 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 420, 29 August 2011 |
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Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Mandriva Linux 2011 marks a radical departure of the once highly popular desktop distribution from its established ways. Simplicity, one application per task, KDE as the only supported desktop, and a plethora of unique desktop utilities - all this is part of the new vision created by the mostly new and mostly Russia-based development crew. Will the distribution and company find success with the new strategy? Read our first-look review to find out what we think. In the news section, Troy Dawson departs Scientific Linux to join Red Hat, Inc., Gentoo Linux gets an Anaconda-based hard disk installer, and Bodhi Linux founder lists the five things the Enlightenment desktop does the best. Also in this issue, a useful tutorial on recovering deleted files from formatted hard disks and a serious question from a reader regarding Linux on the i586 architecture. All this and more in this issue of DistroWatch Weekly - happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
First look at Mandriva Linux 2011
 A new release of Mandriva Linux, the first major one in over a year, was announced informally earlier today. Although the once highly popular distribution lost much of the glitter it had in early parts of this century when it was the most user- and hardware-friendly Linux operating system available and when it comfortably topped our page hit ranking statistics, it still attracts many ardent followers. Its simple installer, one-stop control centre and large software repository with well-established package management tools continue to make Mandriva an attractive proposition for users of all levels. And while it lacks the buzz of the bigger and shinier distributions that have overtaken Mandriva in our charts, it's perhaps this modest and unpretentious nature of the project that make some Linux users feel more at home with Mandriva than they would with any other Linux distro.
The development of Mandriva Linux 2011 was a bumpy and laborious process. It started with an unceremonious dumping of many long-term Mandriva developers as the company sought to regain its footing following another financial disaster. This it did successfully, thanks to a €3 million financial injection by a Russian company called NGI, which now has controlling interest in the French enterprise. While this saved the firm from going bankrupt, it also meant a fresh start, with many new developers of unknown level of expertise and experience. Furthermore, the company has to compete for attention of Mandriva fans with Mageia, a community project launched last year by many former Mandriva employees and contributors who released their first stable version in early June. On a technical side, the distribution now includes several new visual elements developed by Rosa Labs, a Moscow-based software outfit, and it has switched to RPM 5.x, a controversial decision which has created tension among the Mandriva developers and which later contributed to delays in the 2011 release process.
That was a brief run-down on the background and current status of the company and its Linux distribution. With that out of the way, let's take a more technical look at the new release.
Download and installation
The first novelty a Mandriva user will notice is the reduction of download options to just one. Previously, Mandriva Linux came as a set of DVD and CD editions called "Free" and "One", with the live CD choice further fractured into a large number of possibilities depending on your preferred desktop environment and language support. With Mandriva 2011 things have been dramatically simplified - the single option, a roughly 1.6 GB DVD image, can be booted into a live mode (the default) or a hard disk installation wizard. This release strategy means that it is no longer necessary to pick the right edition to install, which I suppose is great for new Linux users, but it does have its drawbacks. The most evident among them is lack of software on the DVD - many server and development packages, as well as desktop environments and window managers, have been omitted from the ISO image and will have to be installed later, from Mandriva's download mirrors.
Mandriva Linux 2011 - KDE is now the only supported desktop
(full image size: 155kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
This is probably one of the more controversial design choices in the new Mandriva. Previously, a user installing the system from the DVD image could choose an installation class (server, desktop, etc.), select the preferred desktop environment and even customise the list of installed packages. No such possibility exists in Mandriva 2011. Once you click on the "Install" button, the installer will simply dump the entire content of the live DVD image onto your hard disk, a process that will turn you into a KDE user whether you like it or not. In fact, KDE is the only officially supported desktop environment. If, by a chance, you prefer a different desktop (available from Mandriva's online repositories), your only option is to go ahead with the default installation, boot into the newly installed KDE, then fire up the package manager for much add/remove work. In other words, you customise your system with preferred software AFTER installation, not before. Also, unlike many other distributions which allow you to make changes to the live session and then install it with your changes preserved, Mandriva doesn't provide an option to install directly from the live desktop, only from the DVD boot menu.
A few more comments on the installer. An already easy and intuitive Mandriva install program has been further simplified in this release, but some relics of the past (now no longer functional) remain. For example, the user is given a choice of bootloaders (GRUB, GRUB 2 and LILO), but since the latter two are not included on the DVD image, selecting them will invariably result in an error. Ditto for input method editors for non-Latin language scripts - SCIM is an option here but once again it is not available on the install media. Since network configuration and online repository setup have been removed from the installer, keeping these options seem like an oversight on the part of the developers. There is one other screen that has been removed - the user creation and root password setup is now a post-install step that has to be completed upon first boot.
On the desktop
The KDE desktop delivers a number of surprises. The "Start Menu" (or "KickOff" in KDE speak) has been replaced with something called "SimpleWelcome" (see screenshot below). This is the first of the many newcomer-friendly visual desktop tools created by the Rosa Labs developers and which are unique to Mandriva Linux. The tablet-like start menu takes up the entire screen, with three additional tabs at the bottom offering further pages. The default "Welcome" screen contains "Recent Applications" (which get added here automatically, but only if you launch them from SimpleWelcome, not from icons on the panel or the desktop), "Places" linking to most often-used folders, and "Recent Documents". The "Applications" tab offers the full list of available programs, again in the form of large icons. The third tab is called "Time Frame", which provides links to files and documents in a chronological order. This seems like an interesting way of accessing documents and files, but it only works if you enable the "Nepomuk Semantic Desktop" in the KDE control centre.
Mandriva Linux 2011 - the "SimpleWelcome" menu
(full image size: 117kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Since I am not a huge fan of these menus that make my computer monitor look like a giant smartphone, I attempted to remove "SimpleWelcome" and replace it with the classic KDE menu. Here I ran into a problem; while it was possible to add the "Application Launcher" widget to the panel, I was unable to move it into my preferred position as the normal way of moving icons on a KDE 4 panel (via "Panel Settings") was not available on the default Mandriva panel. Another Mandriva/Rosa Labs new is a "RocketBar", a fork of the KDE panel with some interesting features. Unfortunately, I could only read about them in the release notes - no matter how many times I added the "RocketBar" to my desktop, I noticed nothing new. It's possible that it only works if you have an accelerated video card and desktop effects enabled, although the release notes say nothing about this. One other Rosa Labs tool worth mentioning is the "StackFolder", a useful applet for the KDE plasma desktop allowing fast access to often-used folders.
On the applications front, gone are the days of abundance as the latest Mandriva has the "one-program-per-task" policy that limits the number of officially supported applications to whatever is provided on the DVD image. As such, the distribution comes with Firefox 5.0 as the default web browser, while Thunderbird 5.0 is the default email client and LibreOffice the preferred productivity suite. On the multimedia front there are some interesting choices, with Amarok dropped in favour of the Clementine music player, and some GNOME/GTK+ applications, such as the Shotwell photo manager and PiTiVi video editor, preferred over their KDE/Qt counterparts. Of course, the Mandriva package manager gives an easy access to thousands of extra packages, so the choice isn't entirely removed, but the release notes remark about community-built packages not officially supported could be disheartening for Mandriva users who have always been accustomed to having the deep Mandriva software well at their disposal.
Package management
Another major change awaiting Mandriva users is taking place on the package management front. After years of using urpmi (and its graphical front-end), Mandriva is in the process of switching to MPM, the Mandriva Package Manager. The utility wasn't quite ready for the release of Mandriva 2011, so it's still urpmi for now, but interested users can already install the new tool via the "Software Management" module in the Mandriva control centre. The package is described as "a front-end (QML/PySide-based) tool for the mdvpkg server. It uses DBus to communicate with the server." Of course, this change will likely be invisible to most desktop users as the look and feel of the graphical front-end won't change, but those used to the command-line way of installing software will have to learn a few new commands.
The package manager contains a huge amount of software, including some non-free ones, such as the Opera browser. It also includes many popular desktop environments and window managers and although the release notes stress that these are all unsupported, the package description for many of them says that "this is an official package supported by Mandriva". In order to test the package manager and try out the distribution's ability to switch to another desktop, I decided to install LXDE and its 24 dependencies (after configuring access to online repositories via the Mandriva control centre, which is largely an automated process). The installation went without a hitch, but the problem was logging into the LXDE desktop, as the simplified Mandriva/Rosa Labs login screen provides no desktop or window manager choices. I had to go into the Mandriva control centre's auto-login screen to select LXDE as the default desktop. This worked and I was soon greeted by a much more responsive (although, admittedly, somewhat less exciting) desktop environment than the default KDE/Rosa Labs innovation.
Hardware and system configuration
I booted and installed Mandriva Linux 2011 on my older test computer with the following specifications: AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+ 2200 MHz, 2 GB or RAM, 160 GB hard disk drive, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 graphics card, NVIDIA nForce3 AC97 sound card, Realtek RTL-8169 Ethernet controller. The distribution detected and configured all hardware correctly, both in live mode and once installed, with the graphics card using the "nv" driver, rather than the newer "nouveau" which was always somewhat unpredictable with this particular NVIDIA graphics card. The installation DVD does not provide any proprietary hardware drivers, so if you need them they will have to be installed via Mandriva's package manager. For my NVIDIA graphics card I tried to install the "nvidia96xx" package, but selecting it resulted in a message saying "sorry, the following packages cannot be selected." There was no such problem with trying to install the latest available NVIDIA version (280.13), so if you have one of the newer NVIDIA cards then you should have no problems, but of course this version won't work with the graphics card in my test machine.
Network was auto-configured via DHCP and up on first boot, but for those users who have a different setup there is always the good old Mandriva control centre, with plethora of tools for just about anything one might need. Software management is the pivotal tool here, but there are many less-frequently needed configuration options, such as security features, boot setup, Samba, NFS and WebDAV shares, disk management, as well as user, services, date/time and localisation options, and of course hardware setup. It's a one-stop service centre that doesn't quite have an equivalent in the Linux world, apart from openSUSE's YaST. The good-looking and functional control centre is probably the main reason why many people fell in love in Mandriva in the early days of desktop Linux and why the distribution is still a preferred choice for many among them.
Mandriva Linux 2011 - the Mandriva control centre
(full image size: 228kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Conclusions
I have mixed feelings about Mandriva Linux 2011. On the one hand, I can understand the developer's motivation to simplify the distribution in order to create a more uniform, newcomer-friendly and easy-to-support installation class. This would be a perfect scenario for schools and government offices and with Russia's highest political echelons reportedly encouraging more free software deployment in the country, one can easily see the reasons for having a simple, easy-to-use and pre-configured desktop system provided locally. On the other hand, long-time Mandriva users are likely to be disappointed with the sudden lack of options previously available to them. Yes, the hybrid live/installation DVD image is a step in the right direction, but those users wishing to use Mandriva in a different deployment scenario than the default KDE desktop might be discouraged by the amount of post-install customisation work and the unequivocal endorsement of KDE as the only supported desktop.
This inevitably brings up the subject of comparison between Mandriva Linux 2011 and Mageia 1 (read our review of Mageia 1 here). As always in these situations, it is best to try both releases and decide which of the two better meets the user's needs, but in my view, it's clear that Mandriva 2011 has departed too far from its roots. In fact, Mageia 1, which resisted the temptation to make large scale changes to its first release, is now a more genuine "Mandriva" than Mandriva itself. Those users who enjoyed the older Mandriva Linux releases will undoubtedly feel more at home with Mageia 1 than with the latest Mandriva release.
Mandriva 2011 feels like a completely new distribution, extravagantly disconnected from its past and with dramatically new values, concepts and orientation. I suspect that it's targeted mainly at larger organisations with a need to have a uniform desktop setup across dozens of computers and, to a lesser extent, at newcomers to Linux. The only thing that still links this release to the old Mandriva is its superb control centre, but everything else has changed or, as in the package manager's case, is about the change. This is not necessarily a bad thing and it's entirely possible that this new philosophy will find acceptance among certain users and organisations where too many choices would present a new set of problems. Furthermore, the Rosa Labs set of desktop tools is an interesting addition, perhaps not entirely bug-free, but presumably well-tested on less technical users. As such, Mandriva could be in a good position to attract new Linux converts, but in the process it has probably shunned many of the more technical users.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
Scientific Linux architect moves to Red Hat, Gentoo Linux gets an installer, best features of Enlightenment and Bodhi, distros for i586
 Troy Dawson, the driving force behind the Scientific Linux project and a person who more or less single-handedly elevated this increasingly popular clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its current status, has announced his departure from the project - to join Red Hat itself: "I have loved all the years that I have been a developer and architect for Scientific Linux, but it is time for me to move on. I have accepted a job offer from Red Hat to work on their new Openshift project. My last day working for Fermilab and on the Scientific Linux project will be September 2, 2011. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged, thanked, and helped me over the past eight years that I have worked on Scientific Linux. I have said it before, and I'll say it now, The Scientific Linux community is one of the best communities there is." There is no word on who will become the new chief architect of Scientific Linux, but there are already some conspiracy theories on Slashdot suggesting that Red Hat has done this to stem the rapid rise of Scientific Linux.
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 Following the recent release of a new Gentoo Linux live DVD, a number of readers here and elsewhere expressed a disappointment that it does not include a hard disk installer. It surely didn't take long for this to change; as Susan Linton reports at OStatic, Wiktor Brodlo has ported the Red Hat's Anaconda installer from Sabayon to Gentoo: "Almost as though they heard my suggestions, Gentoo now has an installer. It's not included on an official live DVD just yet, but it just might next release. Wiktor Brodlo has ported the Red Hat Anaconda installer from Sabayon to work with Gentoo. You can either install it in the live Gentoo environment or you can roll it up in a new Gentoo ISO. In the live environment, one adds the git overlay repository and emerges it. Once installed, one should be able to install the Gentoo binary system. The other option is to create a whole new custom live DVD. One basically mounts the ISO, copies it to the hard drive, chroots into the folder, installs Anaconda, replaces the Squashfs image, and then rolls the ISO. If this works out well, there is little reason Gentoo couldn't include it in their next release."
The above story illustrates the polemical nature of Gentoo. While part of the developers wish to keep it as a mysterious, geek-only operating system for advanced users, there are always those Gentoo contributors who would prefer that more users taste the fruit of their labour. Last week Richard Hillesley wrote an excellent article summarising the past and present of Gentoo Linux: "Gentoo is not like other Linux distribution. The Gentoo swims faster than other penguins, and dives deeper. Where more fashionable distributions worry about fast installation and ease of use, Gentoo worries about efficient compilation and degrees of customisation. Gentoo is not about ease of use or making installation easier for the new user. Computers are what you do with them, and most users have little or no knowledge of how their systems are put together, and care even less. Gentoo is for the users who want to reach under the hood, get their hands dirty, and learn. Installation is hands on, and slow and painstaking, but is worth the effort if you have the time and the inclination to work your way through the Gentoo Handbook, and don't mind waiting while the code compiles."
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 Alternative desktop environments and window manager are currently making a strong comeback, with many users willing to experiment with some that once seemed on the verge of extinction. One of them is Enlightenment, a flashy, but still lightweight window manager whose current version (17) has been in development for nearly a decade. Jeff Hoogland, the founder and lead developer of Bodhi Linux, lists the five things the Enlightenment desktop does best: "There is no doubting that all of our modern desktops have been progressing in features and functionality. One spot where Enlightenment excels though is that it has a focus on remaining trim and fast while adding these new features. Don't believe me? KDE 4.x needs around 512 MB to be happy, GNOME 3 recommends slightly more at 768 MB and Ubuntu's Unity desktop requests a full gigabyte! Someone always pops up and cries out, 'but our computers are so powerful it doesn't matter', whenever you mention system requirements these days. The fact remains though - it does matter. A desktop that runs fast on a slow system will fly on a quick system. Resources should be there for your applications to use, not for your desktop environment to eat up. Trim as Enlightenment already is, the developers are currently in the process of rewriting all of it's code to use XCB to replace XLib - which will make it even faster."
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 Finally, not strictly a news item, but perhaps food for discussion and sharing of experiences in the comments area below. Wojciech Kozikowski has emailed DistroWatch (and Linus Torvalds) with a complaint about his inability to find a distribution that would run on an i586 machine: "I wanted to install Linux on my old AMD K6+III/450 MHz PC. I searched for and downloaded a number of Linux i586 architecture ISO files, burnt them to CDs and attempted to boot my PC with them. To my surprise NONE of these Linux distros boot successfully to completion. Usually there is an error message telling that my CPU lacks CMOV instruction, which is typical for AMD K6/K6+/K6+II/K6+III CPUs. However, Intel CPUs starting with Pentium II upward use this CMOV instruction. I was under the assumption that i586 compiled kernel should support CMOV CPU instruction. However, this is not a case because I encountered so many CMOV errors during booting. This makes me think that Linux Kernel developers DO NOT test their kernels on the real hardware! Unless someone tests Linux Kernel on AMD K6 family processor he/she can not know whether the Linux Kernel boots properly. Another possibility is that people were compiling Linux Kernel with -i586 flag and somehow this CPU dependency is broken now." Can anybody here confirm the above?
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
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Recovering deleted files
It's-all-gone asks: My question I'd like you to answer is what tools would you suggest (and perhaps a brief tutorial on) for data/partition recovery? Specifically geared more for the average, maybe less technical than an IT guru, home user such as myself.
DistroWatch answers: One of the best things you can do for yourself when files go missing is to be prepared. One way to be prepared for data loss is to have backups. Having a backup usually means you won't have to scramble to recover files at all. If you don't have a backup, you can prepare yourself by having a live CD and a spare external disk on hand. Why these? Because when a file gets deleted the first thing to do is to unmount the partition it was on. Doing this will prevent the file's data from being over-written and give us a better chance of getting it back. Having a live CD will allow you to access files on your root partition or on disks no longer able to boot and an external drive will give you a place to put recovered files.
The best way to learn how to make use of file recovery tools is, I think, to actually use them and get a feel for how they work and what to expect. No, I'm not suggesting you delete your important files and try to get them back, I'm saying we should create a practice environment and run through a simple example. So let's do that. Linux treats devices, like disk drives, the same way it treats files giving us the ability to create a pretend partition, save files to it, delete those files and then work to get them back. It's a safe way to run through the steps of deleting and recovering files.
First, let's create a new "partition" which will really be just an empty file. Open a terminal and run:
dd if=/dev/zero of=doomed bs=1024 count=10240
This will create a 10 MB file called doomed. Next we need to give the device a file system. We'll now format our doomed device with the ext3 file system:
mkfs.ext3 doomed
We will be asked if we're sure we want to format a device which isn't a "block special device", and we will confirm the action. Next we need to create a mount point for our doomed device and mount it. You may need to have root access to mount doomed.
mkdir doomed-mount-point
mount -o loop doomed doomed-mount-point
With that done, let's put some small files into the doomed device. In my case I copied two files into the new device:
cp openssn.png sources.list doomed-mount-point
Now that our doomed device is populated, it's time for disaster to strike:
rm doomed-mount-point/*
All of our files are suddenly gone! It's now time to start the recovery process. The first thing we need to do is prevent further damage and unmount the device. Again, you may need to be root to unmount our practice partition.
umount doomed-mount-point
A good next step is to make an image of the original device on which we can operate. This isn't a requirement, but it gives us an extra copy so we don't have to rely solely on the original. Think of it as a belated backup.
dd if=doomed of=hopeful
The hopeful file is our byte-for-byte copy of the original device and we will perform our recovery actions on hopeful to avoid damaging the original:
It's time to try to recover the files. If you haven't already, install ext3grep and PhotoRec. (The PhotoRec application is sometimes bundled with TestDisk.)
Let's try our luck with ext3grep first. The ext3grep program has a number of options for examining and filtering which items we want to restore. For our purposes we just want to try to get everything (both files) back:
ext3grep --restore-all hopeful
The ext3grep program will work with the hopeful device for a few seconds and print out a summary of its work. Any files it was able to save will be placed in the RESTORED_FILES directory. In my case ext3grep was able to bring both of my files back to life.
However, what if our data wasn't on an ext3 partition? What if it was on a different file system or on a digital camera memory card? What if the file system was damaged? That's where PhotoRec comes in handy. Let's try the same recovery operation with PhotoRec.
photorec hopeful
The above command asks us to confirm which device we want to recover from. I confirmed the hopeful entry. The program then asks us to confirm things like the partition type used on the drive (none in our case), which file system was on the device (ext3 in this example) and where to save any files it recovers. On my first run through PhotoRec restored the image file, but not the text file. This is due to the way PhotoRec looks at files to restore. It doesn't recognize the ".list" extension on my text file. If I had originally named the file "sources.txt" instead of "sources.list" PhotoRec would have detected and restored it.
The PhotoRec utility features menus which we can use to set various options, such as which types of files to search for (handy on large drives) and whether we're willing to keep corrupted files, warts, holes and all.
Once we are done practising we can clean up (normally you wouldn't do this, I'm only removing these files because it's an example):
rm -rf doomed doomed-mount-point hopeful RESTORED_FILES recup_dir.1
Both PhotoRec and ext3grep are very useful and they take simple command line options. Usually PhotoRec can be run with all its options left at their defaults, which is practical for less experienced users. I definitely recommend having both of these applications on hand for emergencies.
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| Released Last Week |
Zorin OS 3.1
Artyom Zorin has announced the release of Zorin OS 3.1, an updated release of the project's desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.04: "We have released the first updated version of our Zorin OS 3 Long Term Support release series. Zorin OS 3.1 features a whole host of updates to Zorin OS 3 including an updated Linux Kernel, security updates, upgraded programs, application changes and some aesthetic updates. Zorin OS 3 will be provided with security updates until April 2013, which is the ideal solution for deployments in corporate environments to keep costs down and reduce maintenance while still using a secure and up-to-date operating system." Here is the brief release announcement.
BackTrack 5 R1
An updated release of BackTrack 5, an Ubuntu-based distribution with specialist software designed for penetration testing, was announced (and released via BitTorrent) last week. Today direct downloads of ISO images are also possible. Here is a brief extract from the official release announcement: "We're finally ready to release BackTrack 5 R1. This HOWTOs on our Wiki in the next few days, such as VMware tool installation, alternate compat-wireless setups, etc. The kernel was updated to 2.6.39.4 and includes the relevant injection patches. We are really happy with this release, and believe that, as with every release, this is our best one yet. Some pesky issues such as rfkill in VMware with rtl8187 have been fixed and this provides for a much more solid experience with BackTrack."
Vyatta 6.3
Tom McCafferty has announced the release of Vyatta 6.3, a Debian-based Linux distribution for firewalls: "I'm pleased to announce that Vyatta Core (VC) release 6.3 is now available for download. Vyatta 6.3 features significant enhancements to streamline management, increase security, and improve reliability in the areas of upgrade, IPS, VPN, and overall base system, plus package updates, experimental 64-bit and more: integrated Broadcom Gigabit and 10Gigabit Ethernet controller drivers; pre-defined IPS policies - 'Connectivity', 'Security', 'Balanced'; new configuration subdirectory structure to preserve state during image upgrade; new CLI commands for simplifying file management tasks; optimizations to configure backend performance, efficiency and robustness; enhancements to IPsecVPN management...." See the release announcement and release notes (PDF format) for further details.
Dream Studio 11.04
Dick MacInnis has announced the release of Dream Studio 11.04: "DickMacInnis.com is proud to announce the official release of Dream Studio 11.04. This exciting new version of Dream Studio has all the features that have made past releases one of the most successful multimedia software packages out there, including multi-user, PulseAudio-integrated real-time audio via JACK for use with programs like Ardour, the renowned Cinelerra video editor, a full graphic and web design suite, photography tools, and hundreds of assorted audio and video effects, fonts, and utilities for everything from multimedia file conversion to simple office work and web browsing. New features: Blender has been upgraded to version 2.59, with the Ocean Sim patch applied; several new programs, including MakeHuman, Sonic and Smasher, have been added...." Read the rest of the release announcement for full details.
Mandriva Linux 2011
Viacheslav Kaloshin has announced the release of Mandriva Linux 2011, code name "Hydrogen": "We are happy to announce that Mandriva 2011 is out." Some of the main new features in this release include hybrid live/installation DVD images, a revised system installer, new graphics theme, RPM 5, a series of new desktop utilities from Rosa Labs, and KDE as the only officially supported desktop environment: "GNOME, Xfce and other desktop environments and window managers are no longer included in the official Mandriva packages. However, contribution packages from the Mandriva community are available for these desktop environments. Starting from Mandriva 2011 only KDE 4 is officially supported." Here is the brief release announcement, but more details can be found in the release notes and on this 2011 tour page.
Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.09
Phil Miller has announced the release of Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.09, a desktop distribution originally forked from Arch Linux and featuring the latest KDE desktop, version 4.7: "The Chakra development team is proud to announce the release of 'Edn', Chakra GNU/Linux featuring Linux kernel 3.0 and KDE 4.7. Since our last stable image many things are updated and changed, which makes it hard to install for Chakra newcomers. We decided to release 'Edn' a bit ahead of schedule because of this. We switched to KDE 4.7 and added Linux kernel 3.0 to our repositories. Appset and CCR got enhanced. With this release we offer: minimal image you can build your desktop on; ported Tribe for KDE 4.7 series; updated initscripts with the option to test systemd; updated Mesa stack." Read the rest of the release announcement for further details.
Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.09 - one of the first distributions with KDE 4.7
(full image size: 917kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
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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
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New distributions added to waiting list
- illume OS. illume OS is a lightweight, Debian-based desktop distribution featuring the IceWM window manager and a good mix of lightweight applications, such as the Midori web browser, Audacious audio player, gxine video player, xzgv image viewer, Leafpad text editor, Evince PDF reader and Thunar file manager.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 5 September 2011.
Ladislav Bodnar and Jesse Smith
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Recovery of doomed files. (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-08-29 09:29:56 GMT from Spain)
I think that Foremost and MagicRescue are worth some lines in the recovery instructions above. Both are file system agnostic and very powerful tools. Last time I had to use foremost, I managed to recover 95% of 4000 deleted files. It is said that plain text files can be recovered by a clever use of the grep command too.
Also, the "when a file gets deleted the first thing to do is to unmount the partition it was on" is not fully accurate, as you can remount the file system as read-only (useful when you cannot afford to stop the processes that are reading from that partition).
2 • i586 (by mark_alec on 2011-08-29 09:33:16 GMT from Australia)
The Pentium Pro and upwards (includes Pentium II) were classes as i686, not i586. Gentoo has installation media that supports i486 class hardware, and I presume Debian would as well.
3 • Scientific (by dimitrij on 2011-08-29 09:38:11 GMT from Slovenia)
Hope Scientific can do without Troy, it's a good distro.
4 • Gentoo installer (by jasd on 2011-08-29 09:40:55 GMT from France)
People who know or are interested in Gentoo, or simply want to learn more about GNU/Linux, should use a live CD, follow the Gentoo handbook for doing a stage3 install. This is the Gentoo way, it is always hard for the first time, just like some distributions Gentoo devs AND users want to keep their system simple like Arch or Slackware (which uses a ncurses installer "only"). Gentoo is source-based so you'll have to recompile everything and it's better to start with the base system. OTOH an installer is useful for testing and to see if it'll work on your H/W... But in this case Sabayon is your friend !
5 • i586 H/W (by jasd on 2011-08-29 09:53:13 GMT from France)
Gentoo (x86/i486) and CRUX (i586 port) are in my opinion the good ones for a Pentium or K6 optimized install (with changing some flags in /etc)... if you can distribute or host the compilation on other more poweful machines. Don't think Mandriva, Unity, Sabayon, Sorcerer or Lunar they are not i586 distributions anymore. For binary distribution the best (only ?) choice is Debian (i386/i486 kernel) it works well with OB/LXDE or maybe Xfce with a good GPU and some RAM.
6 • Regarding K6 and CMOV (by Henrique Rodrigues on 2011-08-29 10:32:00 GMT from Portugal)
i think the safest bet is to use Debian i386. Gentoo takes too much time on a machine with such lower specs (I have a Gentoo on a Pentium 133 MHz, though). And Debian is a nice system to work with, so it's a win-win situation.
7 • i586, Distros that perform well (by Chris Daly on 2011-08-29 10:38:27 GMT from New Zealand)
Firstly Ubuntu 10.04 uses a fair bit of CPU but runs happily on a Pentium 2 with 384Mb of memory, The netbook edition of 10.04 deserves recommendation for great layout. ( if only the latest Unity looked like netbook 10.04 )
Mageia 1 is better still, and the pick of the bunch
Mint LXDE great
Saline
Puppy
DSL
Lubuntu
mandriva has issues with screens, as does PC Linux in these early machines
8 • gentoo thoughts (by farsaid on 2011-08-29 11:06:15 GMT from Italy)
true: gentoo's way is compiling everything and its real and most important/irreplaceable installer is and will always be it's handbook, doing it by hand, as a real craftsman would do. This makes it a precious system.
BUT there are times when you are working in rush, needing to get at least a base "core" system installed as soon as possible (Sabayon comes to mind) ...in this kind of situations you find yourself opting for other faster solutions, also in cases where later on it would be very useful to have gentoo power and flexibility, compiling and optimizing everything for best performance.
IMO Giving gentoo the possibility to be installed faster at the cost of postponing compiling/optimizing time can be very useful under some circumstances. You can then recompile everything when you have more time to dedicate to it (in the weekend) instead of finding yourself forced postponing the whole installation or switching to a more rapid pre-built system installation.
Afterall Gentoo is a "meta distribution" and as such I think you should be able to choose from various possibilities, different approaches, more tools and utilities than those available in a pre-built distro. So that it can be used to build different distros, which I think should be the real goal of a meta-distro.
In the end, having at least the possibility to divide a long, complex procedure into smaller, simpler and easier steps is always a good idea. It could also help shortening average user's learning curve. "Divide and Conquer" is a classic and effective stratagem for this reason.
9 • i586 (by mislack on 2011-08-29 11:14:20 GMT from Russian Federation)
I believe, Slackware (32-bit version) should work on i586. Its HOWTO says it works on everything "with at least i486 opcodes". Last year, I installed Slack 13.1 on a PC with Celeron 400+smth MGz without a problem.
10 • i586 (by archer on 2011-08-29 11:48:24 GMT from Germany)
This works definetely: www.connochaetos.org
11 • In search of a i586 distro (by Jesse on 2011-08-29 12:57:17 GMT from Canada)
In response to the question posed in the News section...
This past week I struggled to get a distro to install on an old Pentium machine. It has a 700MHz CPU and about 300MB of RAM. FreeBSD and CentOS failed to work. Mint LXDE would install, but used up all the memory and crashed a lot. Ubuntu (server edition) installed and ran without any problems. Though I haven't tried it, SliTaz will probably work as it's designed for i486 machines and up.
12 • i586 (by dolphin_oracle on 2011-08-29 13:28:51 GMT from United States)
antix has a i486 version. The 8.5 version has been tested reasonably well on a variety of older hardware and there is a thread about different topics in the forums. RAM is going to be the big issue on this class of machine.
13 • Missing from Mandriva review (by Dave on 2011-08-29 13:57:35 GMT from United Kingdom)
I didn't see a mention of the switch to RPM5 in Mandriva 2011... seems like an important point that was missed completely.
14 • Missing from Mandriva review (by Dave on 2011-08-29 14:03:10 GMT from United Kingdom)
Oops. There was a brief mention in the opening paragraph. Seems like if you have a dedicated "Package Management" section, it should include some information about what that change means.
Also, Mandriva has switched to systemd.
15 • Mandriva (by Jackie on 2011-08-29 14:04:51 GMT from United States)
Mandiva would be alright as its bought by the Russians. Its showing good progress with the Rosa Labs and Rocket Bar. I had the RC version and I had already had it upgraded yesterday, even before it was announced. I found that there was nothing to do, when I tried to upgrade today. Everything works well, NVidia and wifi found already. No problems yet. But, I found Sabayon 6 KDE buggy, after 1-2 days it doesn't boot. Chakra is the other KDE distro, which was already upgraded, before it was announced. Thanks guys!
16 • SL Developers (by Anonymous on 2011-08-29 14:18:32 GMT from United States)
So Connie Sieh, the person that started the rebuild back at red hat 5 is chopped liver? I bet she's somewhat surprised at her lack of importance in the project. Your gender bias may be showing d-;
17 • RE: 14 Missing from Mandriva review (by ladislav on 2011-08-29 14:21:52 GMT from Taiwan)
The Mandriva release notes themselves barely mention the switch to RPM 5, only saying that "It has several advantages over RPM4 and gives to developers a more flexible environment to work." But the review does give a link to an interesting write-up about RPM 5 at LWN, which I think is worth a read. It includes further links to other recent RPM 5-related developments.
As for Systemd, you are right, perhaps I should have mentioned it as an interesting technical change.
18 • i586compat. (by Barnabyh on 2011-08-29 14:47:31 GMT from United Kingdom)
Most cli only server or core images should work if the distro is compiled for i586 or lower. SMS, Zenwalk core, Salix core come to mind, and of course Ubuntu server as Jesse just found works. Then just add a light desktop and small basic application set. LXDE on Salix core needs less than 50MB ram.
On another note, I wished people would pay attention to who wrote the article in question if they want to give credit instead of assuming. This weeks overview of the new Mandriva 2011 was written by Ladislav as clearly stated. It's not the first time this happened. Jesse is not the only one writing feature stories on DWW.
19 • Gentoo (by Marcs100 on 2011-08-29 15:04:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
@8 • gentoo thoughts (by farsaid on 2011-08-29 11:06:15 GMT from Italy)
I agree, I have done many Gentoo installs in the past, even stage1 back in the day. Sometimes you just want to get up and running quickly and you can always optimize the system later when you have more time. Nothing wrong with the existing install method using the Gentoo Handbook but for me it would be nice to have an alternative (I have already learnt all I can from the stage 3 install).
I am running Arch Linux at the moment but I may well give the Anaconda installer a go on my spare partition.
20 • Memory requirements of DEs (by Georgios on 2011-08-29 15:25:16 GMT from Greece)
In the Miscellaneous News, Ladislav mentions that gnome3 recommends 768 MB of RAM, and I suspect that this is the case. But, the article uses terms like "KDE needs", "Gnome3 recommends", and "Unity requests", and I have not seen in the web a comparison with actual numbers. Also, I keep on seeing reports about how memory hungry gnome3 is. My experience suggests just the opposite; gnome3 appears to be lighther and faster than gnome2 in both my machines.
Just fyi, these are the memory usage figures of gnome3 and gnome2 on my computers. Notice that, in gnome3, I have installed and activated all the available shell extensions (system monitor, weather, temperature, dock, places status indicator, etc), and, in gnome2, I have added the usual applets in the panel (sensors, window selector, disk mounter, volume).
I report four memory figures taken from htop running in a virtual console:
- logged in with libreoffice quickstarter
- logged in without libreoffice quickstarter
- with gdm, but not logged in
- without gdm
(121 108 70 46) gnome3 acer aspire one netbook/32bit ArchLinux
(125 119 68 46) gnome2 acer aspire one netbook/32bit Debian Squeeze
(273 260 196 122) gnome3 sony vaio F11 with intel i5/64bit ArchLinux
(292 276 174 107) gnome2 sony vaio F11 with intel i5/64bit Debian Wheezy
I suspect that Fedora and OpenSUSE should give similar results regarding gnome3. Could someone report the corresponding figures for Unity and KDE4?
21 • Mandriva 2011.0 (by Bert on 2011-08-29 15:38:36 GMT from Belgium)
The new Mandriva caused me a clean 15 hours of trouble before I finally got a usable system.
Firstly: I could boot the live/installation disks, but my screen turned all vertical lines. (I suppose that's because of my ATI Radeon 2400 Pro; it occurs with many new distro's lately.) So I could not do anything with those.
Secondly: After searching the mirrors I found the net-install ISO (boot.iso) (you can find them here: MIRROR/official/2011/i586/install/images/boot.iso or MIRROR/official/2011/x86_64/install/images/boot.iso) which gives you the choice of which desktop (GNOME, KDE...) you want to install.
I installed the GNOME desktop (4 times) and afterwards I was not able to get an internet connection; neither wired nor wireless.
Seemed that some necessary files were not installed.
Finally: (still using the boot.iso) I chose to install the "Custom" variant, and I selected both GNOME and LXDE. (Using GNOME as desktop..)
That seemed to work a little, but still I could not get any internet connection (neither wired nor wireless).
Then I copied some drivers (b43 and rt71) from an OpenSUSE 11.4 installation to the Mandriva installation, and then - finally - I got it to work.
Mandriva is nice, but the installation files need some work.
Hey, I like Mandriva, but it sure was a hassle!
22 • i586, i686 (by TobiSGD on 2011-08-29 15:50:05 GMT from Germany)
There seems to be some confusion here about what is i586 and what is i686 at some posts. Simple explanation:
i586:
- Intel Pentium I (with and without MMX)
- AMD K5 and K6 (all versions)
- VIA C3 (Samuel and Ezra)
i686:
- Intel Pentium Pro and above
- AMD Athlon and above
- VIA C3 (Nehemia C5XL and above)
23 • Slackware for non i686 CPU (by Not Bob on 2011-08-29 15:58:32 GMT from United States)
It's not the kernel dev's, it's the monkey's that create kernel packages.
They label everything i386/i486, even though they compiled the kernel with the CPU set to i686/Pentium PRO. This poor choice also stops most distros from properly running on some thin clients. As some Geode and VIA cpu's also do not have the complete i686 instruction set.
Slackware, and the Slackware installation CD/DVD includes a TRUE i486 kernel with instructions on how to install on your non i686 CPU.
Slackware's default x86 kernel is compiled with CONFIG_MPENTIUMIII=y with the alternate installation kernel compiled with CONFIG_M486=y. All packages (except Xine AFIAK) are also compiled -march=i486 -mtune=i686
24 • i486/i586 problems (by Jim Stanford on 2011-08-29 16:20:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
Its not just old recycled desktops and thin clients. I have a huge amount of custom hardware (routers, industrial hardware etc) that need the most obscure kernels and kernel packages to perform their daily work.They have a mix of 486 an 586-alike hardware embedded. A few run as i686.
Most have problems running vanilla sources and even the 686 kit is showing problems. Quality seems to have slipped in the last year or two.
25 • Mandriva 2011 (by Carlos Felipe on 2011-08-29 17:44:59 GMT from Brazil)
Very beautiful, but very very slow. I improved the speed when I removed ROSA tasks (all panel) and add a new panel.
26 • i586 Linux (by Alexey on 2011-08-29 18:08:54 GMT from United States)
I run home server with Debian Wheezy x86. It needs to be installed in expert mode though to get option to choose i486 vs i686 vs amd64 kernels. I chose i486 kernel which runs perfectly on my AMD K6-II.
27 • i586 compatible OS (by Jim on 2011-08-29 18:19:35 GMT from United States)
Salix LXDE works fine on a Pentium-1 and AMD K6-II / K6-III CPU. Use the "huge.s" kernel option at the 1st boot screen on the CD. Otherwise, it defaults to the i686 kernel.
28 • The Rocketbarisnoworking-thing. (by Dr. What on 2011-08-29 18:20:18 GMT from Spain)
I don't understand de rocketbar-problem, you can't add it to the panel because it's running allready and you can't add more than one instance. The breakthrough of this new dock is that pin apps works like in Windows 7: it's as simple as adding a new icon to the panel. It may seem silly, but it's the little details that make KDE look like made for sadomasochism.
29 • Mandriva 2011 (by Heiko on 2011-08-29 19:12:49 GMT from Germany)
Mandriva 2011 is the most beautiful distro that I have ever seen! Quick and clear...
I have had no problem. Thank you Mandriva.
30 • i586 (by i586 fan on 2011-08-29 19:16:17 GMT from United States)
I've been looking for a up to date one myself for quite a while. I think I reported the CMOV error on this site years ago. Back then it was a boot loop problem on the live cd.
RE #24: The K6-II is a bit of a mutt but it was good cheap computing at the beginning of the millennium. If I remember it was a i586 that used a modified Pentium socket-a motherboard. At the time they said it was a i686 but it really was not. They were my first Linux machines as they did not like m$ xp too much.
I have given up on them as others have said replacing them with Celereon 700mhz machines. The problems with me has been drivers, memory and hard drives.
I have 3 K6-II machines left a 333mhz, 350mhz and a 475mhz. The 333mhz was a mutt when one of the CPU & motherboards went on a 350mhz. Memory will not go over 512mb on any of these. One only does using sdram and edo at the same time but not all slots can be filled. None of them will take a HD over about 4gb and has to not use a accelerator and cant be a 100/133. One has a Diamond viper II with TV out etc. One has 192mb memory and a odd USB 1.1 controller. You get the picture.
I was able to do the lxde mint but you can't update anything as it creates the cmov problem or updates cram up the HD.
Some others Distros just take a half hour to load with a blank screen because it thinks it can do better or something. Some boot loop or get the CMOV error. Puppy 4 works good and you can manage updates with the save files. I was going to try slax but I think it also works for a while and chokes it later.
I also found that booting a kiosk linux for browsing and one for work makes puppy a bit more tolerable on these machines.
If I don't find a home for them soon I think they are going to be parted out.
31 • Mandriva - boot.iso (by Bert on 2011-08-29 19:16:33 GMT from Belgium)
For those who still cannot find the "boot.iso" file, I'll give you the direct links on 1 of many mirrors:
http://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrivalinux/official/2011/i586/install/images/boot.iso
http://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrivalinux/official/2011/x86_64/install/images/boot.iso
Depending on which arch you need.
32 • Mandriva's new UI (by eco2geek on 2011-08-29 19:27:51 GMT from United States)
Remember, you can remove the so-called "rocket bar" and replace it with KDE 4's regular...I don't know what the KDE term for it is...activity bar (?), then repopulate it with regular KDE widgets (kicker menu; application manager; system tray; etc.) if you don't like it.
I think this was discussed in a prior DistroWatch Weekly, but Mandriva's desktop looks like an attempt to emulate Unity and gnome-shell. It's got its own unique features, but it's based on a GTK theme; its icons are based on Elementary, it's got a full-screen icon picker (the so-called "SimpleWelcome" plasma widget) instead of the kicker menu; and the Dolphin file manager has been re-coded to completely remove the menu bar. (It sort of looks like what you'd get if you crossed Dolphin with Nautilus-Elementary.)
So, gnome-shell, Unity, and now Mandriva are using full-screen icon pickers as their application launchers instead of menus. Is this officially a trend?
33 • Mandriva (by shady on 2011-08-29 19:51:37 GMT from United States)
I kind of like that the distros are now 'shelling' their DE's. I hope the trend continues.
34 • Scientific Linux wasn't a one man operation (by Scott Dowdle on 2011-08-29 19:55:41 GMT from United States)
While I'm sure there will be some impact with the departure of Troy Dawson from Scientific Linux, it wasn't a single person operation. Connie Sieh has been working with Troy for several years now. I imagine that Fermilab will eventually fill the position vacated by Troy.
35 • i586 (by PatrickVerner on 2011-08-29 22:45:08 GMT from United States)
Parted Magic boots on a AMD K6. It's verified on real hardware since 2009. You have to use the i486 version though. It will run on 128MB of RAM in "live" mode. It also ran on a K6 with the 3.0.3 kernel.
36 • i586 (by Mandrivian on 2011-08-30 00:11:43 GMT from United States)
Mandriva 2010.0 is running on PIII laptop (450 MHz processor, 64M RAM). Of course, there is no way to instaal Mandriva/Rosa on the box.
Mageia1 is based on Mandriva 2010.1. It has the same drakX installer. It could be possible to install.
BTW, old laptop doesn't have CD drive.
37 • i586 (by sparkyintx on 2011-08-30 00:15:17 GMT from United States)
If you're looking for a good distro for an old PC, just do a filtered search here on Distrowatch. For "distrobution category" choose "old computers".
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Old+Computers
38 • Wary Puppy does i486 (by Barry Kauler on 2011-08-30 00:21:07 GMT from Australia)
The 2.6.32.x kernel in Wary Puppy is configured for a i486 CPU, with support for the MTRR registers if present. It should boot up on an actual i486.
The applications/libraries are all configured for i486 also, with the exception of mplayer and libvpx, as I recall. Wary Puppy runs on the Gecko Edubook, which has an RDC Vortex86mx 586 CPU (with inbuilt GPU -- Wary also has Xorg driver for that GPU) -- except for mplayer, and I will probably recompile mplayer for next release of Wary to run on a i486.
Wary Puppy targets older hardware. For more info about Wary:
http://bkhome.org/wary/
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02449
Note, the main reason that Wary uses the 2.6.32.x kernel (currently 2.6.32.45) is that is the latest in which I am able to compile my complete collection of 3rd-party analog modem drivers. Wary is committed to supporting those with Internet connection by dialup analog modem.
39 • i586 (by Magic Banana on 2011-08-30 00:56:41 GMT from Brazil)
As archer said, ConnochaetOS is a good (and 100% Free) one to try. I actually believe it is so unique (check out its goals: http://www.connochaetos.org/wiki/purpose), it deserves to be reviewed by DistroWatch Weekly. ;-)
40 • Gentoo gets Installer (by Knowisdom on 2011-08-30 01:37:54 GMT from United States)
Gentoo Linux is all about choices and giving the user as much control over their environment as possible. Using an installer, is a choice. There is nothing wrong with providing that choice, but if you make it mandatory as other distros do, you remove choice and place control on the hands of those who maintain the installer.
41 • Mandriva feature story (by JR on 2011-08-30 03:54:38 GMT from Brazil)
Ladislav: I think the focus of the new mandriva is the end user. For that they needed a final product with a specific focus, with simple configurations - fewer options (see this link that targets the Eugeni Dodonov' blog: http://dodonov.net/blog/2011/07/17/on-linux-distributions -and-desktop /), just remember from earlier attempts: Linspire, Lindows?? and also had an Indian distribution with a dolphin as a symbol, or was a fish? :) that I do not remember the name .. and other later: android, Meego, etc. .. Have you ever tried to customize the interface of the MacOSX? it's something that works as it is!
We like options, customization and freedom, ( I like to install the NILFS2 filesystem for exemple.. weird, I know) and.... that does not seem to be the direction of the new mandriva, new ubuntu (unity), and also gnome3 as a DE. But ...
if I had to choose to install a distribution to a friend or relative who has never seen Linux or be afraid of it, I'd choose something with these new features focused on simplicity and focus on the end user.
To be clear: I would not use distributions that restrict my freedom of choice, but definitely, IMHO they are the ones that will bring in a distant future the long-awaited ease of use for the novice user in linux !!!!!
P.S.: does anyone know if the x86_64 Mandriva 2011 has out of the box support for flash animations?
42 • @ JR (by Bert on 2011-08-30 07:12:50 GMT from Belgium)
Personally I like to think that GNOME2 is an out of the box working system for newbies.
And for people who do not want the GNOME2 to change to GNOME3, such as I.
The GNOME2 interface works perfectly! for me.
GNOME3 does NOT.
(I also still use the windows classic on my windows systems.)
A well known saying goes: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it."
GNOME2 works fine for me.
43 • Multiple DEs? (by zykoda on 2011-08-30 08:21:48 GMT from United Kingdom)
Xfce, LXDE, Gnome3/2, KDE4..etc Desktops don't suit all screens or tasks. Not having investigated the X server scripts maybe someone could enlighten me if it's possible to run simultaneous X displays (eg startx --:[1-6]) style each with a different DE.
44 • Mandriva 2011 looks great (by Manja on 2011-08-30 10:19:19 GMT from Slovenia)
I was Ubuntu User until they ruined it completely with the Unity disaster. Then I started testing other desktops for the first time and I liked KDE a lot, even more then I liked the old GNOME desktop in older Ubuntus. But I had some problems with KDE in Ubuntu so after advise from other pople I started testing distributions focused on KDE (openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, Mandriva) and all had no problems. After some tests I liked Mandriva the most, so now I'm running Mandriva 2010.2. I'm happy that new Mandriva 2011 is out finally and it looks very gorgeous. The only thing I don't like about it is the new fullscreen start menu panel. But no big problem I guess since it is so easy to replace each part of the KDE desktop with other options and I will just switch it back to default KDE's start menu. Other things that sound really strange about this new Mandriva 2011 is the selection of some default apps. I don't get it why they selected Shotwell and Pitivi since Digikam and Kdenlive a a lot better and since they are also KDE apps they also integrate a lot better into the desktop experience. Anyways, Mandriva 2011 looks like a great release and I can't wait to upgrade to it as soon as I finish downloading it.
45 • re #43 multiple desktops at once (by gnomic on 2011-08-30 11:59:25 GMT from New Zealand)
Haven't played with this for a while, but Xnest might be of interest A nice man has written an article that may be of interest.
http://matto.home.xs4all.nl/xnest.html
Don't lose track of where you are in the matrix . . . . ;->
46 • Desktops (by Bert on 2011-08-30 12:28:58 GMT from Belgium)
The discussion about the "Unity" and the "GNOME3" desktops shall not be closed soon. Neither of them works for me.
It reminds me a little bit of the first "Vista" release. (Which was a very good thing for Linux users.)
Now Ubuntu (and Fedora, and some others) do a similar thing with the new desktops: many folks will move away from Linux because of it.
It just does not work for me, and with me for many others.
At this moment my main Linux system is still Lucid.
After that... I yet do not know.
But it most likely wont be Ubunty any more.
I'm browing (searching) for systems that still use GNOME2 and will go on using GNOME2, to use as a base Linux system here.
At this moment, Mageia, openSUSE, Mint, Parsix... are good candidates.
But the Ubuntu repo's are the best there are, and they are fast as well.
Unless the Ubuntu community releases a GNOME2 version, Ubuntu is (after Lucid) not an option for me anymore, I'm sorry to say.
But that's the way it is.
47 • RE:Mandriva and Desktops (by Eddie on 2011-08-30 12:57:32 GMT from United States)
Tried out Mandriva and it is now my favorite looking KDE distro, so far. I really like the looks and it does seem polished to me. I haven't used it enough to give it complete thumbs up as far as system operations. As far as a Gnome distros goes I like Ubuntu 11.04 with the Unity desktop. There is nothing I can't do just as fast in Unity that I could do with classic Gnome. Granted I have made some slight mods and have spent time to learn the system well and after you do that it is very easy. It just boils down to personal preference and wanting to try and learn new things.
On another note I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490CDT. Pentium II 233MHz processor, but the bad thing is that it only has 32.0MB of ram. I may upgrade the ram but I don't believe it can take more then 160.0MB. Is there anything that could run well on this laptop?
48 • re#43 Desktops Bert (by tora201jp on 2011-08-30 13:18:54 GMT from Japan)
Bert, good comment! Agreed entirely. Unity is a dog, and looks even more so (lots of new changes=even more bugs) in 11.10. Haven't even bothered trying Gnome 3 as I have heard very few positive things about it.
Sticking with 11.04 in classic for foreseeable future here. Natty in classic mode rules, btw!
49 • re #47 a PII 233MHz cpu running well with 32Mb RAM? (by gnomic on 2011-08-30 13:49:41 GMT from New Zealand)
Er, gosh. You want a Linux that will run well? Hmmm, perhaps a Linux that will run at all? You could try to find some media for a Linux 2.0 kernel, say SUSE 6? Used to provide a gui on a 486 with 20MB of RAM. What do you mean by well? You are looking at boots to a command line and runs vi. Much more than that I should think means more memory. I expect you'll find a number of options including some that will run a gui on the maximum RAM or even 64 or 128 MB, but again it depends what you mean by well. You will not be browsing the web with Firefox. On the other hand you might be able to run a compiler. You could be looking at slitaz or antiX as just a couple of quick thoughts. No doubt someone will point out you can run Debian on these specs.
50 • No.47 (by Salo on 2011-08-30 14:32:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
The latest Puppy Wary will just about do it with 160MB (192 preferred = 128+64 or 3x64) and is undoubtedly your best option. Make sure you have a swap partition, but don't make it too big- say about 100Mb, not much more with such low RAM or it'll rattle your drive to death.
51 • Scientific Linux (by Lukas on 2011-08-30 15:15:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
A bit disrespectful to say that Troy almost single-handedly drove SL. Not true, as anyone close to the project will know.
52 • Here we go (by Eddie on 2011-08-30 16:07:21 GMT from United States)
@46, About Unity and Gnome3, "Now Ubuntu (and Fedora, and some others) do a similar thing with the new desktops: many folks will move away from Linux because of it." Who will move away from Linux because of Unity or Gnome3? Where will they go? Back to MS? That statement in itself makes no sense. You shouldn't be spreading FUD in the Linux world. Hopefully most people will not take that comment serious. But I see one person did.
@48, "Unity is a dog, and looks even more so". No it's not and no it doesn't. That is about the only rebuttal I can give to a statement like that.
@49,50 Working well is a relative term. It does run Win98se well. I also run Allen Bradley RSLogic 500 PLC software, Allen Bradley 6200 PLC-5 software, Automation Direct's DirectSOFT 32 PLC software, Viso, etc. Granted these are programs that don't take a lot of processing power and Win98se is an old os but still you would think that there is or was a Linux distro that would work as well as 98 on this little old laptop. Anyway I don't use it much anymore and I was just wanting to see what I could do with it. Thanks for the replies.
53 • Mandriva, ROSA... (by Blue Knight on 2011-08-30 16:33:54 GMT from France)
ROSA like GNOME 3 and Unity is just crap. I hate them.
In Mandriva, yes, you can remove it and add a new panel with a KDE style but this means Mandriva defaults are just shitty. I want a distro with sane defaults for mentally sane persons. Thanks. For now, it's Mageia. I use Cauldron. It is much better than Mandriva and while obviously risky, it is surprisingly stable for a cooker/rawhide/unstable distro. If you want a completely stable distro, just use Mageia 1.
54 • AMD K5 is not an i586 processor (by Caitlyn Martin on 2011-08-30 18:01:40 GMT from United States)
#22: The AMD K5 is an i486 class processor, not i586. Even so, there are some distros that will still run on those systems.
55 • Comments Mandriva (by Hassle McAuliffe on 2011-08-30 18:07:12 GMT from Ireland)
Just 2 Mandriva comments :
1. There's not only Mageia as an Mandriva alternative, there's PC Linux as
well. Now in KDE, LCDE, XFCE and Open Box version.
2. Isn't time to change the Mandriva star into a red one?
Cheers,
Hassle
56 • RE:53, I'm Quite Sane (by Eddie on 2011-08-30 18:16:23 GMT from United States)
Another person who doesn't like anything new because it's not what they've been use to for the last several. God forbid anyone should have to change any defaults on a distro. I'm sure you haven't spent any time with ROSA, Gnome3 or Unity or you would know they are not crap. You don't like them because you don't know how to use them and they are different.
It's good for people to have a preference, to like or not like something and to give reasons for their choice. But when people start making false statements like, just crap, is a dog, utter fail, will chase people away, and many others, I would like to know why they feel that way. REAL REASONS. If someone just doesn't like it that is just fine but it doesn't mean there is something wrong. If I don't like something I'll tell you why. Just because I don't like something doesn't mean it's crap. Condemning something without reasons is just plain wrong. It's misleading, and spreads a lot of FUD. Speak your mind but at least have something on your mind to speak, don't just rattle on. Make your words mean something.
57 • BSDs for older computer? (by pearson on 2011-08-30 19:40:14 GMT from United States)
I think that I recall at least one flavor of BSD "can run on a toaster". I'd expect them to support 486 and 585 class computers. Your mileage may vary on what can be run - again, I think I recall that X.org has gotten fairly heavy - maybe run TinyX?
You might could turn the laptop into a small "server" - print server or backup server if you can add enough storage. Those applications can have surprisingly small requirements. X windows is optional.
58 • i586/cmov (by amas on 2011-08-30 20:50:15 GMT from United States)
In my attempts to power-up my parent's pc with linux (and wipe windows 98...argh!) i ran into the same bottleneck. After purchasing a lawnsale pc (with a k6-2) i found a few distros that WOULD run! some of them are even recent!
Puppy - runs like a champ ...though i expected nothing less!
Slax - works though graphics are bad ...just need a card upgrade?
Trisquel - see slax...
i cant find the rest of my umm... research and these are ones i picked off the top of my head.
also i found out that the k6 family is not quite considered an i586 because it lacks the cmov instruction. As to why these distros work and not others; remains a complete mystery. i have abandoned my project and moved on mainly out of frustration.
59 • BSDs (by Jesse on 2011-08-30 20:56:48 GMT from Canada)
>> I think that I recall at least one flavor of BSD "can run on a toaster". I'd expect them to support 486 and 585 class computers.
I think that was NetBSD, which does have very small memory requirements. Though if you go down that road be prepared to do a lot of work up front. The default NetBSD system runs virtually nothing (which is why it is so small), so there will be a lot of configuring and tweaking if you want to run a desktop environment. Actually, the same applies to each of the BSDs, they will probably work, but you'll be building from the ground up.
60 • reviews (by jack on 2011-08-30 21:27:18 GMT from Canada)
Unfortunately linux has acquired a reputation for having "sound" problems (pulse audio etc)
Perhaps the reviewers could be asked to focus on this .
For example a review of Mageia said that everthing worked OOB; yet a commenter said that he had to "tweak" the multimedia part of the install
thanks
61 • RocketBar in Mandriva (by Jackkarta on 2011-08-31 00:04:23 GMT from France)
But, you were simply _using_ Rocket Bar, why trying to install it as it was under your eyes :))
it is the task manager à la Window7/MacOSX with pinable applications
62 • RE: 61 RocketBar in Mandriva (by ladislav on 2011-08-31 00:33:30 GMT from Taiwan)
You are right, of course. I don't know why I thought I had to enable it. Perhaps because I couldn't get those thumbnails showing as they do on the screenshots in the release notes. And while experimenting I must have messed it up completely, because I was unable to move icons around, couldn't get the right size of some newly added widget icons, and once I deleted and re-added the Rocket Bar, I got a brief black screen and then no panel. On the second attempt the Rocket Bar finally appeared, but by trying to move an icon, the whole system froze to the point that only the reset button would rescue it.
The moral of the story: don't mess with the Rocket Bar. Just use it as the developers intended, otherwise you'll get into trouble.
63 • First Avahi then PulseAudio and now systemd. (by RollMeAway on 2011-08-31 02:17:35 GMT from United States)
I sometimes wonder if Lennart Poettering is on the payroll of ms or apple.
I find the 3 subject items incomprehensible, even after reading countless articles.
Solutions looking for a problem?
Any distro that uses systemd, is out of MY control. I find it difficult to impossible, to control what processes/daemons run on my systems. Sometimes I resort to chmod 600 to disable something running. No user should have to resort to such.
Ladislav or Jesse, perhaps you could do an article to shed some independent light on systemd? Why are distributions migrating to it? What problems is it suppose to solve?
64 • Re 63 First Avahi then PulseAudio and now systemd. (by Harry on 2011-08-31 03:32:58 GMT from Canada)
lol, I wondered the same thing. I hope OSS4 gets more attention as it seems to provide the same benefits and more compared to pulseaudio. Plus it's not Linux-specific like Alsa. I would like to see them make it suspend/resume compliant and then I'll give it a serious trial.
AKAIK, systemd basically starts all processes in an on-demand fashion.
65 • Mandriva versus PC LINUX OS (by Hassle McAuliffe on 2011-08-31 09:10:57 GMT from Ireland)
Have a look at the available PC LINUX OS variants :
interesting ....
http://ftp.nluug.nl/ibiblio/distributions/pclinuxos/pclinuxos/live-cd/
66 • Systemd (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-08-31 11:05:17 GMT from Spain)
RollMeAway wrote:
--------------------------------------
Ladislav or Jesse, perhaps you could do an article to shed some independent light on systemd? Why are distributions migrating to it? What problems is it suppose to solve?
--------------------------------------
Personally, I see no problem solved by this thing. SysV and BSD-init have never given me any trouble. Systemd is supposed to make the booting process faster and more tidy, however.
The basic rationale behind systemd is that shell scripts are ugly and should be replaced by some other thing, even if that thing is something no admin understands or can modify easily. Systemd is also supposed to control a few things beyond the booting and shutdown process. I think this is stupid, as I can do everything that systemd does with bsd-init and a few external programs. I don't like the concept of "One Daemon to Rule them All" behind systemd. Many others do.
Systemd is for me more a marketing boost than anything else. I don't oppose its use, but until it has been proven useful and reliable, I'll keep with good old-style booting systems. The problem will raise if systemd is enforced as a dependency for major free software projects (i.e: Gnome3). In this case, there would be no other option than to switch from old-style booting or stay with an old version of a LTS distro. From my point of view, this lack of options would be a kinda lost battle for the FOSS movement.
--------------------------
I sometimes wonder if Lennart Poettering is on the payroll of ms or apple.
--------------------------
You are not the only one. There are some guys that publish and deprecate their software faster than other distributions can integrate it.
I am more suspicious of the Gnome and Unity crowd, anyway :-)
67 • Re 34 (by kilgoretorut on 2011-08-31 11:07:40 GMT from United States)
I agree with your observations on Scientific Linux for the most part except for the likelihood of Fermilab hiring a replacement for Troy. With the opening of the LHC, Fermilab has had to fight for funding every year. Fermilab's tevatron particle accelerator is scheduled to be shut down the end of September 2011, it being viewed as old technology superseded by the LHC. While analysis of already gathered data is expected to continue for some time, Fermilab is definitely in wind down mode due to lack of funding. I don't know what motivated Troy's decision to go to RH but the uncertain employment future at Fermilab may have been a factor.
68 • Ultimate Linux EDition OZ (by John Thornhill on 2011-08-31 11:54:37 GMT from Australia)
Hi I don't normally go out of my way to say something about a Distro I should so here goes I am an old pensioner who was looking around for different alternatives to Windows and tried a few different ones all of them were good ,Sabayon,Mepis,and then found ULTIMATE EDITION OZ edition can only say give it try I have only shown it to three people and they all wanted it
Great work people on Ultimate very very impressed.
John Perth Australia
69 • @63 (by Patrick on 2011-08-31 16:30:05 GMT from United States)
I have the complete opposite view of the projects you mention. I am glad there is such a guy as Lennart Poettering in our community who looks at the status quo, notices big system-level deficiencies and sets out to actually do something about them. It's not like he has some way to strong-arm distro's to pick up his stuff, but they do. Why? Because his projects provide solutions for real problems!
Some people still seem to hate PulseAudio. I think the only problem that ever existed with PulseAudio was that distros started using it before it was ready, leaving a bad first impression. Why were distros so eager to start using it? Because it solved a real, glaring problem. I sure remember the bad old days when it was a major struggle to have more than one program be able to play sound at the same time. How insane was that? Since PulseAudio came along, my audio problems have gone away. Sound just works, and the added flexibility of setting output levels per process is just awesome. I for one am very glad to have it, and I'm sure many others that don't even know what it does for them would be very upset to go back to a pre-PulseAudio system.
Now with systemd, we're finally getting a sane init system. When I first came to Linux, one of the most puzzling thing was how the boot system worked. "You mean this incomprehensible tangle of shell scripts somehow gets the system to start?" was my first thought. As I became more familiar with it, I started hating it even more. The whole system seemed hacked together with thread and tape. Everything was hard coded. Changing something would cause problems because it affected other things and there was no transparency of what depended on what. A lot of time was wasted in starting a pile of shell processes running unnecessary and mostly redundant shell code. Then multi-core systems started to become more common, and here we were, booting sequentially. Hackish attempts to parallelize the SysV init proved too fragile because of timing differences of dependent services on different machines. Upstart tried to solve it but went about it completely the wrong way (since we started A, now we will start B, since we started B, now we will start C... wait a minute, I did not need C!). Systemd has the correct, dependency-based approach (I want B, and B requires A, so let's start A and then B, C is not requested and won't start). Anyone familiar with make files should appreciate that this is the much better approach: you specify your desired state, and the system figures out how to get you there. It makes for a light, clean, parallelized boot that doesn't start things you don't need. Daemons are only started on demand, memory use will be reduced. No more waiting for a pile of shell processes clogging up the boot process. Distro makers can design their startup systems in a way that will be robust on a large variety of systems. What's not to like? I would sure like to hear some REAL reasons for the hate.
70 • @69 PulseAudio (by Jack on 2011-08-31 17:24:13 GMT from Canada)
Patrick, you make no bones about your opinion of PulseAudio, so I'd like to know if you have an opinion of OSS4? I found an interesting article which seems to favour OSS4 with some pretty enticing reasons.
http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html
71 • Flash update notification (by Jack on 2011-08-31 17:31:19 GMT from Canada)
Has anyone ever seen an "Update Notification" from Adobe Flash player in Linux? I can't recall ever seeing one. In the Flash control panel, I have it set to check for updates every 7 days and notify me when an update is available. I assume you have to be viewing flash content to see this mysterious notification. It's been 6 days since the last release and I'm sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for it.
72 • @69 Pulse and systemd (by Jesse on 2011-08-31 17:41:00 GMT from Canada)
I suspect many people are less put off by Mr Poettering's ideas and designs than by his inability to play well with others. For instance, PulseAudio is a nice idea, but distributions shipped it far far too early. And when the bug reports started rolling in, Poettering's response was "it's the drivers, it's the applications, it's the distros" etc etc. It was, in his view, everyone else's fault Pulse didn't work properly. Even now, years later, Pulse still fails to run in same cases. Meanwhile OSS has improved and now handles most of the stuff Pulse was created to fix. And with OSS we don't have all the mess and fuss that comes with Pulse.
I've read the explanation for systemd and, while it sounds like a good idea on paper, I think it may be over-kill. Especially since we already have Upstart Plus it's designed to be Linux only, and Poettering has stated he's not interested in accepting patches to make it portable. This means software written to work with systemd will only work on Linux distros willing to jump on the systemd ship. Other distros and POSIX compliant operating systems will have work around systemd and maintain their own patches without hope of getting their work applied upstream. This could become a serious issue for the BSDs, Solaris, maybe Debian, Slackware, etc.
So my view is that Poettering tends to engineer software to solve problems that have already been solved (see OSS and Upstart) and then refuses to work with others to fix the issues.
73 • Systemd again. (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-08-31 18:17:31 GMT from Spain)
-------------------------------------
When I first came to Linux, one of the most puzzling thing was how the boot system worked. "You mean this incomprehensible tangle of shell scripts somehow gets the system to start?"
------------------------------------
Yes. Shell scripting is an reliable, clean and easily tweakable mechanism. Activating and deactivating startup services in SysV is as easy as renaming its script from S*** to K***.
--------------------------------------
Hackish attempts to parallelize the SysV init proved too fragile because of timing differences of dependent services on different machines.
--------------------------------------
One of the biggest complains about shell scripting is boot time. Palatalize attempts WORK, as I have seen Debian boot in almost zero time with an "slow" SysV. Anyway, if speed is a concern, then I suggest using a faster shell instead of Bash for booting up. You can cut shell interpretation time by 45% replacing Bash with Ash. The scripts themselves can be reduced in size by the user. This is better than rewritting a whole booting system.
What systemd does is not to boot with intelligence: it boots everything up at the same time and hopes each daemon and process to find out when the daemons/processes on which they depend are ready to take their signals. This can easily turn into a Windows-like scenario, where the system "seems" to have booted properly but it remains booting up stuff in the background, thus producing a sluggish experience during the first seconds of your session.
You can defend systemd because you think it is better, but trying to defend it saying that the others alternatives are no good is not going to convince me, sorry.
---------------------------------
It (systemd) makes for a light, clean, parallelized boot that doesn't start things you don't need.
---------------------------------
I spent a few minutes playing with my BSD-init after installing Slackware. It makes for a light, clean pseudo parallelized boot that does not start things I don't need. Plus, BSD-init does not interfere with well established practices as syslog logging, scheduled processes etc,etc.
74 • Anonymous Coward. (by Arg! Spellcheckers suck! on 2011-08-31 18:58:34 GMT from Spain)
"Palatalize attempts WORK " means "Parallelize attempts WORK"
75 • @72 (by Adam Williamson on 2011-08-31 21:05:38 GMT from Canada)
OSS is not solving any problems as long as it's not going upstream into the kernel, and there is a vanishingly small likelihood of that happening. No distro is going to switch to OSS and painfully try and maintain it against a kernel that wants to use ALSA.
systemd is not doing the same as upstart. Lennart wrote a detailed explanation of why he felt he couldn't just improve upstart here:
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
see the section "On Upstart".
76 • @73 (by Adam Williamson on 2011-08-31 21:12:58 GMT from Canada)
"Yes. Shell scripting is an reliable, clean and easily tweakable mechanism. Activating and deactivating startup services in SysV is as easy as renaming its script from S*** to K***."
What does that have to do with shell scripting? you're not modifying the file at all. In systemd, enabling or disabling a service is as easy as creating or deleting a symlink - or you can use systemctl enable / systemctl disable to do it for you. They're very similar mechanisms.
"One of the biggest complains about shell scripting is boot time. Palatalize attempts WORK..."
upstart and systemd both already do parallelization. hell, mdv's pinit did it in 2007. parallelization is a solved problem. It doesn't really do anything to *address* the inefficiencies of giant bash scripts, though, it just hides them to a certain extent; even with parallelization, optimizing the actual startup actions themselves can still provide a significant boot speed boost.
"What systemd does is not to boot with intelligence: it boots everything up at the same time and hopes each daemon and process to find out when the daemons/processes on which they depend are ready to take their signals."
This is not remotely true. systemd startup is ordered based on dependencies; systemd native service files have their own dependency syntax, and systemd also interprets and obeys the LSB-standardized dependency headers in SysV service files. The second part of your sentence doesn't parse at all, so I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're talking about socket activation. One, systemd doesn't 'hope' anything: socket activation requires that the systemd service configuration files explicitly define what sockets the service handles. Two, socket activation is an entirely optional feature of systemd, and not the default: the most simple systemd service configuration does not use socket activation, it simply fires the daemon up on system start, just like SysV.
"This can easily turn into a Windows-like scenario, where the system "seems" to have booted properly but it remains booting up stuff in the background, thus producing a sluggish experience during the first seconds of your session."
This is the typical result of parallelization, nothing specific to systemd...yet you champion parallelization as a good thing earlier in your post. I think you're confused.
77 • @70, 72, 73 (by Patrick on 2011-08-31 21:43:50 GMT from United States)
"""Patrick, you make no bones about your opinion of PulseAudio, so I'd like to know if you have an opinion of OSS4? I found an interesting article which seems to favour OSS4 with some pretty enticing reasons. """
I read about OSS4 quite a while back, and I like what I read quite a lot, although I have to admit I'm not up-to-date with the latest developments, and I have not tried it myself. It seems to me it is what OSS should have been from the start. I don't know all the details about why ALSA came to be, and I realize there was some stuff going on that probably made it necessary, but I really wish ALSA had never happened. Alas, as the situation is now, we're stuck with it. Even considering the technical excellence of OSS4, we now seem to have a situation where some sound cards are only supported by OSS and some by ALSA, and that will be hard to fix. To me it still makes sense to have a system like PulseAudio that hides and takes care of all this mess and presents a working, simple interface to applications.
"""I suspect many people are less put off by Mr Poettering's ideas and designs than by his inability to play well with others."""
This might be the case, I have of course no experience with that. I was only talking about it from a technical point of view, not personal/political/etc. Still, even with this reputation, people seem plenty eager to jump on his ideas even before they're ready for prime time, because they solve real problems.
"""For instance, PulseAudio is a nice idea, but distributions shipped it far far too early."""
Agreed completely, but I don't think you can blame that on him. Of course he his excited about what he's doing, he seems to be good at marketing his ideas, but in the end it is the distribution's responsibility to ensure the quality of the software they integrate.
"""And when the bug reports started rolling in, Poettering's response was "it's the drivers, it's the applications, it's the distros" etc etc. It was, in his view, everyone else's fault Pulse didn't work properly."""
Well, from my admittedly limited experience in working with Linux audio before PulseAudio existed, I'd have to say he was probably right about that in most cases. The total mess that was Linux audio at the time was the reason to start the project in the first place. You had a mess in the drivers, which caused a mess in the applications trying to make those drivers work across incompatibilities, etc. Then PulseAudio tried to insert itself into the middle of that to provide a smoother application interface. It had to absorb all the mess that was previously hidden in the applications, to make the errant drivers work, or demand the drivers to shape up. It also had to emulate ALSA to make existing apps work--apps that were doing weird things because they had all kinds of workarounds in them to deal with crappy drivers. Not a enviable position to be in. And definitely not surprising that it took a couple of years to straighten it out.
"""Even now, years later, Pulse still fails to run in same cases. Meanwhile OSS has improved and now handles most of the stuff Pulse was created to fix. And with OSS we don't have all the mess and fuss that comes with Pulse."""
If OSS does everything Pulse does, I completely agree. I love simplification. You can't blame PulseAudio for having been adopted though, since the landscape looked completely different at the time it was started. But if there are different options now, I'm all for the best one to be widely employed. Still, imagine the moaning and whining that would ensue if someone would suggest to drop PulseAudio now in favor of OSS.
"""Yes. Shell scripting is an reliable, clean and easily tweakable mechanism. Activating and deactivating startup services in SysV is as easy as renaming its script from S*** to K***. [...] You can cut shell interpretation time by 45% replacing Bash with Ash. The scripts themselves can be reduced in size by the user. This is better than rewritting a whole booting system. """
If it was so simple, distros would have made these tuneups a long time ago. It may work in certain cases and an admin can hack on it to make it work if it doesn't, but do you seriously expect "normal" users to hack their init scripts? Rewriting the whole boot system to have one small daemon that uses sane configuration files makes a whole lot more sense to me. You must be a sys admin and I'm not, so I guess we'll never agree on this. I'm more involved with small embedded systems that run shell scripts slower than molasses, so a small daemon taking care of booting processes, making them available when needed, restarting them in case they die, etc. seems like a great thing.
78 • @42 (by JR on 2011-08-31 22:40:13 GMT from Brazil)
Bert:
I use gnome2, and I was not saying that Unity and gnome3 are better, sorry if I left that impression!
but ... they are trying to make Linux look more "friendly" for beginners! At least this seems to be the goal! Because not all we will use tablets every day!
79 • systemd (by Jesse on 2011-08-31 23:45:10 GMT from Canada)
>> "systemd is not doing the same as upstart. Lennart wrote a detailed explanation of why he felt he couldn't just improve upstart here:
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
see the section "On Upstart".
Yes, I read that paper, which is exactly why I stated in my previous post that systemd looked okay on paper. However, when it comes to the real world, systemd isn't as practical as Upstart, for two reasons.
1. Upstart is compatible with older Init systems, systemd is not. This makes life easier on developers, distro maintainers and users.
2. Upstart is, in my tests, faster than systemd.
So while systemd may have, in theory, a cleaner design, there isn't any practical reason to adopt it. The fact that Fedora has picked it up is further evidence that Red Hat developers have a case of "not invented here".
>> "OSS is not solving any problems as long as it's not going upstream into the kernel"
Sadly true, on the Linux side of things. Once again we're stuck with poorer technology. Sound has always been a weak point in the Linux stack and that's not likely to change any time soon. I will grant Pulse Audio is (in most cases) good enough these days. I've even come to like it. But it's would be nice to see a more universal solution put into place upstream.
80 • Posix API, BSD, debian are all irrelevant ! (by RollMeAway on 2011-09-01 04:10:03 GMT from United States)
According to Lennart, read in interview:
http://linuxfr.org/nodes/86687/comments/1249943
If anything, linux needs more standardization, NOT less.
Anyone that cannot comprehend sysv bash init scripts, certainly will not comprehend systemd.
My experience shows most, distribution maintainers do not either.
Which, again, begs the question:
Why are distros TRYING to use systemd.
Faster boot time? Who cares. I boot most computers ONCE a day, some every few months.
Why would I care about a few seconds saved at boot time? Especially at such expense.
81 • re #47 Linux on older Toshiba laptop (by gnomic on 2011-09-01 06:22:53 GMT from New Zealand)
Have a Toshiba Satellite 2100CDS here, 400MHz AMD K6-2 with 160MB RAM, a CD drive, and 800x600 screen with S3 Virge graphics. For the believe it or not files, this machine ran live from an antiX 8.5 486 base CD for 345 days before a power cut finally shut it down a week or so back. It was able to network via a Xircom pc card and via wireless with an ath5k wifi pc card. It also boots Windows 2000 from the hard disk. (OK, since you had to ask, I was going for 365 days uptime before pulling the plug . . . . )
It also boots Legacy OS, a Puppy version aimed specifically at older hardware, although the live CD would only put up 640x480 in my quick test. A DSL CD with 2.4.31 also ran without difficulty and with acceptable speed from the desktop.
82 • Again with systemd (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-09-01 09:45:05 GMT from Spain)
Patrick wrote:
------------------------------------
If it was so simple, distros would have made these tuneups a long time ago. It may work in certain cases and an admin can hack on it to make it work if it doesn't, but do you seriously expect "normal" users to hack their init scripts?
------------------------------------
I don't expect everyday users to tweak the booting scheme by themselves (but I think it will be good for them to learn). However, distributors who are interested in speed above everything else could easily modify their default boot scripts to save many seconds. In fact, I think Debian does already use Dash shell for booting.
The fact that there is too much redundant shell code in default boot scripts (thus losing some time) is because this redundancy can save your if something goes wrong. Slackware's default booting scripts are not fast. Instead, they are designed to be solid, able to work in a generic system and avoid trying to launch commands that do not exist. Does it mean it is slow? Maybe. But if you don't like it, you can take the code you don't like out. That's what I have done and I like the results.
By the way, most time lost during the booting process is not due to the process itself, but to the startup of many daemons you don't need. Many guys out there still start NFS and SSH stuff, thus eating some booting seconds and system resources without actual need. Hell, I have even removed NFS support from my kernel.
RollMeAway wrote:
------------------------------------
Faster boot time? Who cares.
-----------------------------------
Fast booting is desirable. However, when a computer has an uptime of 12 hours, I prefer to use a tried and true booting system which is easy to modify and debug and has proven itself to be effective. Systemd will become a tried and true system one day, but until then you can have a look here: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/bugs/systemd?_csrf_token=dbb6ad6deca1545d88353fc9c96cb217a8c7f13d
This is why I prefer some other guys to do the beta testing for me :-)
From the Arch wiki:
---------------------------------------
Warning: systemd does not support /usr on a separate partition.
--------------------------------------
Can anyone confirm this?
If this is true, then it is an absolute deal breaker for me.
83 • Linux on K6 (by playdayz (Larry Short) on 2011-09-01 17:58:52 GMT from United States)
Wojciech Kozikowski has emailed DistroWatch (and Linus Torvalds) with a complaint about his inability to find a distribution that would run on an i586 machine: "I wanted to install Linux on my old AMD K6+III/450 MHz PC
Lucid Puppy Linux 5.1.1 is tested on AMD K6. It is not the latest Lucid Puppy but we keep it available for that reason.
http://diddywahdiddy.net/LupuNews/index3.html
84 • @84 Boot time (by Patrick on 2011-09-01 21:31:28 GMT from United States)
My car has a back-up camera. It bugs me that, after I turn on the car, there is a delay because the console where the camera image shows still seems to be booting, and it will only start showing me the image when I already made it from the garage to the street. It's supposed to be a safety feature, but it is virtually worthless in my case. Why? Boot time. The delay doesn't exist if the car is already running.
I don't think this console is running Linux. It boots faster than any Linux boot I've ever seen. Still it is causing a problem. To users, a system that makes them wait forever before it starts to serve its purpose is a shoddy system. Take new TV's, Blue-Ray players or cable boxes. Some of those run Linux, and one of the most common customer complaints is that they take forever to start. The ability to boot fast can make or break a system in many cases.
I have observed Linux boots on several embedded systems. The kernel is usually ready after a second or two. After that, the system wastes another 30 seconds to a minute plodding through stupid init-scripts.
85 • @84 (by Blue Knight on 2011-09-01 22:35:15 GMT from Poland)
If you want... but not for me.
To finish with that, the boot time of a computer is almost unimportant, at least for me. Even if a computer takes one minute to boot and what? I guess people don't boot their PC for just using it for 5 minutes, right? Rather, probably for a use for several hours. Even, they shut down it just at the end of the day, maybe or even maybe not... And I don't talk about servers because, as I already said, booting time is irrelevant for them, they're 99.99999% up. So, the boot time is what? 0,00001 % of the whole time? Almost nothing. And again, you can/could/should use hibernation and your computer will boot fast with everything in the state where you have let and ready to use.
86 • @no47 get that up to 128 megs of RAM (by InTheKnow on 2011-09-01 23:24:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,95726.0.html
87 • Fast Boot? (by 123 on 2011-09-02 01:56:19 GMT from United States)
Searched for 2sec Linux boot, found:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMSOIyFBbgU
"Booting debian in 2 sec"
Hmmm.....
88 • Faster boot time (by RollMeAway on 2011-09-02 04:25:53 GMT from United States)
Using hibernate and resume sounds like the logical choice when fast boot is important. Simply restore the state of the ram, from when you last shut down.
It makes no sense to scan for new hardware and try to load drivers for non-existent devices every time the computer starts.
I would suggest to compile the kernel with all your drivers in the kernel, and eliminate initrd altogether.
Remove all unneeded drivers and services as well. Only after these steps would the speed of init scripts become important.
"Systems with Intel Rapid Start utilize hibernate to NAND, which they officially claim will allow your notebook to resume from a zero-power hibernate state in 5 – 6 seconds."
For embedded systems:
http://www.makelinux.com/emb/fastboot/omap
This also hibernates to flash, and resumes in 300ms (that is the claim) !
89 • @88 (by Patrick on 2011-09-02 14:24:06 GMT from United States)
"""For embedded systems:
http://www.makelinux.com/emb/fastboot/omap
This also hibernates to flash, and resumes in 300ms (that is the claim) !"""
That looks pretty impressive. My only worry is that one of their optimization methods is "Reduction of kernel and filesystem size" and they mention their kernel plus filesystem size is... 1.5MB!? That may get "Linux" up and running, but forget about any application code... ;-)
90 • Sabayon is Linux and beyond (by Basilio Guzman on 2011-09-02 21:58:00 GMT from Puerto Rico)
I have tied several versions of Sabayon Linux, and in each one have noticed that, besides it friendliness, there is a visual appeal that engages the users that see my PC screen. I think Sabayon is not only computer science, but also "Computer Art".
91 • PUIAS (by KevinC on 2011-09-03 02:35:17 GMT from United States)
Have played w/ PUIAS in VBox...and it's all good---tho, I don't see why it would be preferable to CentOS or SL. Seems to be the same thing, just orange theme and wallpaper. Should be easy enough to configure, same as CentOS and SL. Running CentOS 6 now as one of my primary desktop OSs----it is doing great. Not really an easy set up for newcomers, but is very stable once set up.
92 • Pulseaudio (by Barnabyh on 2011-09-03 11:55:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have a practical question. Re. the whole conversation about sound on Linux, why is it that in Paudio the volume slider is always maxed out yet I can still hardly hear anything, volume is generally very low? As far as I'm concerned Alsa is much better, it simply is a lot louder (for playing music and movies in particular) when maxing out PCM, Master Volume and sometimes others too.
It works, and I'm used to it, that's all that counts for me. There are even systems where several apps are playing at the same time, (yeah, the 90's have arrived) believe it or not, though I'm not sure why it works on some but not others. To be specific, I can have several movies open and listen to music as well in Arch (no Gnome, no PA), but Slackware 13.37 only plays audio one at a time. So clearly, that bit about Alsa is not true. I think in Zenwalk for instance it used to work too, when I last used it around 2007.
93 • Slackware 13.37 only plays audio one at a time (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-09-03 14:38:46 GMT from Spain)
Barnabyh wrote:
---------------------------------------
Slackware 13.37 only plays audio one at a time.
---------------------------------------
That's wrong.
I can play M.O.C while using MPlayer and both apps are able to sound at the same time.
94 • Audio (by Barnabyh on 2011-09-03 15:36:06 GMT from United Kingdom)
That's great, at least we know that all this stuff about Alsa only playing once at a time is not true, at least not in every case.
Just wondering why it works for you but not me in Slack. I'm talking about playing several movies in SMplayer concurrently, different instances.
95 • re #92 what is volume? (by gnomic on 2011-09-03 21:43:45 GMT from New Zealand)
Hmmm, many great minds have contemplated this question, what is volume and where does it come from? Nobody really seems to know.
There's system volume as often seen with PulseAudio, often the one with not very much volume. There's the volume you get by direct access to the hardware ALSA-style, the one that actually seems to do something. And heaven help us, there's the volume you get by fiddling with individual apps. About all one can say is, good luck with that. Perhaps this is the downside of letting a hundred schools of thought contend, as opposed to the unitary approach of the major proprietary consumer operating systems.
Perhaps someone who knows can clarify why PulseAudio volume is so sad in the main? Every now and then I strike a distro where it does produce adequate output.
96 • Mandriva vs Mageia (by paul cork on 2011-09-04 09:02:20 GMT from Ireland)
i am quite disappointed with this Mageia vs Mandriva commentary, i have in the past number of years seen the mandriva team and community do some great work and a recent example being 2010.2 a fantastic and stable distro, i in the above comments not seen one comment stating that 2010.2 has extended support and if users are not happy with Mandriva 2011 how about returning back to 2010.2 and letting Mandriva community know this, i respect the Mageia fork however just remember where it came from and that it would not have existent if it were not for Mandriva, Mandriva is obviously in financial difficulty and i can not understand why attacking rather than working as a Linux community is being done a total shame and prob the reason why Linux as a Desktop will never go anymore than a hobby , to many distro's out there and not enough unity
97 • Slackware 13.37 only plays audio one at a time (by Anonymous Coward on 2011-09-04 12:36:30 GMT from Spain)
Barnabyh wrote:
------------------------------------
Just wondering why it works for you but not me in Slack. I'm talking about playing several movies in SMplayer concurrently, different instances.
------------------------------------
Well, I have tested playing MOC, two MPlayer videos and some additional stuff at the same time. No problems were found.
I have done nothing special with my install. The only particular difference between my Slackware and other Slackwares around is that mine is a partial install with only half the stuff (took KDEand XFCE out and I run Fluxbox only) . No audio configuration has been touched.
98 • where is the source code for StackFolder & rocketbar (by Bill on 2011-09-04 12:50:01 GMT from United States)
I assume these are foss but the source does not appear available (at east not easily)
has anyone used them on diff distro's?
99 • GNOME Shell & Rosa Labs bring back Windows 3.x ProgMan (by Ariszló on 2011-09-04 13:50:55 GMT from Hungary)
Early 2-o-teens eye candy with early 90s functionality:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Manager
100 • i586 distro (by michel on 2011-09-04 16:30:25 GMT from Russian Federation)
i have opensuse 11.3 running on the media box with via c3 samuel, presumably 11.4 will suit too ( and better). Wasn't able to install debian, it seems being not as i386-able as defined.
101 • re 97 - stripped Slackware (by Wondering on 2011-09-05 03:48:51 GMT from Canada)
Re. 97 by Anonymous Coward:
Sounds like you have down what I would like to do, but there are 2 killer KDE apps that keep my from removing it from my system: K3b and Konqueror. I guess the question is, if you have removed KDE from a Slackware system (or simply not installed it in the first place), what do you use to replace the functionality of those 2 programs? While I am perfectly comfortable running mkisofs and growisfs from the commandline, when you have some elaborate dvd configuration to create or edit, K3b offers unsurpassed control and ease of use that other similar apps simply lack. Need to toggle parameters such as Jolliette support, translation tables? The options are there and clearly defined. Other apps such as Brasero (at least last time I looked) appear to completely omit functionality for the sake of minimalist, non-frightening menus. What's more, the debugging output is there so you can see what commandline switches were used behind the interface (really helpful for getting to grips with all of growisofs commandline switches). And for web browsing, the combined functionality of an all-in-one web browser and file manager is a tremendous time saver. The ability to archive a web page as a web archive (*.war file - really just a tarball) is (to me at least) far superior to the the Firefox way of doing things. So just curious; how do YOU replace that functionality? If anyone can suggest workable alternatives without sacrificing this functionality, then I would gladly remove KDE from my system. For now, I use mainly Fluxbox, but still need KDE for those 2 apps, so suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
102 • Re#101 (by 123 on 2011-09-05 06:09:16 GMT from United States)
Maybe my experience might help:
I have used XcdRoast in the past. No KDE or Gnome, Pulse, etc.
For FireFox I use "Mozilla Archive Format" extension.
It saves web pages in *.maff files, which can be manipulated like zip-files.
Simply rename file.maff to file.zip and now it is basically a zipped web page.
Number of Comments: 102
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