 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 488, 24 December 2012 |
Welcome to this year's final issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Perhaps the biggest talking point of the year, at least among Linux fans, was the controversial Unity desktop as promoted by Ubuntu. Although, as expected, the vocal critics have dominated the forums and online blogs, it's quite possible that most Ubuntu users simply adjusted their desktop user's habits and continue focusing on their computing tasks without thinking too much about the user interface. So Unity really as bad as many claim? Jesse Smith went to investigate and came back with some interesting conclusions. In the news section, FreeBSD developers develop new virtualisation features for version 10, Linux Mint continues to dominate online polls, surveys and contests as the best Linux distro of 2012, and Free Software Foundation distributes copies of Trisquel GNU/Linux in Microsoft stores. Also in this issue, a review of Puppy Linux 5.4 "Slacko", an introduction to SparkyLinux, and the usual regular sections. As this is the last issue of this calendar year, we'd like to take this opportunity and wish all our readers happy festive season and an excellent start of the year 2013! Happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (35MB) and MP3 (51MB) formats
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Unity, what a concept!
 The Unity desktop environment is something which has intrigued me a lot over the past year or so. My interest has partly been in the strong reactions, for or against the environment, from Ubuntu users. The other key point of my interest has been that I've really only used the desktop in short bursts and, as a result, I don't feel I've really got a feel for it. Once every six months I will install Ubuntu, play with Unity for a few days, not long enough to unlearn the habits I've picked up from using other desktop environments, and then I'm off to another distribution and another desktop. In these quick looks at Unity I've certainly encountered things which rubbed me the wrong way, but I've also caught sight of design features which struck me as being beneficial. Or they would be beneficial if one were to use them long enough to form new work patterns.
At any rate, I wanted to find out how I would feel about Unity if I used it long enough to unlearn old habits, behaviour learned after over fifteen years of using desktops with approaches different from Unity's. With that in mind I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on one of my machines and tried to use Unity as much as I could while still taking time to test other Linux distributions.
Right upfront I want to say that it took about a week for the old habits to fade away and for using Unity's controls to become reflex rather than considered actions. Little things like moving the mouse pointer to the right of the window instead of the left have long been actions performed automatically and they were hard to break. This led to several days of jerking the mouse right, then back left to close windows or minimize them. There was also some trial and error at first finding the best way to handle window organization, launch applications and deal with window grouping on the launch bar. Typically, I have found I am most comfortable with setting up multiple virtual work spaces, populating them with related applications and switching between the work spaces. This allows for a small number of open windows in each space and avoids programs grouping on the task switcher. Unity, on the other hand, while it does allow for multiple work spaces, the desktop appears to be much better suited to having few windows open at a time and I slowly came around to typically using one workspace and grouping program windows together, switching between windows rather than work spaces.
Unity 12.04 - previewing multiple work spaces
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Another hurdle I jumped over, which did not take nearly as much time as I had originally feared, was the lack of configuration options. During most of my time with Linux I've tended to prefer KDE, an environment famous (or notorious) for being extremely flexible. Unity, on the other hand, takes a more one-size-fits-all approach and there are relatively few things to adjust, aside from short-cut keys and the wallpaper. Oddly enough, I found I didn't mind so much. While KDE's features and default settings practically require flexibility in order to let users mold the desktop into a desired shape, I found most of Unity's defaults were, well, sane. They weren't always my ideal, but Unity's features and controls were straight forward enough I rarely had the urge to change the environment, apart from the default colours.
Let's look at some of the features of Unity I enjoyed. The first thing I appreciated was the general layout of the desktop. Screens have been getting wider and shorter in recent years. Unity tries to compensate for this horizontal stretching by minimizing the use of features at the top & bottom of the screen and it puts the launch bar on the left side of the screen. Applications have their menus removed and (most) windows will display their window bars in the unified bar at the top of the screen. Having stretched screens has also led to increased mouse travel. On most desktops I move my mouse to the bottom-left of the screen to launch a program, to the top-left to access its menu and to the upper-right to close it. Potentially there is a lot of travel for the virtual rodent. Unity does a pretty good job of keeping most interface elements in the upper-left of the screen. The window controls, the application launcher and the program's menu all exist to the upper-left corner of the display. Once I got used to the positioning, it made for less travel and more action.
Originally I had expected the Unity Dash to be a major point either for or against Unity as a whole. A lot of focus is placed on the Dash, both by Canonical and by reviewers. However, I found I didn't use the Dash all that much. In fact, some days I'm pretty sure I didn't use it at all. The reason is simple: The Dash is primarily for searching for things, mostly applications and documents. I had most of the application launchers I used on a daily basis on the launch bar and I know where my data files are located. Since I didn't have to search for anything, I didn't need the Dash's primary function. The few times I did use the Dash it was typically to launch a program and, for that purpose, I found it worked well. I like being able to use my computer using either the mouse or the keyboard exclusively (depending on what I am doing) and I would rather not switch between input devices. The Dash was ideal for either case. It was easy to simply hit a button to bring up the Dash, type a few letters of the application name and hit Enter. Or, alternatively, click the Application lens and select my desired app.
An additional feature I enjoyed was a little thing, but it fit into my work flow really well. I get a lot of e-mail in the run of the day and, as the audio volume is generally turned down on my machine, my e-mail client can't notify me when new messages arrive via sound. When using KDE I find myself pausing, activating my Thunderbird window, glancing at the various inboxes and then minimizing the window. It just takes a second, but it adds up to many seconds over the course of the day and it breaks my focus. Unity has a nice feature in that the Thunderbird launch bar icon changes to indicate how many unread messages (if any) are present in the user's inboxes. Additionally, when new mail arrives the message notification icon in the upper-right of the screen turns from white to blue. This meant my peripheral vision would let me know when new mail arrived and I didn't have to manually check. In short, Unity let me focus on one task at a time and kept other applications from distracting me.
Unity 12.04 - new mail notification
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A feature of Unity I did not appreciate as much was the heads up display (HUD). On paper the HUD seems like a good idea. By default it is hidden and, with the tap of a button, a search box pops up and allows us to search the current application's menu bar. For example, I can tap the ALT key, type in "save as" and hit Enter. Once a person is accustomed to this it can be faster than taking one's hands off the keyboard, grabbing the mouse and browsing through the menu. The "save as" feature might not be an ideal example, but for applications with a great many menu items, the HUD makes finding things easy if we know its approximate name, but not its location in the menu tree. As I said, on paper, it has promise. In practice I ran into a few problems. The first is that the ALT key is the same key which brings up the application menu. This meant sometimes tapping ALT would highlight the menu bar and let me browse, other times it would activate the HUD. I also found that not all applications integrated with the HUD. This meant many little programs such as the text editor would let me use the HUD to navigate, but other programs would not.
Most of my issues with Unity were not concerns with the design, but rather the quality of the implementation. I ran both the regular 3-D version of Unity and the 2-D version. Both crashed frequently, almost on a daily basis and, after the environment had crashed once, it would continue to do so every few hours for the remainder of the day unless I rebooted the machine. Both the 2-D and 3-D environment worked much the same and looked about the same most of the time. The one important difference I noted was that the 3-D version would not properly handle short-cut keys, while the 2-D Unity would handled them just fine. Whenever I logged into the 3-D environment I would go into the desktop settings, enter my short-cuts and it would remember them for the remainder of the session. Once I logged out the short-cuts were forgotten and, the next day, I would have to re-enter my short-cuts again.
Another problem I had with the 3-D version of Unity was that it chewed up a lot of my CPU usage. Quite often, while my applications were sitting idle, Unity 3-D would use from 40% to 80% of my CPU resources. The Unity 2-D environment, with the same programs open, wouldn't use more than 2% of the CPU. My last technical concern with Unity was the way it handled applications with multiple windows, the best example I have being the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). When working with the GIMP I found performing almost any action on an image would cause the active window to lose focus. This greatly slowed down work and, whenever I went to save an image in GIMP, the application would crash. This bug occurred every time I tried to save an image, but would only occur when running Unity. When I switched to the KDE desktop GIMP's windows behaved as expected and I experienced no crashes.
Unity 12.04 - software crash
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This brings me to another problem, one which isn't Unity's fault, but only really shows it head when Unity is being used. Some applications take steps to manage their own window (or windows). These are generally programs not found in the distribution's repositories, they are third-party software and not under control of the Ubuntu developers. Programs such as Opera and Steam will set up their own tab or window controls. This means the window/tab controls will be on the wrong side of the window and may not always work as other applications do under Unity. This is due to the application making assumptions on how the environment usually works and, when the programs are running on Unity, the guesses aren't correct.
One last thing I would like to touch on is how easy I found Unity to explore once I managed to put aside my old habits. A few days in I started to notice my work flow was getting smoother and I was making use of little aspects of the desktop I had not previously realized existed. As an example, one day early in the experiment I had many programs open and my launch bar was quite full. I moved the mouse pointer over to the sidebar, scrolled the mouse wheel until the application I wanted slid under the mouse and then clicked on it. Afterward it occurred to me that I hadn't consciously known I could manipulate the icons on the launch bar in that fashion, I had just done it. I further discovered I could bring up previews of all grouped application windows in a similar, unconscious way. Bumping into Unity's features this way makes me think new computer users, ones without my years of ingrained habits, would probably take to Unity easier than I did.
My conclusion, after using Unity as my primary desktop for a month, is that it is a pretty good desktop. It is a bit heavier than most traditional desktops, but not overly so. On the right hardware Unity 2-D runs pretty well, though I wouldn't want to try running it on a lower-end system. The design is mostly good and the only times I felt Unity and I were not getting along (again, from a design perspective) was when I would try to juggle many windows at once. Unity seems designed with the idea most computer users will have few programs open at any given time and, as the number of windows increased navigation became proportionally more difficult. To be perfectly honest, I would probably still be using Unity 2-D after my month-long experiment if it wasn't for the technical glitches. The design, as I've said, was to my liking, but the frequent desktop crashes, the strange behaviour when an application juggled multiple windows and the GIMP crashes finally drove me away. I'm now back to using KDE most of the time and I'm in the process of unlearning the ways of Unity. It will make for a few awkward days, but the stable environment will be worth the cost of my transition.
I'm not trying to sway people toward or away from Unity. This experience grew solely out of my own curiosity and I scratched my experimental itch. Often I feel that I am guilty of making up my mind too quickly and this was my chance to really immerse myself in a technology to see if it would win me over. After my month of Unity I came around to the idea that it is probably a good environment for many people, especially people who use their computers for a few tasks (such as e-mail, web, chatting) at a time. It will probably be a good environment for me too, once the remaining bugs are fixed.
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| Reviews (by Jesse Smith) |
First look at Puppy Linux 5.4 "Slacko"
 As we are coming up on the end of the year I want to take a look at a project which is unique and outside the mainstream of Linux projects. I don't think any project embodies distinct and useful technology quite as well as Puppy Linux does. Puppy's 5.4 "Slacko" edition was released recently and it struck me as an interesting and fun way to wrap up the year.
The Slacko edition of Puppy Linux is built using software packages from the Slackware Linux distribution. In this case, Puppy 5.4 uses Slackware's 14.0 repositories. This gives Puppy users a collection of software which should run on a wide range of hardware, including older machines, while providing modern versions of applications. The Slacko edition comes in three flavours: "Firefox", "Opera" and "Opera with PAE support". I opted to download the ISO labelled "Firefox". The ISO file is a mere 160MB in size, making for a quick download and the image fits easily on either a CD or small thumb drive.
Puppy Linux 5.4 "Slacko" - the welcome screen
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Booting from the Puppy media brings us to a desktop laid out in the traditional style. At the bottom of the screen we find our application menu and task switcher. Near the top of the display we find icons for launching many of Puppy's useful applications. It is noteworthy that it is Puppy's style to label icons based on what a program does rather than with its name. This makes it fairly easy for newcomers to find what they need. The name of a web browser or e-mail client may change from one operating system to another, but "Mail", "Web" and "Help" are fairly clear in their respective purposes.
Shortly after logging in a welcome window appears letting us set our preferred language, keyboard layout, time zone and screen resolution. Once we have made any required adjustments a second window appears explaining how we can get on-line, launch programs and find help. Following the instructions for getting on-line we can launch a wizard which walks us through selecting our network interface and it will assist us with inputting any settings needed to connect to the Internet.
Puppy Linux 5.4 "Slacko" - adjusting settings
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The Puppy system installer is amazingly flexible. It allows us to install the distribution to a number of different mediums, including to a USB drive, an internal disk, to a SSD card... just about anywhere with more capacity than a floppy disk. The installer next offers to launch GParted to help us adjust the layout of the disk and we're given tips as to what kind of partitions work best with Puppy. On the next screen we decide on which partition to install Puppy and then provide the location of the source files. In my case the distribution's files were on a CD and the installer was able to automatically locate them. We are then asked if we would like to perform a full installation, such as we would with other Linux distributions, or we can opt to perform a "frugal" install. This latter option copies just a few key files to the destination partition and allows Puppy to co-exist peacefully with other operating systems on the same disk partition. After the installer copies the required files over to the hard drive we are told that we may need to install a boot loader separately. We are provided with the menu location of the GRUB configuration tool which guides us through placing the boot loader on the local machine.
Puppy Linux comes with a lot of configuration and system admin tools, most of which can be accessed through a control panel called PupControl. There are many tools in the control panel and sometimes there appears to be a bit of overlap, for example, there is a separate Flash player installer from the package manager. Still, it is impressive how many of these configuration apps have been included. Users are able to adjust the network connection, firewall rules, and scan network ports. There is an entire group of tools dedicated to working with local hard drives, another section for altering the look & feel of the graphical environment. Yet another section deals with hardware devices, such as printers and digital cameras. There are apps for adjusting the system time, encrypting files, gathering information on our hardware and checking the dependencies of installed software bundles. Really, the PupControl panel is our jump off point to accomplishing almost everything with Puppy and it is, luckily for us, clearly organized.
The package manager is unusual in that it pulls software from several projects' repositories and lets us filter packages based on repository, category and software type. Once we have selected a specific package we would like to download we need to manually select which mirror from which to pull the package. I have found not all mirrors contain all packages, which can cause an error and send us back to manually select a different download location. The package manager is also unusual in that we select software to download one package at a time. This can make installing multiple packages a slow process. Fortunately I found the software which comes on the Puppy CD was able to cover most of my needs.
Puppy Linux, being a small distribution, comes with a surprising amount of applications. The Slacko CD contains the Firefox web browser, the Sylpheed e-mail client, the Gnumeric spreadsheet application and AbiWord for word processing. There is a calendar and appointment app, a GNOME front-end for MPlayer, a text editor and two image editing programs. The XChat IRC client is included, along with a network configuration wizard, a CD player and disc burning software. There is a PDF viewer, multimedia converter app, backup tools, a disk manager and a program for configuring the firewall. There are also graphical tools for giving the user information on their hardware, there is an archive manager and an audio disc ripper. Underneath it all Puppy uses the 3.2 version of the Linux kernel. Many of the programs we have by default are designed to be small rather than familiar or even full featured, however they generally get the job done. People wishing additional functionality can download their preferred applications from Slackware repositories as Puppy Slacko maintains binary compatibility with Slackware 14.0.
Puppy Linux 5.4 "Slacko" - PupControl and the project's documentation
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One thing which separates Puppy Linux from most other distributions which run from live media is that Puppy defaults to giving the user root privileges. This, combined with the automatic login feature, means Puppy is effectively a single-user distribution. It also means responsibility for the safety of the machine is solely in the hands of the user. Personally I'm not interested in getting into whether this is good or bad; whether convenience should trump common security practices. I will say it is in line with the way Puppy operates, trying to give the user the most power (and responsibility) without any hurdles.
I tried running Puppy Linux on two physical machines, a desktop box (dual-core 2.8 GHz CPU, 6 GB of RAM, Radeon video card, Realtek network card) and my HP laptop (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 4 GB of RAM, Intel video and Intel wireless card). In addition I ran Puppy in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The results were quite varied. On my laptop Puppy worked perfectly. It booted quickly, the desktop was responsive, all of my hardware was properly detected and I had no problem getting on-line. My display was set to my laptop's maximum resolution and volume was set at a pleasant medium level. On the other hand, Puppy refused to boot on my desktop box. The distribution would lock up almost immediately upon starting the boot process. I've encountered other distributions which would only boot on this desktop machine when given certain kernel parameters such as "nomodeset". Puppy was not so forgiving and I never did get it running on the desktop. Running the little distro in VirtualBox worked fairly well. Again, Puppy properly set up its screen resolution, got me on-line and worked smoothly. My only complaint when running Puppy in the virtual machine was that the guest's mouse pointer constantly lost sync with my host's mouse pointer, which made interacting with graphical applications a literal "hit or miss" situation. Once installed on a machine I found Puppy used only about 90MB of memory when sitting at the desktop.
In the past I would say my experiences with Puppy have been good, but not great. The little distro has always striven to find a balance between functionality and a tiny footprint. And, in the past, I've felt the project achieved this balance, but in doing so made some tasks awkward. Puppy has a style that is very much its own and people who have used more mainstream distributions may have found Puppy a bit too different, a little too alien in the way it does things. Also in the past I found the occasional bug which put a speed bump in the experience. This time around I am happy to report my experience with Puppy has been pleasantly smooth. I don't think there have been any large changes, but perhaps a few small, evolutionary improvements. For instance, I recall in the past fighting with the package manager, constantly having trouble downloading new packages. This time around I only ran into one instance where a mirror didn't have the package I wanted and I quickly found another which did. If I recall correctly the first time I used Puppy I had trouble getting on-line using my wireless card, this time getting on-line was handled flawlessly.
What really stands out about Puppy 5.4 "Slacko" are the same two things which stand out with every release. The first is that Puppy is fast. The distribution is surprisingly small for all of the functionality it contains. Despite having an attractive desktop and plenty of applications, Puppy requires little RAM and runs very quickly. The other thing is somewhat subtle and that is the attention the developers have paid to documentation. Not on-line documentation, but local documentation built into the Puppy applications. Every step in the installation process and each screen in the configuration process explain the user's options and may even give suggestions or warnings. With just a little technical background a new user can pick up Puppy and use it without wondering what will happen next and probably without ever seeking out further documentation. As someone who generally does not use Puppy, this focus on hand holding without getting in the way is ideal and it really sets Puppy apart from other lightweight Linux solutions. This is a distribution I can recommend for people with old hardware or as a travel CD for people on the go.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
FreeBSD talks virtualisation, Linux Mint wins "best distro" awards, FSF hypes Trisquel as best Windows alternative
 While most FreeBSD users are eagerly awaiting the imminent release of version 9.1, the project's current branch continues to evolve at a rapid pace. FreeBSD developer Ivan Voras even claims that version 10 will be "the most exciting release in years": "There's been a lot of maturing of technology for FreeBSD 10 - lots of new features which make this release the most exciting one in years. Here are some of my personal highlights. There's been a lot of development in the field of virtualization. FreeBSD has almost neglected 'full' virtualization technology (relying on home-brewed jails/vnet), which made it a poor choice for modern deployments, but that is about to change. New stuff which will (probably, but nothing's certain) see the light of day in FreeBSD 10 is: bhyve - the native BSD hypervisor; it will be able to run at least the FreeBSD kernel fully virtualized, and possibly (please donate, or help to make this happen) also other generic operating systems; virtio drivers - developed alongside byhve; the drivers will be in the GENERIC kernel which will make it usable out of the box with any hypervisor supporting this interface - including, but not limited to, byhve, KVM and VirtualBox...."
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 With the year 2012 drawing to an end, it's time for the usual year-end recapitulations. In the world of Linux distribution, this means finding the best release among the hundreds that were uploaded to FTP servers throughout the year. And it seems it's no coincidence that Linux Mint finds itself sitting pretty on top of DistroWatch page hit ranking charts for the second year in a row. Tux Radar: "Mint 13's MATE and Cinnamon desktops complement each other well, and have scored repeatedly for the distro throughout the tournament. The desktops, together with Mint's set of custom tools for every desktop task, including a WUBI-based Windows installer, make it a formidable opponent. There's more to Mint than pleasing new desktop users, though. Besides the codec-laden releases, the distro also produces editions without this fluff, which makes it legal for distributions in virtually every country in the world." Dedoimedo: "Linux Mint has regained its place at the top of the charts, after falling down a whole of four places, mostly because of the unholy Gnome 3 desktop. Since, the dev team has ditched this failure, and the quality and execution of the operating system have climbed up to their expected levels."
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 Software freedom is a noble concept that many of us try to adhere to as much as possible, even though we might take a shortcut or two from time to time. Still, most of us appreciate the enormous amount of good work the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been doing to promote its goals and to protect us from commercial interests of big software monopolies. Last week FSF even gave away free copies of Trisquel GNU/Linux to the visitors of a Microsoft store: "Today, FSF activists visited a local Microsoft store during its "Tech for Tots" session to wish passersby happy holidays with copies of the Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8. The activists were accompanied by a gnu (free software's buffalo-like mascot) and sported Santa hats in the spirit of the season. Their action drew smiles from mall-goers who had expected to see costumed people giving gifts, but not quite like this. On its campaign site, the FSF criticizes Windows 8 for restricting computer users' freedom to modify and share the software on their computers. This action follows a similar one at a Windows 8 launch event in October, when the FSF made international news announcing its campaign to ask computer users to skip Windows 8 in favor of free software."
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| Released Last Week |
Clonezilla Live 2.0.1-15
Steven Shiau has announced the release of Clonezilla Live 2.0.1-15, a new stable release of the distribution's live CD with specialist open-source utilities designed for disk cloning tasks: "This release of Clonezilla live (2.0.1-15) includes minor enhancements and bug fixes. Enhancements and changes: the underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded, this release is based on the Debian 'sid' repository as of 2012-12-17; Linux kernel was updated to 3.2.35; module floppy was listed in the blacklist, the floppy is normally useless but if it exists, it might cause the disk detection delay, if floppy is required, a user still can run 'modprobe floppy' to load it; Catalan language was added and language files were updated. Bug fixes: force to run command 'partprobe' after local disk is inserted in prep-ocsroot; to avoid a GRUB 1 on ext4 issue, running the grub-install from the restored OS should be tried first...." Read the rest of the release announcement for a full changelog.
PC-BSD 9.1
Kris Moore has announced the release of PC-BSD 9.1, a new version of the project's desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD: "The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce that version 9.1 is now available. This release includes many exciting new features and enhancements, such as a vastly improved system installer, ZFS 'Boot Environment' support, TrueOS (a FreeBSD-based server with additional power-user utilities), and much more. Highlights: FreeBSD 9.1; new system installer, greatly simplified for desktop and server installs; support for ZFS mirror during installation; support for SWAP on ZFS, allowing entire disk ZFS installation; support for setting additional ZFS data-set options, such as compression, noexec; Warden jail management integrated into system; support for Warden to create Linux jails...." Read the rest of the release announcement for further details.
IPFire 2.11 Core 65
Michael Tremer has announced the release of IPFire 2.11 Core 65, the latest update of the project's specialist firewall distribution: "Today, the last core update for IPFire 2.11 in this year has been released. It is the 65th of the IPFire 2 series and comes with some new features and bug fixes. Alexander Marx developed a graphical interfaces with help of which one can configure OpenVPN roadwarrior clients individually. It is possible to add routes, different DNS servers, static IP addresses to individual roadwarrior clients. One may also add networks from which IP addresses may be assigned to clients. Those subnets and static IP addresses can be used to create firewall rules and permit clients only to access certain parts of a network. More work in this area will be released in the future." More information on new features can be found in the release announcement.
SparkyLinux 2.0.1
Paweł Pijanowski has announced the release of SparkyLinux 2.0.1, a lightweight Debian-based distribution featuring a customised LXDE desktop and plenty of games: "SparkyLinux 2.0.1 'GameOver'. No, it's not the end of the project. It's brand new release. This idea was waiting in my Tomboy for the whole year. Finally I got back to work and three weeks later it's ready to go. It was built on the latest release of SparkyLinux 2.0 and it's designed for games players. Many applications have been removed from the system and replaced by games. The main system is based on Debian 'Wheezy' and has LXDE as the default desktop. All packages has been synchronised with Debian's 'testing' repositories as of 2012-12-12. What's under the hood: Linux kernel 3.2, LXDE, Iceweasel, VLC, Leafpad, Pidgin, Transmission, XChat, Flash, Java, multimedia codecs, VLC plugin for Iceweasel...." See the release announcement for a full list of included games and a screenshot.
ROSA 2012 "Desktop.Fresh"
Konstantin Kochereshkin has announced the release of ROSA 2012 "Desktop.Fresh" edition, a desktop-oriented Linux distribution with the latest KDE desktop and a variety of home-made applications, utilities and tweaks: "ROSA is pleased to announce a new operating system for desktops - ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012. The product is targeted at enthusiasts who are likely to appreciate the wide choice of fresh software components. ROSA Fresh edition is a non-commercial product distributed free of charge. The name underlines the fact that the system contains 'fresh' versions of user software and system components (compared to enterprise editions of ROSA). Among the major advantages one should mention excellent state of all repositories, stable work and fast boot of the system as a whole." See the full release announcement which includes a large number of screenshots and other information.
Zentyal 3.0-1
José Antonio Calvo has announced the release of Zentyal 3.0-1, an updated build of the project's server distribution based on Ubuntu: "We are glad to let you know that a new Zentyal 3.0-1 installer is now available. This installer includes a new compilation of packages with all the bug fixes and Ubuntu system updates since the release of the first 3.0 installer. Moreover, we would like to highlight the following: this installer already includes the final Samba 4.0.0 package; it comes with improved UTF-8 support - this is specially useful for those who are not using Zentyal in English, but please note that if you are already experiencing issues with UTF-8, upgrading may not be enough and probably you need to re-install the server in order to fix them; this installer also allows to introduce your Zentyal account credentials from the beginning of the installation to automatically register your server." See the release announcement for more information and upgrade instructions.
Gentoo Linux 20121221
Robin Johnson has announced the release of Gentoo Linux 20121221, an up-to-date live DVD showcasing the current cutting-edge state of the popular source-based distribution: "Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new live DVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers, ready to rock the end of the world (or at least southern solstice). The live DVD features a superb list of packages: Linux kernel 3.6.8, X.Org Server 1.12.4, KDE 4.9.4, GNOME 3.4.2, Xfce 4.10, Fluxbox 1.3.2, Firefox 17.0.1, LibreOffice 3.6.4, GIMP 2.8.2, Blender 2.64a, Amarok 2.6.0, MPlayer 2.2.0, Chromium 24.0.1312.35 and much more. There is no new FAQ or artwork the 20121221 release, but you can still get the 12.0 artwork plus DVD cases and covers for the 12.0 release. Special features: ZFSOnLinux; writable file systems using Aufs so you can emerge new packages." The release announcement.
Cinnarch 2012.12.21
Alex Filgueira has announced the release of Cinnarch 2012.12.21, a desktop Linux distribution that combines Arch Linux with Cinnamon (a fork of GNOME Shell): "Cinnarch 2012.12.21 released. This is a minor release with minor changes, including: automatic selection of fastest mirror; launch GParted from the CLI installer; removed deprecated hooks in mkinitcpio; fixed wrong behaviour with keymap selection on installed system; removed some packages that aren't necessary - Eye of GNOME image viewer (Shotwell already does that), Totem video player (Xnoise already does that and also people tend to use other video player solutions), Cheese (not necessary); fixed touchpad configuration to have vertical scroll from the start. Packages in Live medium updated to: Linux kernel 3.6.10; X.Org Server 1.13.1, GNOME 3.6.2, Cinnamon 1.6.7, Nemo 1.1.2, pacmanXG 4.13.9." Here is the release announcement with screenshots.
Linux Mint 14 "Xfce"
Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 14 "Xfce" edition: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 14 Xfce. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment which aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly. This edition features all the improvements from the latest Linux Mint release on top of an Xfce 4.10 desktop. It comes with some of the popular applications found in other Linux Mint editions such as Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, GIMP, Banshee, Pidgin and XChat, but it also replaces many aspects of the desktop with more lightweight Xfce alternatives: Thunar is the default file browser; Xfce Terminal is the default terminal application; Xfburn is the default CD/DVD burner application; Ristretto is the default image viewer; Blueman is used by default for Bluetooth support." Read the release announcement and visit the what's new page for further information.
pfSense 2.0.2
Chris Buechler has announced the release of pfSense 2.0.2, an updated version of the project's specialist FreeBSD-based operating system for firewalls: "pfSense 2.0.2 is a maintenance release with some bug and security fixes since the 2.0.1 release. You can upgrade from any previous release to 2.0.2. Base OS updated to 8.1-RELEASE-p13 to address FreeBSD security advisories. Added a warning to PPTP VPN configuration page - PPTP is no longer considered a secure VPN technology because it relies upon MS-CHAPv2 which has been compromised. If you continue to use PPTP be aware that intercepted traffic can be decrypted by a third party, so it should be considered unencrypted. We advise migrating to another VPN type such as OpenVPN or IPsec. Fix reference to PPTP secondary RADIUS server shared secret. PPTP 1.x to 2.x configuration upgrade fixes." See the detailed release announcement for a complete list of security and bug fixes.
Netrunner 12.12
Clemens Toennies has announced the release of Netrunner 12.12, a new version of the Kubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution featuring the KDE desktop with integrated GNOME applications: "Netrunner 'Dryland' third edition (version 12.12) has arrived. It is based on Kubuntu 12.10 and comes with the following features: GNU/Linux OS kernel 3.5, KDE 4.9.3, Mozilla Firefox 17 with KDE integration, Mozilla Thunderbird 17, VLC 2.0.4, LibreOffice 3.6.2, GIMP 2.8, Krita 2.5.3, Gwenview 4.9.3, Skype 4.1, Kdenlive 0.9.2, Telepathy Messenger, Samba Mounter (easy NAS setup), Webaccounts (social accounts integration), Runners-ID (free and libre cloud storage and music streaming), Muon Discover 1.4, VirtualBox 4.1.18, WINE 1.5.19, and much more. If you have any questions or need further help, please use our forums." Here is the brief release announcement.
Netrunner - a Kubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution
(full image size: 1,401kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
KNOPPIX 7.0.5
Klaus Knopper has announced the release of KNOPPIX 7.0.5, the final update of the KNOPPIX 7.0 line: "Version 7.0.5 of KNOPPIX is based on the usual picks from Debian stable and newer desktop packages from Debian testing and Debian unstable. It uses Linux kernel 3.6.11 and X.Org 7.7 (Core 1.12.4) for supporting current computer hardware. Optional 64-bit kernel via boot option 'knoppix64', supporting systems with more than 4 GB of RAM and chroot to 64-bit installations for system rescue tasks (DVD edition only). LibreOffice 3.6.4, GIMP 2.8, Chromium 22.0.1229.94 and Iceweasel 10.0.11, LXDE (default) with the PCManFM 1.0 file manager, KDE 4.8 (boot option 'knoppix desktop=kde'), GNOME 3.4 (boot option 'knoppix desktop=gnome'). Wine version 1.5 for integration of Windows-based programs...." Read the rest of the release notes for boot options, re-mastering notes and other details.
Wifislax 4.3
Wifislax 4.3 has been released. Wifislax is a Slackware-based live CD containing a variety of security and forensics tools. The current release has been in development for six months, during which time the product underwent significant improvements in terms of system scripts, clean-up and hard disk installation. Wifislax also boasts an impressive range of WiFi utilities and drivers. The live system offers a choice of three different desktops - KDE 4 (the default), Xfce and Openbox, and it provides a choice between standard and PAE kernels. The Linux kernel is at version 3.5.7, well tested for support of the included wireless network card drivers. Additionally, the project develops a number of extra modules (in XZM format) that can extend the system capabilities as desired. For more information please see the full release announcement (in Spanish only) with useful links and screenshots.
Wifislax 4.3 - a Slackware-based distribution with security and forensics tools
(full image size: 1,086kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Jibbed 6.0
Zafer Aydogan has announced the release of Jibbed 6.0, a live CD built from the recently-released NetBSD 6.0: "Announcing Jibbed 6.0. The new version of the live CD is ready for download. A novelty is that this release contains only an image for 64-bit systems (amd64). Everything else remains the same. Jibbed is a bootable live CD based on the NetBSD operating system that works directly from a CD without the need for a hard drive. Automatic hardware detection provides support for a wide variety of graphics cards, sound cards, network interfaces, and USB devices. This live CD showcases a complete NetBSD environment, including compiler sets, and provides features like tmpfs to simulate read-write access on read-only media. The capabilities range from use by experts as a rescue environment to first-time users learning UNIX. The live CD runs fine in VirtualBox, VMware or QEMU." Here is the brief release announcement.
Jibbed 6.0 - a NetBSD-based live CD with Xfce
(full image size: 1,030kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Linux Mint 14 "KDE"
Following the recent release of the "Xfce" flavour of Linux Mint 14, the project's latest "KDE" edition is now also available: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 14 KDE. KDE is a vibrant, innovative, advanced, modern looking and full-featured desktop environment. This edition features all the improvements from the latest Linux Mint release on top of KDE 4.9 which features many improvements. Dolphin: back and forward buttons; ability to show metadata such as ratings, tags, image and file sizes, author, date; grouping and sorting by metadata properties; better Places panel; improved search support; synchronization with terminal location. Konsole: ability to search for a text selection using KDE web shortcuts; new 'Change Directory To' feature when a folder is dropped on the Konsole window...." Read the release announcement and visit the what's new page for additional details.
Slax 7.0.1
Tomáš Matějíček has announced the release of Slax 7.0.1, a bug-fix update of the Slackware-based live CD: "For those who can't leave their computers even during Christmas (as I am apparently one of them), here is an update for Slax, version 7.0.1. Changes include mostly bug fixes, kernel upgrade, Broadcom SoftMac support, and textmode support for keyboard mapping and fonts. Raw changelog: Fixed double-click on location bar in Firefox; fixed Slax buildscript download, it was not working in a subdirectory with spaces; introduced bashrc with colors for Konsole; Xterm no longer needs helper in xterm.bin,; allow underscore and plus sign characters in buildscript names; fixed deactivation of modules which were activated automatically during boot; upgraded to Linux Kernel 3.6.11...." Read the brief release announcement for a complete changelog.
Manjaro Linux 0.8.3
Carl Duff has announced the release of Manjaro Linux 0.8.3, an Arch-based distribution with a choice of Cinnamon 1.6.7, KDE 4.9.4, MATE 1.4.2 and Xfce 4.10 desktops: "Manjaro Linux 0.8.3 has been unleashed. The core system has been upgraded to boost performance and responsiveness, resulting in even faster start-up, shut-down, and operational speeds. The official Manjaro repositories have been transformed with an abundance of updated and brand-new packages. Many software packages themselves have been exclusively patched by the Manjaro team for stability. Accessibility has also been enhanced. New user-friendly desktop tools have been added to easily manage user accounts and to configure the system. A full and comprehensive 66-page user guide has been produced." Read the rest of the release announcement for more details.
* * * * *
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 |
New distributions added to database
* * * * *
New distributions added to waiting list
- Broletto GNU/Linux. Broletto GNU/Linux is an Italian Debian-based distribution featuring the LXDE desktop. The project's website is in Italian.
- ESCLinux. ESCLinux is a Debian-based Linux live CD. It features a modern GNOME desktop, with everything needed to play and create interactive fiction games (Inform, Tads, Hugo, Alan, JACL), and also to read, listen to and create ABC music. It can also be used as a server for accessing those resources from other computers on the network (through the X display, VNC or Samba shares).
- mateu. Mateu is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution featuring the MATE desktop.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 7 January 2013. To contact the authors please send email to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, suggestions and corrections: news, donations, distribution submissions, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (feedback and suggestions: podcast edition)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Unity desktop (by Rajesh Ganesan on 2012-12-24 10:08:51 GMT from India)
Excellent review of Unity Desktop. I totally agree with you. Except for frequent crashes, the destop is really good. I think, users should try it patiently, before coming to a conclusion.
Try uninstalling tracker, apport and update notifier. After this, my system is totally crash free :)
2 • Unity desktop (by Wolf Mondschein on 2012-12-24 10:37:10 GMT from Germany)
Kudos very elaborate review of Unity, me feelings exactly, one annotation, for me unity 3d has one major setback as VNC software seems to be unable to refresh the screen or doesn't get the notice to do so!
Did you have the Amazon Lens removed. A major nuisance though money has to come from somewhere! (over the rainbow)
3 • Unity (by Wine Curmudgeon on 2012-12-24 11:19:51 GMT from United States)
Another excellent review, Jesse. I've never understood the venom against Unity; if you don't like it, don't use it. It's not as if someone is forcing them to run it.
4 • Unity review (by Ger Mulvey on 2012-12-24 11:32:24 GMT from Ireland)
I agree with Rajesh, after uninstalling apport the crash reports cease. I'm not certain most of the reports were crashes tbh. Also running full on compiz effects too and to be totally honest I have found unity to be fairly usable.
5 • Linux Mint Debian (by Candide on 2012-12-24 12:14:03 GMT from Taiwan)
As most have probably noticed, Linux Mint 14 XFCE and KDE editions were released in the past week, while the Cinnamon version was released last month. Although I'm hoping I'm wrong, it looks like a new release of Linux Mint Debian will not be forthcoming. That's a pity - currently, it's my favorite distro. Of course, being based on Debian-testing, I can simply keep updating my existing installation, it's not a problem. The bad part is that when I'm doing a new installation for someone (which I do fairly often), I've now got about a gigabyte of updates to download straight away. I'd sure appreciate an updated release.
About Unity - I've tried it, it's cute, but doesn't really attract me, especially since it seems to be exclusively an Ubuntu thing. But if others like it, great. Different strokes for different folks.
Although not mentioned in this week's DWW, version 1.0 of the Enlightenment 17 desktop was just released. Good stuff, and the base underlying Bodhi Linux. I wish that more distros would latch onto that - far more interesting to me than Unity.
cheers,
Candide
6 • Unity (by Nikos on 2012-12-24 12:19:43 GMT from Greece)
Personally i like unity. I think it is much more usable than the gnome shell.
What prevents me from using it though is that its bloated and only available in ubuntu.
Last time i had tried to use ubuntu on my netbook vlc couldn't play matroska files. The same machine flies with debian, arch or slackware loaded.
I do not know if unity is to blame for this or ubuntu is just bloated, which sounds unlikely.
7 • @5 E17 (by Nikos on 2012-12-24 12:22:07 GMT from Greece)
Good catch. Very surprising E17 is not even mentioned in DWW.
E17 is better and more complete than any other lightweight desktop environment (xfce,lxde,razor-qt)
8 • lol @ Ubuntu crash (by Nobody Special on 2012-12-24 12:40:45 GMT from Canada)
pop-up, it's becoming an all too familiar frequent occurrence, embarrassing.
9 • Unity (by laofzu on 2012-12-24 13:06:25 GMT from United States)
Could live with it if I had to, but still no decent weather application. Also, switching from one open application to another is annoying and slow. Good news, Mate is easily installable providing a fine substitute.
10 • Unity Crashing (by PizzaPanther on 2012-12-24 13:14:17 GMT from United States)
I don't have a big problem with Unity except for the constant crashing and CPU usage. I stopped using Ubuntu a year ago (11.10) because it crashed constantly with Unity. I tried it again this year with 12.04 and 12.10 and it still sucks. So I wouldn't hold your breath. For me Unity only seems to work good on Intel video cards (ran Ubuntu on a Chromebox). If you have a real video card your out of luck.
It's sad Ubuntu sucks so much now. It used to be my favorite desktop.
11 • Puppy Slacko (by Barnabyh on 2012-12-24 14:13:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
Nice, this week we get two reviews for one! I've been suing Slacko now since last year November and went through all its updates. 5.3.3 was a bit unstable here and crashed even, minor changes in the layout between releases are sometimes irritating.
There's also a difference between the different Puppy's, I noticed the ones built on Ubuntu have a different application set available in the repos. The package manager could use some serious work and more frequent package updates. Refreshing the database the updates aren't always saved, but that seems remedied in 5.4. You're always free to download a package seperately from the main distributions' repos, so compatibility is pretty good. It's easy to upgrade versions too, just extract the new SFS and vmlinuz over the old ones. Minimal maintenance. I would never have thought so but Puppy has become one of my favourite distributions.
Saluki's also nice if you prefer Xfce and a few very considered customizations to the menu and file dialogues. Or LXpup built on Slacko, or Fatdog64 for, you know, 64-bit.
Blimey, I sound like a fanboy. I sure don't like it that much. -)
12 • @3: WineCurmodgeon (by dragonmouth on 2012-12-24 14:24:19 GMT from United States)
"if you don't like it, don't use it. It's not as if someone is forcing them to run it."
The problem is, if one likes Ubuntu, one IS forced to use it.
13 • What I still don't understand... (by GJones on 2012-12-24 14:37:43 GMT from United States)
Is why Unity (and Gnome 3) must rely so much on OpenGL compositing.
The 3D situation on Linux is still terrible. Especially on low-end graphics chipsets, like the ubiquitous embedded Intel ones. Blur effects are very slow, there's lots of lagging and lots of artifacts, and framerates are decidedly worse than on Windows.
Why build on Linux's weakest points? Especially when most of Unity's fancy stuff doesn't require 3D, as we saw with Unity 2D? (And as we continue to see with E16, E17, and heck, even Fvwm?)
14 • Linux Mint Debian (by skin27 on 2012-12-24 14:45:25 GMT from Netherlands)
"it looks like a new release of Linux Mint Debian will not be forthcoming". Maybe I missed your point, but as LMDE is a rolling release there are no releases in the traditional sense. Update pack 6 was released last week (http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2254) and will be on a snapshot iso in January.
15 • Puppy (by hayden on 2012-12-24 15:03:06 GMT from United States)
I have run Puppy on MANY older machines going back to 2.14 and a Pentium running <200MHz and found it to be the most likely to boot of Linux distros. In ancient times I used to keep a DOS partition for when Windows screwed up and now I keep a Puppy CD handy for when anything screws up. The most common catastrophe is tinkering with a distro that messes up the MBR without asking.
Readers might be wondering how a frugal install can do much if it only installs a few files. These include something similar to a tarball that includes all the files on the CD or in a regular Linux install. I don't like the idea that you lose everything if ONE file gets corrupted, or that I can't access any files in Puppy when I boot another distro, but this frugal install was needed on the oldest machine I use Puppy on where I have to boot from a floppy!
16 • @12: Dragonmouth (by Kelsey on 2012-12-24 15:05:56 GMT from United States)
"If one likes Ubuntu, one IS forced to use it." Only for the amount of time it takes to find and install a different desktop environment.
17 • Unity, Netrunner release (by Duskfire on 2012-12-24 15:12:03 GMT from United States)
@12: dragonmouth
"The problem is, if one likes Ubuntu, one IS forced to use it."
Nobody is forced to use it. Installing another desktop may not be obvious unless you have a friend suggest it, but saying you are forced to use Unity is only slightly less hyperbolic than saying everyone is FORCED to use Windows because that's what most laptops have installed already.
I understand that the typical person to whom Canonical is marketing Ubuntu is very unlikely to change away from Unity but that's a far cry from saying that they have no other choice.
On another topic, I just installed Netrunner's newest release to do a review, partly because although I love Mint, I need the use of a virtual keyboard and "caribou" (the GNOME accessibility solution) didn't want to come up after I installed and enabled it. I had to add "kvbd" to the Cinnamon release, along with other KDE components.
Netrunner has already made a very positive impression on me (including many games in the install helped there).
18 • Desktop environments (by Jesse on 2012-12-24 15:32:38 GMT from Canada)
>> "Did you have the Amazon Lens removed. A major nuisance though money has to come from somewhere! (over the rainbow)"
I was running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for my experiment with Unity. At that time the Amazon ad feature had not yet been added to the Dash.The ad feature didn't arrive until 12.10.
I would like to wish everyone a happy holiday (or if you don't celebrate a holiday this time of year, then I wish you a pleasant conclusion to 2012).
Someone e-mailed me this morning and asked if I would be willing to do a similar review of GNOME Shell, having just tried Unity. Someone else suggested reviewing Enlightenment. I'm going to leave it up to you, the readers. If you would like me to review one or the other, please drop me an e-mail with your preference in the subject line. I'll tally them up the first week of 2013 and review the winner.
19 • Unity (by octathlon on 2012-12-24 15:48:16 GMT from United States)
I gave Unity a fair shot also. When I upgraded to 12.04 I used Unity for about a month or six weeks. I adjusted to the way it worked, but I there were several things I just didn't like about it, and I also had occasional problems with stability. I went to Ubuntu's Gnome Classic, which I liked, but there were things that still didn't work the way the old Gnome interface did. About a month ago I installed Cinnamon and it solved the issues I had with Gnome Classic, plus has some other nice features I really like, so I've settled on Cinnamon. The only thing I don't like is that it doesn't have Desktop zoom, which I used a lot (to zoom in on small pictures) and really miss. I do like having the window controls on the left, and Cinnamon has an easy setting to put them there.
20 • How to boot WiFiSlax into English? (by Oleg on 2012-12-24 16:15:56 GMT from United States)
I've heard this is a great distro for what it does, but how should I force it to boot into english?
I can find it nowhere!
Thank you!
21 • Unity it's about flavor (by RayRay on 2012-12-24 17:19:18 GMT from United States)
I used it for six months, it worked OK, after six months it still felt like work. I never much liked Gnome 2 but it was flexible. I use Debian Stable sometimes openSUSE with KDE4, but I'm not a gamer and just want to get on my computer and not receive any surprises.
I still don't understand the fascination with Ubuntu or Mint, but to each his own.
I just hope that KDE5 keeps away from the Gnome, Unity and W8 mind sets. Well if they screw up there is always Puppy or AntiX
22 • Unity (by casaduana on 2012-12-24 17:23:19 GMT from United States)
I agree with those whose comments follow the line: Use it if you like it, otherwise switch. My biggest complaint with Unity is Ubuntu, having created a large following with various versions---versions that generally worked well in many different environments----the Unity desktop fails to follow that line of reasoning. It has hardware and software issues that make it difficult if not impossible to use in many cases. The crashes, the "apport" that never works right, the "one-size-fits-all" settings, all are frustrating and lead me to be one of the switchers.
23 • 20 WiFiSlax (by Joji on 2012-12-24 17:57:25 GMT from Belgium)
Agree, WiFiSlax seems to be nice. Even if you do not need the WIFI things.
How do you boot into xfce4 or Openbox?
24 • @14 • Linux Mint Debian (by SayWhat on 2012-12-24 18:15:27 GMT from United States)
Good news, the Mint blog announced an LMDE respin in December or January so hang in there.
25 • still cynical about Unity (by mz on 2012-12-24 18:20:05 GMT from United States)
I've got to say that less mouse travel is a worthy goal; however, the dash utterly fails in this regard. From my experience & observations I can only conclude that Unity dash is meant to make you search to some extent, which may be a valid design choice, but it's also very financially convenient for Canonical. The fact is that in version 12.10 search is both the best way to find unpinned programs & the best way to have ads shoved in your face. Call me cynical but I don't think it's a coincidence.
Just look @ the dash design choices:
http://yeknan.free.fr/dc2/index.php?post/2012/11/15/Les-menus
I'm not likely to be switching from from KDE to something else any time soon, but I have to admit that the Cinnamon menu is a breeze to use compared to almost anything. Search is still available in both Cinnamon & KDE, but the menus are actually usable for mouse users like me. If Canonical would ever redesign the Dash & move toward opt in ads or ads on internet searches I might change my mind, but till then I'll probably never use Unity & I'll recommend against new users even trying it.
26 • Try Caroline Linux based on Puppy with XFCE (by Tony on 2012-12-24 19:27:36 GMT from United Kingdom)
I agree with Barnabyh, Saluki is an excellent version of Puppy. Saluki though, is currently on hold and Carolina linux (Based on Saluki) has now taken it's place as an XFCE Puppy.
I would recommend it as a very easy to use and polished Puppy Linux for any hardware inc old stuff and believe it is well worth a review in it's own right.
27 • Unity (by Anonymous Coward on 2012-12-24 19:45:24 GMT from United States)
I have Ubuntu LTS installed with an alternate desktop as a back-up system. The first step I took was to thoroughly gut Unity, and I would never even consider using it.
However, even though this review was based on the LTS, the spyware in 12.10 should have been mentioned for those who are thinking about trying it.
28 • Focus people, focus... (by Macarena on 2012-12-24 21:38:30 GMT from Sweden)
It's all just cosmetics - Not religion or politics. Let's face it - Everything but the terminal sucks and should be avoided.
29 • Unity vs KDE (by ThoroughlyConfused on 2012-12-24 22:23:13 GMT from United States)
I to am one who doesn't like unity desktop, in anyway. Bizarre.
Running Mint14 KDE and it's nice. And to #29-AMEN and to all a Merry Christmas!
30 • Distrowatch (by Clement Lefebvre on 2012-12-24 22:32:07 GMT from Ireland)
Merry Christmas DW!
I don't come here often anymore. We're busy working on Mint most of the year but we remember the magic. I remember it myself, the joy of discovering Linux, Free Software, this vibrant community, distro-hopping as a hobby, and Distrowatch played a large part in that.
So here's to another year of DW, here's to Patrick also and another year of Slackware from me, to Richard who despite some disagreement is an inspiration to us all, and my best wishes to all the people who make others dream and the best of joy to those who are just coming into this fantastic adventure that is Linux.
Merry Christmas to you all and in advance a very happy new year 2013!
31 • Debian 7 first impressions (by imnotrich on 2012-12-24 22:51:18 GMT from Mexico)
Having grown weary of Squeeze updates that caused various regressions for commonly used stuff that was no longer usable, I decided to take Debian 7 beta4 for a spin (no pun intended).
Wow! Installed pretty much without a hitch on my HP desktop. The only problem was lack of support for a fairly common mini pci-e wireless card, and (unlike Squeeze) at least the installer told me I needed some firmware - of course, no clue where I can find said firmware, no url to visit or button to click but at least the installer sensed something was missing.
The GRUB installer was a little confused by my dual hard drive dual boot situation, and I found boot flags on both drives - easily fixed with gparted. Once done, the GRUB menu correct identified each operating system and poof! I booted into Debian.
But wait - this isn't Debian! Looks more like Ubuntu's unity. Slug bug! The Default desktop appears to be Gnome3. Horrible. After taking a quick test drive just to say I did, I switched to the so-called "Gnome Classic."
Dare I say false advertising? It's not Gnome or classic, and lacks the functionality of Gnome2. Formerly, you could create a launcher and perform other tasks with right click on the desktop. No more. There is a work around for launcher creation but it's buried several layers deep. At least Gnome has improved the "edit menus" function, so after setting a switch in advanced settings to allow it you can create launchers in the menus then drag and drop them to your desktop. Can anyone say counterintuitive? I knew you could.
Another bug? Printers are not automatically installed. That's right, a USB printer connected to your computer and TURNED ON during the install is not found. Noobs would give up at this point, since printing is kinda basic as computer tasks go. The work around (something new with CUPS I guess) is that you have to actually open CUPS and add the printer manually. Ok, fixable. At least network printing was a snap, my windows and other Linux machines immediately saw and networked to the printer share and I didn't have to edit any samba.conf garbage.
File transfers from USB devices or from one folder to the next no longer show a progress indicator, just a spinning cursor. Bug! And if you want to see the properties of a particular folder or drive Debian 7 no longer shows a pie chart. You have to wait for Debian to count all the files and folders before calculating available space. Clumsy.
Running Debian 7 Beta 4 amd64 version, and installing multi-arch was a snap, but the ONLY reason I had to do so was that Skype dropped support for 64 bit OS's, and because Debian multi-media's acroread 64 bit package is no longer available. Not a bug exactly, but not very bright. I'm sure there are 32bit machines out there still, I have some on my home network but darn it 64bit's been around for a while and will likely remain the most common architecture for some time.
Once I got Skype running it's got a habit of crashing out in the middle of Skypeout calls, doesn't always recognize my USB headset, and I have to make sure the headset is unplugged before logging out of Skype because of some horrible digital burp sound Skype makes that will rupture your ear drums.
And silly acroread, you can view documents just fine and you can print black and white but don't bother printing color - acroread will gripe about missing marlett fonts and colors will be badly out of alignment (not a cartridge issue). I did not have this problem with 64bit Squeeze and 64bit acroread.
I'm sure I will find more issues with Beta4 as time goes on (stay tuned), but in the meantime I also want to share my experience with Beta on my laptop.
Surprise! Beta 4's installer actually had firmware for my laptop's wireless card! I ran the entire install/downloads wirelessly and everything pointed to a successful install until...my first boot, I got a "failed to load firmware radeon/r300_cp.bin error, and the laptop froze.
On my next attempt I booted with the extra command ACPI=OFF. Debian throws an error suggesting I boot with the command pnpbios=off, but boots anyway.
Fascinating! Debian has given me the choice of using my video card, or my wireless card. I can't use both simultaneously. This is a known bug going back several years from Squeeze and other distros. I believe it's related to the kernel and worse yet GRUB2 is not smart enough to save the edits I made in order to get Debian to boot. So if I don't manually enter it every time, I'm screwed because GRUB2 doesn't let you edit commands as regular GRUB used to.
I am really, really fond of Debian. Even though it's annoying and not very friendly, once I figure out how to make stuff work Debian is typically rock solid for years more or less. Thing is when these releases (even betas) come out you'd think they'd been thoroughly tested for compatibility, stability and functionality. I guess the average user defines those three features differently than do developers. Bummer.
32 • Unity, Ubuntu, ads, games (by Nikos on 2012-12-24 22:55:55 GMT from Greece)
Another interesting story about Linux gaming and how Canonical has contributed to it is http://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?threads/on-the-controversies-of-humble-canonical-and-team-meat.1567/
DWW missed that as well. I think this, along with the release of E17 and happenings in the GNU project http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/529522/854aed3fb6398b79/ and http://lwn.net/Articles/530460
are this weeks top news.
33 • Linux Mint and Puppy (by SlaxFan on 2012-12-24 23:10:50 GMT from United States)
I have used Puppy and it's variants many times on other peoples machines and on mine when CD burning wasn't working well. It's amazing how much is crammed in and how useful it is.
My main distro has been Linux Mint for the last year. It's great but I may go back to pure Debian. The installer doesn't make it easy to encrypt the hard drive and I think that is increasingly necessary for portable computers.
34 • Separating substance from flash, or the problem of arrested development (by Gnobuddy on 2012-12-25 00:59:03 GMT from United States)
Sometimes it seems to me that an ever-increasing proportion of the worlds adults - definitely including software developers - are suffering from some form of arrested development, with their minds stuck in early childhood even though their bodies are adult.
Imagine you owned a factory that manufactured balls. If you make toy balls for little children, you would probably make them in bright colours, maybe make them translucent, or put glitter on them. These things appeal to young children's minds.
On the other hand, if you made, say, golf balls for athletes, you would do things differently. Adult golfers couldn't care less about colour or shine of a golf ball - what they care about is how far it travels, how true it flies, how well balanced it is, how durable it is, and so on. Those are the things that matter, and if you want your golf ball to sell, it had better match or exceed other offerings on the market in those key areas.
It should be the same way with computers; adult users with mature brains care about how good a tool the computer is. We want it to be fast. We want it to be stable. We want it to be secure. We want to be able to use the computer in whatever way is most efficient for us, so we want it to be able to customize it to our preferred way of working. We want the computer to be like a good hammer, something that does the job as efficiently as possible without getting in the way.
All that changed in 1998 when Steve Jobs took some slow, overpriced, and unpopular computer hardware, put it in a translucent blue plastic enclosure, and marketed it to adults with arrested development: adults whose immature child-like brains were attracted to the shiny translucent plastic, adults whose childish brains prevented them from noticing the iMac was still slow and overpriced and didn't work any better than its beige predecessors had. People came out of the woodwork to snap up the toy-like computers, Apple was saved, and the tech world discovered that it was very profitable to market to adults with arrested development.
Since then, we hear slogans like "pretty is a feature", we've seen the colour of the case play a major role in the sales of phones, and we have witnessed software - including Linux desktops - regress in usability for mature adult users even as they became shiny, translucent, wobbly, and added other visual qualities designed to appeal to three-to-five year old children.
Now, there is nothing wrong with adding aesthetic appeal to a computer per se. The problem only occurs when you actually *take away the qualities that do matter* and replace them with translucency, glitter, shine, and other infantile "features" that are completely irrelevant to adults.
That is what truly bothers me about current versions of Unity, KDE, and Gnome, not to mention horrors like Windows Vista and Windows 8. In every case, they have actually taken away the qualities that matter - speed, efficiency, ease of use, customisability which is absolutely necessary for efficiency (by allowing software to match the users preferences), usability, and so on. In return we've been given features that appeal to infants and adults with arrested development: 3D desktops, animated windows, sliding icons, translucency, shading, and other useless features.
Even worse, those "features" have come at a high price: hugely increased hardware requirements, much slower performance, reduced hardware compatibility (like the Unity vs graphics card issues), worse usability for experienced users, and so on.
We're now like golfers who've been given shiny translucent blue golf balls with silver sparkles, golden tassells, and a Winnie-the-Pooh toy inside. At the same time the aerodynamic dimples that make the ball travel further have been removed, the enclosed Winnie-the-Pooh upsets the balance of the ball so it spirals randomly in an unpredictable way, the golden tassells add so much air drag that the ball only travels 50 feet, and the pretty translucent plastic falls apart after about five hits from a golf club.
So today those of us Linux users who do not actually suffer from arrested development are left to struggle along with primitive desktop environments like LXDE and Openbox, which are lacking the golden tassells and enclosed Winnie-the-Pooh of Unity, Gnome 3, etc, but also lacking the efficiency and ease of use of, for instance, the KDE 3.5.10 desktop and applications. We're actually worse off than we were ten years ago in 2003, when KDE 3 was showing the world what a really good desktop environment looked like.
I fear this situation will not get any better, because with every year that passes I notice more and more people around me suffering from arrested development and increasingly childlike behaviour. More and more people now only have a small childs social skills, language skills, attention spans, mathematical ability, ability to focus and work towards goals, sense of personal responsibility, and so on.
There is some widespread sociological problem at work here, and it's not likely to go away any time soon.
-Gnobuddy
35 • @34 (by mz on 2012-12-25 03:18:06 GMT from United States)
Disdain of all that is shinny & new is problem much wider than computers and it generally isn't productive. When the wheel is reinvented for reinvention's sake & your idiotic new 'touch style' desktop can't be reconfigured, then you have a problem. Unity & Gnome 3 both have significant customization hurdles added on top of weird new design, which is the real problem with new desktops including Windows 8. I don't see any real problems with KDE4, except possibly the lack of a simple 'turn everything unneeded off' button. After file indexing is turned off KDE is as light as any other modern desktop, & the fancy effects that I happen to enjoy can easily be turned off. The configuration part of the puzzle is the main problem I see with Gnome 3 & Unity. With KDE, & I think Enlightenment as well, you can make the DE do what you want it to do. I know KDE 4 had a bad launch early on, but I really can't fathom why some group it in with Unity & Gnome 3. If you just hate all that is shiny use the commandline or LXDE, but don't lump all modern DEs into the same boat.
36 • Puppy (by denflen on 2012-12-25 03:52:31 GMT from United States)
I have used Puppy Linux off and on for several years, and although it has never been my distro of "first choice", several times it has been my distro of "last chance". Whenever I have completely borked my computer beyond all hope, I just fire up a copy of Puppy, and get to work. With my limited knowledge of computer skills, if I can't fix it with Puppy, I might as well throw it away. And the older any of my desktops get, the better Puppy looks. The only thing holding back a complete switch to full time Puppy usage for me is the lack of an apt-get package manager.
37 • @34 (by Anonymous Coward on 2012-12-25 04:26:02 GMT from United States)
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. BUT - you know that in desktops like KDE, you can turn OFF all those resource-hungry features.
When I use KDE it's without akonadi or any of its useless (to me) PIM features. Same goes for Nepomuk file indexing. At startup I'm using about half a gig of RAM, and that's with some of the more common desktop effects enabled. With 6 Gigs of RAM I see no harm in it. Most of my resources get used up by development tools like IDE's.
A stripped down KDE configuration would probably serve you much better than LXDE. And maybe even Openbox but I can't say for sure --- I don't use it. I do know that with fluxbox, lack of true compositing does affect my ability to maximize usage of workspace. For example autohidden docks stay beneath windows, forcing me to shrink anything that may be covering them.
If you're a keyboard purist who looks down on pointing devices, you shouldn't even be using a full-fledged DE anyway.
Having said that - I'll support your opinion that some of these "modern" desktops FAIL on many levels.
38 • @36 Advise (by JS on 2012-12-25 06:59:45 GMT from United States)
Knoppix is great for fixing broken PCs. It is one of its intents. I can't see Puppy Linux as a last chance distro. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been hyped up that way. If you feel your skills are limited, then you are doing great getting Puppy Linux to fix your computer problems.
39 • Puppies Galore! (by Somewhat Reticent on 2012-12-25 07:37:29 GMT from United States)
Puppy Linux seems (to me) like a methodology layered onto a distro. There's the original Puppy (Woof?) based on T2-SDE, others based on Ubuntu, DebIan (apt-get!?), and Slackware; hopefully there will be one based on Mageia2. There's a lot to like about Puppies. Some can save older hardware, some make new hardware fly. The approach likes modular and frugal. Of course, one can run into typical Linux frustrations, but there are several fora and wiki resources.
40 • "Crash-free" Ubuntu; Ubuntu desktop choices; Review gnome shell (by eco2geek on 2012-12-25 07:49:47 GMT from United States)
As people have noted above, after uninstalling apport, you stop seeing crash reports. That's not the same thing as not having applications crash any longer. It's just turning off the notification. :-)
To those who don't like the Unity UI: You are actually still running Ubuntu, just with a different UI, if you install Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME Remix, and/or any one of a bunch of different Ubuntu remixes. They're all running on the same base. (I always find it odd that, whenever there's a new Ubuntu release, each flavor gets its own Distrowatch release announcement. Yes, I know that Ubuntu proper is the only one actually developed by Canonical.)
Jesse, spend some extended time with gnome-shell and see how you like it.
41 • @? (by Ludolf on 2012-12-25 08:44:32 GMT from Netherlands)
Please stop discussing what windowmanager or desktop to use,
Things u do not like, dont install them, features u dont use disable them.
Linux is linux eg kernel nothing more, with some work u can run, unity, gnome and kde, and enlightenment programs all togheter on the same installation.
Stop comparing, if you are a real linux user turn the system in waht you like it to be, or waht is useful to you, and stop complaining.
Its free to come up with a custom build, and share it at distrowatch.
Put some effort in it yourself.
anyhowe merry christmass everybody.
42 • wifislax re #20 and #23 (by gnomic on 2012-12-25 09:30:45 GMT from New Zealand)
Linux wifislax 3.5.7-wifislax #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Dec 19 03:24:11 UTC 2012 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
Live session of wifislax here. It seems setxkmap could be your friend unless your keyboard is Spanish ;-) It does do 3g modem web connect thanks to sakis3g.
#20 As to how to get English, not a clue so far. Maybe an option when installing? Didn't see any sign of an English language option during live boot.
#23 Running Xfce live now - a menu option at boot time provided you have quick reactions.
43 • #34 #35 #37 (by zykoda on 2012-12-25 09:31:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
The "DE/IOware" is wandering about in space, time, features, operation,... etc.. seeking solutions to poorly notioned problems, creating problems for optimal operation on the gamut of obsolescent, replacement, current and emerging hardware in the competition for kudos, equity and survival.
44 • re #30 cheers all round (by gnomic on 2012-12-25 09:45:31 GMT from New Zealand)
Clement said graciously:-
"So here's to another year of DW, here's to Patrick also and another year of Slackware from me, to Richard who despite some disagreement is an inspiration to us all, and my best wishes to all the people who make others dream and the best of joy to those who are just coming into this fantastic adventure that is Linux."
That all sounds good to me (who knew you are a secret Slackware fan? ;->)
45 • Multiple repos serving multiple distros. (by Vishwanath on 2012-12-25 11:16:59 GMT from India)
"The package manager is unusual in that it pulls software from several projects' repositories and lets us filter packages based on repository, category and software type."
Really wish someone would import this feature into all other linux distros. Then you could have a situation in which a piece of software found in a derivative distro (not found in the base distro from it which was derived) can be used in every compatible distro by just readjusting entries in the "software sources."
This can also result in a cottage industry where people only provide software in repositories (no full distro); the distro people can then focus only on the distro not on different software.
46 • Puppy Linux (by greg on 2012-12-25 13:49:16 GMT from United States)
Puppy Linux is my favorite repair program. If you mount another distro partition at the bottom of the screen, then you have root access to modify any file. It's just easier to view an entire file and edit it, rather than to memorize a bunch of commands (at least for me it is).
47 • Gnome2 & weather app (by Lee on 2012-12-25 14:49:20 GMT from United States)
@9 Weather app ... Mate
Yeah, among the reasons I hold on to Gnome2 is the 3 pane weather
app on the toolbar that includes radar.
For years I thought that I loved Ubuntu, upgrading it twice a year.
It turns out That I loved Gnome2. This year I replaced Mint9/Gnome2
with Mint13/Mate on one computer and Mint9/Gnome2 with SolusOS on
another.
My desktop is littered with files, links, & urls. I move them to
$home/documents or pictures or videos. Then they are archived to
optical disc or usb or offline partition.
I think that as long as I use a keyboard/mouse I will use Gnome2.
However, my next computer may be an Android tablet.
48 • Responses (by Pierre on 2012-12-25 17:49:12 GMT from Germany)
@7 (@5 E17 by Nikos)
I have to say that this is absolutely not true. E17 is a nice piece of software, that's for sure, but Xfce and LXDE are a lot more stable and complete that E17. In E17 even something so basic like the terminal emulator is still not finished. This is an evidence of incapacity regarding the long period that it is under development already. Additionally it lacks a lot of features which are for example delivered by Xfce (e.g. window tiling etc.).
So next time you are praising E17 you should praise something that is worth it. Or at least prove your allegations.
@31 (Debian 7 first impressions by imnotrich)
Even for Debian it is important to take a beta as what it is: a development release and not meant for productivity use and is not intended to be stable enough for that. Not even all features have to work at all and for sure not as expected.
So, if you take Debian for a spin, just expect to have some rough edges.
I do not understand what was the problem with the driver. As a Debian user you should know that proprietary software and therefor most (wifi-)driver, too, are not included in the install media and are only delivered by the additional and only optional non-free repository. From there you can easely download the wifidrivers you might need.
Gnome 3 is expected to be replaced with Xfce as default desktop on the final release.
Your problems with the missing pie chart of harddisk usage and the waiting time until all files had been counted and the total usage has been calculated are due to the desktop (Gnome 3 and not version 2 as in Squeeze) and has nothing to do with Debian itself.
Who ever is using Skype just should really think about replacing that solution with something else and more applicable to the philosophy behind Debian and GNU/Linux. And you definitely do not need acroread for displaying pdf-files, just take Evince, the default decument viewer on Gnome or Okular on KDE or what ever else you might prefer. I recommend to rethink your habbits before blaming others because of such stange habbits.
@Unity review:
Unity's design is a nice idea and has always been. But it is not usable if it is not stable. Additionally I just prever KDE over Unity. The mentioned feature that new emails are displayed by the mail checker in the top panel can easely be added to the KDE panel as well by using a mail checker applet. KDE can quite simply be turned into something that behaves like Unity... but try that the other way round. And not forget, KDE delivers that and even got finally stable in the long run - without a big company like Cannonical behind them.
Greetings from Germany
Pierre
49 • #49 (by imnotrich on 2012-12-25 19:58:39 GMT from Mexico)
Am I the only person who finds it odd that Debian 7 Beta 4's installer is compatible with my laptop's video card and wireless card, but the Debian 7 operating system, once installed by that installer, is not?
Past experience with Debian drivers (free or non free) is that they're not always compatible with the devices they claim compatibility with, and that's assuming drivers exist at all. In some cases they do not, or you have to spend a week with Google to find them and it's often because someone not officially connected to Debian was able to kludge something together.
Another omission with Debian 7are Nvidia drivers. They don't exist in the repos, not yet anyway, and I have yet to find an appropriate driver or procedure to add the driver for my 3 month old pci-e video card.
Not sure I would characterize lack of support for video and wifi to be "rough edge." More like basic functionality, but anyway.
Sure, I understand there are risks with installing a BETA but Squeeze was no longer stable for me, and my hardware too new (a two year old desktop) and I was constantly running into issues with sound and video, among other things.
As for Skype, even after becoming part of the Microsoft family Skype remains the best VOIP software available. If audio quality, reliability, large user base, and features are important to you then Skype is the only viable option. Not saying Skype doesn't have issues, there are problems things like voice mail notifications being delayed a up to a month, callers getting a busy signal when you're not on the phone instead of your phone ringing or at least be routed to vm.
Alternatives to Skype, though are an even bigger joke.
Ekiga, even after the inclusion of SILK codecs still has lousy audio quality and isn't entirely compatible with some platforms (such as windows). Another inferior VOIP program is Twinkle, audio quality wise. However at this time any discussion of Twinkle is moot because there is no .deb for Debian 7 and attempts to compile get lost in dependency hell. Twinkle hasn't been updated for so long and so many of it's dependencies are no longer available and/or you'd be reckless to try and install them. Jitsi seems more of a toy or wanna be meebo messenger, and how many millions of people use Jitsi again?
And acroread? Again, alternatives are inferior and lack compatibility. Just like Open and Libre Office. If I interact with people using the "real" thing (ie MicrosoftOffice or Adobe), exchanging documents those folks can't open just because I have a strange habit aversion to proprietary software is pointless. When the open source alternatives are as good or better, I'll use them, and unless it something I'm going to share all documents I create for my own use are using Open or Libre. But sadly these documents even when saved in an MSOffice format are not 100% compatible.
Other examples Flash, Java etc...when will the open source version be the equivalent? If it's not today, I'm not waiting.I have work to do.
50 • Unity, Unity 2D and why? (by Chanath on 2012-12-25 23:01:28 GMT from Sri Lanka)
I am glad that Jesse took on this subject. When Unity first came, I was quite happy that things are going in new ways, but after a while, I got tired of Unity. I got tired of the fixed to the left Unity launcher and the fixed to one place "top" panel. I started thinking about why these two must be there and why they should be fixed to the given places.
I found that the main idea behind this Unity was the Dash, not the left panel or the top panel. Once you have this Dash, it had to be fixed to some panel, which should work as the "window list." So, the left panel came up and as there should be something to hold the file menus, the top panel had to come in. But none of these could not be made moveable, as if those could be moved to other places in the screen, the whole idea of Unity would go away.
At the beginning, Unity 2D had to be there with its Unity-2D-Shell, Unity-2D-Panel, Unity-2D-Spread, until such time, the devs could bundle these three inside Unity (3D), so no one could get at them. And, the 6 months time limit always gets shorter, before this bundling could be done. Precise had to be released on time, and it came with Unity 2D too. This Precise has to live on until April 2017, whether anyone likes that or not.
Just before Quantal was to be released, Ubuntu announced that Unity 2D would not be included init. The reason given was that there is no one to maintain it. Strange as the same Unity 2D would be maintained until April 2017, very much after Quantal would be taken off support.
Interesting fact is that the Dash can work without the so-called Unity launcher and the top panel. If that situation would be known, then there would be an Ubuntu based distro, which would boast giving Dash, but without the headache of having the fixed left and top Unity panels. This was a pretty dangerous situation. If that happens, where would Unity 3D go?!
So, the best thing to do was to kill off Unity 2D in Quantal and let the users forget about that. And, that was done. Only thing the Ubuntu devs forgot was that the same Unity 2D would live on in Precise for long years, considering our present fast movement of the Linux world.
In Quantal, you can see dummy packages of the shell, spread and the panel. You just can't find anything called Dash or Dashboard in it. That's bundled in to Unity 3D and hidden away.
The Dash or the Dashboard a very good thing. It mimics MacOSX's launcher. It also mimics old Slingshot. It can launch apps and it can search anything inside the computer. You don't need to write exactly in the box, but on the keyboard without even looking at the screen and bang comes on the app you searched for. You don't need to do lot of work, just push the super button. Everything is right in front of you!
So, this Dash has to hidden so far inside the Unity 3D in Quantal, Raring etc. But, in Precise it lives on until April 2017.
For you guys to see it for yourself, I invite you to look at this screenshot. http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/9696/dashwithouttheunityleft.jpg
What you see in that screenshot gave a lot of jitters to few people.
51 • Unity (by mmesantos1 on 2012-12-26 01:06:23 GMT from United States)
Well I am glad to see that you took the dive and ran Unity for some time to get a real idea of what the DE was about. I did the same thing back with Ubuntu 11.10. I installed the OS and ran it for 3 weeks to give it a fair try. I was like you in the fact that I would run Unity for short periods never really giving it a proper run. I hid my DVD's and thumb drives away out of site for those 3 weeks and ran the OS like I would a normal install for every day use. To my surprise I found I could run the DE with no issue and that it was a productive DE after all. This helped me learn a lesson not to judge any DE too quickly. While I will still admit I am a Gnome-Shell fan even with the changes that keep coming I still love it. But for Unity I found that I could use it and did not mind doing so. My point after all this typing is again good to see you took the time to form a educated opinion on the DE and look forward to more of this in your future reviews. Thank you for all your time you spend on this sort of thing.
Marc
52 • 50 • Unity, Unity 2D and why? (by Chanath on 2012-12-26 01:55:24 GMT from Sri Lanka)
In that screenshot you are seeing Gnome classic session, but not Unity. There is only the Dash.
53 • @48 (by Nikos on 2012-12-26 03:20:49 GMT from Greece)
"I have to say that this is absolutely not true. E17 is a nice piece of software, that's for sure, but Xfce and LXDE are a lot more stable and complete that E17. In E17 even something so basic like the terminal emulator is still not finished. This is an evidence of incapacity regarding the long period that it is under development already. Additionally it lacks a lot of features which are for example delivered by Xfce (e.g. window tiling etc.).
So next time you are praising E17 you should praise something that is worth it. Or at least prove your allegations."
Stable maybe. Complete i would have to disagree to some extend. E17 unlike any of those DE's you mention does not rely on gnome to accomplish essential tasks like connecting to a network. Both XFCE and LXDE use network-manager-applet which a soon to be extinct gnome project.
I consider that more essential than having a terminal emulator. urxvt is better and much more featureful than all anyway,
What one considers basic fuctionality is subjective. Neither of these desktops for example has a text editor, or a bluetooth manager, which E17 used to have a while back. In XFCE basic functionality like a clipboard manager or changing the language is made via addons.
I don't think neither of these desktops is complete in any way, but to each his own.
54 • Unity Desktop Review (by Pauli on 2012-12-26 06:14:36 GMT from United States)
Jesse, when a DE crashes multiple times a day, uses HUGE amounts of CPU power, won't save files with certain programs, etc... it is NOT a "pretty good desktop", as you conclude in your review.... it is a piece of S&#! Reminds me of my experience with Windows XP!!!
55 • from debian to centos (by ken on 2012-12-26 06:30:09 GMT from Congo, The Democratic Republic of the)
Seeing that soon debian wheezy was going Gnome 3 I have gone centos 6. It is old outside but modern inside, and still gnome 2. Repositories in centos 6 are not as well organised as in debian but once we have hunted the necessary software all over and installed them the system is just good. Dedoimedo was very helpful in this. My computers are old and need an old distro and DE that will be supported for long time.
56 • Desktop (by Rajesh on 2012-12-26 07:08:31 GMT from Qatar)
should be snappy and responsive, i.e. applications should launch in a snap and multi-tasking between applications should be good.
should allow the distro to run easily in 512 MB ram
should play well with components from other desktop environments
should not crash
lxde with a gnome or unity functionality, integration and look should be great.
kde is overkill with a lot of customization and xfce is becoming heavy like gnome and unity.
Linus folks are reinventing the wheel with minor variations every day
desktop environments are now turning into distros or what?
a lightweight desktop is good for all scenarios
be it a net-book, mobile, laptop or a server
unity or gnome would have done the trick but it is too late now.
it is heavy and slow like an elephant.
the inflexible dash is a disaster, i hate it
At present after using all these Desktop Environment. I feel KDE is the best Desktop Environment for Linux at Present on any average system.
It is really Snappy and multitasking, even though its memory footprint is high.
I had moved from Gnome to Unity and settled on KDE
There are no crashes or glitches now.
Gaming is perfect on it. You can also run medium type servers with it. For extreme speed and reliability use CLI on Debian Squeeze.
Wheezy just got obese with GNOME-3.
57 • 56 Desktop (by Rajesh (by Chanath on 2012-12-26 07:21:11 GMT from Sri Lanka)
When you take out the Unity left bar and the top panel, the Dash works quite snappily. It works in Lubuntu and Xubuntu and even in Kubuntu. It works very well with clean Kde, Lxde and Xfce installed in a distro made from scratch out of the mini.iso.
The Dash is the search engine and the apps launcher. It doesn't need the ubuntu desktop installed, in other words, it doesn't need Unity DE.
There are 2 such search engine cum launchers; the "old" Slingshot and the Dash of Unity. Out of the two, the "old" Slingshot is the universal one. It can be easily installed in any Debian and Ubuntu distro, while one has to manipulate a little to get the Dash. No wonder , why the Mac OSX Lion uses as its Dash, the old Slingshot!
All our devs try to bundle this type of apps in to a bundle, so the user won't get a chance to use one app independently. So much for the "freedom" in the Open source Community!
58 • Unity and other DEs and WMs . . . (by Drew on 2012-12-26 14:55:22 GMT from United States)
Jesse,
Thank you for the review of the Unity desktop. Comments saying, "If you don't like it, don't use it," miss the boat completely. Most of us care deeply about how we interact with our computers. Reviews of desktop environments or window managers are valuable because we have so much choice in the GNU/Linux world. It is good to know about the options and their pros and cons.
Being different or doing things differently is neither a virtue nor a curse until the whole context is taking into account. WindowMaker works differently from Fluxbox, which is different from XFCE, KDE, Unity etc. Some of the above have been around for a long time, but are still actively developed.
What would be interesting is to see some sort of standardized comparison of the different options. Benchmarks could include: how many clicks it takes to complete a set of common tasks, ease of customization, the extent to which one can use the keyboard, integration of various major applications into the DE/WM, etc.
59 • E17 and Slackware (by David L on 2012-12-26 15:08:52 GMT from United States)
The perfect combo: E17 via slacke17 and Slackware 14. Stability and Bling. What a great Christmas present to meeeeee!
60 • 42 • wifislax re #20 and #23 (by gnomic on 201-12-25 09:30:45 GMT from New Zeal (by joji on 2012-12-26 17:45:19 GMT from Belgium)
#23 Running Xfce live now - a menu option at boot time provided you have quick reactions.
Kindly provide exact cheatcode. Didn't find it on www.
61 • Unity and recent Kernel panic (by avelinus on 2012-12-26 19:43:59 GMT from Portugal)
Since Ubuntu 10.10 untill 12.10 I get anoying Kernel panic messages that make me enjoy better my Zorin 3 32bits and my Sabayon 10 KDE 64bits.
When I try Mint, I always get the same message and the Recover boot mode doesn't help as with Zorin 3.
That's why I still recomend Zorin3 and Sabayon 10 if you want a current OS.
62 • @53 (by Barnabyh on 2012-12-26 23:09:34 GMT from United Kingdom)
Sorry to sound crude but it's quite evident you don't know what you're talking about. Neither Xfce nor LXDE use network-manager. This completely depends on the way the distribution in question has set it up. Both work just as well with Wicd or Frisbee.
Similarly Xfce has had several text editors for ages, both mousepad and leafpad as part of the wider project. The clipboard may be a plugin according to the UNIX philosophy because not everybody needs one, but even in Gnome 2 it was only an applet as well.
Please inform better next time. Can't believe I'm even responding to this.
63 • Unity 2D & Unity 3D (by Chanath on 2012-12-26 23:12:23 GMT from Sri Lanka)
Jesse wrote; "Another problem I had with the 3-D version of Unity was that it chewed up a lot of my CPU usage. Quite often, while my applications were sitting idle, Unity 3-D would use from 40% to 80% of my CPU resources. The Unity 2-D environment, with the same programs open, wouldn't use more than 2% of the CPU"
And there is a very important message there. Unity 3D was artificially created, to block out Unity 2D.
In the screenshot in posted, the session is Gnome-classic, and the Dash is working very well there. I've installed Compiz, just to check whether this Dash would work with the 3D environment. Gnome-classic is also 3D environment. The story that Ubuntu needs only Unity 3D is nonsense. It is just a made up story. That so-called Unity 2D left bar and the top panel worked very well in this environment.
I just didn't need them; I only wanted the Dash.
The idea, which is being pumped into us that Unity needs 3D environment is just nonsense. But, the bundling up everything and adding the unstable Compiz 0.9.x into it and making so many apps working eating up the memory, when the computer is idle, is a major bug, but man-made bug, a deliberately made situation.
If these all kinds of apps bundled into making Unity would have taken off, there won't be any Unity in Ubuntu. This bundling is the mainstay of the distro. These dependencies are artificial. Period!
That's why the "old" Slingshot is super! It doesn't need much, just a few dependencies to work independently in any Debian and Ubuntu distro!
64 • Wifislax in English (by eco2geek on 2012-12-27 05:27:04 GMT from United States)
I dinked around with Wifislax 4.3 (i386) in Virtualbox, and found a module named "032-WifislaxEnglish.xzm" available from their download site, here:
http://www.downloadwireless.net/
(navigate to the "modulos" directory, then into the "wifislax-4-3" directory).
With Wifislax running, save that module, then, in Dolphin, right-click on it and activate it. Log out of KDE and back in (the default root password is "toor"), and most of KDE will come up in English. (I never did see the option to boot into Xfce or Openbox.)
As far as an English keyboard layout, there's an indicator in the system tray that lets you select your keyboard layout on the fly.
If you installed this distro to a USB key, you "should" be able to drop the English *.xzm module into the "base" directory. (I tried to do that using the ISO image, but it wouldn't boot after failing a checksum test.)
Have fun!
65 • One more response (by Pierre on 2012-12-27 06:26:29 GMT from Germany)
@53 (@48 by Nikos)
See response 62 (@53 by Barnabyh). And my add: It's not necessary to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Xfce and LXDE and even Gnome deliver a basic, functional and stable environment that can be customized via plugins and addons or widgets to fit one's needs.
And you have a choice what better fits your needs. This is flexibility with optimal use of resources. No wonder that the dev team of E17 still has not made it to deliver all wanted features if they start new for every component instead of reusing working, stable and mature software parts already available.
Sure, they deserve respect for developing a desktop environment from scratch, but if you ask me, this simply is wasted energy in at least some parts. Especially when I see how unstable some parts are. For example the panel unexpectedly rearranged the items, the system tray sometimes simply disappears, the Terminal is crashing from time to time while still not every feature is implemented and some other smaller annoyances.
As long as it works, it looks quite good. But look does not mean anything to me. This is why I am using i3 as window manager at the moment. It's highly customizable, very stable and the tiling concept fits my working habbits more than every other window manager or desktop environment out there.
Greetings.
66 • General thanks... (by eco2geek on 2012-12-27 06:36:01 GMT from United States)
...to Ladislav for this site; to Jesse, for his reviews; and to all the distro maintainers and software developers, for giving us so much to try out and to argue about.
No doubt, 2013 will be at least as interesting and fruitful as 2012 was in the world of Linux and FOSS. Happy new year!
67 • re #60 and wifislax xfce ... in spanish at any rate (by gnomic on 2012-12-27 09:48:23 GMT from New Zealand)
Hi there - did I mention quick reactions? On my machine at least I very briefly got a listing of options including sundry desktops. Moving at something near the speed of light I was able to select Xfce before the default desktop began to run. Was there a delay of 7 seconds?
Note to live CD makers - a long delay for options at boot does no harm :-) Those who know what they want will select it quickly, while those who want to consider the choices get time to ponder. Some of the users may even have English as a second language . . . and need some time to compute.
This means you Tomas of Slax - what is that 4 second craziness? Maybe it takes that long to read the message saying press key X to get some choices at boot time with live media?
68 • Virtualbox mouse bug (by matt on 2012-12-27 16:46:16 GMT from Finland)
About the virtualbox mouse bug. It's a bug in Virtualbox since version 4, and can be seen with other distros using the small X servers too.
If you try virtualbox 3 or some alternative virtualization software, the mouse should act properly.
69 • Post Number Sixty-six (66) (by Jordan on 2012-12-27 18:56:11 GMT from United States)
eco2geek.. well said and very much agreed with. :)
Now.. will some clever deve please please make java work in all Pogo games (and a few other sites) like Windows does. Clever as in giving a darn. ... lol... (please?).
Vector did for a while, but as soon as you run the updates it breaks java (for Pogo, etc).
Dang it all.. the posted/linked solutions seem to work temporarily..then the error messages at Pogo start coming.. except in Windows 7/8. I want a full time Linux! :(
70 • @imnotrich Debian 7 first impressions (by Peter Besenbruch on 2012-12-27 23:00:10 GMT from Japan)
'But wait - this isn't Debian! Looks more like Ubuntu's unity. Slug bug! The Default desktop appears to be Gnome3. Horrible. After taking a quick test drive just to say I did, I switched to the so-called "Gnome Classic."'
I'm not sure what Debian is supposed to look like. They toyed with the idea of using XFCE to keep the install disk CD-ROM compatible, but then went with what they habitually used as a desktop default, Gnome.
"Dare I say false advertising? It's not Gnome or classic, and lacks the functionality of Gnome2."
No, it's Gnome, basic, default Gnome. Debian does not add extras, or try to alter the look and feel of a desktop environment. Personally, I have never been fond of Gnome, so I never installed it when using Debian. It's easy enough to avoid it: When presented with the kinds of stuff you want to install by Dselect, make sure the desktop environment isn't checked.
After one's first boot, one logs in as root and issues the following commands:
apt-get update
apt-get install xorg lightdm xfce4 (or another desktop).
"Another bug? Printers are not automatically installed. That's right, a USB printer connected to your computer and TURNED ON during the install is not found. Noobs would give up at this point, since printing is kinda basic as computer tasks go."
Debian is not a "noob" distro. Us "non-noobs" like it that way. I also like the option on certain machines of not installing Cups at all. The package you want for automatic printer detection and installation is "system-config-printer-udev". Personally, I don't like it, and don't install it.
"File transfers from USB devices or from one folder to the next no longer show a progress indicator, just a spinning cursor. Bug! And if you want to see the properties of a particular folder or drive Debian 7 no longer shows a pie chart. You have to wait for Debian to count all the files and folders before calculating available space. Clumsy."
You are using Nautilus from Gnome 3.4. I hear it's worse with Nautilus for Gnome 3.6. You might want to consider another file manager, or another desktop.
"Running Debian 7 Beta 4 amd64 version, and installing multi-arch was a snap, but the ONLY reason I had to do so was that Skype dropped support for 64 bit OS's, and because Debian multi-media's acroread 64 bit package is no longer available."
I have found that Okular does a better job on PDFs, especially compound PDFs, than Acrobat. As for Skype, version 2.2 works better for me than version 4. I do not run anything under 64 bit, as I tend to go light weight with the software, and very light weight with the hardware (think netbooks).
"Surprise! Beta 4's installer actually had firmware for my laptop's wireless card! I ran the entire install/downloads wirelessly and everything pointed to a successful install until...my first boot, I got a "failed to load firmware radeon/r300_cp.bin error, and the laptop froze."
If you are running a Radeon chipset, you may want to get the Catalyst drivers from AMD.
It sounds like you might need the firmware for your wireless card. The reason it wasn't installed is because firmware isn't usually open source. On the initial installation Debian won't install stuff that is incompatible with their open source principles. You need to add that stuff to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. You need to add the words "contrib" and "non-free" to everything that has "main". It sounds like you have already dinked around with the file when you added the deb-multimedia repository. When you are done "dinking," run a network cable to your laptop and install the firmware.
Like I said, Debian isn't for noobs.
"... and worse yet GRUB2 is not smart enough to save the edits I made in order to get Debian to boot. So if I don't manually enter it every time, I'm screwed because GRUB2 doesn't let you edit commands as regular GRUB used to."
Flat out false. Grub2 has been used in both Squeeze and Wheezy, for one, and, two, it allows the making of changes. The file you need to edit is /etc/default/grub. Once finished editing the file (as root) you run the command "update-grub".
"I guess the average user defines those three features differently than do developers. Bummer. "
I am no developer, but I use Debian. It gives the flexibility to install what I want, when I want it. That said, I tend to go with Intel, or Nvidia chipsets. I have heard too many horror stories over the years concerning AMD/ATI's programing prowess.
71 • @70 (by Nobody Special on 2012-12-27 23:06:54 GMT from Canada)
"I am no developer, but I use Debian. It gives the flexibility to install what I want, when I want it. That said, I tend to go with Intel, or Nvidia chipsets. I have heard too many horror stories over the years concerning AMD/ATI's programing prowess."
Same here! I not only heard the stories, I experienced it first hand, never again.
72 • What makes a Good Desktop? (by Peter Besenbruch on 2012-12-27 23:24:16 GMT from Germany)
Two things: Stability, and the ability to launch stuff. A person may get used to Unity, but the lack of stability, and the fights with software, like the GIMP, are show stoppers.
On an unrelated point, Rajesh maintains that XFCE is becoming heavy, like Gnome and KDE. I would submit that Xubuntu is heavy, Mint XFCE is heavy, not XFCE itself. There is a difference. On my machines, an XFCE environment takes up a little over 80 megabytes when first run.
As for the stability, I run a month or more before rebooting (usually because of a kernel update).
73 • #70...you kinda missed the point. (by imnotrich on 2012-12-28 04:58:10 GMT from Mexico)
Last time I test drove XFCE it lacked right click functionality. Maybe XFCE has changed, but back then most apps were not compatible with the XFCE de.
Gnome 2 is "classic." By that I mean maximum functionality and ease of use. Anything Gnome 3 or beyond is junk. I'd rather go with windows 8.
Printers are basic functionality, maybe non-noobs don't use printers? My point here was EVERY past iteration of Debian/CUPS I've used over the last 10 years automatically installed my printer. Version 7 did not. Why the inconsistency? I used the net install cd, so it's not something basic they omitted intentionally to save space.
Nautilus and Gnome are the "defaults" for Debian 7 Beta 4. What's the deal? You'd think Debian would want to put their best foot forward.
My experience with non-adobe PDF manipulation software has been disappointing. I work with fillable forms, documents scanned as pdf's and I often have to print them. The only thing that comes close to adobe is authentic adobe.
Skype 2.2 for amd64 worked great for a while on Squeeze, but as Squeeze sent out updates right and left, Skype no longer was compatible. Constantly crashes out when you open Skype, beyond fixable. For a time there were Skype 4-something for amd64 available for download and it worked great. But at some point Skype withdrew the .deb file, and 2.2 for amd64 doesn't work at all in Debian 7. So I had to go multi-arch. Which, as it turns out Skype 4 crashes a lot as well. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but Skype 4 seems to work best with Windows. Hmmm.
Regarding my wireless card please read my post again. Not only was working firmware available to the Debian installer, I ran the entire 1200+ file download during the install over my wifi connection! So if I understand you correctly you're saying the installer doesn't comply with Debian's no proprietary firmware rule? Why does the wireless card work during the install but won't even scan or try to connect after the install is complete?
The video card in my laptop is another matter. Worked great during the install. No messages about firmware. But now that the install is complete I have to acpi-off pnpbios=off nomodeset to boot to the Debian. Odd.
As previously stated, most of the time since Squeeze Debian the installer doesn't notify you when firmware is missing and notification or not that firmware is almost always not to be found in any debian repo. You have to dig and google and dig some more hoping to find it. In a twisted sort of way, I like jigsaw puzzles too - but why making things more difficult than they have to be? Ok, so strip all the firmware and everything else needed to make a distro functional if that's what you want - but for people who actually use their distros for work they don't have a week or two to waste tweaking and researching stuff until it actually works. Give us an easy button please! At least don't bury the firmware on some obscure Martian repo.
And there still remains no nvidia driver for my recent vintage desktop's video card either for Debian 7, at least not yet. Another annoyance, because with Squeeze it was a fairly easy matter to select a few packages in Synaptic and click "apply."
I would agree that AMD and ATI video cards can be problematic. For a while, nearly all Intel and AMD and ATI and Nvidia cards were incompatible with Linux. Thing is I'm not rich and as such I can't just buy new hardware every time the Linux Kernel drops support for my recent vintage gadgets. There's got to be some sanity here. Not everybody uses Linux as a hobby, and not everybody is made of cash.
A while back I tried to submit some bug reports, only to find the bug reporting software itself had bugs and all the work I put in was lost-never submitted. Since I don't code, I've donated money and hardware...but in my next life I'm going to learn to code so I can help find annoying bugs with distros and FIX them before they are released to the general public. How can we every advocate for increased market share, when Linux can't consistently handle basic tasks commonly required by end users?
74 • Gnome classic is not heavy (by Chanath on 2012-12-28 05:37:02 GMT from Sri Lanka)
Most of us think that Xfce is light, but Gnome 3 is heavy. No one is pressured to use Gnome shell of the Gnome 3. You can use Gnome-classic and that's not heavy. If you want to use Unity's dash without Unity's buggy Compiz 0.9.x--I don't say it, but the Compiz developers say that--, you can still find a way to use that Dash with Gnome-classic without the burden of using Unity, as I showed in my post #50.
Its quite fascinating that no one, who is in to Unity 3D had refuted me yet. The next job is to find how to separate Dash from its "hidden" position Quanta's, Raring's, 13.10's Unity 3D, or make Unity 2D's Dash, which is the only Dash in Ubuntu work in Ubuntu 14.04. There si no use wasting time trying to do that in releases that would die away, before 14.04 comes in.
This Dash is going to work in Gnome classic environment, and that environment is not heavy, and also it has all the apps, we are used to work with.
Nautilus 3.4.2 can be re-introduced to the forthcoming 14.04. Thunar of Xfce is not that feature rich as Nautilus. It would be quite nice, if we can install Dolphin to Ubuntu without the whole lot of KDE stuff coming with it.
75 • 70 @imnotrich Debian 7 first impressions (by Peter Besenbruch (by Chanath on 2012-12-28 06:25:58 GMT from Sri Lanka)
"Like I said, Debian isn't for noobs."
Okay, no problem there. While waiting for Debian 7 to be released, one can get the maximum out of it. How?
There is a distro, which would not be developed as it is, but the develoeper is going some other direction. It is Solus OS 2 Alpha5, which is based on Debian Wheezy, and works very well. Except for one repo, all others are from Debian Wheezy, so when one updates and upgrades it, all the goodness of Debian Wheezy 7 comes in. Also, this SolusOS 2 A5 works with all kinds of hardware.
So, there is no real reason to wait for Debian Wheezy to come, but have it for every day use. It also has Gnome-classic in the old way, still in Gnome 2 actions. The most important fact is it that it is very quick in response to keyboard clicks.
Now you can have a rolling Debian Wheezy in your updated and upgraded SolusOS 2A5. Why not try that and have the goodness of Debian Wheezy every day?
You don't need to be a geek to have the newest Debian, do you?
76 • Unity / Ubuntu (by reg on 2012-12-28 11:09:11 GMT from Brazil)
Nice review on Unity. Personally i like it, in fact if i had to design a interface myself it would be very similar to unity i guess. it's practical and i do not not miss lots of features like KDE (which i also have on my desktop). What i miss is that it does not show the open instances when you pass the mouse over the dock icon. They could put a menu with a list to pick, but it's ok. Thanks for a great site and great reviews.
77 • 75 • 70 @imnotrich Debian 7 first impressions (by Peter Besenbruch (by Chanath o (by Stefan Gronewold on 2012-12-28 19:02:51 GMT from Germany)
I work a year with SolusOS 1.2 and SolusOS2 alpha5
also Debian Squeeze and Debian Wheezy the best on SolusOS is indeed the Gnome 2 Dektop i don't like Gnome 3.
I have the newest Packageson SolusOS 1.2 so FF and Thunderbird and Skype and much more.
I had many trouble with Debian before i work with SolusOS and now i must say i would it not missing it works and the low resources it is great.
78 • @imnotrich and comment 73 (by Peter Besenbruch on 2012-12-28 22:11:55 GMT from United States)
"Last time I test drove XFCE it lacked right click functionality. Maybe XFCE has changed, but back then most apps were not compatible with the XFCE de."
I have used XFCE 4.6, 4.8, and 4.10. They all had right click capability, and all applications were compatible. I use, like most people, a combination of GTK and QT apps.
"Printers are basic functionality, maybe non-noobs don't use printers?"
Sometimes the answer is "yes." There are times when I don't want to print with a given machine. Why even install Cups in that case? Debian lets you choose.
"My point here was EVERY past iteration of Debian/CUPS I've used over the last 10 years automatically installed my printer. Version 7 did not. Why the inconsistency? I used the net install cd, so it's not something basic they omitted intentionally to save space."
And my point is that since Sarge, Debian has not automatically installed my printers. I would include Woody, but I was using it in conjunction with Libranet.
"Nautilus and Gnome are the "defaults" for Debian 7 Beta 4. What's the deal? You'd think Debian would want to put their best foot forward."
For Debian to change, there needs to be a lot of discussion, and possibly a vote. I know there was some discussion about changing to XFCE, but that ultimately didn't happen.
Also, Debian isn't a "best foot forward" kind of distro. It's a conservative, stable one. Knowing them, they would probably settle on FVWM instead of Gnome. ;)
"Skype 2.2 for amd64 worked great for a while on Squeeze, but as Squeeze sent out updates right and left, Skype no longer was compatible. Constantly crashes out when you open Skype, beyond fixable. For a time there were Skype 4-something for amd64 available for download and it worked great. But at some point Skype withdrew the .deb file, and 2.2 for amd64 doesn't work at all in Debian 7."
I had problems with sound when communicating from version 4 to version 4, so I went back to 2.2. It works fine with the Squeeze and Wheezy 32 bit versions. I have held off moving to 64 bit, because of these compatibility issues. It's not just with Skype, I was concerned about Flash, too.
"Regarding my wireless card please read my post again. Not only was working firmware available to the Debian installer, I ran the entire 1200+ file download during the install over my wifi connection!"
That's nice of them.
"So if I understand you correctly you're saying the installer doesn't comply with Debian's no proprietary firmware rule?"
The installer is complying. It's not installing something proprietary on your computer, unless you specifically go out there and enable "non-free." You don't have to like it, but that's how they operate.
"The video card in my laptop is another matter. Worked great during the install. No messages about firmware. But now that the install is complete I have to acpi-off pnpbios=off nomodeset to boot to the Debian. Odd."
Yes, it is, and it's worth visiting the discussion forums, or submitting a bug over the issue.
"As previously stated, most of the time since Squeeze Debian the installer doesn't notify you when firmware is missing and notification or not that firmware is almost always not to be found in any debian repo."
And as previously stated, Squeeze notified me of mine. Now it may be that they hadn't supported your hardware in Squeeze, yet, but did in Wheezy. For me, every firmware notification in Squeeze's install was backed up with firmware in non-free. That said, there is no guarantee the firmware would actually work. To activate the wireless on my Toshiba NB505 netbook, I needed to grab newer firmware and a kernel from Backports. Even so, I was notified during the install about missing firmware.
" but why making things more difficult than they have to be?"
Because, sometimes too much automation makes things worse? Because, they value free software more than convenience?
"And there still remains no nvidia driver for my recent vintage desktop's video card either for Debian 7, at least not yet."
And there won't be until Wheezy goes stable. Wheezy is currently frozen, and accepting bug fixes only. When Wheezy goes stable, there will be a new testing branch accepting a pile of updates from Experimental via Sid (the unstable branch). Once the new drivers hit Testing, Backports will follow quickly.
In the mean time you have two options: use the driver from Nvidia, or try the newer version in Experimental. At this point in the cycle, it likely is compatible.
"I would agree that AMD and ATI video cards can be problematic. For a while, nearly all Intel and AMD and ATI and Nvidia cards were incompatible with Linux."
I have been using Linux since 2002, and both Intel and Nvidia worked well. ATI has reportedly improved over the last two years, but I do not trust them yet. I especially don't trust them after their latest round of layoffs.
"Thing is I'm not rich and as such I can't just buy new hardware every time the Linux Kernel drops support for my recent vintage gadgets."
You were complaining that that your recent hardware wasn't supported, yet, and now you are complaining about support that did exist, but is now dropped? When upgrading from one version of Debian to the next, you get to keep your old kernel. I usually keep an older version of the kernel for just such situations. You can run a 2.6.32 kernel on Wheezy. I know, because I've done it.
79 • Peppermint 3 (by Herbert Thornton on 2012-12-28 22:58:34 GMT from Canada)
I've been trying various Linux distributions for several years, but have generally found then too disorganized and clunky and that has always made me return to Windows - most lately to Windows 7.
But when I recently tried out Windows 8, I was so repelled by it that I resumed my Linux search hoping for something new and better - and at last I've found exactly what I was hoping for.
It's Linux Peppermint 3. In every way, I find it at least equal to Windows 7 and in several ways, better. Unlike W7, it isn't subject to the kinds of obstacles that Microsoft subject people to, such as demanding a coded "key" or being required to be "activated". It's very easy to use too, and installing Firefox and Thunderbird (the two programs that I prefer) takes only a couple minutes. Both Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 and Faststone (my two preferred photo programs) are easily installed via Wine.
My two computers are quite old - an H.P a1100n (my main computer) and a Dell Dimension 4700 (that I use as a spare). They both operate Peppermint very well.
I was considering buying something newer, but after I put the cheapest Solid State drive I could find into the HP a1100n it runs so fast that can't see any point in buying a new one.
To my mind, Peppermint 3 is The Best. Try it. I think you'll like it.
80 • @Chanath and how to get the Maximum from Wheezy (by Peter Besenbruch on 2012-12-28 23:59:41 GMT from Anonymous Proxy)
"While waiting for Debian 7 to be released, one can get the maximum out of it."
Yes, one can, by using Debian 7. ;)
Seriously, when installing on a new machine at this point in the upgrade cycle, I use Wheezy.
I have used a number of distros over the years based on a larger one. It started with Libranet. You get to use the Debian repositories, and then add something extra. Invariably, there would be a problem as the base distro changed, and the one I was using didn't. A further issue that I found was that invariably the additions slowed things down. Mint DE is the worst offender in this regard. I found it simpler in the end to just use Debian.
Question for you. Why are you using 2.0a5 instead of 1.2 Eveline? It looks like the software used in version 1.2 is newer, at least as listed on the Distrowatch page.
81 • 80 @Chanath and how to get the Maximum from Wheezy (by Peter Besenbruch (by Chanath on 2012-12-29 09:48:52 GMT from Sri Lanka)
I have Eveline 1.2 too. All the software can be reached at SolusoS repos. I find SolusOS 2A5 a very stable distro. Ikey wants to move to a different direction, so I want to keep this distro. He would come up with a completely different SolusOS 2.
As both Eveline and 2A5 are Debian, all I need to do to get at any software is to add the repos to the sources.list. I have even got Ubuntu software installed in 2A5, just for checking and fun, especially the ppas. You can read something interesting here; http://main.solusos.com/showthread.php?3176-Ideas-again-for-SolusOS-2-and-further
82 • And even more responses (by Pierre on 2012-12-29 15:33:29 GMT from Germany)
@74 (Gnome classic is not heavy by Chanath)
As long as there is no one to be found who will extract the functions Dolphin depends on in KDE libraries, we won't see a KDE-independent version of Dolphin. But I even see no reason why one should want that. The KDE libraries do not hurt you. And if you like Dolphin it is absolutely possible you even like other KDE software, so you just have one base library on which they depend, and that's ok in my opinion.
I am using the i3 window manager and with it software that simply fits my needs. For me it does not matter if that piece of software is developed under the KDE or Gnome or what-so-ever-flag. I just care about the fact that it's nicely doing what it is intended to do for me.
So, images for example are opened in Gwenview (KDE/Qt), for editing they are opened in GIMP(Gtk+2), for scanning documents I prefer SimpleScan (Gnome3/Gtk+3), for browsing the WWW I use both, Firefox and Chromium (both Gtk+2), etc.
So as you see, I simply do not care which Framework or project is developing the software I prefer to use because it best fits my needs and habits.
@78 (@imnotrich and comment 73 by Peter Besenbruch) and @73 ( #70...you kinda missed the point. by imnotrich)
I never had any problems with using Debian, no matter about how new or old the hardware was or which version.
If you do not have much money for buying hardware, it is recommended to inform oneself before buying if it is supported by the Linux kernel and Linux drivers.
I bought hardware to build a new PC from scratch only 1 and a half year ago and was preparing that for one or two month, just to be sure the quite new graphics card by nVidia will be supported by neauvou (the open source nVidia driver) and nVidia's proprietary driver. The Wifi card was chosen wisely, too, by searching which cards are using chipsets that are having Linux drivers.
So, this way you can make quite sure that the hardware you bought will be functional in Linux for quite some long time. Mostly support for newer devices is added and not abandoned for older hardware. And if you do not have more than 4 GB of RAM you will have not many advantages out of using 64 bit Linux, more likely you will have much than problems by doing so.
Although 64 bit will be the future of computing, the 32 bit support still is a little better when it comes to multimedia devices and software like Flash (although already fully abandoned) and Skype etc.
And again. Debian 7 sill is under development, no matter if it is in feature freeze since quite some time, you are not supposed to treat it as fully stable or working flawless.
Nevertheless, even without feature freeze Debian 7 was already quite stable for me. I guess that the experience and how you rate it much depends on what you expect. Debian is no noob distro and I as a few others like and understand the way it's working.
And by the way: I am no Debian user full time. Most of my machines are running openSUSE 12.2, so I am no Debian fanboy, if someone might think that by reading my post. ;)
Greetings.
83 • @62,65 (by Nikos on 2012-12-29 19:28:27 GMT from Greece)
First of all leafpad was never part of XFCE. If by wider project you mean that it is a GTK+2 application then your definition of what goes under the XFCE project is different than mine.
Regarding NetworkManager and not being XFCE/LXDE. That's what i said too. They don't have a GUI network manager at all.
Consider this scenario, which IMO will soon take place like it already has in other places, see for example the transmission bug report about removing the tray icon opened by a GNOME developer https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 .
Red Hat develops and cares only for GNOME. Red Hat pays someone to code NetworkManager for it to work a GNOME environment. GNOME already from 3.7 and officially from 3.8 doesn't need the network manager applet cause the GNOME Shell has that kind of functionality built in. Red Hat stops paying someone to code nm-applet and the applet is considered dead for nm upstream. That means no GTK based environment other than GNOME itself has a GUI for configuring the network. You have to use the command line, if possible, or develop your own GUI for it.
E17 doesn't duplicate anything in this regard. They have a GUI for connman, just like XFCE and LXDE will be forced to create one pretty soon.
PS. It is very clear to me that since Canonical decided to leave GNOME and develop Unity on their own, Red Hat started following the same strategy and i doubt the will be paying many people for working of features that work only outside of GNOME. They want money, power, control and they want to build a brand.
They have even been trying to change the way applications outside of GNOME work, for example transmission https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 and you are telling me about code duplication. Good luck with trying to include GNOME components in your non GNOME environment in the future.
84 • Unity (by TobiSGD on 2012-12-29 19:42:45 GMT from Germany)
" I wanted to find out how I would feel about Unity if I used it long enough to unlearn old habits"
And this is the phrase that I don't understand. Unlike (almost?) any other tool, the computer as a tool is shapeable to your needs. You can configure and use it exactly the way you want. That exciting feature lead me from KDE and Gnome 2 over XFCE, LXDE, Openbox and many others to i3, a WM with the ability to be absolutely configurable with almost no limits.
In my eyes, any WM/DE that limits configurability should be dismissed, since it is not able to adapt itself to different users. Of course only my opinion, but I would rather invest 2 days in configuring my UI the way I need it than a week with adapting my workflow to a way some developers thought it may be a good idea.
85 • @84 by TobiSGD (by Pierre on 2012-12-29 20:33:32 GMT from Germany)
Another happy i3 user! :)
I am using i3, too, made exactly the same way from KDE over Gnome2, then XFCE, Openbox and am now very very pleased and happy with i3. :) Ok, I had tried LXDE, Fluxbox and other in that line, too. Awesome is a very nice and flexible window manager as well, but I found i3 to have a philosophy better fitting my needs and habits.
But there is one thing I have to disagree: All the DEs and WMs that are not as flexible as i3, awesome etc. are nice ways to go for all the people who are not that geeky and nerdy and just want to have a nice and functional DE they can simply start with and where they do not have to take care about config files etc.
86 • 55 • from debian to centos (by ken (by Beach Boy on 2012-12-29 23:27:23 GMT from Brazil)
I was a loyal LMDE user, until I got a (new) girlfriend whose father is a software engineer working for a company with a big network based on CentOS. He showed me the advantages of RHEL clones over other Linux distros, and then I switched to Stella (a CentOS spin). Apparently, it has a multimedia capability similar to LMDE, but is faster and never let the Internet connection drop. (LMDE did it sometimes, unhappily.)
So I think the best distro of 2012 was Stella, not Mint. Maybe ken (of Congo) and many other African/American/Asian/European/Oceanian users of RHEL clones agree with me. By the way, CentOS itself is a heck of a lot good, although not as suitable for a desktop PC as Stella. It really deserves a review by Jesse!
How wonderful would be a version of Stella made on top of Scientific Linux miniLiveCD...
87 • 82 And even more responses (by Pierre (by Chanath on 2012-12-30 01:30:26 GMT from Sri Lanka)
Well, why not? I installed Dolphin to my Precise 12.04.1 after reading your comment. It asked for only 3 dependencies. It is feature full and doesn't have this war between nautilus 3.4.2 and 3.6. and Dolphin is pretty snappy. Actually, I like KDE for its KWin, but don't like Caligra, Rekong etc.
Why I said that Gnome Classic is not heavy, because at this moment i can have it without all kinds of hangers-on getting installed with it. The Gnome-shell carries a lot of such hangers-on, just as Unity. What I did was uninstalled Unity, leaving some parts of Unity 2D, and extracted Dash. So, I have the Gnome-Classic session with unity's Dash, "old" Slingshot and now Dolphin too.
I like the visual search engine and the launcher of apps. I've been using the slingshot--the one that's abandoned by even the present maintainer--for quite a while. It works flawlessly. As a challenge, I separated the Dash from Unity and got it working with the Gnome-Classic session.
Now, the work with the distro is very interesting; I can push the super and get only the Dash, push al and get the HUD--it is practically useless--and with a click the Slingshot appears. I can use one of them at will.
The Gnome-panel (or the LXpanel) works as the "window list" and the holder of the indicator applet. I can have Awn dock, Cairo dock or Docky o do that work and also Tint2.
I don't need Gnome-shell or Unity at all, and that makes my instillation not heavy. I also have a full assortment of applications. My laptop is a P4 2.4GHz core 2 duo one. I can imagine how swiftly it would work on a i5 or i7!
I am quite tired of noticing that the Dash is hidden so deeply in Unity 3D of Quantal and Raring, not allowing us to use only the Dash. I am not a geek, but as I came so far, I'd try my best to extract Dash out of Unity 3D. Between the 2 launchers/search engines, I prefer "old" Slingshot for its universality.
88 • in addition to my post 87 (by Chanath on 2012-12-30 03:16:06 GMT from Sri Lanka)
This is Ubuntu 12.04.1 and here I have two visual apps launchers/search engines in the same distro.
The "Old" Slingshot appears, when I click on the icon on the Gnome-classic panel. You can see that at the bottom left hand corner. The Gnome-classic panel holds other icons of apps, I use frequently. It is somewhat darker, but the transparency can be increased. http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/5899/theoldslingshotwithubun.jpg
Here is the screenshot of Dash without the Unity left launcher/window list bar and the Unity top panel.It is quite transparent. http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/1135/dashwithoutunitylaunche.jpg
As you notice, both the launchers/search engines are good at finding an app or a file very fast. One doesn't need to even look at the screen. the maximum letters I had to write was 3 for far away app or a file.
The "abandoned" old Slingshot is much better than the Unity's Dash, as everything is right there in front of you and it is universal. No wonder why the "devs" are trying to dump it to the history. But, the Mac guys had found it useful for their expensive hardware.
In this fervour of "development", the devs and the owners of companies are actually killing off good applications, and introducing all kinds of restrictions to the user.
89 • @86 by Beach Boy (by Pierre on 2012-12-30 16:56:25 GMT from Germany)
As your girlfriend's father found advantages of RHEL-clones over other distros I am able to find a lot of advantages of other distros over CentOS-like distros.
It always depends on your needs and wishes and the use case which distro fits best your needs.
For some software developers Debian and RHEL or it's clones might be a very nice idea. They feature very mature and stable software as well as a long term support kernel all giving them the insurance that software they develop for that system will not get incompatible when updates come in.
Another thing is, they are working with CentOS for special reasons and chose it wisely.
While this is very important in a business, it does not matter a lot for a user who only uses the system on private purpose.
For such a user it might even be a lot more important to have up-to-date apps running and this is where Debian stable and RHEL-clones just do not cover up with distros like Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mageia, Mint, Fedora, Arch etc. - just to name a few popular.
Even the conservative Slackware distro is shipping with very stable but still a lot more up-to-date apps.
And the last point: Although I know a lot of people loving Gnome 2 and some of them now are using MATE now, I know hardly anyone who wants to use Gnome 2, which got abandoned and is not getting further developed.
There are so many and very nice distros out there and which is seen as the best very depends on the own habits, needs and wishes. If Stella is to your liking then ok. But as you can easily see, Mint actually is the most popular distros at the moment when it comes to the page hit ranking.
So, if everyone would now start to name the own distro of choice the best distro of the year, we would rapidly have a discussion about what is the best. And you know what? Everyone will be right - but only for himself.
I personally would call the great release of openSUSE 12.2 the distro of the year. And others would name Mint or Ubuntu. But thats the great thing about choice! :)
Greetings.
90 • @Imnotrich- Debian 7 bugs? (by Carlos on 2012-12-31 00:05:46 GMT from Mexico)
Hi Innotrich, first of all, you forget the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines), exactly: Debian Developers an team FULLY support the FREE software and the privative software don't...
ALL Your BUGS? are related with privative software.
Why DFSG? Because:
1.- AMD/NVIDIA Drivers not fully support Linux and not up to date (Manufacturer problem's).
2.- Adobe software drop support for Linux (Adobe problem).
3.- MS Office & Skype Fully compatibility? heyy, remember, is MSoft Software! Never be a Fully compatible, is a dream! because MSoft all the life has stonewalled Linux, and never stop.
A tip: if your computing life revolves around Windows software, you have two options:
1. - Revolutionizing the world and adopt the completely free software, so you have to battle or.
2. - Back to Windows.
PD:Sorry for my bad and real english.
91 • Duh! (by imnotrich on 2012-12-31 05:18:31 GMT from Mexico)
Obviously, if spending $20 on a new mini-pci wireless card with better Linux compatibility is not an option for me then most folks would understand purchasing new hardware or doing a custom build was beyond reach. Doesn't solve the problem that Debian does not support my laptop's video card either. With laptops you already own you're pretty much stuck with the hardware provided, and good luck finding specifics about mobo-integrated hardware prior to purchase.
Even if I was in a position to do the research and buy different hardware, within 6 months or a year it would no longer be supported by whatever distro I'm running. That's been my experience over the last 10 years anyway. Some new kernel update or other changes frequently bork my install, dropping support for my hardware in some cases and I have to start from scratch. Occasionally I've even had to switch distros because of it. Hardware support is not bloat and for me my operating system is NOT my hobby. I shouldn't have to spend a week or two getting everything to work properly.
Now with Debian part of the problem since Squeeze is that much of the time, if proprietary firmware is needed Squeeze won't say anything during the install, because it's biased in favor of the included open source firmware which may or may not work. Has nothing to do with enabling certain repositories, we're talking about the install process not the endless tweaking that follows. Point of fact there is no non-free firmware available in ANY Debian repo for the Realtek 8185 card in my laptop. Realtek 8185 was supported by Etch and Lenny (probably proprietary code included in the kernel) but not Squeeze. Ubuntu 9.04 and Puppy 4.3.1 supported it, too but later versions no. Now Wheezy's open source firmware will allow me to use my wireless card during install, but then disables it somehow after the install is complete? This is a bizarre bug, plain and simple and makes no sense whatsoever. Same for the manner in which Debian treats my laptop's video card (refer to prior posts).
As for my earlier comments about compatibility, somebody subsequently gave me a lecture about using non-free stuff (specifically Skype). I apologize if I didn't properly articulate the point.
I don't ever expect the level of cooperation necessary between the closed source and open source camps will ever happen which would allow documents created by MSOffice to be 100% compatible and have interoperability with Open or Libre Office and vice versa. Or Adobe Acrobat and 3rd party imitations. Or Skype. I do expect if these vendors release a Linux version that it operate bug free, but the main point I was trying to make is there are valid reasons people who use their computers for work cannot abandon closed source. If I'm creating or editing documents for my own use, that's one thing. If it's something I have to share with others then most of the time the ONLY option is closed source. That's why I used WINE with MSOffice for years, and now my main desktop is dual boot Windows 7/MSOffice and Debian 7. It's a fact of life and market share. Even MAC users use Microsoft Office, so what to do? Send people documents in odt format they can't open?
92 • Poster #91 (by borion on 2012-12-31 05:44:18 GMT from United States)
To poster #91,
Welcome to to the messed up reality of Linux and open source software ... where nobody cares about quality or the reality ... as long as you utter the buzz words of free and open source.
To those who want to crucify me ... have you looked at the quality of the Linux apps lately, I mean for the last 15-20 years?
Get real guys, it ain't going to get any better. You can call me a troll, if you like ... but, its not going to change anything.
93 • #80 (by zykoda on 2012-12-31 07:33:09 GMT from United Kingdom)
NB. Firefox shows Stella has a self signed untrusted certificate!
94 • @91 and PCI Wireless Card Support (by Peter Besenbruch on 2012-12-31 09:01:59 GMT from United States)
If you can't get and rtl8185 supported, there are three options: a supported card, or NDIS Wrapper. An Intel card starts at $5, not twenty. Shipping is perhaps another $3. There are lots of comments that NDIS Wrapper works fine for this chipset. Most others as root did "modprobe rtl8180", and that worked for Squeeze/Lucid.
Indeed, yours is the only post on the Internet that complains about the card not working with recent releases.
95 • Let's NOT make Linux popular!!!! (by Ed Pills on 2012-12-31 12:36:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
I've been a habitual Linux OS user since 2004, when simply getting a Linux OS to connect to your dial-up modem was sometimes approaching mission impossible and resulted in much celebration when successful.
Over the years I have heard one refrain from Linux users - How to make Linux popular among the computer using masses. Yes, it's a weakness in human nature. We all want to be popular. But fro Linux Operating Systems it's the Achilles Heel.
There could be nothing, absolutely nothing, more devastating to the "Linux experience" than for it to rival Microsoft Windows for popularity. With popularity comes commercialisation, viruses, costly virus protection rackets, malware, worms, trojan horses, spyware ... the list could go on.
Linux is great because it's NOT popular. It's a fringe anarchist operating system and may it always stay that way.
If you love Linux don't shout it to the rooftops. Sure share it with a few close friends but don't try to make it go viral. If it did go viral it would be the death of Linux as we know it.
96 • #95 (by zykoda on 2012-12-31 16:10:31 GMT from United Kingdom)
Populations wax and wane for many different reasons. But you have my vote from the small Linux electorate. The "linux" gene pool is rich and awaiting a niche to exploit. Android certainly made headway! Democratic vox populi seems a silly statistical way of subtracting two large numbers of almost equal size to obtain a government. Such methods are IMHO a poor and inefficient way to progress a country especially when internationalization allows so many loopholes for some.
97 • Linux for the masses (re #95 (by Jordan on 2012-12-31 18:03:38 GMT from United States)
Mr. Torvalds may disagree, and also may opine that the very reasons Microsoft products are so vulnerable to exploints are the reasons Linux must be perfected (by the masses of dedicated devs).
He may not.. it's my opinion, but he was the person who popped into my mind when I read that post. Keep Linux for a fringe group because we're afraid of exploits? Ummmmm..
...no. ;)
98 • "Need" Microsoft Windows for work? (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2012-12-31 19:08:15 GMT from United States)
I've heard that hype many a time, from people who actually believe it. It's rarely true. Microsoft doesn't even make software (easily) compatible with its own. May have something to do with selling hardware. If you dig, though, there's almost always a way, like using an "older" file format.
These days it's harder to find something that doesn't require Google or Adobe (or Cisco) than something that can't be done without Microsoft. There are plenty of wanna-be-(owners-of-the)-Gates.
I appreciate competition in a truly free market: helps keep us all honest.
99 • Windows (by Neil on 2012-12-31 20:10:30 GMT from United States)
@98 I use Windows (XP) Only when I use Yahoo Messenger. I have not found a Linux program as easy to use for both audio and video. Happy 2013 to All!!
100 • @borion - Your SHORT reality.. (by Carlos on 2012-12-31 21:27:53 GMT from Mexico)
"Welcome to to the messed up reality of Linux and open source software ..."
Where you living? in caves? Have not you heard that windowusers prefer free software?
Web explorer: the prefered is Firefox because IE is slow, lacks of plugins and frequently is "kidnaped" by malware, the most important antimalware companies advise no to use IE for banking.
Download Manager: The best and number one is Jdownloader.
Mail: Outlook and live mail are suck, nobody use that! prefer Thunderbird for security.
PDF: The US Departament of Defense used Red Hat derivative OS with SELinux (the most security software in the world) and for Windows strongly recommend using the increasingly popular and safe Foxit Reader.
Virtualization: anything best to Virtualbox? Before 2007, it was the best VMWare and VirtualBox (proprietary software) is not sticking.
In 2007 released the source code, there Virtualbox OSE (open source) and has become the best application virtualization today.
The last time that I used Windows as host (School windows policy) , took me hours to find that a malware was blocking my wifi signal, however have had:
Windows 7 License buyed, Office 2010 original, Antivirus original, Firewall, Antispyware, Antispam, every week desfragmented, clean, cheked, all up to date, etc.
NOTHING is enough for keep Windows Clean and online usable, piece of garbage.
I am back home forever and I'm happy because solved my School problems:
Linux Host with Virtualized Windows 7 HP 64 Bits original in Virtualbox ONLY for School tasks, for everything else, Linux satisfies me with the best quality.
101 • 95 Let's NOT make Linux popular!!!! (by Ed Pills (by Chanath on 2012-12-31 23:53:12 GMT from Sri Lanka)
"With popularity comes commercialisation, viruses, costly virus protection rackets, malware, worms, trojan horses, spyware ... the list could go on." Golden words!
With the rush for popularity comes other restrictions imposed by the developers and owners of companies. When some application happens to be universal, it get pushed under the carpet, so the users won't get the full benefits of using it. One such application is Ubuntu's Unity 2D. It was written in an easy language, quite customizable, so it got the poor cousin's treatment.
Here is something that might intrigue you; http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/8552/unitydashwithpurelxde.jpg
Underneath the Dash, you'd notice the very fast LXDE in its pure form. The LXDE panel is also seen. Just imagine having a very fast LXDE Ubuntu based distro with the Dash as the visual launcher and the search engine of applications!
102 • Thanks to All (by Bill on 2012-12-31 23:55:10 GMT from United States)
Thanks to Ladislav, Jesse, and Bruce who together have given us a website to enjoy and learn from (not to mention distro hopping and downloading), for another year. We almost never agree on anything, yet I learn something every time I visit. Between links to articles and reviews, to programs people like which I never heard of before, this is quite a nice website to visit each week.
Wishing us all a very prosperous, meaningful, joy filled New Year wherever you happen to be in this wide world of ours.
Linux Rocks!
Bill
103 • Unity and accessibility (by jeffrx on 2013-01-01 18:07:15 GMT from United States)
I have a spinal cord injury and need sticky keys to use a computer. Ubuntu left the disabled community behind with Unity. While it is possible to get sticky keys to work, without the Keyboard Accessibility Status Indicator in gnome it is very hard to use. Fortunately, MATE has our backs. as KAS works nicely.
104 • The State of Enlightenment (e17) (by RollMeAway on 2013-01-01 23:37:18 GMT from United States)
The base system was officially released on 12/21/12, however many e_modules had problems.
My first successful compile from svn occurred on 12/27/12. All the e_modules I use worked fine then.
Users of *buntu with hannes-janetzek-enlightenment ppa enabled seen full function on or before 12/30.
Several distros have the official release, with broken e_modules, among them mageia, rosa, snow-e17.
Missing in action is bodhi. Last e17 upgrade is dated 10/02/12.
It appears bodhi will treat the official e17 release as a separate entity, and offer new install disks.
Please post any other knowledge, you may have, of distros offering current e17.
105 • Installed Mint 14 (x64) on my HP laptop, the good the bad and the ugly. (by Jeffersonian on 2013-01-01 23:40:22 GMT from United States)
Hello:
after I damaged my system beyond repair, I had to reinstall Linux on my notebook.
Mint 14, was really a pain to install, deleted a partition data that I did not want to delete, etc...
I had to do three installs and pretty much reformat the /boot (ext4) and /home (xfs) partition, to be able to successfully install Mint 14 x64.
And this was not all !
Installing the Nvidia, and (wifi) Broadcom drivers was not a piece of cake either: long frustrating install of Mint 14 MATE.
But when I was done, I am very happy of the way it works: Really clean, fast and very stable, congratulation Clem ! Just as good as Fedora, but in a different way : I do like both distros... and both are hard to install !(multi-boot).
The Linux installers seems to me to be the weakest point of Linux. None of them is really good, even if there is some progress compared to ten years ago.
One "universal" (love this word!) Linux installer is all we need, and it could be same for all the Linux Distros! Actually this could also apply to system management too.
106 • 94 again I say duh! (by Imnotrich on 2013-01-02 01:01:54 GMT from Mexico)
You failed to notice the Realtek 8185 is not the same as the rtl8180. There remains no current firmware specific to the 8185 anywhere to be found on the net. Realteks site has one written for Ubuntu 8. This card can be made to work with the wrong firmware somehow even Debian 7s installer can do it but once the install is complete the installer disables or blocks this card from working. Not just a bug but a reallly stupid bug. Being able to write lots of code should not be a pre requisite for having a working installl. And anybody who can provide links showing the bug fix procedure for this wifi card and my laptops video card needs to step up now, all others need to just shut the front door lest they continue to expose their Linux ignorance.
107 • Linux Mint (by Barney on 2013-01-02 03:42:56 GMT from Kuwait)
I love Linux Mint! Linux Mint works great 'out of the box' with no hassle. Linux Mint also offers a choice of 4 desktop environments. I just donated another $5 to their cause. Thanks Clem for continuing to make such a great OS! Happy New Year!
108 • @Imnotrich and Linux WIFI (by Peter Besenbruch on 2013-01-02 05:05:19 GMT from Netherlands)
You missed my point. Countless posts say the rtl8180 module works with the rtl8185. Moreover, it works well. Feel free not to try it, or NDIS Wrapper, or a cheap Intel card. That the card worked out of the box on install indicates that your card works fine with Debian. No WIFI card that I have had works after first boot after a Debian install. You may not like it, but it has been that way through multiple releases, not just with Wheezy. It is not a bug, as it is done deliberately.
109 • @ 105 Jeffersonian and @107 Barney (by Chanath on 2013-01-02 09:20:35 GMT from Sri Lanka)
Linux Mint Cinnamon...You might be interested about how Dash can be made to work with Cinnamon. Have look http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4412/itslikethisnow.jpg
Or, Cinnamon could be made to work with Dash, but without the Unity left bar and the global menu bar.
110 • @104 - E17 stable now in Bodhi repos (by Uncle Slacky on 2013-01-02 15:58:18 GMT from France)
As subject - also available as a respin ISO (Bodhi v2.2.0). Seems to work well so far.
111 • flashiness vs substance (by Tom on 2013-01-02 16:02:07 GMT from United States)
I just want to say I totally agree with #34 that the open source community seems to have a problem of focusing on flashiness as opposed to usability.
KDE did need a rewrite of the code. However even with 4.8 there are still features not implemented (or not fully implemented) that worked fine in 3.5.
Who would have thought when I switched to KDE in 2002 that 11 years later I'd be looking into Trinity (a fork of the KDE 3.5 code) and trying to go back in time just to get a functional system?
One would have thought Gnome would have seen what happened with KDE and would have done Gnome 3 right. However it is apparent they fell into the same traps that KDE did.
Now we have Unity from Ubuntu. It is being called a good desktop environment, yet it crashes a lot and uses a lot of CPU (not to mention the lack of the ability to customize it is touted as a feature). I'm sorry but I agree with the others who say it can't possibly be good if its features are frequent crashes and CPU hog.
What I don't understand is why we're having such negative development from the open source community. We're supposed to be showing the world a better way, yet we're producing crap that isn't much better than Win8. It has been years since I have been able to show off my Linux system to people who use Windows and I fear I may never be able to do so again.
112 • E17 Slackbuild (by Rick on 2013-01-02 18:42:57 GMT from United States)
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.0/desktop/enlightenment/ The Slackbuilds page is very informative and detailed. Dependencies and build order included. Other that "overloading the E17 server" by download the source, the entire compile install and first login all worked without issue.
113 • @111, Tom (by Barnabyh on 2013-01-02 21:31:13 GMT from United Kingdom)
The developers thought THIS was the better way. Obviously deluded.
114 • 111 flashiness vs substance (by Tom (by Chanath on 2013-01-02 22:42:54 GMT from Sri Lanka)
"Now we have Unity from Ubuntu. It is being called a good desktop environment, yet it crashes a lot and uses a lot of CPU (not to mention the lack of the ability to customize it is touted as a feature). I'm sorry but I agree with the others who say it can't possibly be good if its features are frequent crashes and CPU hog."
There is Unity and Unity. One that crashes a lot and one that won't crash at all. One that works with any compositing environment and one, which claims to be a Compiz plugin, but can't work with other Compiz plugins such as 3D windows and few others that use 3D!
One that crashes a lot is Unity 3D, and the one that works with the same Compiz and won't crash is Unity 2D. Just imagine the value of "development" when the Unity 3D in Quantal and Raring cannot even work the 3D effects Lucid had with Compiz!
What the use of this "developed" Unity 3D in Quantal and Raring that can't even make a simple 3D desktop cube, let alone a cylinder?
115 • New breed of devs are smart phone addicts (by RollMeAway on 2013-01-02 22:43:29 GMT from United States)
More evident by the new feature presented by rosa linux's "fresh" kde release.
The menu button turns the desktop into a smart phone, much like unity and gnome3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FuGoLrAUHHA
Fortunately the conventional menu can still be added to the taskbar.
116 • @111 (by Pierre on 2013-01-03 07:21:16 GMT from Germany)
If you are not able to show off your Linux system to people who are using Windows you probably are doing something wrong.
It is right, that KDE has done a lot wrong since KDE 4. But since KDE 4.8 I had a more or less stable system comparable to KDE 3.5 at it's time.
The thing is, we do not have 2003, we have 10 years later and the requirements are quite different to 10 years ago.
10 years ago we were happy with a snappy system that provided us access to the internet and some important programs we need for work.
Nowadays not only the open source developers are requested to not only release ever more feature rich apps, but even very good looking, powerful but nevertheless simple and beautiful. The expectations grew with the possibilities of the hardware and we maybe all lost the old values in most of the main projects.
Because features became more important than a stable system we are where got now. We can complain about that now or rethink and start to look around.
Because nevertheless there are still projects that do focus on snappy and useful environments and applications like Xfce and LXDE, OpenBox etc.
So, if you are not able to show your system to other people who are using Windows without being proud, you definitely are doing something wrong!
Just my 2 cents...
117 • What doesn't KDE 4.9 do? (by mz on 2013-01-03 20:36:37 GMT from United States)
I keep on hearing these KDE 4 vs Gnome 3 comparisons, but nobody seems to be able to give a valid reason why KDE 4.8 & newer are so bad. # 111 did say that newer KDEs don't have some previous features, but didn't tell what they are. I know there were some bad release decisions early on in the KDE 4.x line from various distro makers, but those were avoidable problems created by distos & those who were too eager to try KDE 4.0. I'd like to know from someone who's actually tried KDE & tweaked it to their liking what the problem with recent KDE releases is. If you don't like something in KDE you can change the setting, but up until recently things you didn't like in Gnome 3 meant you had to rely on 'fallback' or change your desktop. I make have started out on Linux with Mint 6 & Gnome, but I've become rather biased toward KDE 4, & I just don't get the comparisons between current versions of KDE & Gnome. Could someone please give a better explanation?
118 • KDE (by Mac on 2013-01-04 22:58:51 GMT from United States)
I too have been able to tweak kde to my liking. Everything I do is db with xp or 7 for me are someone else and have had no one complain yet and that is for several different people. To each his or her own but it is KDE for me.
Have fun Mack
119 • @117 and KDE 4.x (by Pierre on 2013-01-05 06:22:09 GMT from Germany)
I don't see any problem with missing features either.
The KDE 4.x series are delivering so many features KDE 3.5.x never had. Additionally I don't see any reason to complain about missing features most people - and even most of those who are complaining about - never ever used!
I don't even see any reason in this lechery for features hardly anyone really needs to get things done. I have never seen any reason in such things like conky which is the reason for some problems in the latest Ubuntu release. What for? That windows I close are fading out? That's just good looking nonsense that even reducing responsiveness and has a negative influence to the work flow.
It's not that I want to preach purity. But effects should help to achieve an increased work flow instead of decreasing it.
This is why, as I already pointed out in an earlier post, I am using the i3 window manager with some KDE and Gnome applications.
120 • Slax 7 - new knife/base, no blades? (by Somewhat Reticent on 2013-01-05 20:25:14 GMT from United States)
[@67-gnomic: so edit the configuration to your taste: see TIMEOUT in /boot/syslinux.cfg]
Like a new Swiss Army knife handle, Slax 7 holds great promise.
A handle without blades, yet, apparently. (Shouldn't this be called alpha?)
Earlier versions had many blades. Piled up. In heaps. Big heaps. Long stringy heaps.
Finding the right combination of blades could take way too long.
There is promise of blades to come. Let us hope for better organized, better searchable.
121 • watch out for Calculate linux-fair warning (by Roland on 2013-01-06 00:00:28 GMT from United States)
The different versions of this release all ASSUME your hardware clock is set to local time, and then they write to it without permission to ENSURE it's local time. This is dumb, and it screws things up royally if you multi-boot, as I do. Localtime is just weird. Linux contains software to deal with that weirdness, but it doesn't work if it isn't used. And setting your hwclock bypasses that software. The hwclock should ALWAYS be set to UTC, so linux can deal with things like DaylightSavings, and moving from one timezone to another, as so many people do these days.
122 • RE: 30-79-105-111-119 (by Landor on 2013-01-06 06:41:00 GMT from Canada)
#30
I don't think your post was appropriate. If you wanted to actually be decent, why did you point out a difference in the person? That would be like me saying that you don't care about my freedom, and all you care about it making money at the cost of my freedom. You see though, I wouldn't do that. If I wanted to convey a warm, and kind wish, I wouldn't have singled out any difference. Doing so is only rude.
#79
So let me get this straight, Linux is clunky and disorganized (whatever that is supposed to mean), but it's better than a MS product because you don't have to pay for it? What a nice analogy.
#105
I've never had any problems with any installer used by a distribution.
Also though, who is going to create this universal installer? Red Hat? Canonical? Debian? SUSE? Gentoo? After they create it, who's going to maintain it? What about distribution specific patches that can only be used by one distribution? In case you say, well that distribution should apply their own patches, what happens when you can't apply the patches because the code's changed because someone else maintains the installer? Who decides what features get implemented, and which ones don't?
It's easy to say that this or that should be universal, it's another thing to actually look at it logically. I honestly have to think that most people really have the oligarchy mindset from the OS they're coming from.
#111
Who says we're supposed to be showing the world a better way? I don't remember ever seeing that in any mission statement. As I've said before, if people don't like what's going on in a project, join it, become a voice campaigning for your choices, and vote for a new direction. The comments section for DistroWatch Weekly isn't going to serve as a medium to resolve what you feel are inadequacies in any aspect of an operating system based on the Linux Kernel.
To be honest, I want the reverse. I want people to leave. I prefer the times where we actually had intelligent conversations with other like-minded people of technical merit. Even the last two to three years here has shown a severe decline in that area.
#119
Conky is causing problems in Ubuntu's latest release? You must mean Compiz, but I have no idea how anyone could mix up the two in this community.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
123 • @119 and 122 (by Pierre on 2013-01-06 16:00:08 GMT from Germany)
Yeah, actually that really was a confusing typo. Don't know what was going on in my mind that i mixed up conky and compiz. :D
So I have no idea either. But at least you knew what was meant. ;)
Greetings from Germany.
124 • Mageia-3 install without akonadi/nepomuk/*pim (by RollMeAway on 2013-01-06 19:29:11 GMT from United States)
A recent install using "Mageia-3-beta1-kde4-i586" CD dated 12/17/12 gave me a nice surprise.
kmail/*pim/nepomuk/akonadi were NOT installed !
The recent Slax-7 is the only other instance, I know of, without these resource leaches.
Where slax is a live only distro, mageia is installed to hard disk.
Hopefully other distros will follow this trend.
125 • RE: 124 (by Landor on 2013-01-06 19:53:07 GMT from Canada)
Why not decompress the file system and work at hacking Slax 7 into a working hard drive install? I know it's a lot of effort, but if you really enjoy the system, the effort may be worth it. Due to its Slackware heritage you could even eventually install Slackware based packages.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
Number of Comments: 125
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