 GMT from New Zealand)
Used to be with enterprises, if you're not getting bigger, you're dying on the vine. Sometimes it seems it's the same with big projects like Gnome or KDE, if there's no super phantastic new stuff, you're nowhere. And maybe it's part of the nerd genome to be trying out new concepts even if it means things get a bit chaotic (or even simply broken) for a while . . . ;->
Dare I say, at the risk of going off-topic, that we all live in a technological cocoon, we computer users, and of course a computer is no use without the interwebs, which are like a fact of life. Meanwhile there are still humans who have no access to a telephone, let alone a CPU of their own. Some contemplate a future in the cloud, but does tomorrow's world definitely include an internet? Besides following distrowatch I also read the archdruid's weekly soothsayings on blogspot. See his latest gloomy prognostications about the possible future demise of the internet in this week's article headed A Bridge to Somewhere.
Meanwhile there is of course still Joe's Window Manager, as seen in Puppy Linux and derivatives operable even by newbies. Fluxbox and Openbox still work for me on occasion. Apparently there are actually people out there who can work with dwm and its congeners.
85 • Gnome 3 (by tdockery97 on 2011-06-09 14:33:00 GMT from United States)
Well, I think I now see why there has been such a great push to get Gnome 3 going. MS has given a little preview of what Windows 8 will be like, and guess what...so maybe the Gnome Team has just been trying to beat MS to the punch for a change.
86 • @80 (by notsure on 2011-06-10 13:49:11 GMT from United States)
"why is it that Slackware can't handle KDE but everyone else can"
Slackware has a very small development team, and alienbob is the kde maintainer. What is proposed is the same that was proposed with gnome, hand it off to a 3rd party and let them deal with the headache, so they can continue developing a killer base distribution (i would like to see it like that). if users want kde, they would just grab it somewhere else, that is all, no more, no less.
87 • Re #75 and Debian Squeeze (by imnotrich on 2011-06-10 16:50:26 GMT from Mexico)
1. Debian - Disappointing, failure to excel: "My first reaction to Debian's latest was one of disappointment.... I found that, once it was up and running, Debian was all very satisfactory -- stable, useful, fast, accessible -- but by being so general, so universal, I felt Squeeze didn't excel at anything."
I disagree. Squeeze installs a version of hplip that is "new" enough to support my 4 year old printer/scanner. Lenny did not - went through dependency hell and never could get hplip to work properly.
Squeeze's support for NVIDIA drivers - fantastic. Very simple, unlike previous Debian versions. The "nouveau" drivers have issues but thank goodness Debian developers allow us alternatives that actually work, at least with respect to video (a potential dealbreaker since video is kinda important for most folks).
Bugs - Squeeze excelled at breaking stuff that worked in previous versions. Wireless networking for one. Sound, USB, microphones, parallel ports, and hundreds of packages in the Squeeze main repo don't work like they're supposed to. I have other gripes about Squeeze as regular distrowatch peeps are aware.
Update regarding my Debian Squeeze slug bug series: In my last report, I removed Squeeze from my Gateway ML-3109 (which is not even 4 years old) laptop and tried a variety of different current distros. Most did not support my realtek 8185 wireless card, though some knew the card was there. All of them had difficulties supporting my very common ATI video card. Ubuntu 9.04, remarkably, was able to use my wireless card and had no trouble with the ATI video but as most people know Pulse was still not ready for prime time with 9.04, so I upgraded to 9.10-epic fail. No wireless, and no video. Desperate, willing to try anything I installed Debian Lenny from my netinst cd.
TAA DAA! Wireless works out of the box. Sound, Video, everything! Amazing! My only gripes so far is that the install hooked me up with the volatile repos, not stable lenny but so far nothing's failed except flash. There appears to be no copy of the flashplugin-nonfree in any of the repos including multimedia. Iceweasel and Epiph say Flash is installed, but it doesn't run and I'm having difficulties getting the official Flash version from Adobe to upgrade and run in those two browsers. Flash does work in Chrome, but video playback stutters/is choppy. And Chrome is giving me annoying error messages like "your OS is obsolete so we're not going to send you updates." Well no, Lenny is not obsolete. It's the best Debian ever. Another Chrome error - blocking java. Yes, even though Chrome's java is installed and will work, everytime a website calls java I have to manually click somewhere to give java permission to run. This is BS. Chrome refuses to run java because it's an "outdated" (downloaded yesterday from google, how can it be outdated) version but there appears to be no official or easy way to update java. BUG!
On my desktop - I'm still running Squeeze 64, but that may not last long either - Squeeze still has problems with usb headsets/mics. I had it working yesterday. Today, I've been fighting with Squeeze for 90 minutes now to recognize/use my usb headset and mic so I can make some Skype calls or record my voice. Guess what? Best I've been able to do so far is get sound to come through the headset. Still not recognizing the mic. This is crazy stupid. How many hours do I have to waste getting something BASIC to work? Something that should operate natively, with no hassle?
Are there any distros that "just work" with basic stuff? I'm not running obscure hardware, nothing very old, nothing very new just basic stuff! Arrgh!
88 • RE: 76 - 78 - 80 - Gnome (by Landor on 2011-06-10 16:51:27 GMT from Canada)
#76
I don't know about that. I am quite sure that even a couple older AGP based chipsets that I've used (and one board that still exists here) would be able to run Gnome 3. One is an NVIDIA 7600 GT standalone card. Then next that is on the board, and I know for a fact will play games like OpenArena and the like, is a VIA Chrome chipset that will do 3D very well from the openchrome driver in X11. As I said, I'd take a chance that it would be functional for Gnome 3. If it can play games like those, but not run gnome 3, then I personally believe the gnome 3 guys went a little too far and it's not worth using.
My point about the older card and chipset is that PCI-E as a scale in the 95%+ area would work with Gnome 3. It would be a rare find that it didn't work, unless it was some unsupported crap from ATI, or one of Intel's proprietary messes that everyone seems to enjoy and thinks are so wonderful. Also, one other point I didn't mention in regard to Adam's erroneous statement about the PCI-E based card, how does that help people who own a laptop? Which just shows yet again, he really just shouldn't have made that comment at all.
#78
I was surprised that it would fail, then just keep working. I'm guessing each aspect of the screen saver is a component on top of the core, and if the component crashes the core keep going, that's just total theory though and I have absolutely no basis for it. :)
It's not often when I run a distribution in RAM, I'm sure 1.8 is more than enough for Fedora though. :)
Is that why I've come to notice that you download a lot of smaller distributions to test? I know you're already aware of this, but wouldn't a download manager, or using wget, to download part of the iso one day, then continue on the next, etc, until its done work? Oh, or is that the point, you find it more interesting testing out the smaller builds as opposed to a bigger one that doesn't hold much in the way of interest for you?
#80
For anyone that doesn't know, Slackware isn't dropping KDE at the moment, and the issue isn't at the level everyone believes it to be. There was a discussion over at LQ about this not linked to in this week's DWW that even the Slackware leader got involved in (comment #36 on page three of the thread). He stated that they were currently in discussion with the KDE team about how to better split the packages. He also stated that other distributions had voiced similar concerns and they were all working together to get it worked out. That doesn't tell me that Slackware, or any other distribution for that matter will be dropping KDE. They're working on it, as they should be, as a community. Here's the link: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/kick-away-kde-just-like-gnome-884323/
----
Gnome 3 is a shot at making Gnome modular for various applications of it. That's my opinion. Pretty well the same for Unity too.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
89 • RE: 88 and KDE (by Landor on 2011-06-10 20:43:34 GMT from Canada)
I just want to note that for anyone interested in KDE they should go to that link and read the thread, paying close attention to what AlienBob posts, as in post #42. He makes some great points in such a small space.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
90 • @88 (by dialup on 2011-06-11 05:00:25 GMT from United States)
You're persisting in taking Adam W,'s response out of context; here's the header:
"86 • @51 (by Adam Williamson on 2011-05-31 21:52:11 GMT from Canada)"
In #51, what I'd asked was: "Any suggestions of low cost graphics cards known to be compatible and preferably supported "out of the box" by the F15 Gnome CD?"
His response to the question was spot-on.
91 • @88 (by Antony on 2011-06-11 08:51:22 GMT from United Kingdom)
"Adam's erroneous statement about the PCI-E based card......... Which just shows yet again, he really just shouldn't have made that comment at all."
Adam was asked for advice in obtaining a low cost gfx card for use with Gnome 3. Therefore, as you perhaps read his comment a little to quickly at first, then I now assume you will admit that you really just shouldn't have made that comment at all?
92 • apropos of Gnome 3 working on a basic Intel video with paldo (by gnomic on 2011-06-11 13:26:15 GMT from New Zealand)
Just thought the world may like to know that paldo is providing me with the Gnome 3 'standard experience' on a rather average Intel chipset bearing the name 852GM/855GM in this ThinkPad R51. That's to say, I appear to be getting the full Gnome 3 thing such as it is. It's not utterly bad, but I still want my Aging Gorilla. Linux paldo 2.6.38.7-paldo1-x86 #1 SMP Mon May 23 12:41:27 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux
By the way I seem to recall Adam W providing a useful guide as to what video cards are up to speed for Gnome 3 a couple of weeks back. May I quote? (i8xx does seem to be running Gnome 3 on paldo here currently, whereas on F15 it spat the dummy).
"cards that can run shell, best I can make it:
Intel - i9xx and higher. i8xx is known to sort-of-work but have major issues if you forcibly override the blacklist.
Radeon - r300 and higher, that's Radeon 9500 and higher. r200 and r100 are the same story as i8xx: they have major rendering problems that can't be fixed, and are blacklisted by the gnome-session-is-accelerated check.
NVIDIA - GeForce (or possibly GeForce 2) up to GeForce 300 series. The Fermi cards (400 and 500 series, the most recent GeForces) don't have redistributable firmware quite yet (though it's coming as I speak), I believe if you use some tool to extract firmware from their Windows driver it can be made to work, but I have no experience with that. There's a bit more info in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=679538 and probably more at Phoronix.
All this is _in general_; there will of course be individual cards within the 'supported' range which don't work due to some driver bug or another."
93 • desktops dying (by jack on 2011-06-11 14:40:27 GMT from Canada)
Some comments on /. today stating that desktops are dying :
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/06/11/137202/Apple-Now-Worlds-Largest-Semiconductor-Buyer
raises some questions about ergonomics
I have not heard anyone say that using a laptop at a desk is as comfortable as using a standard desktop computer.
If there are any ergonomic studies giving advice on which posture is best for all day work (using a laptop at a desk ) please post a link.
Thanks
94 • Finally a real LITE kde4? (by RollMeAway on 2011-06-11 21:31:45 GMT from United States)
After reading through this:
http://www.mail-archive.com/release-team@kde.org/msg04709.html
It appears the main reason for breaking kde4.7 into smaller packages is their move from svn to git.
I expect someone will create "meta" packages for the lazy packagers.
My long time hope is that some distro developers will use this opportunity to create a truly LITE kde4. Thus leaving out akonadi, nepomuk and other such bs.
As noted gentoo has, for a long time, broken kde pkgs into smaller groups, and I already have compiled a gentoo kde4 system WITHOUT akonadi, nepomuk. It can be done!
Think about it. If you like ONE game, why should you have to install 64 others, that you would never use?
I applaud the move.
95 • Desktops Dying (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-06-12 21:44:40 GMT from Spain)
jack wrote
------------------------------------------------
Some comments on /. today stating that desktops are dying :
------------------------------------------------
I bet the number of desktop computers is not rising as faster as laptop sales. I suppose this is because when someone wants a portable computer, he buys a notebook and, since he already has a machine, doesn't bother to purchase a proper workstation.
For actual domestic work, nothing beats a workstation. Desktop computers don't have batteries which can fail, are easily upgraded, are modular so you can replace defective components... Most important: they have big keyboards and screens! If something in your laptop breaks, you usually depend on the manofacturer to fix the device for you. Its components are highty integrated into the laptop, and most of the times they are build "ad hoc" under the ODM specifications, so you cannot fix many hardware problems easily. If something in your desktop machine breaks, you can replace it by yourself most of the times. When you trash an old desktop computer away, you can even take its working components and use them in modern PCs.
PCs have a bigger lifespan. I have here a desktop computer of 10 years or so which has been working flawlessly for its whole life, and it continues doing it. I still have to found a notebook which has survived for so long under heavy-work conditions. Desktop computers are more powerful, more solid. You can BUILD them from old components, but you won't be able to do that with a Notebook.
MIni-computers are not to take over the desktop market yet. A laptop is not a susbtitute for a good-old-style PC if you need it to work in a office. Keyboard and screen size make a difference when you are to work for six hours in front of them. Processor and memory make also a difference when you are to compile lots of software or comit other intensive tasks.
If I needed a portable computer, I would buy a (very cheap) portable computer, but I would still use a desktop unit for my day to day work. Many homes follow this approach.
A lot of future remains for the desktop computer.
96 • @ 94 (by JMiahMan on 2011-06-13 05:17:31 GMT from United States)
There are Distributions, at least running Live that disable Nepomuk and Akonadi. The memory that the applications take up (without MySQLd and Akonadi running) ranges from 180-190M. That's about pre KDE 4.0 numbers. The Sad part is, that Akonadi is now so ingrained into into kdepimlibs (required by kdebase-workspace) that it can't be taken out. It's also so ingrained into kmail, and the rest of the kdepim suite that it doesn;t function without it. Why anyone would want to have a 30-60M MySQL process running in the background for something as simple as fetching contacts is beyond me and just plain awful. It's quite simply bloat ware, and what makes it bloat ware is the fact it's force onto the user whether they want it or not. I'm sure it works great, but the trade off just isn't worth. SO no amount of packager trimming is going to fix that the KDE Developers are going to have to come up with a (way) lighter database system or allow applications to run without it. The way it's set up now severely handicaps KDE 4 and KDE PIM. Task Packages btw aren't for lazy packagers, but lazy users who don't want to click 15 packages to install a PIM Suite. Any Good packager should not be using task packages to pull in BuildRequires or Requires, that's not what they should be used for.
Number of Comments: 96
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
| | |
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Archives |
| • Issue 1104 (2025-01-13): DAT Linux 2.0, Silly things to do with a minimal computer, Budgie prepares Wayland only releases, SteamOS coming to third-party devices, Murena upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1103 (2025-01-06): elementary OS 8.0, filtering ads with Pi-hole, Debian testing its installer, Pop!_OS faces delays, Ubuntu Studio upgrades not working, Absolute discontinued |
| • Issue 1102 (2024-12-23): Best distros of 2024, changing a process name, Fedora to expand Btrfs support and releases Asahi Remix 41, openSUSE patches out security sandbox and donations from Bottles while ending support for Leap 15.5 |
| • Issue 1101 (2024-12-16): GhostBSD 24.10.1, sending attachments from the command line, openSUSE shows off GPU assignment tool, UBports publishes security update, Murena launches its first tablet, Xfce 4.20 released |
| • Issue 1100 (2024-12-09): Oreon 9.3, differences in speed, IPFire's new appliance, Fedora Asahi Remix gets new video drivers, openSUSE Leap Micro updated, Redox OS running Redox OS |
| • Issue 1099 (2024-12-02): AnduinOS 1.0.1, measuring RAM usage, SUSE continues rebranding efforts, UBports prepares for next major version, Murena offering non-NFC phone |
| • Issue 1098 (2024-11-25): Linux Lite 7.2, backing up specific folders, Murena and Fairphone partner in fair trade deal, Arch installer gets new text interface, Ubuntu security tool patched |
| • Issue 1097 (2024-11-18): Chimera Linux vs Chimera OS, choosing between AlmaLinux and Debian, Fedora elevates KDE spin to an edition, Fedora previews new installer, KDE testing its own distro, Qubes-style isolation coming to FreeBSD |
| • Issue 1096 (2024-11-11): Bazzite 40, Playtron OS Alpha 1, Tucana Linux 3.1, detecting Screen sessions, Redox imports COSMIC software centre, FreeBSD booting on the PinePhone Pro, LXQt supports Wayland window managers |
| • Issue 1095 (2024-11-04): Fedora 41 Kinoite, transferring applications between computers, openSUSE Tumbleweed receives multiple upgrades, Ubuntu testing compiler optimizations, Mint partners with Framework |
| • Issue 1094 (2024-10-28): DebLight OS 1, backing up crontab, AlmaLinux introduces Litten branch, openSUSE unveils refreshed look, Ubuntu turns 20
| | • Issue 1093 (2024-10-21): Kubuntu 24.10, atomic vs immutable distributions, Debian upgrading Perl packages, UBports adding VoLTE support, Android to gain native GNU/Linux application support |
| • Issue 1092 (2024-10-14): FunOS 24.04.1, a home directory inside a file, work starts of openSUSE Leap 16.0, improvements in Haiku, KDE neon upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1091 (2024-10-07): Redox OS 0.9.0, Unified package management vs universal package formats, Redox begins RISC-V port, Mint polishes interface, Qubes certifies new laptop |
| • Issue 1090 (2024-09-30): Rhino Linux 2024.2, commercial distros with alternative desktops, Valve seeks to improve Wayland performance, HardenedBSD parterns with Protectli, Tails merges with Tor Project, Quantum Leap partners with the FreeBSD Foundation |
| • Issue 1089 (2024-09-23): Expirion 6.0, openKylin 2.0, managing configuration files, the future of Linux development, fixing bugs in Haiku, Slackware packages dracut |
| • Issue 1088 (2024-09-16): PorteuX 1.6, migrating from Windows 10 to which Linux distro, making NetBSD immutable, AlmaLinux offers hardware certification, Mint updates old APT tools |
| • Issue 1087 (2024-09-09): COSMIC desktop, running cron jobs at variable times, UBports highlights new apps, HardenedBSD offers work around for FreeBSD change, Debian considers how to cull old packages, systemd ported to musl |
| • Issue 1086 (2024-09-02): Vanilla OS 2, command line tips for simple tasks, FreeBSD receives investment from STF, openSUSE Tumbleweed update can break network connections, Debian refreshes media |
| • Issue 1085 (2024-08-26): Nobara 40, OpenMandriva 24.07 "ROME", distros which include source code, FreeBSD publishes quarterly report, Microsoft updates breaks Linux in dual-boot environments |
| • Issue 1084 (2024-08-19): Liya 2.0, dual boot with encryption, Haiku introduces performance improvements, Gentoo dropping IA-64, Redcore merges major upgrade |
| • Issue 1083 (2024-08-12): TrueNAS 24.04.2 "SCALE", Linux distros for smartphones, Redox OS introduces web server, PipeWire exposes battery drain on Linux, Canonical updates kernel version policy |
| • Issue 1082 (2024-08-05): Linux Mint 22, taking snapshots of UFS on FreeBSD, openSUSE updates Tumbleweed and Aeon, Debian creates Tiny QA Tasks, Manjaro testing immutable images |
| • Issue 1081 (2024-07-29): SysLinuxOS 12.4, OpenBSD gain hardware acceleration, Slackware changes kernel naming, Mint publishes upgrade instructions |
| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • Issue 1076 (2024-06-24): openSUSE 15.6, what makes Linux unique, SUSE Liberty Linux to support CentOS Linux 7, SLE receives 19 years of support, openSUSE testing Leap Micro edition |
| • Issue 1075 (2024-06-17): Redox OS, X11 and Wayland on the BSDs, AlmaLinux releases Pi build, Canonical announces RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu, key changes in systemd |
| • Issue 1074 (2024-06-10): Endless OS 6.0.0, distros with init diversity, Mint to filter unverified Flatpaks, Debian adds systemd-boot options, Redox adopts COSMIC desktop, OpenSSH gains new security features |
| • Issue 1073 (2024-06-03): LXQt 2.0.0, an overview of Linux desktop environments, Canonical partners with Milk-V, openSUSE introduces new features in Aeon Desktop, Fedora mirrors see rise in traffic, Wayland adds OpenBSD support |
| • Issue 1072 (2024-05-27): Manjaro 24.0, comparing init software, OpenBSD ports Plasma 6, Arch community debates mirror requirements, ThinOS to upgrade its FreeBSD core |
| • Issue 1071 (2024-05-20): Archcraft 2024.04.06, common command line mistakes, ReactOS imports WINE improvements, Haiku makes adjusting themes easier, NetBSD takes a stand against code generated by chatbots |
| • Issue 1070 (2024-05-13): Damn Small Linux 2024, hiding kernel messages during boot, Red Hat offers AI edition, new web browser for UBports, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 released, Qubes extends support for version 4.1 |
| • Issue 1069 (2024-05-06): Ubuntu 24.04, installing packages in alternative locations, systemd creates sudo alternative, Mint encourages XApps collaboration, FreeBSD publishes quarterly update |
| • Issue 1068 (2024-04-29): Fedora 40, transforming one distro into another, Debian elects new Project Leader, Red Hat extends support cycle, Emmabuntus adds accessibility features, Canonical's new security features |
| • Issue 1067 (2024-04-22): LocalSend for transferring files, detecting supported CPU architecure levels, new visual design for APT, Fedora and openSUSE working on reproducible builds, LXQt released, AlmaLinux re-adds hardware support |
| • Issue 1066 (2024-04-15): Fun projects to do with the Raspberry Pi and PinePhone, installing new software on fixed-release distributions, improving GNOME Terminal performance, Mint testing new repository mirrors, Gentoo becomes a Software In the Public Interest project |
| • Issue 1065 (2024-04-08): Dr.Parted Live 24.03, answering questions about the xz exploit, Linux Mint to ship HWE kernel, AlmaLinux patches flaw ahead of upstream Red Hat, Calculate changes release model |
| • Issue 1064 (2024-04-01): NixOS 23.11, the status of Hurd, liblzma compromised upstream, FreeBSD Foundation focuses on improving wireless networking, Ubuntu Pro offers 12 years of support |
| • Issue 1063 (2024-03-25): Redcore Linux 2401, how slowly can a rolling release update, Debian starts new Project Leader election, Red Hat creating new NVIDIA driver, Snap store hit with more malware |
| • Issue 1062 (2024-03-18): KDE neon 20240304, changing file permissions, Canonical turns 20, Pop!_OS creates new software centre, openSUSE packages Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
| • Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
| • Issue 1059 (2024-02-26): Warp Terminal, navigating manual pages, malware found in the Snap store, Red Hat considering CPU requirement update, UBports organizes ongoing work |
| • Issue 1058 (2024-02-19): Drauger OS 7.6, how much disk space to allocate, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop, UBports changes its version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication |
| • Issue 1057 (2024-02-12): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta, rolling release vs fixed for a smoother experience, Debian working on 2038 bug, elementary OS to split applications from base system updates, Fedora announces Atomic Desktops |
| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
|
| Random Distribution | 
Vine Linux
Vine Linux is a supreme Linux distribution with integrated Japanese environment for desktop PCs and notebooks. Project Vine was founded by six members of the Project Japanese Extension (JPE) in 1998 and has been developing Vine Linux with help of many members and volunteers. Vine Seed, the development version of Vine Linux, is a public software repository, which all developers are welcome to join and contribute to. Out-of-the-box Kanji support is available throughout most applications and Japanese input support is provided by either the FreeWnn (or Wnn6 in the commercial "CR" edition) or the Canna input server.
Status: Active
|
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
|
|
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
