 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 415, 25 July 2011 |
Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! How many people do you know who run Debian on top of a FreeBSD kernel? Probably not many. Nevertheless it's possible, thanks to the excellent work of Debian developers who have released a GNU/kFreeBSD variant of their distribution for i386 and amd64 architectures with version 6.0. While it's probably true that this setup won't appeal to great many users out there, it's still pretty cool that it exists, says Jesse Smith in his first-look review of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. In the news section, OpenBSD approaches a new release with a host of powerful features, Fedora 16 is set to switch to GRUB 2 as the default bootloader, Max Spevack says good-bye to Red Hat and Fedora, and former DPL Martin Michlmayr recalls his beginnings with the Debian project. Also in this issue, ten reasons for using Slackware Linux, an array of useful tips and tricks for the command line, and the addition of PUIAS Linux (a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) to the DistroWatch database. Happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (21MB) and MP3 (28MB) formats
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD
 Back in February I did a review of Debian GNU/Linux 6, also known as "Squeeze". It was a mixed trial for me. On the one hand, the installer was long and buggy and taking all the defaults I could resulted in a fairly bare system. On the other hand, once it was up and running, I found Debian Squeeze to be a solid, efficient distribution. In the end I concluded that, despite problems early on, Debian "is fast and responsive, boot times are quick and the presented software is stable without being terribly out of date."
A lot of people wrote in to say they didn't think I was being fair to the old girl, that I was attacking their favourite distribution. It certainly wasn't my intent, I tried to report the good and the bad points of my experience. I have a great deal of respect for Debian and I enjoy working with several of the developers. However, I will admit I did go into the Debian GNU/Linux review with high hopes and the bugs and problems I encountered early on placed a cloud over the rest of my otherwise good time with Debian. I can admit that my expectations not being met are as much my own fault as a product's. So, when a reader asked me to review Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD project (a marriage of the GNU userland software with FreeBSD's kernel) I saw it as an opportunity to try Debian again with a clean slate. And, since I'm giving Debian a fresh start, I hope fan's of the project will extend me an open mind.
Admittedly my fresh start got off on the wrong foot. I had begun by downloading the DVD image of Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD (hereafter referred to simply as kFreeBSD) and found my download would frequently time-out. Figuring the server was simply under heavy load I set my downloader to automatically resume the connection and left it. A few hours later I returned to find the download had stopped at around 65% completion. The reason turned out to be that I had been downloading the ISO for kFreeBSD 6.0.1. The day that I was downloading the ISO happened to be the same day the new 6.0.2 images were uploaded to the server. The old 6.0.1 file was removed while I was downloading it and replaced with version 6.0.2. I began again and managed to get the file without further interruptions.
Booting off the DVD brings up a menu with the option to perform an install via three different methods: default, automatic or expert. In practice these options are similar to each other, but with a few important differences. The automatic install gets us to select our preferred language and our location, then asks for a "preseed" (or pre-configuration) file. We're not given a description of a pre-configuration file, but I gather it's a way to script the install process. I did a quick check of the kFreeBSD installation manual and didn't find any details on how to set up one of these files. Fortunately, if we don't provide a "preseed" file, the installer will carry on with the steps required to get a basic install up and running. This includes setting a root password, creating a user account and partitioning the local drive. In the end we end up with a bare-bones installation with no desktop or network services.
The default installer goes through the same basic steps, selecting a language, setting passwords and partitioning. In addition the default install process allows us to choose to install a desktop environment (GNOME) and we can select common network services, such as secure shell, to install too. The expert method is quite similar to the default approach. The two big differences being using the expert method we can add additional modules to the installer for increased flexibility and we can choose to perform each task in the order of our choosing. It is, of course, important to make sure when using the expert method that we go through each screen (it's easy to skip steps) and we should do each step in a sane order. It's very much a case of letting us do whatever we want, even if what we want is a bad idea.
I ran into a few problems with the installer, which were most apparent when using the default method. Prior to copying files to the hard drive the installer asks if we'd like to contact software mirrors and download updated packages from there. Since I was already using the freshly updated 6.0.2 DVD I opted to use local sources (the DVD). The installer connected to the repositories anyway and downloaded packages from there instead of the DVD. It was a slow process and, an hour in, the download was 16% complete. I decided to go back and start over, this time with the network cable unplugged. This works in that it forces the installer to use local copies of packages, but it means the installer can't configure a network connection, and it will still try to contact the remote repositories and it takes several minutes for the connection to time-out. Users wanting the best of both worlds can leave the network physically connected during the initial setup stages and then pull the plug prior to copying packages.
It's a rough ride through the installer, but I will say that most of the steps are well laid out. The text installer gives explanations for each step and the menus I found easier to navigate than the graphical installer which comes with the GNU/Linux branch. The steps are the same, but the menu structure seems better suited to text-based menus. There were two other oddities that popped up, both during the partitioning section. During one of my installs I took the guided partitioning option and asked it to create a separate /home partition for me. The layout I was presented with properly showed separate /home, root and swap divisions of appropriate sizes. However, when I confirmed the layout the partitioner reported it could not create the /home partition and I had to start over. My last issue (and this may have been a limitation of my hardware) was that the kFreeBSD documentation says the installer supports ZFS, but it was not an option when I was dividing up the disk. The installer lists ext2, UFS and FAT as possible options.
Despite the various issues I ran into, each time I ran the installer through to completion it gave me a bootable operating system. With the desktop packages installed kFreeBSD booted to a graphical login screen which looks standard for GNOME environments. Unfortunately I was unable to login to a graphical desktop. Attempting to login, either as the root user or as my regular user, caused the interface to hang. No error message was presented. The operating system comes with a fallback TWM environment and trying to login to this GUI also caused the interface to freeze. This left me with the text console with which to play.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 6.0 - Debian running on top of the FreeBSD 8.1 kernel
(full image size: 194kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
The kFreeBSD distro comes with a small collection of software on the default install. In fact, without a desktop environment, the installer drops no more than 350 MB of data onto the hard drive. This includes the basic GNU tool set. Common software like the GNU Compiler Collection, Java, the Lynx text-based web browser and even the ping program are not included. There are manual pages though, so users have help on hand. There's really just enough here to run scripts and help the user fetch the software they will need from Debian's massive repositories.
Speaking of the repositories, package management is, as with other Debian branches, handled by APT, specifically apt-get. Post-install, I had to adjust the list of APT sources a bit as security updates and the DVD were listed as sources, but the main Debian repository was not. With that done, APT worked as expected and I was able to grab security updates and install new software. Debian comes with just about everything a person will need (there are about 29,000 packages in the latest stable release) and I found everything I was looking for.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD uses the 8.1 release of the FreeBSD kernel. For the most part, day-to-day use of the operating system probably won't turn up differences between the Linux kernel and the FreeBSD kernel. The one area where I did notice I wasn't using a Linux-based project was regarding the device names. On Linux one gets accustomed to seeing eth0 for the network and sda for the hard drive. On kFreeBSD I had to mentally switch gears to work with em0 for the network and ad0 for the disk. The /proc directory is a bit sparse under the FreeBSD kernel, compared to Linux's /proc implementation, but it's hardly likely to be noticed by most users.
Generally speaking my hardware was handled properly. I didn't spend much time in graphical environments, but my Intel and NVIDIA video cards were detected and used properly, enough to show me a graphical login screen. Network ports were detected and worked well. My laptop's Intel wireless card wasn't picked up and I believe this was due to Debian's policy regarding non-free firmware. Vanilla FreeBSD handles the Intel card, so I suspect it's just a matter of hunting down the correct firmware in Debian's non-free repository. On both of my machines boot times were good, I think a touch slower than Debian's GNU/Linux and a little faster than plain FreeBSD. Memory usage was quite low and I don't think I ever topped 100 MB of RAM being used, even including cached data.
I've heard two popular reasons for running a GNU environment on top of a FreeBSD kernel. One is script compatibility. The idea being that if a person needs a FreeBSD kernel (for whatever reason) they may still want to run GNU-specific scripts. I can see the reasoning behind this, though kFreeBSD does have a few quirks to it (such as the device names I mentioned above) which may introduce new incompatibilities. The other reason often cited is ZFS support. Though I didn't find ZFS tools installed by default, ZFS utilities are available in the kFreeBSD repositories. This brings together great file system technology with an environment which will be familiar to GNU/Linux users. A third, and often overlooked, reason for running kFreeBSD is because we can. There is something compelling about running a mash-up of technologies from two different open source camps. For people who just like to tinker with computers kFreeBSD is right up there with trying MINIX or running NetBSD on a toaster.
Given the problems I ran into with the installer and issues I ran into trying to login to a graphical environment, I have to say kFreeBSD isn't a project I would recommend to many people, certainly not novice users. Given the defaults it appears as though the project is aimed mostly at people running servers who have an interest in both GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. And, though certainly not without rough edges, it is an interesting operating system. It has got warts and it can be a pain to get up and running, but the fact that it can exist -- does exist -- is, well, is pretty cool when you think about it.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
OpenBSD 5.0 and Fedora 16 features, farewell for Max Spevack, interview with Debian's Martin Michlmayr, ten reasons to use Slackware
 Continuing with the BSD theme, the developers of OpenBSD, an operating system reputed for its security features, will release version 5.0 later this year. The magic number has caught the attention of some websites, expecting this to be a major update, but the truth is that OpenBSD follows a more mundane versioning scheme where 4.8 is followed by 4.9 and 4.9 by 5.0. Nevertheless, there is plenty to look forward to in the release expected to arrive in early November. Peter Hansteen summarises some of the more interesting features in "What to expect in OpenBSD 5.0 onwards": "BIGMEM on by default on amd64 - this is literally a big one. The amd64 architecture has true 64-bit capability, but the ghosts of hardware design past keeps haunting us, with legacy devices that continue to require a lot of dark magic to be handled correctly and safely. This commit happened fairly early in the OpenBSD 5.0 cycle. Disk UID (DUID) support in all storage related parts such as mount, and by extension fstab (and DUID-style fstab enabled by default for new installs), so disk device renumbering will not be such a headache the next time you add or remove disks."
* * * * *
 While on the subject of upcoming releases, Fedora 16 is scheduled to be released at about the same time as the above-mentioned OpenBSD 5.0 and its approved feature list is now starting to take firm shape. The H Open reports in "Fedora 16 to have GRUB 2, GNOME 3.2 and KDE 4.7": "The feature list contains 40 items, including GNOME 3.2 and KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.7. The developers are planning to switch to using GRUB 2 for the bootloader. Having switched to systemd, as an alternative to SysVinit and Upstart, in Fedora 15, the project plans to replace further SysVinit scripts with systemd units in version 16. Furthermore, Fedora is to offer everything that's required for Xen virtualisation, as version 3.0 of the Linux kernel, which is now expected to be released on Friday, will include all the necessary components. However, the Fedora project may well discard some of the features, or postpone their inclusion until Fedora 17, if they prove to be not mature enough. This could potentially happen with the planned use of Btrfs as the distribution's standard file system."
* * * * *
  Sad news: Max Spevack, one of the more visible Red Hat engineers and a former Fedora Project Leader, is leaving Red Hat, Inc. at the end of this month: "I am leaving Red Hat at the end of July, just short of my seven year anniversary. As a result, my roles and responsibilities in the Fedora Project will be changing significantly at the same time. Red Hat's commitment to Fedora has in no way changed, nor has the Community Architecture team's commitment to Fedora. In addition to Fedora's established leadership team, Harish Pillay is stepping into the management and leadership role that I've been filling. He has already shared his thoughts about this transition, and I have no doubt that the team will continue to grow and be successful under his leadership." And where does the career change of your favourite Fedora personality lead to? "I'm off to Seattle in August to join Amazon Web Services as an Engineering Manager in their Kernel & Operating Systems group, with a focus on Amazon Machine Images and EC2."
* * * * *
 Speaking about former project leaders, here is a nice interview with Martin Michlmayr, a former leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project. How did he start contributing to Debian? "I first used Debian in the days of 0.93R6, some time around the end of 1995. The 0.93R6 release was still based on a.out but I needed an ELF-based system for some application, so I moved to Slackware. I then quickly moved to Red Hat Linux where I stayed for several years. I rediscovered Debian in 2000 and quickly decided to join the project. I cannot recall how I rediscovered Debian but when I did, it was clear to me that Debian was the ideal project for me: I could identify with its philosophy, I liked the volunteer nature of the project, and I found the size and diversity of Debian interesting since a large project offers a lot of different challenges and opportunities." And here is a quick advice to those joining the Debian project today: "New contributors should find an area where they can make a unique contribution. Most people in Debian maintain packages but there are so many other ways to contribute. For example, most of my contributions were not technical but were about coordination and other organizational activities."
* * * * *
 In contrast with a large community of developers that forges the Debian project, Slackware Linux is often seen as a one-man project by Patrick Volkerding. Although this is not strictly true as there are other names frequently mentioned in the Slackware ChangeLog, it is still tiny in comparison with most other major distributions. But it has been around for nearly two decades and there are many people who wouldn't use anything else. Jack Wallen lists "Ten reasons for giving Slackware Linux a go": "Even for an operating system known for its stability, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more reliable Linux distribution than Slackware. It has been around for 20 years and has long enjoyed a reputation for being solid. In my time using it -- and I have installed the most recent version as well as having used versions throughout my time with Linux -- I can honestly say its reputation is entirely justified. Whether on a server or a desktop, it is remarkably stable." Besides stability, clean configuration is another reason the author chooses Slackware: "One of the criticisms levelled at Slackware is a lack of graphical configuration utilities in just about every subsystem on the installation. If you want to add users, you use the command line. If you want to configure Samba or start up services, you use the command line. This approach helps create much cleaner configuration files."
* * * * *
 Finally, some interesting information for MeeGo users. Wesley Chong has emailed DistroWatch to let us know that has developed a Distrowatch News Client for MeeGo 1.2: "Today, I am proud to announce that DNC, the Distrowatch News Client for MeeGo 1.2 'Harmattan' has been released. This application is targeted to Linux fans like me, who would check DistroWatch.com every day to get updated with latest distro and packages release. This version, 0.1.0, features news feed for DistroWatch.com news headlines, latest packages, latest podcasts (OGG and MP3). In the news headlines page, there are buttons for visiting the selected news website and the corresponding distro website within DistroWatch.com and there is a distro screenshot in the news headlines page. This is the initial release, please drop me a line if you have any suggestion or comment using this application. If you found any bug within this application, please file the bug by sending me an email or by leaving comment." Visit the above blog post to see screenshots and videos of the DistroWatch News Client for MeeGo.
DistroWatch News Client for MeeGo
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| Tips and Tricks (by Jesse Smith) |
Command-line fun
My inbox has been fairly quiet this week so let's take a break from questions and instead look at fun things to do with the command line. Feel free to follow along at home.
Have you ever found yourself in a position where you have a lot of files with the wrong extension or an extra extension? Perhaps you backed up your photos and somehow changed the extensions in the process from .jpg to .jpg.bak. Now you want to return the extension to its original state. One way to perform a mass extension removal is with the basename command. The basename program is usually used to show the name of a file, minus the directory name. For example, using
basename /home/jesse/example.txt
will output "example.txt". We can take this a step further and ask basename to strip trailing characters like this:
basename /home/jesse/example.txt .txt
The above command outputs "example". Now, if we combine basename's extension removal with a loop, we can rename a group of files. The following example hunts down all files in the current directory which have the extension ".bak" and renames them, removing that extension. Other files, those not ending in ".bak", are left alone.
for i in *.bak ; do mv "$i" "`basename "$i" .bak`" ; done
The quote marks protect us against spaces in the file names. Since the command line uses spaces to separate parameters, file names containing spaces would make a mess of our instructions.
A companion command to basename is dirname. The dirname command performs the opposite task of basename and shows us a file's directory path, but not the file name. For example:
dirname /home/jesse/example.txt
returns "/home/jesse". This may not be useful very often, but it does allow us to perform a few tricks. Say, for instance, we want to find out where a certain file is and then we want to jump into that directory we can use
cd `dirname $(which krename)`
The above command figures out where the krename program is on the drive and moves us into that directory.
A more commonly used command is alias. The alias command allows us to create short-cuts on the command line. Do you find yourself running long commands over and over? Alias can speed up the process and avoid typing errors. Take the command "apt-get update". Lots of people on Debian-based systems use this on a regular basis. With alias we can trim down the command.
alias update="apt-get update"
Now, running update will be interpreted as the full "apt-get update" command. The same can be done for other commands.
alias install="apt-get install"
alias remove="apt-get remove"
alias search="apt-cache search"
Now we can run "search office" or "install liquidwar", rather than the entire apt-get command. The alias command can also be used to protect us from ourselves. Quite often admins will use the following alias to help them avoid deleting files since the "rm -i" command will delete a file only after the user confirms the action. The following makes the "rm" command safer:
alias rm="rm -i"
Alias commands, like the ones shown above, can be placed in our Bash profile file so they do not have to be re-typed each time we login.
Here is a long string that can be used to tell us how often we use commands. This looks at our command line history, counts how often we use each command and then sorts the list by frequency.
history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"}{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | sort -nr
The result is a list of the top ten most frequently used commands with a number next to each showing how many times we ran that command. If you don't want people knowing how often you run your commands, the line
history -c
erases the contents of your history file.
Did you know you can use a command to send text to the X clipboard and bring it back? The xsel command can be used to copy and paste items for us. For example, this saves our command line history to the clipboard:
history | xsel -i
Then this command lets us paste the contents of the clipboard to our terminal screen:
xsel -o
The xsel command works with the mouse too. Highlight a section of text in one window, then move to the command line and run "xsel -o" and the highlighted text will appear in the console window. Likewise, copying something to the clipboard with "xsel -i" allows us to paste using the mouse (usually by clicking with the left and right buttons at the same time). One way this can be useful is, let's say we have a big table of data in a spreadsheet. We just want to extract the contents of two columns from the data and output it to another file. We can highlight the entire table with our mouse, then move to a terminal window and run
xsel -o | awk '{print $2 " " $4}' > new_table.txt
Now we have a new file with just the second and forth columns of data.
The Linux command line is a powerful and flexible tool and it can be very useful, even in a modern environment with slick graphical interfaces.
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| Released Last Week |
PCLinuxOS 2011-07 "Phoenix Xfce"
Bill Reynolds has announced the release of PCLinuxOS 2011-07 "Phoenix Xfce" edition: "PCLinuxOS Phoenix edition 2011-07 is now available for download. PCLinuxOS Phoenix edition 2011 live CD comes with the latest versions of most popular programs such as Xfce 4.8, Firefox 5.0, Thunderbird 3.1.11 just to name a few. OpenOffice.org Manager has been replaced with LibreOffice Manager. Due to the limited size of the live CD the office suite is not included but can be installed through the LibreOffice Manager either in live CD mode (3 GB of memory required) or preferably after hard drive installation. Addlocale has updated translations and can convert a PCLinuxOS installation into over 70 different languages. The software included on the live CD was based on community feedback as to what the PCLinuxOS users wanted to be included by default." Read the rest of the release announcement a more complete list of changes and features.
Lightweight Portable Security 1.2.2
Lightweight Portable Security (LPS), created by USA's Department of Defence, is a small Linux live CD focusing on privacy and security while using online services. A new maintenance release was announced earlier today: "A new version of LPS (1.2.2) has been released and is accessible via the web. Changes: fixed a problem with iMac Radeon video drivers; fixed problem with trackpad not working on older MacBooks; Rdesktop - enabled compression to improve performance, fixed problem with cursor control keys not working properly; updated NVIDIA display driver to version 275.09.07; added UVC USB web camera support; added minicom 2.4 as a serial port terminal emulator under the Communications menu; updated Firefox to 3.6.19; updated DOD Configuration add-on to 1.3.1; updated Gmail S/MIME add-on to 0.5.2; updated Flash to 10.3.181.34." Here is the complete changelog.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7
Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.7, a new update of the legacy 5.x series: "Red Hat today announced the general availability of the seventh update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7. This release is important for our customers who wish to remain on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 while gaining some of the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Key highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 include: support for new hardware delivered in 2011, including Intel, AMD, POWER and IBM System z; encompasses processors, chipsets and new drivers for storage, networking, and graphics; introducing Subscription Manager to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - enables improved tracking of subscriptions and usage; first introduced in RHEL 6.1...." Read the release announcement, the press release and the release notes for further details.
Ubuntu 10.04.3, Kubuntu 10.04.3
Kate Stewart has announced the release of Ubuntu 10.04.3 and Kubuntu 10.04.3, a maintenance update to the projects' latest releases with long-term support: "The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, the third maintenance update to Ubuntu's 10.04 LTS release. This release includes updated server, desktop, alternate installation CDs and DVDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures. The Kubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Kubuntu 10.04.3. This release includes updated images for the desktop and alternate installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures. Numerous updates have been integrated, and updated installation media have been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation." See the release announcement and the detailed summary of changes for more information.
Salix OS 13.37 "KDE"
George Vlahavas has announced the release of Salix OS 13.37 "KDE" edition, a Slackware-based desktop distribution: "Salix KDE 13.37 images are now available to download. This release includes KDE 4.5.5, the same as in Slackware 13.37. One major difference since our previous release is the inclusion of the Mozilla Firefox 5.0 web browser in place of Konqueror. We believe that Firefox has improved a lot with its latest releases and provides a better web experience compared to Konqueror. However, if any users want Konqueror back, they only have to install the 'kdebase' package using the package manager, replacing the default kdebase-lite package. Another important change is the switch from Kaffeine to Bangarang as the default media player." Read the rest of the release announcement for more information.
GParted LiveCD 0.9.0-6
Steven Shiau has announced the release of GParted LiveCD 0.9.0-6, a new stable version of the useful utility live CD designed for data rescue and disk partitioning tasks. This release includes the new GParted 0.9.0 and the CD image is now compressed with xz instead of gzip. From the release notes: "This is GParted Live 0.9.0-6. New in this release: the underlying GNU/Linux operating system is based on the Debian 'Sid' repository (as of 2011-07-23); new GParted 0.9.0; Parted was rolled back to 0.2.3-7 with the patch file fix-head-size-assertion.patch from Ubuntu; Linux kernel 2.6.39-3 is used; xz compression instead of gzip method was used when making Squashfs and initrd, therefore the GParted Live ISO image and ZIP file are smaller by about 24 MB."
Finnix 102
Ryan Finnie has announced the release of Finnix 102, a Debian-based live CD for system administrators: "Today marks the release of Finnix 102, the eighteenth release of Finnix since its beginnings over ten years ago. Finnix 102 includes Linux kernel 3.0, a smaller distribution size, new Xen pvops and 486 support, and minor bug fixes. Finnix 102 includes the recently-released Linux 3.0 kernel, and is a slight departure from usual Finnix method of closely following Debian kernel development. Configuration management was based on Debian pre-release kernels, but patch management was handled internally, basing only partly on Debian. Linux 3.0 support was tested heavily throughout the Linux 3.0-rc process. Finnix 102 includes XZ (LZMA2) compression of the compressed root and initrd." Read the rest of the release announcement for additional details.
IPFire 2.9 Core 50
Arne Fitzenreiter has announced the release of IPFire 2.9 Core 50, a new updated of the specialist Linux-based distribution for firewalls: "Today, we release the 50th update of IPFire 2.9. In Core 50 there are updates to Squid (3.1.14), Python (2.7.2), Apache (2.2.19), smartmontools and collectd. From now on, IPFire is installable and configurable in Polish language and there have been a couple of small issues removed on the web user interface. Since 44 months and 50 core updates, IPFire is working better than on the first day. The developers keep working on little updates that improve the base system and add-ons, but also bring major updates along the way. That is why the system runs great on recent hardware and keeps up with new technologies. Special attention is paid to safety-critical problems. Many security issues of third party packages have been patched, tested and delivered within a couple of hours." Here is the "anniversary" announcement.
Calculate Linux 11.6.1
Alexander Tratsevskiy has announced the release of Calculate 11.6.1, a Gentoo-based distribution for desktops and servers: "The first update for the Calculate Linux 11.6 distribution has been released. Major Changes: fixed KNetworkManager KDE applet; fixed installation with the first version of GRUB; fixed permissions for Samba server share distfiles; fixed auto-install video driver onto USB hard disk drive; fixed saving settings; display the disk size using binary prefix instead of decimal; improved localization of the Bulgarian language; KDE updated to version 4.6.5. Major components: Linux kernel 2.6.38.8, KDE 4.6.5, X.Org 7.4, LibreOffice 3.3.3, Chromium 12.0.742.112...." Here is the brief release announcement.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
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New distributions added to database
* * * * *
New distributions added to waiting list
- BeedBox. BeedBox is a Debian-based Linux distribution dedicated to simplify hosting. The project's goal is to provide a web interface to configure any services (mail, blog, etc.) with a few clicks.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 1 August 2011.
Jesse Smith and Ladislav Bodnar
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • PUIAS Inclusion is a good news! (by manmath sahu on 2011-07-25 08:24:26 GMT from India)
Good that you've included PUIAS into your db. The project seems very promising.
Also the basename tricks really helped me maintain sanity of my files that were lying cluttered for several years.
2 • PUIAS (by earlybird on 2011-07-25 09:40:12 GMT from Canada)
Agree with #1-manmath sahu - That sounds really interesting. Will have to check that out and see how it compares to Scientific Linux.
Also enjoyed the review on kfreebsd. Again, something out of left field. Even if not immediately useful for most of us, such experimentation is one of the attractions of opensource, not being constrained by the the hands of a monopoly, and perhaps being able to integrate successful ideas back into the mainstream for the benefit of all.
The best part of this weeks edition was on the command line. It was fitting that the same edition mentioned the stability of Slackware and it's use of the commandline for most configuration.
So refreshing to find 3 really good topics and no mention of Ubuntu (forgive me; couldn't resist)
Now getting back to the commandline; if I could just remember how to reset a mucked-up terminal when a typo, or perhaps accidentally catting a binary scrambles the screen.....
3 • Resetting a terminal (by Dolphin on 2011-07-25 10:10:22 GMT from Israel)
Just type a "reset" command.
4 • alias (by laoguy on 2011-07-25 10:22:23 GMT from Australia)
Should those quotation marks be single or double in the alias examples?
5 • ZFS Debian/KFreeBSD (by Fossala on 2011-07-25 10:45:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'm fairly sure that the ZFS is only included in the amd64 iso because of instablity of ZFS in i386. It is also recomended to have 4GB ram for ZFS and without PAE i386 can only use ~3GB.
6 • Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (by koroshiya itchy on 2011-07-25 12:12:09 GMT from Belgium)
I have installed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in two different computers (one laptop and one workstation) using the netinstall CD without any problem. It is great that one can use different kernels in an GNU environment (namely in Debian). The main problem I currently see with such "hybrid" systems have to do with the compilation of new kernel modules (in may case, mainly the proprietary Nvidia drivers, that I really need, not only for 3D acceleration but also for GPU computing).
Regarding, ZFS. Installing ZFS in a root filesystem is not a trivial task for any of the distros I know, except for OpenIndiana (well, last time I tried it was still OpenSolaris). Even user-friendly FreeBSD derivatives such as PC-BSD and Ghost-BSD require a lot of manual configuration and know-how. ZFS is great but beware that it requires a lot of RAM memory (several GB) for optimal functioning.
7 • Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (by Mathew John Roberts on 2011-07-25 12:14:10 GMT from United Kingdom)
Awesome!
Good to see a review of this. I've installed it in a vm (virtualbox). It is rather flakey but the install was smooth and it boots up fine into the login screen. I get to the gnome desktop (ugh, i wish they packaged xfce) and it seems to work sometimes. It is hard to describe.
I really like the fact that people work on these type of projects just because they can. I fully agree with the "cool" factor and it also helps to debug applications so that they are truly cross-platform (not just linux specific).
I wish other distros would do this too. An Arch/kfreebsd would totally rock! They do have Arch/Hurd! It would be brilliant to see Debian/Minix or Debian/OpenIndiana. Even better would be a Debian/OpenBSD. I'm more of an Arch fan than Debian but it does seem to me that Debian is more willing to push the boundaries.
8 • 1975 versus 1985 (by CAI ENG on 2011-07-25 13:29:17 GMT from United States)
In defense of Slackware's requirement to employ the keyboard, rather than the mouse, for installation/configuration, Jack Wallen wrote
"This approach helps create much cleaner configuration files."
?Cleaner?
What is he talking about?
"Cleaner" for the user? Or, simpler for the developer?
This is the sort of nonsense one read, a quarter century ago, let's stop repeating it.....There is nothing "cleaner" about code designed to intercept the user's intention using a keyboard, than code designed to intercept the user's intention using a mouse.
CAI ENG
9 • PU_IAS (by Dave Postles on 2011-07-25 13:37:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
I've been using PU_IAS for most of this year now, on my desktop PC for the stability. I've installed LibO,but I've placed an icon in the top panel (the green tick from LibO) rather than use the desktop-integration which needs some work with PU_IAS and RHEL derivatives. From the repositories, I've added VLC, LyX, K3B, and gretl. I use *nix ftp from the terminal. The one programme that I miss is QGIS, so I have other distros on my laptops. I've found PU_IAS rock solid and what I used most of the time. The people at PU_IAS (through the mailing lists) have been so kind too. My desktop is at:
http://www.historicalresources.myzen.co.uk/LINUX/linuxhome.html
10 • I'm Slack and I'm proud (by Microlinux on 2011-07-25 14:02:10 GMT from France)
@8: Greetings from an IT professional (see link) using Slackware 13.37 on both servers and desktops. Folks who prefer doing it manually are not necessarily a bunch of wankers.
11 • UUID (by Anonymous on 2011-07-25 14:23:36 GMT from United States)
so disk device renumbering will not be such a headache the next time you add or remove disks
Because UUID=86fr5683f-4this-8is879-very998-86753elstupid01 is far more memorable and easier to use than /dev/sda or /dev/ad0
12 • Alias and ZFS (by Jesse on 2011-07-25 14:47:18 GMT from Canada)
>> "Should those quotation marks be single or double in the alias examples?"
Those are double quotes around the alias commands.
Regarding the ZFS option (or lack of) in the installer, I suspect there's a check in Debian's installer which looks for a certain amount of disk space or memory. Which is a fairly reasonable precaution. Though I wish the install manual listed the requirements. I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris with 512MB of RAM and about 8GB of disk space in a virtual environment, so the requirements shouldn't be too high.
As I mentioned, the ZFS tools are in kFreeBSD's repository, so people wanting to set up ZFS can do so manually.
13 • Please stop re-inventing the wheel. (by os2_user on 2011-07-25 15:14:23 GMT from United States)
"For people who just like to tinker with computers kFreeBSD is right up there with trying MINIX or running NetBSD on a toaster."
Have to say ENOUGH already with re-inventing wheels after reading the Feature Story and the above quote. I understand the fun of "just" tinkering, but it's also as in #8: "This is the sort of nonsense one read, a quarter century ago, let's stop repeating it....."
Nothing is being advanced or even perfected by endless repetition of same old basics.
Take specifically: for Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD to pretty much freeze during install because downloading from a repository -- if one doesn't remove the cable at the right time -- OUGHT to just be laughed out of existence. But it won't be because SO ingrained in Unix culture that many actually think it's GOOD to spend a couple of hours on just installing, requiring more arcane expertise than any sane person would acquire just to get sort of going.
So, anyway, that's why though I WISH Linux would take off and wipe out M$, I've my doubts that its internal culture will ever, er, move on from the 1980's.
14 • Market dominace is not the goal (by Brotherred on 2011-07-25 15:40:00 GMT from United States)
For many market dominance is not the goal. There are many things that BSD, Linux and Hurd can learn from one another. Can learn and *have been* learning from each other all long. Does that slow time to market or common Joe recondition? Likely yes. But this is a vast and more diverse community than most can imagine and for some of those market presence is the least of their concerns.
Further more who are we the end u$ers to say that those more talented than us are working on the wrong things.
15 • #13 Linux wiping out M$ (by imnotrich on 2011-07-25 16:16:41 GMT from Mexico)
I'm sad to admit but IMHO Linux will never overtake Microsoft or Apple for end users because:
1. Microsoft and Apple have better hardware support, and they don't abandon hardware just because it's two or three years old. Drivers are available for many years.
2. It's easy to install Windows or MAC OS, no hours or days or weeks of endless tinkering and googling to get everything working. Problematic installs are rare.
3. A gui that makes sense (vs guis that change every few months just to be different, move buttons around and such)
4. Microsoft Office vs. Open Office vs. Word Perfect vs. Libre Office file format pissing matches. "People, can't we all get along?" (Rodney King).
Linux developers do an incredible job with #1, but not all hardware manufacturers cooperate, then there are distros who insist on omitting proprietary code, either way I've never found a distro that consistently supports a wide variety of hardware across multiple machines. Worse yet because Linux wants to be bleeding edge, it's quick to drop support for common devices (such as video and wireless) simply because those devices are a few years old. Hint from the perspective of a user: Hardware support is not "bloat."
Re #2, Linux is all about tinkering and experimentation. Linux Developers would consider themselves failures if they produce a flawless, working distro that required no tweaking, and honestly...how many of us would lose interest in Linux if "just worked" was the rule, not the exception?
GUI's - users should be given choices during the initial install. People will argue that you can change your desktop environment later but...that goes back to #2. Mucho tinkering and experimentation and maybe it will work. Maybe it won't and there's a good chance you will bork your install.
Finally, office file formats. If you're going to have interoperability with the "other" OS's, there needs to be standards that all Office/Word processing suites support. As long as there is no 100% functional equivalent for Microsoft Office, company IT departments will be reluctant to switch to Linux for Open Office or other alternatives which may be 75% or 80% equivalent...not good enough. Expect Microsoft will not cooperate, and plan accordingly.
Linux market share will grow in future years, and I expect web servers and corporate servers will migrate to Linux in greater numbers but for end users.. Linux has to be more like Windows in order to be Windows (the thought of which is enough to make most Linux developers puke I am sure).
16 • review request (by Andrei Raevky on 2011-07-25 16:22:09 GMT from United States)
Hi,
First, I want to thank you for a fantastic show! Second, since you reviewed Kubuntu, I would like to suggest that you review Xubuntu which is, I believe, an even better alternative for those running away from the inanity of Unity (and possibly GNOME3).
Cheers!
Andrei
17 • @15 (by fernbap on 2011-07-25 17:10:35 GMT from Portugal)
"I'm sad to admit but IMHO Linux will never overtake Microsoft or Apple for end users because:"
Linux objective is not world domination;
"It's easy to install Windows or MAC OS, no hours or days or weeks of endless tinkering and googling to get everything working. Problematic installs are rare."
Are you kidding me? A linux desktop distro takes typically 30 minutes to install. If a windows install doesn't work, too bad for you, you will have to change the hardware. If a linux install doesn't work, you will be able to make it work.
"Microsoft and Apple have better hardware support, and they don't abandon hardware just because it's two or three years old. Drivers are available for many years."
Wrong. They don't have hardware support. They rely on third party drivers, and many are not even tested.
"A gui that makes sense (vs guis that change every few months just to be different, move buttons around and such)"
I'm sure you can find a gui that makes sense to you amongst the many Linux has to offer. Besides, that statement is entirely subjective.
"Microsoft Office vs. Open Office vs. Word Perfect vs. Libre Office file format pissing matches. "People, can't we all get along?" (Rodney King).!
There are a lot of formats that all of those offices support. However, M$ makes sure that every of his releases uses a format that is incompatible with the former releases. Talk about having the user interest in mind... :P
18 • #15 troll? (by Chris on 2011-07-25 17:16:15 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'm not sure whether you are being serious?
Re #1 there are plenty of Linux distributions with amazing hardware support, and yes my ancient desktop still runs on Linux without problem. I haven't experienced this "abandon hardware" that you talk about. What drivers have been dropped that you need? Seems like hogwash to me.
Re #2 it is actually easier in some cases to install say Linux than Windows, since often your hardware works straight away and you don't need to track down drivers. It's actually extremely difficult to install MacOS on anything except Mac hardware. The Ubuntu's and Mints are making it extremely easy these days to install Linux.
Re #3 are you suggesting that the Windows and Mac OS interfaces haven't changed at all? Also, last time I checked, you don't have to upgrade if you're happy with what you've got. People are still using Windows XP, and people are still using Debian 5.
Re #4 I'm guessing you haven't seen this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
19 • Re: #8 Configuration (by silent on 2011-07-25 17:18:29 GMT from Hungary)
I guess 'cleaner' simply means that there is only one way of modifying configuration files, and there is only one configuration file for each attribute. Imagine a Linux distribution with several GUI configuration frontends and several config file options (eg. mimeapps.list and defaults.list for default applications). Some of those GUI frontends may completely erase the previous version of the config file, some will add extra lines without removing anything, some will modify one configuration file, some another one, so the precedences may decide what settings are applied at the end.
20 • Cleaner Configurations (by DavidEF on 2011-07-25 17:22:37 GMT from United States)
@ #8 -CAI ENG
I'm sure the word "cleaner" there is referring to keeping configuration options simple, organized, and in the right places. The problem with using a GUI for configuration is the same as using a republican survey for democrats, or vice-versa. There is an extra layer of "interpretation" involved which can cause confusion. Part of the problem is that there are sometimes different ways to get similar, but not exactly the same, results.
If I know exactly what I want, I'd rather have a list of well-documented commands to choose from, rather than a GUI application which may describe things in a way that I only "think" I might get what I want out of it. When it turns out that I don't get what I want, I have to go back and change that option back, then keep looking for the option that will ultimately give me what I'm looking for. If the GUI application is complex and/or I haven't used it before, that might be the start of a lot of mess for me!
I love GUI applications. I don't really prefer the command line. But, for config files, the command line is definitely the "cleaner" way to do it.
21 • @16 (by Gustavo on 2011-07-25 17:30:16 GMT from Brazil)
I agree.
Xubuntu 10.04 LTS is still the best distro/version for those who just want a trouble free system. It is like the "Windows XP" of linuxes [without malware] ;)
22 • Windows faster to install? (by DavidEF on 2011-07-25 17:34:01 GMT from United States)
@ #15 - imnotrich
"2. It's easy to install Windows or MAC OS, no hours or days or weeks of endless tinkering and googling to get everything working. Problematic installs are rare."
Thanks for the laugh! I don't know about MacOS, but Windows always takes at least several hours, if not days, to get to a usable installed state. That includes getting all the updates, and installing any applications you need, since there are several which Windows doesn't supply.
Most linux distributions are installed in working order, with applications for just about everything, in 30 minutes or less. If you do happen to install an older version, you may have an hour or two of updates, which also includes all of the applications, as well as the OS.
23 • re #13 (by x on 2011-07-25 17:37:17 GMT from United States)
"Reinventing the wheel" ? If no one tried reinventing the proverbial wheel, we would still be living in caves. So from technological view, it is important to constantly reinvent and tweak that old wheel. Admittedly, this is not what mainstream users want, they just want it to work.
If someone did not take the initiative and 'reinvent', FreeBSD would most likely be the operating system of choice among the non-proprietary operating systems.
Attempts to reinvent the wheel is one of the reasons there are multiple tire and wheel manufacturers. Just choose one that fits your needs and don't complain about the competitors unless you have actually had unresolvable problems.
24 • Downloading updates at install time (by Pixel on 2011-07-25 17:43:12 GMT from United States)
In your review of kFreeBSD, you mentioned the problems incurred when trying to download updates during the installation. Several distros are now trying to do this (Ubuntu/Mint/LMDE, so far in my experience), and it seems misguided. This is especially problematic for those distros which target new users.
I would think install time should be given over to simply laying down a working system. Ttrying to update at that time adds an unnecessary complication. Of the three times I've tried this, two resulted in broken installs, requiring me to start over, and one added about 30 minutes to an install that would otherwise have taken 10. Since then, I've just turned off the network during that part of the install, resulting in cleanliness every time.
If its that important to have users update immediately, why not just present a dialog on first and subsequent boots of the installed system as a reminder? For example, the Mint welcome dialog could do this.
25 • Xubuntu (by Jesse on 2011-07-25 17:46:23 GMT from Canada)
>> "since you reviewed Kubuntu, I would like to suggest that you review Xubuntu which is, I believe, an even better alternative for those running away from the inanity of Unity (and possibly GNOME3)."
I probably won't review Xubuntu this release cycle, but remind me again when 11.10 comes out. I'll probably end up doing a review of Ubuntu and one of the alternatives (either Xubuntu or Lubuntu) for comparison.
26 • Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (by Alwin on 2011-07-25 19:03:15 GMT from United States)
Comment deleted (off-topic).
27 • Ethernet on FreeBSD (by Fossala on 2011-07-25 19:16:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
Just want to give people a heads up ethernet names e.g. re0 em0 bge0 are related to the hardware and not just a generic name for the network device (eth0).
28 • RE 24 Updates at install. (by Bunky on 2011-07-25 19:21:45 GMT from United States)
Sometimes I wonder why they ask you anything, the installer is going to do what it wants. It has been like this for a while, everything from partitioning, choosing the install media, what you want to load on install, what video resolution and what driver, etc.
Specifically to the debian installer, I do not have DHCP on my network and even if I want to install from a CD it will crash 2/3 of the way through because of all things it insists on setting the time.
It will then ask you for the IP, which it did not do waiting for 5 minutes to make a connection the first time. Then it will get updates anyway. Then when it comes up the first time it will install more stuff.
Either update from the CD or don't build on top of it taking up double or triple the HD space. That is where I get the bad installs, it is from getting stuck in the middle of update heck or ignore your wishes and leave you in a command line.
29 • CentOS 6 (by coolpup on 2011-07-25 19:30:38 GMT from Canada)
I checked out CentOS 6 "Live" today. It installed nicely, and worked well until I updated it. After updates, the panel with the menu, clock, etc., magically disappeared with no way to replace it. It looks like an interesting distro, but leaves a lot to be desired if one can't do much with it. I mentioned the "bug" to the CentOS folks, and will see what they have to say about it.
30 • bashisms (by Daniel on 2011-07-25 22:08:39 GMT from Israel)
Jesse's 'history -c' tips only work in bash. They aren't portable to POSIX sh or to ash/ksh/zsh etc.
31 • PUIAS Linux (by :wq on 2011-07-25 22:13:27 GMT from United States)
In addition to PUIAS 6.1, the installation boot.iso for PUIAS 5.7 can be found @
i386: http://puias.princeton.edu/data/puias/5.7/en/os/i386/images/boot.iso
x86_64: http://puias.princeton.edu/data/puias/5.7/en/os/x86_64/images/boot.iso
"Select URL when prompted for installation media source. The url should be automatically filled in for the princeton server. If you wish to use the IAS server, change puias.princeton.edu to puias.math.ias.edu or one of the European mirrors."
32 • Review of debianKFreeBSD (by @nyMoUSE on 2011-07-25 22:50:38 GMT from United States)
@Jesse,
What does KFreeBSD Debian offer over native FreeBSD? What does it offer that is not over in the other camp? Does it allow flash + java without Linuxulation?
Is it just a Toy OS? Can you do most things with it that you can with Debian or with vanilla FreeBSD?
Thanks
33 • Deleted off-topic posts (by ladislav on 2011-07-26 00:50:10 GMT from Taiwan)
Guys please, stay on topic. This week's DWW is about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, there a good variety of news, some interesting command-line tricks that you could maybe expand on. The Linux vs Windows topic has been beaten to death here and elsewhere so don't start it again (or if you must, find an appropriate forum). All Windows vs Linux posts will be deleted.
Also, it's amazing how many people felt the need to comment on the kFreeBSD screenshot! Next time I think I'll just create a user "jesse" so that some readers aren't too SHOCKED to see one editor writing a review and the other taking the screenshots. Is that really that extraordinary that some of you had to comment on it?
In all honesty, I'd rather have ten quality comments per week (something that other readers can find useful - think Adam Williamson here), than hundreds of chit-chat kind of posts that don't serve anybody. So before pressing the "submit" button, ask yourself: is my post going to provide useful information to other readers? If the answer is "no" then please try to resist the temptation to post the comment.
34 • @11 UUID (by William Barath on 2011-07-26 00:50:50 GMT from Canada)
It's not about being memorable to us humans. For that, disklabel is a much better choice.
35 • @33, Ladislav, Content (by William Barath on 2011-07-26 00:59:18 GMT from Canada)
I applaud you for trying to keep the signal to noise ration as high as possible.
Maybe you should consider taking the "best" comments from the previous DWW comments and making a summary article in the following DWW. That would help the useful content find its audience and vice versa, and possibly encourage a competitive urge to post higher quality content. =)
36 • kFreeBSD (by Jesse on 2011-07-26 01:06:57 GMT from Canada)
>> "What does KFreeBSD Debian offer over native FreeBSD? What does it offer that is not over in the other camp? Does it allow flash + java without Linuxulation?
Is it just a Toy OS? Can you do most things with it that you can with Debian or with vanilla FreeBSD?"
Debian's kFreeBSD offers Debian's massive software collection. FreeBSD has a lot of ports (around 22,000 I think), but some of them may need to be compiled. kFreeBSD should be able to run most of Debian's 29,000 pre-compiled packages. So convenient package management, lots of software and familiar GNU tools all come to mind as positives.
Assuming you can get kFreeBSD to run with a desktop environment you should be able to run Flash and Java. Though, to be fair, you can do that on FreeBSD too. Flash will require the Linux compatibility layer as there isn't a FreeBSD version of Flash (that I know of).
Is it a toy OS? Define toy. Assuming Debian's kFreeBSD runs on your hardware it should be able to do anything Debian GNU/Linux does. It's the same software, just running a different kernel. I doubt many places would offer commercial support for kFreeBSD if that's what you're asking.
37 • RE: 36 • kFreeBSD (by @nyMoUSE on 2011-07-26 01:20:19 GMT from United States)
Thanks Jesse for the clarification :)
It makes sense now. I don't know why but I prefer native FreeBSD over it, there are other little things that would also be useful to cover like GNU utilities vs BSD utilities, clang vs gcc, etc. I know for a fact that FreeBSD stays a little behind with regards to development and following upstream, but in return one gets a robust system that works well. With regards, to flash player, I try to avoid it and prefer not to install it on FreeBSD and use noscript & flashblock add ons.
A while ago I remember that you reviewed BSD LiveCDs, among them were BSDAnywhere(*ceased development), FreeSBIE(*no new releases as of 2.0.1 release). Ladislav mentioned an OpenBSD based livecd FujuIta. There was a livecd called Frenzy it exists, but developed by another guy. I remember there was a small 200-250 MB livecd with firefox and useful applications that could be copied to ram(Run off RAM) like Austrumi, Slax, Porteus, but for BSD :), it would be interesting to know that such a livecd variant exists :). RoFreeSBIE apparently has died, but now GhostBSD has taken over but it is big and does not have the packages that were on RoFreeSBIE to make me like it.
Also, does there exist a toolkit for *BSD that can make a livecd from your running system?, or one has to make a separate directory/partition to make it?
I know too many questions, and too little time. Thank you guys for Distrowatch.com, a must read every Monday :)
38 • Debian, kfreebsd, and stuff... (by davemc on 2011-07-26 02:38:13 GMT from United States)
Why a BSD port for Debian?
http://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD_why
Thats why. Its clearly stated there on the very same website that Jesse claimed far and wide in his last Debian review as flawed and inferior. No need to look any further as the Debian Wiki very clearly and quite concisely lays everything out there for anyone to read.
I am writing this from a fresh Debian kfreebsd install that worked flawless the first time through with no freezes. No hiccups. No issues. I used the i386 netinst cd and accepted all defaults, unlike Jesse, and everything just worked, as is typically the case with Debian I think for the vast majority of people who do give an honest and fair trial a shot.
39 • @38 does kfreebsd have a livecd/livedvd to try? (by bSDuser on 2011-07-26 03:20:45 GMT from United States)
Thanks for your input regarding kFreeBSD from Debian. Is there a livecd/liveDVD that one can try? Can one build a livecd from an installed kFreeBSD?
Thanks for your input.
I am using NetBSD livecd
$ uname -r
5.1
$ uname -a
NetBSD livecd.jibbed.org 5.1 NetBSD 5.1 (JIBBED) #0: Wed Nov 10 22:47:59 CET 2010 zafer@pembe.aydogan.net:/root/livecd/work/JIBBED i386
$
it works very well.
40 • fedora feature list (by JR on 2011-07-26 03:29:55 GMT from Brazil)
"However, the Fedora project may well discard some of the features, or postpone their inclusion until Fedora 17, if they prove to be not mature enough. This could potentially happen with the planned use of Btrfs as the distribution's standard file system."
I really did not like to know that. I'm anxious to see Btrfs by default in fedora! Would accelerate the adoption of the file system.
I do not understand how we still use as a default a file system that has no dynamic allocation of inodes. The ext4 upgrades compared to ext3 (and ext2) are great, but they are like having a electronic turbo intercooler in a old car with carburetor!
Also, how long it takes to format a hard drive of 2TB with ext4?
No offense, ext4 is a great file system, the best for desktops, but the old ReiserFS had abilities that the family "extended" will never have like dynamic allocation and automatic bad blocks marking for example ....
41 • kFreeBSD (by tdockery97 on 2011-07-26 03:50:46 GMT from United States)
So tell me, totally omitting binary drivers from the kernel means installing a system with absolutely no wifi capability? Why would I want to do that? No ath9k kind of makes it useless to me and thousands of others with laptops using Atheros chips.
42 • kfreebsd and things.. (by davemc on 2011-07-26 03:51:25 GMT from United States)
Stable as a rock so far but its missing some of the functionality now common to Linux systems such as flash support via the debian multimedia repo's. It apparently uses OSS, which has always been a mixed bag for me. Its a very new port for them and you can clearly tell that they have put a lot of work into it with more to follow. It will be fun to follow their progress with it as it continues to mature.
43 • UUID vs. disklabel; installing linux v. windows. (by ArkanabarTverrickIlarsadin on 2011-07-26 06:37:14 GMT from United States)
I do only UUIDs in fstab. A partition's UUID doesn't change unless I format it, whereas /dev labels can change every boot. And I can certainly believe they'd change in BSD if you added another disk.
I recently got a lappy with win7 preinstalled. I worked on that bastard for days, trying to get everything installed that I wanted. I partitioned the HD, installed Lubuntu 11.04, and had it running like I wanted within three hours. And with Granola, Jupiter, and xfce-power-manager, I get a couple more hours out of the battery than with win7.
44 • ZFS RAM (by vermaden on 2011-07-26 08:18:27 GMT from Poland)
I am using ZFS on my home storage box with Intel T8100 and 965GM MiniITX motherboard along with 1GB of RAM. I have 2 x 2TB drives put together in ZFS mirror for storage purposes, everything under control of 64bit FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE (amd64). I share that almost 2TB ZFS pool over SAMBA/NFS protocols to the local LAN/WLAN and even use that box as a server (converting various video formats using FFMPEG and so) ... and everything is stable as rock, You definitely do not need 16GB RAM to use ZFS with FreeBSD, also do not ave any 'manual' limits set in /boot/loader.conf, only modules loading:
$ cat /boot/loader.conf
ahci_load=YES
zfs_load=YES
aio_load=YES
coretemp_load=YES
... and ...
$ uptime
10:14AM up 52 days, 16 mins, 7 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
It would be about 200+ days, but this box does not uses UPS, so when the power is gone, so is the box ;)
Regards,
vermaden
45 • Fun stuff (by megadriver on 2011-07-26 08:27:28 GMT from Iceland)
Congratulations for a great DWW this week!
I mean, it was all about "having fun with computing using Linux and BSD", as this site's motto says. The "U word" was also mentioned just in passing, which is great, too! :)
I've always wanted to play with a BSD. Unfortunately, no BSD variant seems to like my current hardware that much. Specially my network card (SIS191). Apparently it's a bit "weird". Even the Linux driver for it contains a lot of "magic numbers" and other strangeness. Oh well...
46 • #43 (by zykoda on 2011-07-26 11:50:59 GMT from United Kingdom)
The /dev/sdx is not a disk label in that sense. See "man mount -L" option and device specification parameter.
47 • Gnome 3 (by pfb on 2011-07-26 12:59:38 GMT from United States)
After re-installing Fedora 15 it seems to working somewhat correctly in Gnome 3. The only trouble I have now is finding out how to activate a program from the icons. Don't laugh -- I tried to search the net. Apparently nobody else has my problem. Through trial and error I found that a triple right click will usually bring up a balloon, wherein I can select "New Window". Some how I don't believe that this is the intended mode of operation. Should not a single left click, or a double click, be sufficient to launch a program?
48 • @40 (by Blue Knight on 2011-07-26 17:31:36 GMT from France)
> "No offense, ext4 is a great file system, the best for desktops, but the old ReiserFS..."
No offense but ReiserFS was often crap and no, ext4 is not the "best" file system, if never there is one. XFS and JFS are quite/much better.
49 • re #47 triple clicking Gnome 3 (by gnomic on 2011-07-26 21:28:24 GMT from New Zealand)
Not seeing your reported difficulty here on various laptops and desktops - perhaps there is something untoward going on with your hardware? Sounds like clicks are getting lost. A double click works here. Perhaps investigate mouse settings - I expect there must still be some in Gnome 3, can't check just now.
50 • Coupla things (by CopperStuff on 2011-07-26 23:24:35 GMT from United States)
Ladislav I understand your post about keeping to the topic of DW at hand but I am doing this in hopes of getting a response.
I registered for the PCLinuxOS forum several weeks ago and not only have I not heard from them I seem to have been blocked. I am curious about this.
I also asked about this using the reply button on their initial email and have not heard from them.
I am using the same name I used in registering. Did I inadvertently use a name over the billions that could be picked that has already been used and it's a bad one?
And there is a thing called manners. Time after time I see the "forum rules" on various distro sites about conduct and that is understandable. Asking questions from volunteers is different than paid support. I doubt anyone would question that. Fine. But manners and common decency is a 2-way street. And I have seen some very short and biting responses to noobs asking questions. Maybe asking questions in an approved manner is part of the learning process. Any of the high and mighty mods ever think about that?
Maybe that is part of why Linux isn't as far along as it could be. People trying to learn get jumped on out of the gate and give up and go back to either windows or mac. And who could blame them.
51 • Review request - Mint LXDE (by fernbap on 2011-07-26 23:46:47 GMT from Portugal)
I always had a crush on Mint LXDE. It is typically the distro i install on older hardware to replace XP, with excelent results.
52 • #43 Partition labels (by jaglu on 2011-07-26 23:49:21 GMT from Denmark)
dev/sda8 might change to dev/sda10 if you delete a partition. But the labels you yourself put on a partition do not change and are easy to read. Mint11, Fedora15, DATA etc.
In my multi boot setup, 5 distros plus a Data partition I just run a mkdir /media/DATA in each partition and then in each fstab add the following line: LABEL=DATA /media/DATA ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2 and the DATA partition is automounted in each distro.
53 • #49 Triple Clicking (by pfb on 2011-07-27 01:05:09 GMT from United States)
Perhaps you have the answer. I am running a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz w/2Gb memory and an ATI 9600 All-in-Wonder. I suspect Fedora has passed me by. It is not the first time that Fedora has proven too much for one of my computers.
Only this time, since I have too many, I will have to pass on Fedora maybe. I do not need to buy another computer.
I just tried CentOS 6, and it works like a charm. As does Koraraa. I have downloaded KDE (FEDORA) to see if it will work, but I have little hope for it. Neither XFCE nor LXDE seem to be able to handle dual monitors. And before I reloaded Fedora, KDE was no better.
But, I do like Fedora.
54 • @48 (by JR on 2011-07-27 03:47:17 GMT from Brazil)
>"No offense but ReiserFS was often crap and no, ext4 is not the "best" file system, if never there is one. XFS and JFS are quite/much better."
For desktops that may have data journaling they are not much better, they have just meta-data journaling, only the filesystem itself is preserved ("with guaranteed filesystem consistency" like XFS guys like to say)
they are in fact file systems developed more recently, if you compare them to the ext family, which makes them somewhat more advanced, but you have to think about what is most important, each case is unique .....
and... the best IS NOT perfect, it is only the best for a certain task!
55 • @ 50 : Re-registration PCLinuxOS forumk (by Chon on 2011-07-27 05:48:59 GMT from Thailand)
>>>>I registered for the PCLinuxOS forum several weeks ago and not only have I not heard from them I seem to have been blocked. I am curious about this.<<<<<
CopperStuff
You are registered on the PCLinuxOS forum
Registration date :2011/07/13
Registration time : 05:38:42
Amount of posts : 0 ( as in zero )
Your email : hidden
If you think you have a problem, try to contact a moderator like / OP / Neal / .......
I also will inform them today about your problem
Chon
56 • Dual Monitors, @49 (by Stan on 2011-07-27 06:16:47 GMT from United States)
Unless you want to do something weird, both KDE and XFCE can handle dual monitors just fine. With KDE, click on Display in the System Settings, and with XFCE, it's also Display, but this time in the Settings menu (or Settings Manager application). Both work just fine here, with open-source drivers no less.
If you have a NVIDIA card and are using the proprietary drivers, you might have more luck with TwinView, under any desktop environment.
57 • #53 CENTOS (by Michael King on 2011-07-27 07:55:58 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have to agree with PB and the recent Dedoimedo review on this, CentOS 6 is a really good desktop OS! It offers Gnome 2 refugees a stable functional desktop supported if you want right up until 2016! I downloaded the Live dvd version which also has lots of usable KDE apps added as well and all the office multimedia tools and games.. try the live CD if you want to add all your own software choices!
58 • @7 other distros (by disi on 2011-07-27 12:07:16 GMT from Germany)
Gentoo has a *BSD project going on for a longer time.
FreeBSD: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-freebsd.xml
OpenBSD: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/obsd/doc/new-install.xml
technical the same installation guides, but different kernels.
I once tried it myself ~2-3years ago and it worked pretty well, bash and GNU userland worked fine. Not sure about the current status but all the pages were updated a couple of months ago.
The FreeBSD port is based on 7.2 btw.
59 • Humble Bundle (by Jesse on 2011-07-27 13:56:09 GMT from Canada)
For those of you interested, there is a new Humble Bundle event on at the moment. This gives us the chance to purchase DRM-free games for the Linux platform for the amount we want to pay. Proceeds go to the developers, the EFF, Child's Play charity and the event coordinators.
http://www.humblebundle.com
60 • @44 FreeBSD and zfs (by disi on 2011-07-27 14:39:02 GMT from Germany)
I had a little trouble with the Marvell controller, which was fixed with a recent patch I hope. We will see in about 2 months uptime, if it still goes nuts :D
Other than that, it runs on a miniITX board with dual atom and 2GB RAM without problems. Using LZO compression for the zpools (except for the root zpool on a seperate 32GB SSD) on ~7.2TB storage (2xzpools with each 3x2TB WD). All drives shared via NFS.
This is a nasty machine and is also DHCP, DNS, Router, icecast streaming :P
61 • *56 -- Dual Monitors (by pfb on 2011-07-27 20:16:54 GMT from United States)
Yes i understand that XFCE, LXDE, and KDE handle dual monitors just fine. However monitor number 2 is a Dell E193something. And a number of distro versions of X, L, and K cannot recognize this monitor and do not believe that it can handle 1280x1024. Consequently, when I force it with xrandr some systems disconnect VGA-1. (I have yet to find anything that will reconnect it.) Sometimes the monitor is actually disconnected, and other times it is still on but only partially usable. I.e., I cannot move open windows onto the monitor.
I find it somewhat amusing that Gnome (the desktop that knows what is best for me, better than I do myself) can function with this monitor, while others (that provide some flexibility for me to have it my way) cannot. But this is just Fedora 15 (although I did have similar problems with Mint 11).
62 • re 61 that elusive 1280x1024 resolution (by gnomic on 2011-07-27 22:54:01 GMT from New Zealand)
I quite often find that Xorg ignores the possibility of 1280x1024 and insists on 1152x864. Attempting to force a resolution using xrandr that has not been generated by Xorg as an available mode will not work as I understand it. The post quoted below on Distrowatch from a while back may shed light in the darkness on this point. It has worked for me. It's a kind of annoying quirk in Xorg I think; perhaps 40-50% of live CDs I point at a 1280x1024 screen show this problem. Sometimes 1280x1024 is available to be selected but for some reason 1152x864 is still preferred by default. Zygmunt was talking about Fedora 14 here but it is a generic solution, provided of course that cvt and xrandr (or equivalent) are available.
F14 (by zygmunt on 2010-11-01 21:22:43 GMT from United Kingdom)
Usual display resolution workaround required to get 1280x1024
#!/bin/sh
cvt 1280 1024 60
xrandr --newmode "1280x1024_60.00" 109.00 1280 1368 1496 1712 1024 1027 1034 1063 -hsync +vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA-0 "1280x1024_60.00"
xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode "1280x1024_60.00"
63 • Zorin os Lite Lxde is awesome (by Roy H Huddleston on 2011-07-27 23:45:54 GMT from United States)
I really liked it that they based this one on Lubuntu 11.04 Natty especially the LXDM part of it. It is certainly the best LXDE version out there in my opinion. :)
64 • kFreeBSD (by RollMeAway on 2011-07-28 05:10:51 GMT from United States)
I've been playing with an installation since Feb. 2010. I 'visit' it for 2 or 3 days about once each month, do a dist-upgrade, checkout progress, regressions, etc.
I treat it as a curiosity, nothing I could regularly use. Coincidently, I spent last weekend doing a dist-upgrade. I am running sid, so problems are always expected. A new one this time was no mouse when X started up. Web searching, I found that /var/run/hald (directory) was not being created at boot. (/var/run is in a tmpfs, not persistent). I now have to open a tty term. mkdir /var/run/hald, and manually start hald. When I go back to X I have a mouse.
Currently kde4 will come up, but with a 1 to 5 sec delay for everything, like open a window, type a character, etc. NOT usable.
Gnome opens with a "gconf / dbus mis-configured" error.
Xfce4 is usable with minor quirks. Cannot move an open terminal window.
LXDE, and e17:55225 both work without any problems.
After reading a few post above of how "stable and great" their kfreebsd install is, perhaps it is time for me to RE-INSTALL. Perhaps my system if beyond my capacity to repair or fix.
Or, perhaps these posters simply have not played the upgrade game yet!
65 • #62 Resolution (by pfb on 2011-07-28 17:33:34 GMT from United States)
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I never occurred to me that I needed to include the --newmode stuff. With past systems I never needed it.
Now Fedora works with LXDE and KDE. And kinda sorta with XFCE. Cool.
66 • quick plug for new puppy forums (by wolf on 2011-07-30 03:04:40 GMT from Canada)
everyone welcome, just starting out..
=================================
"Main Mission Statement
This forum serves four main purposes:
Ask for help with Puppy Linux
Give help for Puppy Linux
Discuss the future of Puppy Linux
Personal, friendly, noncombative, non-technical communication"
===============================
http://www.puppylinuxforum.org/index.php
67 • re #66 new forum for Puppy Linux (by gnomic on 2011-07-30 04:40:43 GMT from New Zealand)
There is an existing forum for Puppy Linux - http://murga-linux.com/puppy/
Is the new forum intended as supplementary or perhaps a replacement? Just curious so I know where to go in future :-)
68 • new puppy forums (by wolf on 2011-07-30 05:38:33 GMT from Canada)
speaking as a member, the new forums are taking a rules and order approach to forums, with focus, rather than the opposite
here's one of the "general rules"
"Links to or mention of murga-linux.com is forbidden"
i would describe the new forums as distinctly different, if not the opposite, with new folks ultimately deciding in witch direction it will go
personally, i have no interest in the original forum
69 • re#67 (by Puppy User on 2011-07-30 06:16:51 GMT from United States)
The new forum was started by a few former members of the Murga forum who were banned.As you can tell by the rule mentioned in #68,they appear to be really open minded.
70 • My Forum (by Puppyite on 2011-07-30 16:37:06 GMT from United States)
re#66 The Puppy Linux Forum @ http://www.puppylinuxforum.org/ will supersede murga-linux.
71 • My FAQ (by Puppyite on 2011-07-30 16:51:22 GMT from United States)
Puppy Linux FAQ @ http://www.puppylinuxfaq.org/ supersedes Lobster - Coolpup wiki.
72 • Scientific Linux 6.1 (by Caraibes on 2011-07-30 19:02:51 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Sci Lin 6.1 looks pretty good, no ? I tried it live on various laptops... Looks like the winner so far... Don't have a machine to install it right now... Would be curious to read reviews... Looks like Gnome 2.x will stay alive & well with the help of RHEL clones, Squeeze & Lucid...
73 • re #70,71 puppy forums (by gnomic on 2011-07-31 00:36:40 GMT from New Zealand)
I take it that your statements above are an expression of your personal opinion, and must therefore be taken with a grain of salt?
I expect the truth of the matter will become apparent in due course. I have no axe to grind here, and am not involved with the existing Puppy forum aside from a few contributions on various topics.
Number of Comments: 73
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Freeduc-cd
Freeduc was a "run-from-CD" Linux distribution based on Knoppix and created by OFSET in France: "Until now - and probably for a while in most heads - the GNU/Linux system at school has been perceived as a good replacement of other proprietary servers. However the server was probably the least important thing in terms of freedom in a school network. It doesn't allow a teacher to share a workstation software with students. Supporting GNU/Linux in the workstation side can grant higher freedom and liberty between users in a school. Therefore, OFSET has setup Freeduc, a tool to help to list, to evaluate and to package only free - non GPL exclusive - edu soft."
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