 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 506, 6 May 2013 |
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Welcome to this year's 18th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Ubuntu's latest release, while not among the most innovative or adventurous ones, continues to intrigue many casual and home users (business users are probably more comfortable with one of LTS releases). Still, many are wondering whether they should risk an upgrade to a new but rather unremarkable release whose support has been cut down to just nine months. In our feature article this week Jesse Smith takes a look at both Ubuntu and Kubuntu 13.04 and finds the latter a more pleasant experience. In the news section, Debian "Wheezy" arrives after more than two years of intense development, Mageia delays its third stable release due to installer bugs, Slackware ponders the inevitability of systemd as a service manager, and FreeBSD expands its activities thanks to record-breaking receipts of funds in 2012. Also in this issue, a link to an article comparing a number of special distributions for the Raspberry Pi, and a review of A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming by Mark Sobell. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the April 2013 DistroWatch.com donation is the Internet Software Consortium's DHCP project. Happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (28MB) and MP3 (51MB) formats
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
First looks at Ubuntu and Kubuntu 13.04
 Ubuntu is one of the most widely used Linux distributions alive today. It and its many derivatives and off-shoots are used by millions of people all around the world. As such when Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu it sends ripples throughout the open source community. The latest release of Ubuntu, version 13.04, arrived on April 25. A lot of rumours circulated over the past six months as to what would make it into the new release, whether Ubuntu would move to a rolling release model and what would happen with the Unity Dash. Now that Ubuntu 13.04 is here we can find out what direction Canonical has decided to take with its popular distribution.
As it turns out Ubuntu 13.04 is a relatively calm release. According to the project's release notes most of the effort put into the new version was focused on minor improvements. Canonical reports Unity has received some polish, the desktop should perform better and effort has been made to reduce the distribution's memory footprint. Rather than moving to a rolling release model Canonical has decided to cut the length of their support life cycle. Versions of Ubuntu which are not long term support releases will only receive 9 months of support as opposed to 18 months. The release notes also point out that the Wubi Windows installer, which allows users to install Ubuntu alongside Windows without repartitioning the hard drive, has been dropped for this version. It seems as though Canonical is trimming down support and features for this cycle and focusing on making Unity a more attractive desktop. Though not native to the main Ubuntu edition, there is a new flavour of Ubuntu available which focuses on the GNOME 3 desktop. The Ubuntu GNOME project is now an official community branch of Ubuntu and this can only be good news for GNOME fans.
Ubuntu 13.04 - the system installer
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Ubuntu is available in a few different editions, the main two being Desktop and Server. These editions are available in both 32-bit builds and 64-bit builds. The Desktop edition, which is the one I am interested in this week, can be downloaded as a 795MB ISO image. Booting from the media brings up a graphical environment and gives us the option of either exploring the Ubuntu live desktop or launching the distribution's system installer. Ubuntu's installer starts out by letting us select our preferred language and then we are given the option to download available security updates. We can also choose to install third-party software such as Adobe's Flash player and mp3 support. I ran into an odd bug where the installer indicated I was not on-line and would not let me download security updates during the installation process, however Network Manager indicated I was connected to the Internet.
Moving forward we get into partitioning our hard disk. The Ubuntu installer is quite friendly when it comes to partitioning and will offer to automatically set up partitions using available free space. Alternatively we can manually partition our disk and the installer provides a very friendly partition manager which I find is nicely streamlined. Ubuntu's installer supports ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT, JFS, XFS and ReiserFS partitions. We can also choose to make use of volume management through either Btrfs or LVM. I opted to use Btrfs for my root file system. Up next we confirm our time zone from a map of the world and select our keyboard's layout from a list. The following screen asks us to create a user account and set a password on the account. We have the option of enabling encryption on our files and automatic logins can also be enabled on this screen. From there the installer displays a slide show of the distribution's key features while the system copies files to the hard drive.
Once the installer finished its work I was prompted to reboot the system. Upon loading my local copy of Ubuntu for the first time I encountered an error saying "sparse file not allowed". This error appears sometimes when using Btrfs file systems and I didn't worry too much about it. However, when I hit Enter to continue the boot process the system locked up. I was unable to get the system to complete its boot process. Using the live media I went back through the install process again, this time opting to use the ext3 file system instead of Btrfs and, once the installer finished, I was able to reboot the system and was brought to a graphical login screen. The login screen will allow us to sign in using a regular user account, a guest account (which has no password) or we can sign into a remote server if we have enabled remote logins using our e-mail account.
Ubuntu 13.04 - Unity's Dash and shopping lens
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Logging into our account brings us to the Unity desktop. Down the left side of the display we find the Dash menu and a series of quick-launch buttons. In the upper-right corner of the screen is the system tray and notification area. The default background is a mixture of purple and orange. Shortly after I logged in a window popped up to tell me my preferred language was not set up for full support and a trip to the settings panel would correct this. I followed the steps indicated which guided me to the Language Support module of the System Settings panel. Here I found the missing items were writing aids, such as spell check packages which are used by LibreOffice and the Thunderbird e-mail client. I added the additional software needed for full language support. It was while I was doing this I noticed Unity was quite slow to respond.
Opening a new application or bringing up Unity's Dash required around five seconds or more. When switching between two open application windows the time it took for one window to fade into the background and the other window to be drawn was about four seconds. The current version of Ubuntu does not include 2-D support for Unity, users are forced to use a 3-D environment and this means users must have suitable video drivers which support 3-D drawing. Since I was in the System Settings panel already I went into the Software & Updates module and selected the box which would install third-party drivers which might improve performance. The software appeared to download without any problems, but then the system locked up before the installation finished, forcing me to power off the computer and boot again.
On my second attempt to acquire the necessary video support the third-party drivers I wanted installed and I rebooted the computer. When the system came back on-line I found the desktop was still slow to respond and performance had not improved considerably. At this point I had to make a choice as to whether or not I should keep using Ubuntu (and face a week of several second lag following all keyboard and mouse input) or I could switch to a different distribution. I decided to move to Kubuntu, which I hoped would offer better performance while staying within the Ubuntu family.
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 The Kubuntu distribution uses the same package repositories available to Ubuntu users while focusing on the KDE desktop environment. The distribution comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds and the Kubuntu download image is 960MB in size. As the Kubuntu and Ubuntu distributions are based on the same technology my initial impressions were much the same. Booting from the Kubuntu media brings us to a screen asking if we would like to run a live desktop from the installation media or if we would like to launch the system installer. The installer walks us through the same steps previously outlined and then copies its files to the local hard disk. The one difference I noted was with the visual appearance of the two installers. Ubuntu's installer reminds me of mobile interfaces while Kubuntu's installer looks more like a classic desktop application. Where the Ubuntu installer, and desktop in general, appear to be designed to look colourful and fun, Kubuntu's interface generally looks conservative and professional.
Kubuntu 13.04 - the installer and release notes
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I installed Kubuntu with the Btrfs advanced file system. As with my experience with Ubuntu when I booted Kubuntu an error message appeared saying "sparse file not allowed". When I pressed Enter to continue the boot process Kubuntu brought me to a colourful graphical login screen. Kubuntu allows us to login with a regular user account or a guest account, the remote account option offered by Ubuntu is not available. Logging in brings up the KDE 4.10 desktop which is laid out in the traditional manner. Our application menu, task switcher and system tray sit at the bottom of the screen. The desktop is empty and decorated with eye catching colours.
Kubuntu comes with a small collection of useful software, most of which fits in with the distribution's focus on KDE/Qt software. In the application menu we find the Rekonq web browser, KMail, a remote desktop client and the KTorrent bittorrent software. Network Manager and the KPPP dial-up software are included to help us get on-line. For playing videos we are given Dragon Player and Amarok is provided for playing audio files. To go along with these media applications Kubuntu gives us the option at install time to include popular multimedia codecs. The distribution includes the Okular document viewer, the LibreOffice suite and the Calligra productivity suite. Users are able to make use of a desktop calculator, a text editor and note taking apps. Some accessibility tools are included in the distribution, including utilities to help us use the mouse and magnify parts of the screen.
For managing the look and feel of the desktop the KDE System Settings panel is included and this gives us fine tuned control over the entire graphical interface. In the background we find the Linux kernel, version 3.8. Kubuntu doesn't, by default, include one of the more popular web browsers, but there is an item in the application menu called the Firefox Browser Installer. Usually I'm wary of tools which install applications in non-standard ways, but Kubuntu gets around that. Running the Firefox installer actually launches the distribution's package manager and brings up an information page for the Firefox package. This makes Firefox easy to find for new users while keeping the browser's installation process integrated with the operating system's normal package manager. It's an approach I think most users will find appealing.
Kubuntu 13.04 - application and package management
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Kubuntu comes with two graphical package managers. The first one, the Muon Software Centre, takes an application-centric approach to dealing with software. We are presented with a nice, web-like interface. We can browse for software by category or by name. Applications are displayed with a colourful icon, description and user-supplied rating. We can click on packages to bring up more detailed information and see a screen shot. Adding or removing an application from the system is as simple as clicking a button and, while software is being installed, we can continue browsing for other packages. One feature of the Software Centre I like is, once an installation has successfully completed, a Start button will appear at the top of the Software Centre's window. Clicking the button opens the program we just installed, saving us from digging through the application menu. The Muon Package Manager, Kubuntu's second front-end for software management, takes a more package-oriented approach. This program resembles Synaptic in both its layout and its focus for working on the individual package level. Both programs worked well for me and, during my trial, I encountered no problems with either. Package transactions happened quickly and I found both graphical front-ends put a friendly face on software management.
When I was using the openSUSE distribution I became fond of a tool which links Btrfs to the operating system's package manager. While Kubuntu doesn't come with a tool like this installed by default, there is a utility which can be downloaded from the repositories. The apt-btrfs-snapshot package, once installed, will take file system snapshots each time a package is installed or removed. This means that if we make a package change which introduces problems to the system we can roll back to an older snapshot of the system. While Kubuntu's Btrfs utilities aren't as integrated nor as user friendly as openSUSE's it does give the user some insurance against boot or performance problems introduced by changes to the system's software.
Kubuntu 13.04 - changing desktop settings
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I ran both Kubuntu and Ubuntu on a desktop machine (dual-core 2.8 GHz CPU, 6 GB of RAM, Realtek network card, Radeon video card). With both distributions I found sound worked out of the box, I had no trouble getting on-line and my screen was set to its maximum resolution. But while Kubuntu ran quickly and the desktop was quite responsive, I found Ubuntu was sluggish and slow to react to input. I found that when sitting idle on the desktop Ubuntu used approximately 210MB of RAM and Kubuntu used about 240MB of memory. I ran both distributions in a VirtualBox virtual machine and found the virtual environment provided a nearly identical experience to running the distributions on physical hardware. As is to be expected both distros ran a little slower in the virtual environment, but otherwise there was no difference.
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Conclusions
I had two remarkably different experiences with these two distributions this week and so I would like to share my closing thoughts on these two projects separately. First, let's look at Ubuntu. Honestly, I'm a little surprised Canonical pushed the 13.04 release out the door. The latest version of Ubuntu doesn't bring many desirable changes to the table and, in fact, includes a number of changes which I'm sure will be unpopular. Perhaps the most obvious step backward is the move to decrease the life cycle of non-LTS releases from 18 months to 9 months. In addition, dropping the Wubi Windows installer for this release is unfortunate timing given all of the press hype circulating right now about how consumers are ignoring Windows 8. Alternative operating systems have a potential foot in the door here and it would be a shame to lose any opportunities. The Btrfs bug which pauses the boot process was also unwelcome.
However, for me, the worst part of my experience with Ubuntu was Unity. As I've stated in the past the general design of Unity is something I can live with, but the implementation is not. Unity absolutely crawls on my desktop machine (and in a virtual machine). I believe it was a poor choice for Canonical to force Unity users to have 3-D graphics support as finding the right hardware/drivers for 3-D support on Linux can be a challenge. This move is all the more curious since Ubuntu previously supported a 2-D mode of Unity which worked fairly well. Last, but not least, on my list of complaints is Canonical's insistence on keeping the Dash shopping lens which records the user's key strokes and serves up ads from Amazon. While the feature can be disabled, having such a blatant privacy invasion turned on by default strikes me as a poor idea. In addition, the feature is visually distracting. When I open the Dash and search for "office" I want to get to my productivity suite, not see ads for popular television shows. In exchange for these problems, what positive features does Ubuntu 13.04 have? We get some updated packages, such as LibreOffice 4.0 and a slightly smaller memory footprint. It hardly feels like a good exchange for Ubuntu's user base.
Kubuntu 13.04, while providing the same low-level software, gave me a much more pleasant experience. Since Kubuntu shares its package base with Ubuntu its support cycle has also been shortened. Kubuntu also gave me the unfortunate Btrfs-related error at start-up. However, Kubuntu gave me a very responsive graphical environment, an application menu which was free from advertisements and the distribution did not insist I install third-party drivers just to use my desktop. The 4.10 release of KDE has really brought a high level of performance and polish to the desktop experience and I found myself thinking it is a shame Kubuntu 13.04 is only supported for 9 months. A longer release cycle might have convinced me to keep the distribution installed on my computers. I particularly like how the Muon Software Centre has come along, it feels faster and more stable now compared with past releases. I also like that Kubuntu has embraced the concept of the guest account, making it easier for us to hand over our computer to friends. Now there isn't any need to set up an extra account or clean up the digital footprints left behind.
Both distributions I tried this week feel like small stepping stones on the road to something bigger. That something may be a long term support release or it might be Mir, the display server Canonical plans to ship toward the end of 2013. We are given some updated software at which to look, but I suspect the interesting stuff is still behind the curtain and I believe many of us won't mind skipping this release while we wait for the next big thing.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
Review of Debian 7.0, Mageia 3 delay, Slackware on systemd, FreeBSD activity expansion, Raspberry Pi distro test
 As promised, the much-anticipated new stable version of Debian GNU/Linux was released over the weekend. Although the 27 months that passed since the project's last stable release did result in a huge number of updated packages and many other improvements, the general feeling about the distribution did not change much. Available for many architectures and extremely well-tested, if somewhat raw and outdated in terms of components and general look & feel - that has been the stereotypical view of many reviewers in the past and "Wheezy" doesn't try to be different in this respect. In one of the first reviews, Unixmen's Chris Jones concludes: "Debian is a hard beast to rate and it really depends on what you plan to do with it as to how it performs. As mentioned, out-of-the-box it's all bare essentials everywhere you look. It's even up to the user to update the APT source file with the repositories of their choice. Otherwise, you will not be able to install anything as it ships with only the Debian updates repository enabled. Debian 7.0 has an uncanny ability to feel raw yet ready, stable, polished and perfect all at the same time. Of all the different varieties of Linux (and UNIX) distributions that I have tested over the years, only Debian has the ability to give this impression. Being just short of 20 years in existence, Debian deserves respect. And Debian 7.0 'Wheezy' earns its respect in all the right ways."
Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 - the project's first stable release in over two years
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 Mageia was another distribution expected to arrive last week, but the developers pulled the plug at the last minute, largely due to some release-critical bugs found in the installer. Anne Nicolas explains in this blog post: "After some thought and discussions it was decided to delay the Mageia 3 final release until the 18th of May. We still have some release-blocker bugs to fix, meaning bugs which cannot be fixed after release through updates. They are mainly to do with the installer, hardware detection and the installation media. We could say, 'Mageia will be released when it's ready', but we would look like a copycat. Packagers and the QA team are on the case and doing all the hard work so that you have a great Mageia 3 release! Thank you for all your testing and bug reports. We are a community and you are an important part of it. You have helped to make Mageia. If you would like to get more involved in making Mageia, please do so. Take a look here for some ideas, there are all sorts of teams to join and you don't need to be overly technical to get involved. You would be very welcome."
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 The systemd service manager, originally developed by Fedora but now slowly making its way into other Linux distributions, is a controversial software component that some non-Fedora distro developers seem to dislike as something disruptive and departing from the established UNIX practices. But modern trends are sometimes hard to ignore and even the most conservative among Linux distributions, such as Slackware Linux, need to adapt to the changing world of Linux development. Slackware founder Patrick Volkerding's recent comments illustrate the dilemma faced by many distro developers: "Concerning systemd, I do like the idea of a faster boot time (obviously), but I also like controlling the start-up of the system with shell scripts that are readable, and I'm guessing that's what most Slackware users prefer too. I don't spend all day rebooting my machine, and having looked at systemd config files it seems to me a very foreign way of controlling a system to me, and attempting to control services, sockets, devices, mounts, etc., all within one daemon flies in the face of the UNIX concept of doing one thing and doing it well. To the typical end user, if this results in a faster boot then mission accomplished. With udev being phased out in favor of systemd performing those tasks we'll have to make the decision at some point between whether we want to try to maintain udev ourselves, have systemd replace just udev's functions, or if we want the whole kit and caboodle....""
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 The concept of open-source software where large volunteer communities create excellent solutions that are often superior (not to mention free of charge) to proprietary software, has resulted in a much better world (at least that's what we think). Just imagine what the Internet would be like if we were forced to run our websites on expensive and buggy Microsoft servers! As a token of appreciation for the great work done by volunteer developers, many users of free software choose to donate money to the projects they enjoy most. And unlikely as it may sound, this method of financing is actually quite successful. As an example, last year the FreeBSD Foundation expected to raise half a million dollars, but instead they received a total of US$770,000! This success has resulted in an expansion of FreeBSD's activities. iTWire's Sam Varghese reports: "Veteran FreeBSD developer Marshall McKusick told iTWire that for starters, three new technical staff had been recruited to the foundation. Two more will be recruited during the course of the year. McKusick said work on five new TCP congestion control algorithms for FreeBSD had been already completed. 'Each congestion control algorithm is implemented as a loadable kernel module. Algorithms can be selected to suit the application/network characteristics and requirements of the host's installation,' he said. Additionally, work had been also completed to bring the IPv6 subsystem to performance parity with its IPv4 counterpart."
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 Of the many low-cost, ARM-based computer boards available today, Raspberry Pi has emerged as the most popular by far. If you are lucky enough to have become an owner of one (the manufacturer has had much trouble in producing enough boards to cover the enormous demand!), then the next question is which Linux distribution would be the best to suit your particular needs. TuxRadar is here to help, thanks to its "Distro Super Test - Raspberry Pi Edition": "The Raspberry Pi has been out for over a year now, and in that time the number of distributions for the device has grown considerably compared to the few available at launch. The function of these distributions has also expanded, with the desktop operating systems making way for media centres and thin clients. Today, we're focusing on the desktop distros, comparing six of the best to find out exactly what their strengths and weaknesses are. All but one of the operating systems in this test use armhf, 'hard float', and are optimised for the ARMv6 processor that powers the Pi. Reportedly this can result in floating-point operations speeding up by a factor of ten, so are such distros generally a better choice to get the most out of the Raspberry Pi? We'll be using a pretty varied mix of distros in the test, from the Debian-based Raspbian to the source-built Gentoo and everything in between." And the winner is Raspbian (but do read the whole article to find out more).
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| Book Reviews (by Jesse Smith) |
A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming
 There are times I'll find a book which introduces Linux or programming or trouble-shooting servers and be impressed. There are a lot of good texts floating around out there whether you want to get your first taste of the Linux desktop, wish to learn how to use the command line or want to figure out why your e-mail server has gone off-line. However, there are very few times I pick up an educational book and ask myself, "Why, oh why, didn't we have this textbook in school?" The book A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming by Mark G. Sobell falls into this elite category.
The book starts out with a little history with regards to GNU/Linux, then explains a bit of how the command line works and then eases us into doing things like opening manual pages and copying files. As the book advances we march into increasingly advanced topics such as alternative shells, shell scripting, managing databases, synchronizing files between computers, security and package management. There are chapters covering simple Python and Perl programming and, perhaps best of all, an extensive command quick reference (similar to Linux man pages) with detailed examples to show us how the commands should be used. The text is over 1,000 pages in length and none of it is wasted, every page contains practical reference information, examples and clear explanations.
There are many aspects of A Practical Guide To Linux I greatly appreciated and it's difficult to go over all of the points without trying to recreate, or at least summarize, the contents of the book. There are a few key areas I'd like to focus on where I feel Mr Sobell really goes above and beyond in his sharing of Linux knowledge. The first is the careful way in which the author builds from the ground up. The book starts out with some UNIX history and we are then walked through introductions to BSD, GNU and, finally, the Linux kernel. The chapters covering BASH and TC Shell include historical information which helps to put the lessons in context. Modern Linux distributions and their tools are deeply rooted in tradition and it can be difficult for a new user to step onto the scene and understand the organization and design of the system. Giving everything historical context helps the reader both understand and appreciate the design of a modern Linux distribution.
A second aspect of the book I enjoyed was the presentation of common mistakes. Quite often documentation lays out situations in which everything works properly and, as we all know, computers frequently do not behave the way we wish them to. Mr Sobell throws in the occasional example of things going wrong and offers explanations as to why a command failed and what to do to correct the problem. This is especially helpful in the MySQL and rsync sections. These two technologies are very powerful and their syntax can become quite complex. Having examples of common mistakes and problems included in the chapters will help guide people through these tricky areas of system administration.
The third thing I greatly appreciated about this book was the detail in which it addressed the functionality of specific commands. The text contains a chapter which is dedicated to providing a quick reference to UNIX and GNU command line programs. Each command is given a description, the possible command line arguments are laid out and we are given clear and detailed examples. This makes the chapter essentially a more detailed and clear version of the man(ual) pages which accompany most Linux distributions. If you look up the manual pages of classic GNU utilities on your distribution right now you will find many of them include only one brief line explaining what the command does and most of the manual pages do not include examples of the command's usage. The book provides more complete explanations and we get to see examples of how the command is to be used, which removes a good deal of the guess work that often accompanies manual page reading.
And, finally, I appreciate that this book takes a different approach to being platform agnostic. Often times when a UNIX or Linux textbook claims to be operating system neutral it means nothing is included in the book which is not true across all the major distributions. Mr Sobell takes a different approach. His book covers popular Linux distributions and OS X. Some features are unique to one platform and these are clearly marked. Also, where there are small differences between one platform and another these are also clearly noted. For example, Linux uses a file called /etc/passwd to store user account information. The OS X operating system uses an alternative technology, Open Directory, for most of its handling of user accounts. This is clearly mentioned in the parts of the book which talk about the Linux passwd file and the reader is directed to where they can read a detailed description of Open Directory in an appendix dedicated to OS X-specific technology. It also doesn't matter if we are using a distribution which uses YUM or APT to handle package management, both technologies are covered. This gives A Practical Guide to Linux an inclusive approach to diversity rather than an exclusive approach. It means people, such as myself, who distro hop a lot are covered regardless of which platform we use.
All in all, A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming is a remarkably detailed and thorough book which walks us through using the command line, editors and scripting straight from step one through to complex usage. No stone is left unturned along the journey and we are exposed to configuration files, shell variables, history and handy system administration tools. The examples are practical, the explanations are clear and I think the book is a great asset, both to people just starting out using the command line and for people who want a handy reference. I will say that the text isn't for the faint of heart. While Sobell starts off by laying a foundation of knowledge before building upon it, the book does assume we are here to learn, to get our hands dirty. This book is less of an introduction to the Linux command line as it is an instructional textbook, suitable for classrooms as well as the server room. I believe this book was written for people who want to become experts in the field of using Linux and UNIX systems, not for people who just want to dip their toes in the water. If you are looking for a way to expand your command line knowledge, this is the book that can take you from zero experience with the Linux command line through to becoming an expert. It is well worth a read if you wish to master the power of your Linux distribution.
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- Title: A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming (Third Edition)
- Author: Mark G. Sobell, © 2012
- Publisher: Prentice Hall
- ISBN: 0-13-308504-X
- Length: 1154 pages
- Available from: InformIT and Amazon.com
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| Released Last Week |
DragonFly BSD 3.4.1
Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 3.4.1, a UNIX-like operating system created in 2003 as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8: "Version 3.4 of DragonFly BSD is officially out." Big ticket items of the release include: "Experimental packaging system - dports uses the FreeBSD ports system to build ports for DragonFly and uses pkgng to manage the binary packages produced from those ports; The DragonFly snapshots are built using dports and also have Xfce for the desktop; performance improvements under extreme load - improvements in poudriere performance, tmpfs performance and CPU usage; new default compiler - the two base compilers have swapped roles, GCC 4.7, introduced as an alternative compiler with release 3.2, is now the primary compiler used to build DragonFly; new USB stack - USB4BSD." See the brief release announcement and read the detailed release notes for a full list of new features and improvements.
Clonezilla Live 2.1.1-25
Steven Shiau has announced the release of an updated version of Clonezilla Live, a specialist live CD designed for disk cloning: "This release of Clonezilla Live (2.1.1-25) 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 2013-04-20); Linux kernel was updated to 3.2.41; Partclone was updated to 0.2.60; The drbl package was updated to 2.3.28 and Clonezilla was updated to 3.3.40; sample file 'custom-ocs-1' was updated; the MAC address of a network card will be shown when configuring the network settings. Bug fixes: a bug which caused the first menu to continue even after it was cancelled; when using 'select_in_client' mode the post-run action is now correctly passed to PXE clients...." The release announcement.
Sabayon Linux 13.04
Fabio Erculiani has announced the release of Sabayon Linux 13.04, a desktop distribution with a choice of GNOME, KDE, MATE of Xfce desktops, based on Gentoo Linux: "Sabayon 13.04 is a modern and easy-to-use Linux distribution based on Gentoo, following an extreme yet reliable rolling-release model. This is a monthly release generated, tested and published by our build servers containing the latest and greatest collection of software available in the Entropy repositories. Linux kernel 3.8.8 with BFQ iosched and ZFS, GNOME 3.6.3, KDE 4.10.2, MATE 1.6, Xfce 4.10, LibreOffice 4.0, production-ready UEFI support and experimental systemd support are just some of the things you will find inside the box." Read the full release announcement for more details.
OpenBSD 5.3
Stuart Henderson has announced the release of OpenBSD 5.3, a free, multi-platform operating system with a strong focus on security and meticulous code review: "We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 5.3. This is our 33rd release on CD-ROM (and 34th via FTP). As in our previous releases, 5.3 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system: improved hardware support, including new driver oce(4) for Emulex OneConnect 10Gb Ethernet adapters, new driver rtsx(4) for the Realtek RTS5209 card reader; OpenSMTPD 5.3; OpenSSH 6.2; over 7,800 ports, major performance and stability improvements in the package build process. Some highlights: GNOME 3.6.2, KDE 3.5.10, Xenocara (based on X.Org 7.7 with X.Org Server 1.12.3 + patches...." Read the OpenBSD 5.3 release page which for a long list of improvements.
Parted Magic 2013_05_01
Patrick Verner has announced the release of Parted Magic 2013_05_01, an updated release of a live CD containing useful tools for data rescue and disk management tasks: "The Parted Magic project is proud to announce another stable release of the popular partitioning and system rescue environment. This has been by far the most ambitious release of Parted Magic to date. EFI booting support from CDROM has been greatly improved. Erase Disk has a new menu with translations. The f2fs-tools package has been added, you an also create a f2fs with GParted. A new 'forcevesa' kernel command-line option has been added, this works with cards like the MGA G200* series; the Parted Magic Wipe Free Space GUI has been translated. We have created a simple GTK+ GUI for chntpw, it should make changing Windows passwords much easier. The X.Org Server has been upgraded to 1.14.1." See the project's news page for the full release announcement.
Korora 18
Ian Firns has announced the release of Korora 18, a Fedora-based distribution with a large number of tweaks, tools and extras for improved user friendliness: "We have decided to make the existing beta release of Korora (Flo) 18 the final version, as the beta period did not reveal any major issues which warranted a new build. The existing beta images have simply been renamed, so if you already have the beta you also have the final release. Derived from Fedora 18, this release comes with the usual Korora extras out of the box, such as: Adobe Flash plugin; experimental support for Valve's Steam client; unburden-home-dir, which moves cache files (like in Firefox profiles) onto RAMFS at login; undistract-me, which pops up a GUI notification when a terminal command has completed; tweaked KDE and GNOME base systems; experimental support for Cinnamon desktop in GNOME; third-party repositories...." Read the rest of the release announcement for known issues and upgrade instructions.
OpenELEC 3.0.2
Stephan Raue has announced the release of OpenELEC 3.0.2, a bug-fix and security update of the project's specialist Linux distribution featuring XBMC, the open-source entertainment media hub: "The OpenELEC team is proud to release OpenELEC 3.0.2! This is a maintenance release with some bug and security fixes since OpenELEC 3.0.1. You must upgrade from any previous 2.9x.x or 3.x release to 3.0.2. Changelog: update to XBMC 12.2, MySQL 5.1.68; RPi - add SPI device support; added DVB adapter Terratec H5 Rev3 to em28xx driver; add support for DVB_USB_CXUSB; add P54 network driver; replace BusyBox free with real free from procps-ng; add proper less to image (disable BusyBox less); installer - make system partition per default 256 MB...." Read the rest of the release announcement for a full changelog.
Debian GNU/Linux 7.0
Debian GNU/Linux 7.0, a new stable version of the world's largest Linux distribution, has been released: "After many months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 7.0. This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories. Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for Wheezy, will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically." Read the release announcement for basic information and check out the release notes for technical details.
aptosid 2013-01
Stefan Lippers-Hollmann has announced the release of aptosid 2013-01, a modern desktop Linux distribution with a choice of KDE or Xfce desktops and the latest Linux kernel, based on Debian's "unstable" branch: "We have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the aptosid 2013-01 "Hesperides" release. New features are in particular kernel 3.9 and numerous integration and stabilisation fixes. Special focus has been cast upon improving system compatibility with various UEFI systems and the Ivy-Bridge architecture; basic Haswell support should now be complete. Kernel 3.9 doesn't only improve and stabilise hardware support for newer devices, it also improves power-saving approaches for libata targets." Read the detailed release notes for more information, system requirements and upgrade instructions.
aptosid 2013-01 - featuring the KDE 4.8 desktop from Debian's "unstable" repository
(full image size: 543kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Kwort Linux 4
David Cortarello has announced the release of Kwort Linux 4, a lightweight CRUX-based distribution (now for 64-bit systems only) with Openbox and a custom package manager called kpkg: "Kwort Linux 4 is finally here. For those who don't know, Kwort 4 is a full x86_64 system. In the last couple of week we've been testing Kwort 4 hard to see if everything is 'stable-enough'. This new version is actually pretty awesome, fast, stable, and with the simplicity that has always characterized Kwort. Because of the architecture switch, we have everything rebuilt from scratch, from the toolchain to the latest X11 application. And of course, our package mirror is already populated with some useful packages. Now, the most significant technical aspects: Linux kernel 3.8.5; Chromium 25.0.1364.97; Firefox 20.0; LibreOffice 4.0.1. Our new installation system, as the system in general got a significant speed up because of the architecture upgrade. Of course, our system remains light and clean as Kwort users like it." Visit the distribution's home page to read the full release announcement.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
April 2013 DistroWatch.com donation: DHCP
We are happy to announce that the recipient of the April 2013 DistroWatch.com donation is Internet Systems Consortium's DHCP, the most widely-used open-source DHCP implementation on the Internet. It receives US$300 in cash.
What exactly is Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)? According to the explanation on the project's website, "ISC DHCP is open source software that implements the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocols for connection to a local network. It is a reference implementation of those protocols, but it is also production-grade software, suitable for use in high-volume and high-reliability applications. DHCP is available for free download under the terms of the ISC License, a BSD style license. DHCP is an Internet-standard protocol by which a computer can be connected to a local network, ask to be given configuration information, and receive from a server enough information to configure itself as a member of that network." Besides DHCP, Internet Systems Consortium also develops BIND, open-source software that implements the Domain Name System (DNS) protocols for the Internet.
Launched in 2004, this monthly donations programme is a DistroWatch initiative to support free and open-source software projects and operating systems with cash contributions. Readers are welcome to nominate their favourite project for future donations. Those readers who wish to contribute towards these donations, please use our advertising page to make a payment (PayPal, credit cards and Bitcoins are accepted). Here is the list of the projects that have received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme (figures in US dollars):
- 2004: GnuCash ($250), Quanta Plus ($200), PCLinuxOS ($300), The GIMP ($300), Vidalinux ($200), Fluxbox ($200), K3b ($350), Arch Linux ($300), Kile KDE LaTeX Editor ($100) and UNICEF - Tsunami Relief Operation ($340)
- 2005: Vim ($250), AbiWord ($220), BitTorrent ($300), NDISwrapper ($250), Audacity ($250), Debian GNU/Linux ($420), GNOME ($425), Enlightenment ($250), MPlayer ($400), Amarok ($300), KANOTIX ($250) and Cacti ($375)
- 2006: Gambas ($250), Krusader ($250), FreeBSD Foundation ($450), GParted ($360), Doxygen ($260), LilyPond ($250), Lua ($250), Gentoo Linux ($500), Blender ($500), Puppy Linux ($350), Inkscape ($350), Cape Linux Users Group ($130), Mandriva Linux ($405, a Powerpack competition), Digikam ($408) and Sabayon Linux ($450)
- 2007: GQview ($250), Kaffeine ($250), sidux ($350), CentOS ($400), LyX ($350), VectorLinux ($350), KTorrent ($400), FreeNAS ($350), lighttpd ($400), Damn Small Linux ($350), NimbleX ($450), MEPIS Linux ($300), Zenwalk Linux ($300)
- 2008: VLC ($350), Frugalware Linux ($340), cURL ($300), GSPCA ($400), FileZilla ($400), MythDora ($500), Linux Mint ($400), Parsix GNU/Linux ($300), Miro ($300), GoblinX ($250), Dillo ($150), LXDE ($250)
- 2009: Openbox ($250), Wolvix GNU/Linux ($200), smxi ($200), Python ($300), SliTaz GNU/Linux ($200), LiVES ($300), Osmo ($300), LMMS ($250), KompoZer ($360), OpenSSH ($350), Parted Magic ($350) and Krita ($285)
- 2010: Qimo 4 Kids ($250), Squid ($250), Libre Graphics Meeting ($300), Bacula ($250), FileZilla ($300), GCompris ($352), Xiph.org ($250), Clonezilla ($250), Debian Multimedia ($280), Geany ($300), Mageia ($470), gtkpod ($300)
- 2011: CGSecurity ($300), OpenShot ($300), Imagination ($250), Calibre ($300), RIPLinuX ($300), Midori ($310), vsftpd ($300), OpenShot ($350), Trinity Desktop Environment ($300), LibreCAD ($300), LiVES ($300), Transmission ($250)
- 2012: GnuPG ($350), ImageMagick ($350), GNU ddrescue ($350), Slackware Linux ($500), MATE ($250), LibreCAD ($250), BleachBit ($350), cherrytree ($260), Zim ($335), nginx ($250), LFTP ($250), Remastersys ($300)
- 2013: MariaDB ($300), Linux From Scratch ($350), GhostBSD ($340), DHCP ($300)
Since the launch of the Donations Program in March 2004, DistroWatch has donated a total of US$35,275 to various open-source software projects.
* * * * *
New distributions added to waiting list
- Australis. Australis is a desktop Linux distribution based on the latest Ubuntu LTS (long-term support) release and featuring the most recent version of the MATE desktop environment.
- BlueStar Linux. BlueStar Linux is a new desktop distribution based on Arch Linux.
- Xiaopan OS. Xiaopan OS is an easy-to-use live Linux distribution that includes a number of advanced hacking tools to penetrate WPA / WPA2 / WPS / WEP wireless networks. Based on Tiny Core Linux, it has a slick graphical user interface requiring no need for typing Linux commands. Xiaopan OS is compatible with Windows, OS X and Linux.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 13 May 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 • @Jess: suspending/hybernating ? (by meanpt on 2013-05-06 08:48:57 GMT from Portugal)
Did you get those working out of the box?
2 • Re: Ubuntu Unity review (by silent on 2013-05-06 08:56:00 GMT from France)
Strictly speaking a 3D video driver is not required for Unity, one can use software rendering with LLVMPipe, however this can be indeed slow. In VirtualBox some tweaking may be necessary to switch from LLVMPipe to 3D video driver.
3 • Ubuntu 13.04 (by Chanath on 2013-05-06 10:33:48 GMT from Sri Lanka)
"However, for me, the worst part of my experience with Ubuntu was Unity." For me too. Ubuntu must've been thinking of the mobile market, when it came out with the Unity DE. Maybe, Ubuntu would be successful with that market, and earn money. But, losing the desktop market would be a disaster for Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is still okay after uninstalling Unity and installing any other DE. Lot of Ubuntu users do that anyway. Looks like one can get a better deal by installing Ubuntu Studio and installing any other DE to it.
4 • Ubuntu 13.04 (by Wine Curmudgeon on 2013-05-06 10:59:54 GMT from United States)
I don't dislike Unity, either, and compared to Windows 8, it's a dream. But still running Xubuntu 12.04, and it's easily the best Linux distro I've used in four years.
5 • wubi (by greg on 2013-05-06 11:04:16 GMT from Slovenia)
there were two issues with wubi - developer running out of steam (ok this could be sovled by forking etc.) and windows 8 which gave a headache.
as i read it wasn't even a cannonical project though i think it would be in their interest to throw some money at it and try to develop it further. if at least as trial session for users and to fill them with confidence for a full install.
6 • 13.04 (by nope on 2013-05-06 11:25:56 GMT from Serbia)
Ubuntu 12.10 was working well on my notebook and system was quick. Ubuntu 13.04 is disaster. It is slow motion of 12.10,and it is impossible to do anything serious with it. Windows are often grayed if more then one is open,it is like I have 300 MB of RAM,and not 1GB,and dualcore CPU. My recomendation is do not upgrade to 13.04.
7 • The blessing of new versions (by jan on 2013-05-06 11:47:00 GMT from Poland)
I just read an interesting article on Linux Today on whether the linux desktop is dead or was it never born at all. The main reason our desktop doesn't fly is caused by the very fundamental priciples it lacks, in contrast to the linux kernel. The kernel's development is based on the compatibility principle - if a new feature causes some legacy functions to carsh, it is considered a bug, and not an improvement. If you use a 20 years old app that calls only the kernel features, you probably could use it for another 40 years, if you wished. By contrast, if you use any of the magnificent windows management systems (Gnome, KDE, LXDE, ...) you constantly find, that some older app versions destabilize your system, or that if you install a newest version of the productivity suite, you'll end up reinstalling your system, and your productivity would indeed decrease.
From the perspective of an app developer, this is not acceptable. Even if you write an app and package it for the 5 top distros, in a couple of months time you'll find out it is no longer compatible with the distros' newer versions. No serious development team would ever attempt to maintain an app with over 1 million lines of code for the linux desktop - it would be a task only for sadomasochists. Not all the darwinian laws apply to all the human endeavors. But unfortunately, they do apply to business. If we consider linux a product of our ingenuity that saveguards some of our freedoms in the world where the multinationals are trying to fit all of us into a matrix, then fine - we can continue as we do now. But if the Linux community wants to produce a system that will truly be usable on a desktop - that is a very different story. I just wish some Linus alter ego creates a desktop manager, where development is based on reason and not thoughtlessness.
8 • My opinions for: 1) Ubuntu's problem; 2) Debian Wheezy summary; and 3) SystemD (by youniquegeek on 2013-05-06 12:03:53 GMT from United States)
I can see where this is going with regards to Ubuntu. Metaphorically, Canonical is emerging as the new Microsoft and Ubuntu is becoming the new Windows Os for them. And this is unfortunate because just as the path MS has taken with Windows from XP to Vista (sans Windows 7 due to it really being Vista fixed up, dressed up, and with a few band-aids) to now the Windows 8 design failure (and also hardware failures with Surface RT), Ubuntu is driving its fans away all the time. And it boils down to money, and the power of greed at the heart of a big corporation. And the "big whigs" then forget their little men (consumers). It once was I heard of Ubuntu here and there spoken of on the internet with fascination and awe, but no more. I am just glad I found Linux before this downward spiral started. Red Hat and Novell avoided this eventuality unknowingly long ago dividing enterprise and free desktops (Red Hat/Fedora and OpenSUSE/SUSE) and their successes continue to show respectively. Canonical take note.
2) I have used Debian Wheezy on several occasions over the last year and so I really knew what was coming before it came officially. But even then, it says something that Debian's announcement as it officially "stable" had me cheering silently and was glad to see its fruition. I agree with the paraphrase in the above article concerning it. Debian, like Slackware, has its loyal base of users and uses and that is just as it should be, and that is a fine thing too. I myself like the increasing number of distros trying to make things more newer for those wanting bleeding edge, such as Aptosid or Siduction, and even to a lesser extent Linux Mint Debian Edition. Even these pay homage to Debian at all times.
3) Only recently have I dabbled with the command line using SystemD, and that was whilst installing and setting up Arch Linux. Through that, I found that SystemD is quite useful and efficient getting anyone thing done and over with all in one shot (systemctl ...), so I recommend Slackware consider incorporate it. I know just in setting up Networking, it will ease things along quite nicely. Even udev had its beginnings, and I assume it will have its endings some day.
9 • now that there is no Unity-2d (by jerome on 2013-05-06 12:08:59 GMT from France)
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.terminal-server.x2go.devel/4367
"If Ubuntu sticks to going the OpenGL path and puts more efforts in
supporting hardware acceleration than network transparency of
graphical applications, then no, X2Go will not be able to go that path
(with NX as technology)."
One more reason to drop Ubuntu...
10 • Kubuntu and Netrunner (by TomG on 2013-05-06 12:19:27 GMT from United States)
Jesse, when have you last looked at Netrunner? Kubuntu is closely related to it; they both have the same sponsor.
I haven't looked at Kubuntu at all, but when I reviewed Netrunner at the beginning of the year, I was quite impressed.
11 • reply to #10 post: Netrunner review link (by youniquegeek on 2013-05-06 12:31:36 GMT from United States)
@10 (TomG)
Here is a review of Netrunner: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/netrunner-12-12.html
Kubuntu is better.
12 • Canonical (by Pilotbay on 2013-05-06 12:32:25 GMT from United States)
I have distrubuted 20 something Unity LTS laptops over the last 15 months without any problems. I have spread Unity to a certain point, at a well known mobile wireless provider, for whom I work for. All, please refer to the link below.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/the-canonical-conundrum-why-the-ubuntu-hate/4226
13 • #8 Slackware systemd (by darkstar on 2013-05-06 12:43:03 GMT from United States)
You seem to be the only one for it. It has already been debated on the Slackware LQ forums many times. I would say at least 99% of the users are against it. This topic most likely would have not have come up if the article by Dietrich Schmitz opened the debate.
I boot my one of my Slackware computers once a day so there is no need for faster boot times. My other Slackware is keep on all the time.
As for systemd in Arch Linux, I tried installing it on an extra computer and failed completely all because of systemd, and I have installed Arch hundreds of times. Systemd makes setup and configuration of services way too over complicated.
14 • Holy cow! Another GUI slow on 2.8G dual core! (by os2er on 2013-05-06 12:52:03 GMT from United States)
"...had to make a choice as to whether or not I should keep using Ubuntu (and face a week of several second lag following all keyboard and mouse input)"!!!
Following up #7, I'd say GUI sloth is the worst threat to Linux. I've found several unusable for that reason, put it down to my relative antiques. But it's now obvious that the sloth is endemic in the GUIs, and not just in a few obscure distros. -- And as one who wrote a hobbyist GUI for an 8MHz x86, including graphics primitives, in Turbo Pascal, I'm stunned that one even CAN so complicate a GUI that it's not blinding fast on ANY hardware of this century. To me, that says it's intentional! At the very least, whoever writes those are just blind to results. -- And that's only on sheer speed, nothing about EASE. Don't get me started...
15 • systemd and boot times (by dsaster on 2013-05-06 13:00:56 GMT from United States)
Everyone is saying systemd makes boot times faster, but I've yet to see it. Boot times for the latest OpenSUSE, and every other systemd based distro I've tried, are very slow (i.e. 50+ seconds to the login manager).
OpenSUSE and Fedora are also spectacularly unresponsive on the desktop, compared to distros that don't use systemd. I'm beginning to wonder if systemd creates additional overhead.
If it doesn't work as advertised...
16 • @12 (by Sam Graf on 2013-05-06 13:10:16 GMT from United States)
I'm not in favor of hating Canonical or calling them evil, but I don't think it's as simple as Mr. Wallen makes it sound.
For example, Ubuntu doesn't work, or rather no longer works for everyone. I'm thinking particularly of SMB users who might be looking for ways to bring new life to XP-era hardware. Ubuntu is not an optimal choice, though 12.04 LTS is not a total wreck either.
And I wonder what would have happened if Canonical had behaved the way they do now from the beginning. Again, I'm not calling Canonical evil, but certainly the practical dynamic has changed.
No, it's not simple, so there is room for defenders, but also room for creible critics. In my case, I am moving on from Ubuntu on the desktop because Ubuntu has moved on from that place where I'm at. No hard feelings, but also no felt need to stick with doesn't work anymore. Maybe I'm not the only one.
17 • #13 Slackware systemd (by youniquegeek on 2013-05-06 13:25:01 GMT from United States)
I don't doubt that I am the minority among Slacksters. I myself am about 2 years old and growing in Linux. So really systemd is most of what I know and am used too since its recently been implemented. And Slacksters like their Slack as it was in the beginning. As for boot times, I have not noticed a whole lot of differences really among distros, except GNOME shell seems to take a little longer once GDM is started. I might start using the bootchart package more in comparing what is taking so long in boot times. I do remember a bootchart .png from Ubuntu around 12.04 that had udev way higher than other processes in time taken to boot.
18 • systemd, Slackware and Arch (by schultzter on 2013-05-06 13:32:51 GMT from Canada)
I was a Slacker from the early days, I tried a few others, but always came back to Slackware.
Then the whole systemd controversy erupted and people were so passionate that I figured I should give it a try and see what the fuss is all about. I tried it on Arch because always I thought Arch sounded nice and this was a good excuse to give it a try.
Now every machine I have runs Arch and systemd! I wish I had made the change earlier because Arch is amazing (but you do have to know what you're doing) and systemd boots my machines in the blink of an eye - even the old decrepit 32-bit AMD laptop that was on it's way to the trash is now the most used computer in the house!!!
19 • 13 systemd (by mandog on 2013-05-06 13:33:19 GMT from Peru)
>As for systemd in Arch Linux, I tried installing it on an extra computer and failed completely all because of systemd, and I have installed Arch hundreds of times. Systemd makes setup and configuration of services way too over complicated.
what a load of cobblers
Systemt makes it simple, there is nothing to setup as its installed in the setup,
the commands are simple systemctl start <unit> systemctl stop <unit> systemctl restart <unit> systemctl reload <unit> Disable a unit to not start during bootup: # systemctl disable <unit> # systemctl enable <unit> etc whats hard with that, all KISS at the end of the day. No altering config files.
Its time people stopped the attitude got on with life, if you don't like Arch don't use it.
Or try BSD.
20 • ubuntu (by walter_j on 2013-05-06 13:46:41 GMT from Canada)
I upgraded ubuntu 12.10 to 13.04 without problem. I left it on for a number of hours, and when I came back the system was unresponsive. Even the cursor stopped for awhile. Eventually the system started working again - just before i hit the reset switch. That was the end of testing this version.
Perhaps the one program I sort of miss from windows is itunes. I haven't found a service thats available in canada where i can buy music that is as extensive as itunes. I hope ubuntu can include more music in Ubuntu Music. That feature alone would ensure a permanent spot for ubuntu on my system. Right now it has virtually no music I'd be interested in. It's a step in the right direction though.
21 • Ubuntu 13.04 (by Angel on 2013-05-06 14:00:00 GMT from Philippines)
Long time reader of DistroWatch and first time I'm moved to comment. Lately I've noticed a frequent wide divergence between what is experienced by the reviewers and posters of comments and my own experience. I'm running Ubuntu 13.04 Unity on VirtualBox, the latest downloaded from Oracle, and I notice no lag whatsoever in response. The desktop feels every bit as responsive as Mint 13 Cinnamon and PinguyOS with Gnome shell running directly on my PC. With Cairo Dock installed it uses just under 400meg of memory. Only thing is I can't use OpenGL. Haven't tried Kubuntu yet.
I rather like the desktop and it works just fine on my 22" screen. While I'm past retirement age and I still like the old desktops, this is an old dog that can still learn new tricks. I started using docks years ago and they sure beat the heck out of sorting through menus. So I typed "office" and "enter" just as Jesse did and up popped all the LibreOffice apps. I like that! Wasn't distracted by the lens and the ads. In fact, If Jesse had not mentioned them i may not even have noticed.
I can see the advantages to these newfangled desktops if one is willing to adjust. I even have Windows 8 on a VM and I've begun to like that too. I get the idea, and once I get the idea it's just as simple if not simpler. I get what they are trying to do.
We run a PC repair shop in the Philippines and I try to get clients to dual-boot Linux on any PC I work on, even if they will still be using Windows. Just makes it easier for us when we have to be moving their files to work on Windows and it gives them a working computer when Windows craps out. As a result I get to install Linux different distros often on varied hardware. I have more than a dozen installed at home between my PCs and VMs. Most of the majors work fine. Usually the choice is a matter of taste or hardware. The one problem I've run into lately, not only with Unity, is the ATI drivers which either don't install or don't install properly.
22 • Dash (by Jon Wright on 2013-05-06 14:32:09 GMT from Vietnam)
> "When I open the Dash and search for 'office' I want to get to my productivity suite, not see ads for popular television shows."
If you think that's bad, try 'anal' (cos you want to run disk analyzer, right?).
h/t Dedoimedo.
23 • @3 Unity (by DavidEF on 2013-05-06 14:32:45 GMT from United States)
Chanath,
Jesse specifically denied hating the Unity UI design. He said it was something he could live with. So, your comment is not relevant to his review, though your opinion is still valid on its own, of course. What he said was that it was too slow on his hardware. Others have found that to be true also.
I happen to like the Unity Shell design. But, I have had some glitches in my system the past couple of cycles. The latest release actually fixes some of my problems from 12.10, but introduces new ones. Overall, I'd say 13.04 is better than 12.10 on my hardware, so although it is a boring release, there is enough reason for me to upgrade, which I did. For others, I now recommend sticking with 12.04 LTS.
Knowing it will obviously come up at some point, let me call a preemptive strike. Mint did not fare any better on my hardware. In fact, it was worse. I had constant visual glitches, couldn't get printer sharing to work, and just plain got tired of using it. As always, YMMV, so feel free to disagree. Ubuntu is still the best OS for my hardware and my usage patterns.
24 • Korora (by Terence on 2013-05-06 14:36:31 GMT from United States)
I have been a bit of a distro hopper over the last year (I'm thinking I should've been taking notes and started a review site, I could rival any other site out there for the number of reviews), but I had never taken Korora for a spin. Then the other day, version 18 was released on DW and I thought, let me try this out. Whoa, where have I been with this one? KDE? Check. Codecs? Check. Latest Kernel and software? Check and check. Stability? Check.
Most every distro seems to have an idiosyncrasy that seems to disappoint me. For example, Manjaro burps an error when I disconnected my headphones and wouldn't play any of my DVD movies. All my hardware is detected and it purrs like a kitten. Suspend on the laptop works without a hitch. I sincerely hope I can call this one home.
25 • Debian is unique (by Tinkerer on 2013-05-06 14:45:23 GMT from United States)
I liked the comment quoted as it has been my experience as well. It take some effort to make Debian Stable do what I want but it is Stable, Extensible, and Well Supported. I have never been disappointed with the Performance of an install on any platform. My sincere thanks to the Debian team/community.
26 • systemd and Slackware (by JWJones on 2013-05-06 14:56:13 GMT from United States)
I don't really know what the technical merits are of systemd, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem. I don't reboot my Slackware machines very often, so reduced boot time is not a selling point. The really issue at hand is about CHOICE. RedHat and LP seem intent on foisting their "solutions" and way of doing things on the entire Linux sphere, whether they want it or not, whether the technology has been suffciently tested or not, whether it's needed or not.
27 • Netrunner and systemd (by Jesse on 2013-05-06 14:59:39 GMT from Canada)
@10: The last time I tried Netrunner was July 2012. If you're interested you can find my review here: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20120716#feature
Regarding systemd, I am unconvinced of the claims of faster boot times. I've experienced systemd on Fedora and openSUSE, neither of which impressed me with their boot times. There may be other reasons to adopt the technology, but I'm yet to see evidence that systemd can out perform other init technologies.
28 • @ 24 (by Terence (by mandog on 2013-05-06 15:00:27 GMT from Peru)
> and wouldn't play any of my DVD movies
Did you install Libdcss to unscramble the protection?
29 • About Kubuntu Support: (by Ismael VC on 2013-05-06 15:07:32 GMT from Mexico)
You may like to read this!!!
http://blogs.kde.org/2013/05/04/kubuntu-support
30 • Ubuntu sluggishness (by octathlon on 2013-05-06 15:13:54 GMT from United States)
I wonder if the problem was not the actual GUI but rather a background process going on such as indexing. I have heard of that kind of trouble with KDE and needing to turn off indexing to get responsiveness. Another possibility: you mentioned trouble with the internet connection-- perhaps Unity trying to contact the vendors to download their ads could also slow things down. The ad process is probably given the highest priority. :-p
Not having a 2D option seems crazy, but apparently they want to focus only on users with newer hardware. Yet even Windows lets you turn off Aero, doesn't it?
31 • RE: First looks at Ubuntu and Kubuntu 13.04 (by M. Edward (Ed) Borasky on 2013-05-06 15:56:35 GMT from United States)
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks Ubuntu has lost its edge. After screwing around a bit with 12.10 and Linux Mint 13 and 14, I decided to drop support for Ubuntu except for 12.04 LTS for my Computational Journalism Publishers Workbench. Ubuntu's date-driven strategy isn't matching up with how the real world behaves any more.
When Linux was just basically the kernel, the GNU tools, the LAMP stack and a few die-hards like me running scientific workstations, fixed release cycles made sense. But a modern Linux is much bigger now - office suites, web stacks like Rails and Django and Node.js, a handful of NoSQL databases, OpenStack, half a dozen viable workstation desktops, ... I don't think a fixed release cycle is an option any more. You either do what Debian does - ship when everything is stable - or you do a rolling release.
32 • Ubuntu Releases (by tdockery97 on 2013-05-06 16:39:38 GMT from United States)
Whether it is right thinking or not, I believe Ubuntu's reasoning on their 9 month EOL schedule is the fact that a huge number of users reinstall or upgrade at each 6 month release. Between that and the LTS users, is an 18 month lifespan really needed?
33 • Muon (by Nick on 2013-05-06 16:55:48 GMT from United Kingdom)
Contrary to Jesse Smith's experirnce, I found Muon Software Centre to be buggy.
The worst problem I found is after removing a couple of packages, the search function stopped working - no results were displayed for any search. I had to restart it several times.
Thank goodness Muon Package Manager works perfectly though.
34 • @32 Ubuntu Releases (by DavidEF on 2013-05-06 16:56:05 GMT from United States)
tdockery97,
I see your point, but there are some good releases and some stinkers sometimes between LTS's. I can imagine someone wanting to stick to a "regular" release for more than 9 months, if the next "regular" release happens to not work as well on their hardware, and they don't want to revert back to the last LTS. An 18 month cycle ensures that there is support to get through a couple release cycles, in case of a regression, or even just that the version in use is "good enough" and there is nothing special worth upgrading for. In any case, longer support is always considered better support, even by those who don't use it! There is a psychological effect to it. A longer warranty MEANS a better product, to a lot of people. A shorter warranty means cheap junk.
35 • Gnome Classic (by Gustavo on 2013-05-06 17:05:43 GMT from Brazil)
Would someone be interested in trying my Gnome Classic respin of Ubuntu 12.04 and give some feedback?
https://sites.google.com/site/ubuntuclassic/
36 • wubi mess! (by TransformHumanity on 2013-05-06 17:22:56 GMT from India)
#5 wubi
recall what Linus had to say about UEFI (Redhat ************* Microsoft);
to me wubi is like that!
37 • Distro Hopping is for kids. (by bam on 2013-05-06 18:04:20 GMT from United States)
The problem with Linux is; every-time you look around, here comes a new distro release. Regular people want a LTS so we can get our work done, with out all this wild un-installing and re-installing every 18 months. I don't care if the software is free. Time for Linux to move from being some fringe niche software. Thank goodness for the people at Canonical with vision beyond the desktop. I use Linux to get work done, not to pimp-out and do funny tricks with my desktop.
38 • Ubuntu 13.04 (by laite on 2013-05-06 19:29:51 GMT from Finland)
I, too, tried ubuntu after long time since I've heard good things about unity maturing nowdays, but unfortunately I had exactly same problem as Jesse: everything was unbearably slow. It took several seconds for 'dash' to open, icon highlight 'activate' on mouseover and so on. Needless to say, I was back with Xubuntu quite soon.
39 • @37 - LTS is > 18 months (by behind-the-times on 2013-05-06 19:38:35 GMT from United States)
"Regular people want a LTS so we can get our work done, with out all this wild un-installing and re-installing every 18 months."
I suppose that's why many people are still running Win98/ME/XP. Or in many business situations OS/2. LTS isn't really long-term support if it's only two years. That's really short-term support when compared to other operating systems.
(Red) Hat's off to the EL clones. I finally upgraded to my EL6 clone of choice (CentOS) this year. Not a moment too soon because EL5's EOL is rapidly approaching in late 2017. Now I have another three years (EL6 EOL is in Nov 2020). Hope my laptop lasts that long. How many iterations of *buntu will there be over the next 7.5 years? Yeah. And what do you get with those updates beyond Unity bloat and Canonical's intrusive Amazon spyware? Sigh...
40 • Remember 2004 (by Pilotbay on 2013-05-06 19:42:28 GMT from United States)
I quote: "in 2004, Ubuntu came along with the focus firmly back on end-users. This kick started a flurry of activity and a number of new Ubuntu based Linux distros started to sprung up. "
Thank-you all
41 • wubi (by jimcooncat on 2013-05-06 20:01:27 GMT from United States)
#5, #36. I have not tried it lately, but I would recommend staying away from wubi, I've hosed two systems with it. On both of these I experienced ntfs errors, one from a power outage while in Ubuntu, and one from a bad shutdown of a Windows session. Since these Ubuntu installs resided in a single file in the Windows file system, I suppose you could say this was no fault of the Ubuntu install.
My point is, though, that wubi provides a very fragile setup. Just do a persistent live usb instead.
42 • @39-Ubuntu LTS has 5 year support... (by Ralph on 2013-05-06 20:10:39 GMT from Canada)
...it's just that it releases a new LTS every 2 years.
43 • @35 • Gnome Classic (by Bill on 2013-05-06 20:44:19 GMT from United States)
Working fine for me in Virtualbox.
Of course I speak only english, but I'm very familiar with the button locations. ;-)
Typing this with your respin, it's a okay amigo.
44 • Debian Wheezy (by gee7 on 2013-05-06 21:02:01 GMT from United Kingdom)
@21 Pleased to see your comment, Angel po, I found what you had to say very interesting. It is a great thing that you are making Linux known in your community too.
I would love to see the Philippines create their own Linux distro as well because it could be so usefull to the economy. In the past, I did try to install both Filipino distros that were in the Distro Watch active list namely Kahel and Bayanihan Linux, but without success. They would install but never boot so I am waiting for a new wave of Pinoy developers to get involved in the scene and when they do, I will try whatever distro they create.
@Debian Wheezy
In my honest and personal opinion, the Debian decision-making team made a huge mistake both in making Gnome-3 the default desktop environment and in suggesting that Gnome Classic could satisfy the users whose hardware was not suitable for Gnome-3 and who liked a traditional desktop. Do not believe the sleeve notes on that long-playing record, Gnome Classic can never be comparable to or a substitute for Gnome-2, which sadly comes to the end of its Debian support in February 2014. Perhaps the Debian team could reconsider extending that support, as the DE in 6.07 is still in use. Gnome-2 may have been difficult for developers but its speed and functional elegance was more cutting edge than Gnome-3 could ever be.
In Gnome-3, the panel appears to be fixed and inflexible, without the functionality that the previous Gnome had in its heyday (how I miss right-clicking and being able to set the Kill icon in the centre of the panel, where being easily accessible it would could get me out of difficulties when curiosity got me surfing dangerous waters online), so I downloaded the LXDE environment to use instead of Gnome-3. However, I found that there was American spelling in the LXDE Menu although my default language is British English. This is the first time that I have seen this happen in Debian, which is usually so polite to its users in respecting culture and language, unlike some other distros which otherwise would have appeal. So I removed both Gnome-3 and LXDE from my system, and from the default dvd-1 that I had previously downloaded, I installed KDE. To do this, do not select Install on the installation DVD but click first on Alternate Desktops (or perhaps it was named Other Desktops?) on the installation disk, and new options will come up.
Within KDE, I searched in software for "XFCE desktop" and "LXDE desktop" and these were immediately found and quickly installed too, so now I have the choice of 3 desktop environments at log-in. LXDE installed from with KDE comes without Gnome-based Menu entries in another language. So far however I have been using mostly XFCE and enjoying the experience. I could even install my favourite game Shogi without problems or workarounds, which is not possible in Debian spins like Ubuntu and Linux Mint, at least when last I tried them.
Mostly, I have written this comment to say a big Thank You to the Debian team. Very few of us humans are perfect, but the Debian team members are more perfect than others and Debian 7 Wheezy is Superb. Congratulations, ladies and gents. Perhaps at last Debian will rightfully get the attention it deserves.
Best wishes to all.
45 • @43 (by Gustavo on 2013-05-06 21:20:55 GMT from Brazil)
Thanks buddy!
You can select english language by pressing F2 at initial boot screen.
46 • @44 (by Gustavo on 2013-05-06 21:29:00 GMT from Brazil)
gee7, it is possible to configure Gnome Classic panel with aid of left ALT key and right mouse button. Altough not as flexible as Gnome 2 it is still very versatile. Please take a look at this screenshot: https://sites.google.com/site/ubuntuclassic/_/rsrc/1367801424283...
47 • Ubuntu sluggishness and Jesse's Radeon card (by Andy Prough on 2013-05-06 21:52:15 GMT from United States)
Jesse, I know you feel that distro's should be supporting your Radeon card, but I just tried the new Ubuntu on my workstation with an nVidia GT 440 (about 4-year old technology) and had no slowness problems whatsoever. I still firmly believe Radeon is poorly supported under Linux when compared to nVidia and especially Intel.
I'm not trying to tell you how to do reviews or what hardware to review distro's with, but I do find it interesting that you've had significant problems this spring with openSUSE, Fedora, and now Ubuntu all with the same machine and the same card. Not all graphics drivers are created equal.
48 • Ubuntu 13.04 (by 4ensicPenguin2 on 2013-05-06 22:41:31 GMT from United States)
Having been with Ubuntu since 5.04' I must admit that Mint 14 Cinnamon just works.
49 • Wheezy, Gnome and misc rants (by imnotrich on 2013-05-06 22:41:46 GMT from Mexico)
Wheezy has bugs and features poor wireless support making it totally worthless on my laptop, but I've been running Wheezy for quite some time on my desktop with ok results.
Most of my gripes about desktop Wheezy relate to gnome. Gnome 3 is junk. Gnome classic isn't all that great either and I'm especially annoyed at Gnome's arrogance, telling ME which applications I can use to open files based on file extension. No Gnome, that's my job. Give me back the command line option (ala Gnome 2) to specify which application I want to use. Instead, a window pops up and tells me which applications are suitable, with no option for the user to define which app he wants to use. Gnome classic doesn't respect changes I make to the defaults file either. Epic fail.
As for Wheezy wireless, I can use the net install iso and my wireless card to install Wheezy with my wpa2 encryption but when I boot into Debian wireless has been disabled. Network manager or wicd, same problem. Either it won't scan at all or it will scan but gives me some password invalid error loop. Even though the password is correct. People say, oh just buy a different wireless card, which is bogus but I eventually succumbed. Guess what? Same failure. Then it's "don't use encryption" and I say yeah right but just for fun I try without encryption and supposedly I can't pull an IP address from the dhcp server. Now tell me if my ipad, iphone, and two windows laptops can get an ip address on this network using WPA2 why can't Linux? Isn't DHCP basic functionality? For that matter, isn't wireless basic functionality?
Why Linux tends to ignore basic functionality is beyond me but then we have Unity, Windows 8, Gnome 3 and most of the other desktop environments out there so maybe it's not Linux. Maybe it's the developers.
50 • @ #49 (by Pierre on 2013-05-06 23:20:05 GMT from Germany)
I read this over and over again and I keep repeating: Debian does not install most of the firmware that especially wireless cards need due to legality issues. This does not mean you weren't able to download these non-free firmware without problems and include the firmware-non-free package at install time.
If you did so and experience the problems I have no clue why. For me Debian Wheezy ran perfectly the time I used it on my workstation. Maybe you should then consider to file a bug.
Gnome 3 is a disaster and I have no idea why the Debian developer did include it as the main desktop. I know there are Xfce spins available but I would have set Xfce as a default and released KDE and Gnome as spins because it does fit better into Debian's conservative design. Nevertheless, at least there is an edition with Xfce.
51 • Big Congratz to Debian! (by davemc on 2013-05-06 23:23:54 GMT from United States)
A major tribute to the Debian Dev team, I switched to Wheezy almost three months ago and never even knew they released several days ago! The friggin thing is just rock solid stable and I never really noticed any major updates for a few weeks now. I run KDE on it and have to say that Wheezy's implementation of KDE4.8 is simply perfection! Love it!
I started out my Linux journey many years ago now and hopped around a lot of distro's until about 2 years ago, I tried Debain Squeeze right after it released. Never looked back because it met all my needs and never broke no matter how hard I tried to do so. Simple as that. I suspect 10 years from now I will still be running Debian. Its kind of funny, but there simply is no Distro in the world today that can compare to it in terms of stability, software freedom, and a simple, yet elegant design that always "just works". So much more can be said in praise of that organization, but the best tribute anyone can pay to it is simply to install and use it.
52 • @ #49 (by Pierre on 2013-05-06 23:29:59 GMT from Germany)
And honestly, imnotrich, you keep complaining about the same stuff at least every 2 to 3 months and still did not get smarter.
Why not think about new complaints? Would make answering your posts a lot more interesting. ;)
Additionally: Don't compare Debian - which comes free - with your expensive Apple devices you paid way too much money for. Honestly, for me this explains why you are still not able to install Debian correctly. Sad but that's typical for most of the Apple hipsters.
Sorry, but considering this it's even surprising you know what encryption is and what a DHCP server is supposed to do.
Just keep playing with you shiny baby-toys if the toys of the big guys are too much to handle for you. ;)
53 • #50 and 52's ignorance (by imnotrich on 2013-05-07 00:12:20 GMT from Mexico)
Lack of wireless support in my case is not a firmware issue, it's a bug. It's been filed. In fact, this password loop bug has been known for years if you take the time to go back and search as have I. At first I thought it was a network manager issue, but wicd suffers from the same problem. So if there's anybody out there who has solved this please speak up. So far all I hear are crickets and flames. The odd thing is Debian's installer does not suffer from this wireless bug but as soon as you try and actually run Debian you are screwed. So again I state it's a bug. Not a firmware issue. The firmware works.
Same for that silly kernel modeset bug. Been known for years. No fix has ever been made to allow hardware that doesn't support kernel modesetting to run. There is a workaround, but is not video a basic function too? Instead of creating these goofy looking counterintuitive guis for touch screen toy users why aren't developers working on a fix for this bug too? Linux developers who leave users behind simply because of the age of a machine are pulling a Microsoft. Shame on them.
I did point out that except for Gnome Classic issues, my Wheezy desktop runs fairly well. Now if I can only figure out how to get it to use all 4 cores of my quad core CPU as well as Windows 7 does everything would be golden but I digress.
As for ipads and iphones those are just toys provided me by an employer. I didn't buy them. Just seems odd though that Apple and Microsoft products are able to work or play together on the same network, but Linux is not?
And so #52 you may be on to something. Linux will never be more than a toy for desktops until Linux is capable of handling basic tasks well. Like networking and video.
54 • Congratulations to Debian (by Peter Besenbruch on 2013-05-07 00:59:00 GMT from United States)
Wheezy works. Over the last year I have been moving the machines I support from Ubuntu and Mint to Debian. Under the Ubuntu Lucid regime, it had been the other way. That said, you need to realize Debian's limitations.
1) Wheezy was "old" six months before release. Gnome, KDE, and XFCE all had produced new versions. So had Firefox (Iceweasel) and LibreOffice. The Kernel is at version 3.2; the current version is 3.9.
2) If you want 3D graphics you may want to stick to Nvidia and use their driver. I have two machines that use the Intel 4000 chipset, and the graphics driver crashes after 20 minutes, or so. I noticed this with the Open-GL version of Xscreensaver and the game Supertuxkart. Dialing back the 3D effects helps some on Supertuxkart, and uninstalling Xscreensaver-gl helps. For this reason, also, I would hesitate to use any desktop environment that uses 3D.
3) Debian is not for the install and forget about it crowd. It wants setting up. Of course, if you are a suitably geeky person, you can then clone your settings and install them on other machine.
Debian's advantages?
1) Stability (mostly). Things tend to work and keep working over a 2-3 year period.
2) Flexibility. I am currently running Wheezy with XFCE 4.10, Iceweasel 20, and LibreOffice 4.0.3. LibreOffice provides debs, if you want them. Wheezy users have been grabbing Iceweasel from Debian's experimental branch. With the release of Wheezy as the stable branch, we will grab Iceweasel from the Debian Mozilla Team's backport repository. I grabbed XFCE from a Siduction repository. It filled in the holes left by the missing packages in Debian's experimental branch.
In the last several months prior to release, Wheezy became increasingly like Sid (the unstable branch), and could access items in experimental. With Wheezy declared stable, Sid will unfreeze, and become largely incompatible with Wheezy again. Those wanting to install XFCE 4.10 now should wait a few months until it gets repacked for Wheezy by debian-desktop.org (the same is true for Gnome and KDE.
3) Integrity. This means several things. Debian will not spy on you, or enable others to do so. It remains committed to free software, yet lets you use non-free additions, if you need to. It removes buggy packages from the repository, if they haven't been fixed. It installs software in a configuration close to the defaults intended by the developers.
Debian's integrity tends to do several things: It highlights Canonical's sleaze. The spyware issue was a major reason I abandoned Ubuntu.
I tend to seek out free versions of my software, but there are some software items where free software doesn't work too well. Wireless firmware, video drivers, VirtualBox, Flash, codecs, and Skype come to mind. Debian leaves all this stuff out, but if you need them, you can install them.
Debian's repositories are enormous, and most developers want their software listed there. Major bugs will have Debian asking developers to fix them. If they fail to, either Debian will try to, or more likely Debian will pull the package from their repository. That provides a big incentive for developers to clean up their programs.
Finally, Debian always looks rather spartan, given its preference for developer defaults. It also tends to run in less RAM that other systems. Debian, the Linux flavor that makes netbooks seem fast.
55 • Wireless (by Fairly Reticent on 2013-05-07 01:00:46 GMT from United States)
It's not basic.
It's not simple: the technology is volatile; manufacturers hate support.
Without hardware specs, you don't get support, even from makers.
Whining won't even get your diapers changed any more. Grow up.
When something works during installation, but fails on boot, yes, something very basic went wrong; blaming it entirely on operator error is irresponsible.
56 • One more negative blunder for Ubuntu 13.04 (by youniquegeek on 2013-05-07 01:15:49 GMT from United States)
Anyone tried install Google Chrome on it? Won't happen. So I ask how can one new release with minor improvements (12.10>13.04) of the previous release create a no-go for Chrome? Good grief! And cause of just one dependency. Lame.
57 • @35 Gnome Classic Respin (by linuxrules on 2013-05-07 01:54:58 GMT from United States)
Nice job Gustavo. Running on a flash drive and it`s fine so far.
58 • #56 installing chrome on ubuntu 13.04 (by Verndog on 2013-05-07 02:13:12 GMT from United States)
64-bit:
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb
32-bit:
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
then:
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome*
fix errors:
sudo apt-get install -f
59 • Comparision of UIs (by Howar Dsherba on 2013-05-07 02:14:38 GMT from United States)
An objective look at several User Interfaces (KDE,UNITY, GNOME, etc) to see which way
the Linux users are headed. Which one will finally turn out to be most useful to all of LINUX users. What are your thoughts?
Thank you.
Howard S.
60 • Wheezy (by Jon Wright on 2013-05-07 02:28:23 GMT from Vietnam)
When the Wheezy live CDs come out will DW be devoting a news item? As I recall, every Ubuntu LTS gets a news item and the SL live releases (like Debian, they lag behind the main release) get a new item but the last 'Recent Related News' for Debian was the release of Squeeze 27 months ago. Squeeze is on 6.0.7 now.
61 • Drivers (by Jesse on 2013-05-07 02:30:41 GMT from Canada)
>> "I'm not trying to tell you how to do reviews or what hardware to review distro's with, but I do find it interesting that you've had significant problems this spring with openSUSE, Fedora, and now Ubuntu all with the same machine and the same card. Not all graphics drivers are created equal."
With Fedora and Ubuntu the issue lies with the 3-D desktop. Both distributions use a default desktop which requires good 3-D support and it's not easy to get that without closed-source drivers (and good driver/card combinations). The contrast between running Unity and KDE, both using the Ubuntu 13.04 base OS and kernel, is striking. I find it a little unsettling that I can run 3-D games on the KDE desktop with good performance, but Unity absolutely crawls on the same hardware using the same kernel and the same drivers. That should be a red flag to the desktop developers.
62 • @ 23 • @3 Unity - DavidEF (by Chanath on 2013-05-07 02:36:01 GMT from Sri Lanka)
I am not hating Unity. I just can't use it or get used to it. I can get used to my Samsung mobile with its left side bar, but I cannot get used to Unity's left side bar. The question of feeling something slow is how much time one needs to use its functions. So, Unity is too slow, and annoying too, because of that.
Shell design; I didn't like gnome 3 when it came up. It didn't have hiding top panel and so many other things, but it was open and lot of people added extensions to it, and now it is a beauty. The top panel hides, you can have Dash, Gnomenu, classic menu, Slingshot, a dock on the left or right, window list and lot more.
I wanted to have old fashioned Gnome panel with right click etc. Played with that for sometime, added Dash without the Unity's left bar, Slingshot, Cinnamon etc, but its time to go forward, so its time for Gnome 3. I am getting to like it more & more.
I also had gone back to Sabayon, interestingly its 13.04 too. Its nicely done and very snappy. I am learning a little about Gentoo.
Ubuntu is under all its derivatives, so I tried every one of them (this time my Internet connection just flies--few minutes downloads) and stopped at Ubuntu Studio. I installed Gnome 3 to it, and I have Ubuntu with Gnome shell plus quite a lot of applications. Why the decision to for Ubuntu Studio to go with XFCE? Just imagine the same Ubuntu Studio with Gnome 3. It would be a challenge to Ubuntu itself!
63 • 62 - continuation (by Chanath on 2013-05-07 02:42:33 GMT from Sri Lanka)
Take Ubuntu Studio, install Gnome, uninstall XFCE, clean it up, get rid of some applications, add some, remaster it, and have two distros, one with Gnome shell, another with Gnome-classic+ desktop effects. Won't that Studio 1 and Studio 2 be a challenge to Ubuntu itself?
64 • @Ubuntu,@Fedora@Gnome@LMDE (by CarlosLB on 2013-05-07 04:42:10 GMT from Mexico)
Bad news for the Linux World.
Ubuntu 13.04 it's really buggy in my PC, freeze many times, like Fedora.
Gnome is not a issue, in Arch rocks out the box.
My bet is for LMDE, Stable, loking good, modern, fast and responsive.
65 • Debian Wheezy (by gee7 on 2013-05-07 08:16:21 GMT from United Kingdom)
@44 Hi Gustave, good luck with your project.
Your respin looks good in the screenshot but maybe not for me as there are so many other fun distros around, I just haven't got the time or inclination to check out Ubuntu respins, apologies for that. Besides, the fine control would still be missing.
People have an innate sense of how they like to place the things around them, whether this is a furniture in a room, tools to do a job, garden landscaping or forms in an abstract painting. Take away the fine control of placement and you take away the choice and that sense of things being right in the world. Whoever wrote those lines of code that made the first Gnome panel so suitable for minor adjustments was a master craftsman and deserves to go down in the history books of Linux development. I bow my head to him or her. Does anyone know who were those early Gnome developers and have they all passed on or retired now? In Menu/System/About Gnome/ names come up but those well be the names of the current Gnome team or of the Debian people working on the Gnome project.
With the panel in Gnome-2, it was giving the ability for fine control that made it cutting edge. IMHO no design ideas since have achieved such sweet functionality.
The designers at KDE and XFCE seem first class and either one deserves the opportunity of having their desktops being made the Default Desktop in top Linux distros like Debian. For the new and yet to come, we have Consort is waiting in the wings, that's something to look forward to.
66 • Ubuntu, Debian, Mageia (by Charles on 2013-05-07 12:41:42 GMT from United States)
I have to say as of now my favorite Distro is Fedora 18 (XFCE Spin.) I also have Debian SID installed on another hard drive and it works great. Though for an unstable branch it lags behind Fedora final releases I noticed. For example, I believe Debian SID has 3.2 Kernel and Fedora 18 has 3.8 (approx numbers.) I love them both. I am trying to give Gnome 3 a fair shot in Debian but I also have XFCE installed there and use that more times than Gnome 3. The feel and set up is just better for me.
I tried Ubuntu 13.04 with Unity. Everything went great, at first. But I like to customize my install and that is where I ran into problems. Up until that point I was actually liking Unity, which is why I decided to give Gnome3 another shot in Debian. Ubuntu was replaced by Mageia 3 RC.
Mageia 3 RC. I love it but there are a few things still missing. I am sure it will get covered in the near future. I am hoping for a resurrection, of a sort, of the old Mandrake community/spirit with them. They are off to a great start.
I personally never care what the default desktop of any distro is. Things usually work great if I use another one.
67 • Ubuntu sluggishness and Jesse's Radeon card (by Angel on 2013-05-07 14:06:07 GMT from Philippines)
@47,
I tend to agree. ATI drivers have been giving me headaches lately. Nevertheless, because it pains me to see a worthwhile effort dismissed out of hand as unusable even if it's not what I'll be using, I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on an old workhorse, a 7 year old Gateway laptop with AMD Turion and ATI card. Other than some jerkiness when using the "spread mode" I still don't experience what Jesse did.. Granted, it's not as snappy as Bodhi with E17, which it replaced, or LXDE, XFCE and other lighter desktops which I've run on this laptop, but it's comparable to Cinnamon, KDE, Gnome3, et al. May even run better if I could use the proprietary driver, but to do that I have to go back to 12.04 or spend time trying to configure the sucker, which I'm not about to do.
As for the bothersome ads, two clicks took care of that.
It's a puzzlement.
68 • Elementary Luna (by Chanath on 2013-05-07 15:13:37 GMT from Sri Lanka)
I sometimes wonder, whether the final Elementary Luna would be released before the release of Ubuntu 14.04. I hope the devs would get their new applications ready by that time, or the next Elementary would be already deprecated. What the use of fighting with forking Ubuntu 12.04 now, when there is only 11 months to go till the next release of Ubuntu LTS?
69 • Debian 7 is 'slow' (by Will Brokenbourgh on 2013-05-07 19:17:33 GMT from United States)
I was a very regular user of Debian on the desktop, and still use it for server duties, but ever since I started using Wheezy (a few months ago), the GUI performance, especially with GTK apps, is noticeably slower than QT apps or other non-Debian-based distros. I filed a bug report about this, but it has not been given much attention.
I now must move off of Debian and use Ubuntu (unfortunately), as Ubuntu doesn't have the same GTK app latency that Debian 7 does. It makes me sad, because I really enjoy Debian's huge collection of packages and stability.
Maybe they'll fix the GUI latency with the next release, but that's a long time coming...
70 • Debian 7 is 'slow' (by Will Brokenbourgh on 2013-05-07 19:19:48 GMT from United States)
...oh, and it's not just a single video card or system that is experiencing this GUI latency...it's on multiple systems with different video systems and drivers. :-(
71 • Slow Wheezy (by Sam Graf on 2013-05-07 20:13:15 GMT from United States)
@69, etc. That's interesting. I'm actually moving the opposite way for similar reasons. I'm using primarily older hardware and have found (this is obviously just my experience and proves nothing) Ubuntu performance becoming problematic. I was concerned about GNOME 3 performance in Debian on the same hardware but, so far at least, have been pleasantly surprised. I'll be installing on more hardware over the coming weeks and will be interested to see if I've somehow just dodged some bullet so far.
72 • Debian 7 is 'slow' (by Will Brokenbourgh on 2013-05-07 20:21:58 GMT from United States)
@71,
I'm glad that you're having a better experience than me. Debian is a great distro otherwise...I would use it in a second if they addressed the issue I reported. :-)
73 • Why so few features in 13.04 (by cflow on 2013-05-07 21:18:27 GMT from United States)
The reason why there's limited features in this release is they are planning on scrapping this gtk3/compiz/nux based unity in the future (yes, on the desktop) and switching to a qml form which they call "Unity Next". This might take a while - and we might have to suffer from these issues _this_ unity has as the resources shift away from it...
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec?action=show&redirect=Touch%2FSpecs%2FUnityNext
74 • Debian Wheezy (by davemc on 2013-05-08 00:40:53 GMT from United States)
#54, Comment #2 - "If you want 3D graphics you may want to stick to Nvidia and use their driver. "
I actually run ATi graphics exclusively and have experienced flawless performance on KDE. I have seen no reported issues thus far with Intel graphics as well. Have you reported your issue?
#2 -"In the last several months prior to release, Wheezy became increasingly like Sid (the unstable branch), and could access items in experimental. With Wheezy declared stable, Sid will unfreeze, and become largely incompatible with Wheezy again. Those wanting to install XFCE 4.10 now should wait a few months until it gets repacked for Wheezy by debian-desktop.org (the same is true for Gnome and KDE."
No idea what your talking about here. You are mixing and matching several distro's for some reason as if they are all the same. Debian Unstable = Sid. Debian Experimental is a totally isolated and seperate Repo and is ~not~ Sid. Debian Testing is ~not~ Sid, and has no relation to the Experimental Repos. Wheezy (now stable Distro) was for a long time the Testing Distro, which was frozen. Now that Wheezy has become the Stable Distro (formerly Squeeze), Testing will unfreeze and accept an avalanche of packages from Sid. Sid never did go into a freeze! The Experimental Repo is the Experimental Repo. I guess it may be confusing to some, but not really.
75 • KISS (by udev-fan on 2013-05-08 03:01:45 GMT from Brazil)
"...I also like controlling the start-up of the system with shell scripts that are """"readable"""", and I'm guessing that's what most Slackware users prefer too. "
I for sure prefer it!
"...flies in the face of the UNIX concept of doing one thing and doing it well."
I hope Slackware developers sticks with that, or in the future we can have things like bloated unsecure registry.dat files for Linux :(.
76 • Debian 7.0 (by claudecat on 2013-05-08 07:40:51 GMT from United States)
After a year or two of inveterate distro-hopping, I settled on Wheezy/KDE several months ago and have been extremely satisfied. I use the Nvidia driver and everything works smooth as silk. Not a single crash, glitch or even minor hiccup - and my bandwidth cap isn't eaten up by constant deluges of updates (I'm looking at you Arch and Gentoo).
Once I got over the need/want to have the latest and greatest of everything, I decided that stability and things not requiring incessant fiddling was a higher priority. I still have several other distros installed, but I've given up on keeping them current.
Once installed and fine-tuned, Debian is perfect for the lazy person (me) that just wants to get stuff done without drama. Congrats to the entire Debian team for all you do!
77 • Ubuntu and only ubuntu (by Vikas on 2013-05-08 09:20:56 GMT from India)
I agree with DW that ubuntu now moving towards its commercial activities as tracking our activities. and its last two products are not upto mark, Ubuntu 12.04 is miles away from 12.10 and 13.04 ...
While Using OpenSUSE , if we forget bugs than OpenSUSE is best till distro I have used right now (KDE Version), whether speed, stability or graphics all are stunning...
78 • @ #53 (by Pierre on 2013-05-08 11:06:25 GMT from Germany)
My comment has nothing to do with ignorance but with being weary of you complaining.
Open source is no heavily financed commercial project like Microsoft's Windows or Apple's Mac OS. So it's nothing out of the ordinary if bugs keep unsolved if they are no major ones because only a very few are experiencing them.
Therefore it's your fault to have misled expectations on open source projects in common and Debian in particular.
And: Linux is no toy. It's not for no reason that Linux is used for most of the heavy load datacenters, webservers etc. instead of the Microsoft's or Apple's products. Your comment only shows even more how misled even your preception of the facts is.
79 • @ #59 • Comparision of UIs (by Howar Dsherba) (by Pierre on 2013-05-08 15:11:08 GMT from Germany)
I have expressed my thoughts about UIs maybe even way too often already.
Nevertheless I will tell what I think once again because - and that is the first thought about it directly - UIs matter a lot:
This is because UIs make the work with the computer a lot more comfortable.
But how compfortable and how exactly an UI meets one's preferences and needs depends on taste and working habits.
For me the i3 window manager is the best solution in additon with a lot of KDE SC apps, Firefox and some others.
But I am doing fine with Xfce, KDE and such, too. Even Gnome3 and Unity are ok as long as you are willing to adopt the different design and usage patterns - and if they are not in conflict with your way of working like it's the case for me. I am most productive on i3 or at least KDE/Xfce.
The ideal desktop always is the one you are the most productive with. And I don't care if that means someone is using a kind of geeky window manager like me or if you love to have a 24 inches smartphone. ;)
Use what makes you productive!
Greetings from Germany.
Pierre
80 • re: 74 Debian Wheezy (by Peter Besenbruch on 2013-05-08 22:18:01 GMT from United States)
"I actually run ATi graphics exclusively and have experienced flawless performance on KDE. I have seen no reported issues thus far with Intel graphics as well. Have you reported your issue?"
No, I haven't. perhaps I should report the issue, but it was simpler to remove Xscreensaver-gl. I am glad you have had no trouble with the ATI drivers, but the consensus online is that ATI causes far more trouble if you are serious about 3D than Nvidia. Intel was never considered a serious 3D contender, though the 4000 series isn't too terrible.
"No idea what your talking about here."
I was talking about the similarity between Wheezy and Sid. Long time Debian users know that the testing and unstable branches become increasingly similar during the freeze phase. One example is the kernel. In the month before Wheezy's release, both branches carried 3.2.41. As others have pointed out, version 3.2 is relatively old, yet Sid has remained on version 3.2 since last June, because of the freeze.
One experiment you can do as a Debian user running the testing branch is enable the unstable branch to see the differences between them. There were about 15 packages needing to be upgraded, had I wanted too in the 2 weeks prior to Wheezy going stable. All the differences were minor point releases.
"You are mixing and matching several distro's for some reason as if they are all the same. Debian Unstable = Sid. Debian Experimental is a totally isolated and seperate Repo and is ~not~ Sid. Debian Testing is ~not~ Sid, and has no relation to the Experimental Repos."
So many false statements, so little time. I have already covered the relationship between unstable and testing. Now let's bring in experimental. I run Iceweasel 20, not 10esr, which has resided in Wheezy since the freeze. The Debian Mozilla Team has a helpful Web site that instructs you how to keep Iceweasel up to date for the various branches. For stable, you use the Mozilla Team repository at mozilla.debian.net. For testing and unstable, you use the version in experimental. There was one update last Fall that failed, because Wheezy had too early a version of dependent package. The correct version resided in Sid. I had a choice: I could wait a month for the package in Sid to migrate to Wheezy, or I could go and grab it from Sid. As the package was used only by Iceweasel, grabbing it was an easy choice.
This illustrates the relationships between the branches: Experimental is incomplete. Experimental does not resolve all dependencies within itself. Instead, it relies on the unstable branch for dependency resolution. As Wheezy, the testing branch, moved toward release, I no longer needed to use unstable. Now that Wheezy has become the stable branch, I will no longer do that.
"Wheezy (now stable Distro) was for a long time the Testing Distro, which was frozen."
Sid also went into a freeze at the same time.
"Now that Wheezy has become the Stable Distro (formerly Squeeze), Testing will unfreeze and accept an avalanche of packages from Sid."
That will take a while. The first branch to get hammered is Sid, as all the packages waiting around in experimental move into the unstable branch. Only when the blatantly awful bugs are eliminated, and support is readied for all supported architectures, will the packages in Sid move to testing (now called Jessie).
"Sid never did go into a freeze!"
You are simply wrong.
"The Experimental Repo is the Experimental Repo. I guess it may be confusing to some, but not really."
It seems to confuse the hell out of you. I'll finish with a word about the Siduction and Apt2sid distributions. I grabbed XFCE 4.10 from Siduction, because XFCE in Sid was frozen at version 4.8. Most, but not all of 4.10, resided in experimental. Siduction prepared about a half dozen packages, including a meta-package or two that pulled what was available from experimental. I used them without issue, because Sid and Wheezy were essentially the same a week ago. Because they were the same, I was able to use the packages in experimental and the packages from Siduction without activating the Debian Sid repository.
Siduction and Apt2sid exist in large part, because Sid freezes for about 6-9 months before the release of a new stable version. Let's just say that immediately prior to a Debian stable release, Sid also gets very stable, and a bit stale.
81 • @3 (by MiRa on 2013-05-08 23:13:28 GMT from Spain)
"Maybe, Ubuntu would be successful with that market, and earn money."
From me, surely not; I'll never buy a ------- phone. ;D
"But, losing the desktop market would be a disaster for Ubuntu."
That means a gain for GNU/Linux world! :D
82 • Reivew Check-off Item Suggestion (by RO on 2013-05-09 02:02:56 GMT from United States)
Please specify the system requirements (if you can find them - some distro sites seem to be extremely vague or outright secretive about this). I keep getting frustrated when trying new distros/versions on old hardware - PAE is the most annoying one most of the time for me.
TIA
RO
83 • Sabayon 13.04 (by Chanath on 2013-05-09 02:09:12 GMT from Sri Lanka)
After being with Ubuntu for so long, I find my time with Sabayon 13.04 Gnome edition is quite uneventful--no crashes, no hitches. I also started liking Gnome 3. Looks like Sabayon devs had really understood Gnome 3.
84 • Debian Unstable (by davemc on 2013-05-09 04:29:49 GMT from United States)
#80 - ""Sid never did go into a freeze!"
You are simply wrong."
Actually, no, I am not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian
"unstable, permanently aliased sid, repository contains packages currently under development; ~it is updated continually.~ This repository is designed for Debian developers who participate in a project and need the latest libraries available, or for those who like to "live on the edge", so it will not be as stable as the other distributions. There are no official CDs/DVDs because it is rapidly changing and the project does not support it, although CD and DVD images of sid are built quarterly by aptosid. Additionally, the other two distributions can be upgraded to unstable.[34]"
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable
"Debian Unstable (also known by its codename "Sid") is not strictly a release, but rather a rolling development version of the Debian distribution ~ containing the latest and greatest packages which have been introduced into the Debian system ~. If you are a hardcore developer or tester you should use this release. If you are a power user you might also consider using Debian Testing. "
Debian Sid never freezes. Ever. It may slow down a notch or ten on introducing new packages from time to time, but it does not officially go into freeze. Debian Testing does go into an officially announced freeze period. Debian Unstable never does.
85 • Debian Freeze Periods (by davemc on 2013-05-09 04:52:51 GMT from United States)
http://release.debian.org/wheezy/freeze_policy.html
This describes well the relationship during the Wheezy freeze period and how things worked at that time. It worked remarkably similar during the Squeeze freeze period, because the freeze policy has never changed that I am aware of. I think the confusion comes from the fact that Unstable does tend to be very cutting edge during non freeze periods, and sometimes (not all the time) can slow its roll a little bit during freeze periods for a lot of reasons. Unstable however, never does go into a freeze period at any time.
"Wheezy (now stable Distro) was for a long time the Testing Distro, which was frozen."
"Sid also went into a freeze at the same time."
If you can link us the announcement from the Debian Dev team where they stated that Unstable was going into an official freeze period, that would be very helpful. Thanks. I simply can't find it. Anywhere. Google be damned, because not even daddy Google can find it!
"Now that Wheezy has become the Stable Distro (formerly Squeeze), Testing will unfreeze and accept an avalanche of packages from Sid."
"That will take a while. The first branch to get hammered is Sid, as all the packages waiting around in experimental move into the unstable branch. Only when the blatantly awful bugs are eliminated, and support is readied for all supported architectures, will the packages in Sid move to testing (now called Jessie)."
That is somewhat true. Unstable will catch up very quickly. Testing however, will catch up in (most likely) one massive update. Or, they may do it in two or three updates. I seem to remember after the Squeeze release that it did not take that long for Testing to get a massive data dump.
86 • Are Debian's Iceweasel web browsers 3.5.16 and 10.0.12 unmaintained? (by cba on 2013-05-09 11:30:22 GMT from Germany)
This question arises automatically when you read the last changelogs for the Iceweasel software in Debian Squeeze and Wheezy:
http://ftp-master.metadata.debian.org/changelogs//main/i/iceweasel/iceweasel_10.0.12esr-1_changelog (last code change on Tue, 20 Nov 2012 23:26:21 +0100)
and
http://ftp-master.metadata.debian.org/changelogs//main/i/iceweasel/iceweasel_3.5.16-20_changelog (last code change on Fri, 07 Dec 2012 22:09:28 +0100)
The same data apply to the underlying Xulrunner packages, xulrunner-10.0 and xulrunner-1.9.1. So Iceape and Icedove in Debian Squeeze and Wheezy have the very same problem as Iceweasel and, therefore, this "Ice" software is very likely unsecure and contains unpatched security flaws. Please compare with these changelogs of Firefox 17 ESR:
http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefoxESR.html
The problem is that Debian contains a lot of architectures on which Firefox/Iceweasel 17 ESR or Iceweasel20/Firefox 20 from mozilla.org will not run:
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=iceweasel&suite=sid
and
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=iceweasel&suite=experimental
So a "self-made" update is no solution in such cases.
But what bothers me most is that nobody talks about this concrete security problem. Offering old software like in Debian does not necessarily mean that it remains unpatched and open to security flaws.
87 • Regarding Sid and Freezes (by Peter Besenbruch on 2013-05-09 17:49:03 GMT from United States)
I had said: "You are simply wrong."
davemc replied: "Actually, no, I am not."
Actually, you are. The arguments you advance are irrelevant. Sid freezes, as I have argued, when the testing branch does. Sid then becomes a conduit for bug fixes that then filter down to testing. By the end of the process Sid and testing contain basically the same packages.
"That is somewhat true. Unstable will catch up very quickly."
You basically acknowledge as much here. Sid will catch up VERY quickly. I repeat: Sid gets very stable and a bit stale in the months before release, because of the freeze. It becomes essentially the same as testing. Running Sid in the month after a Debian release, however, can get very "interesting."
88 • Best Debian ever (by FormerDistroHopper on 2013-05-09 18:32:30 GMT from Germany)
Of course i don't use Gnome3, but that's what spins are for. If you don't like Gnome3 (like me), use Xfce (like me) and stop whining.
Wheezy is the best Debian ever. With Debian & Gentoo i really don't need any other distro anymore, except specialized distros with focus on certain use cases.
Congrats to the Debian team. What would Linux be without you guys? :O
89 • @ #84 Debian Unstable (by davemc) and Debian repositories in general (by Pierre on 2013-05-10 09:53:00 GMT from Germany)
Actually there are 3 real branches:
Stable, Testing and Unstable. Additionally there is a incomplete repository called Experimental that is filled with the very first builds of the most current packages and is only something like an addition to Unstable.
If Experimental packages are available for all supported architectures and prove to be mostly usable they find their way into Unstable. If they prove to be quite stable and ready for a full support they are moved to Testing, which will become the next Stable release.
Therefore Stable and Testing have changing codenames. Currently Stable is codenamed Wheezy and Testing is codenamed Jessie.
Packages in Stable only receive security patches. Testing will evolve until freeze period and will then receive bug fixes and security patches only. Unstable, codenamed Sid will continue to receive major package updates, no matter which phase or condition Testing is in.
This is why siduction and aptosid are using Sid for delivering a rolling release distribution.
Nevertheless Peter is not completely wrong. Sid's development is slowed down most often to nearly freeze during the freeze period of Testing because all efforts go into hardening and stablizing Testing which will become the next stable release and receives priority over Sid.
Hope I could make it clear to both of you, what the other meant.
90 • What?! (by davemc on 2013-05-11 03:10:45 GMT from United States)
#89 - I really don't think there is anything in your whole post that is different than what I posted?.. Same meanings, just different wordings. I have been using Debian as my one and only Desktop for years and have been through these release cycles a few times now, so I kind of know what they are all about by now. Well enough to know that Peter is completely wrong in his belief that Sid goes into official freeze periods when Testing does, because Unstable certainly ~does not~ go into freeze periods.
Then again, it does slow down a bit from time to time for many reasons. At no time and at no point has or will the Debian Development Team officially announce a development freeze period for Unstable. Ever. That is, it will never happen. Never.
91 • @ 90 by davemc (by Pierre on 2013-05-11 12:24:15 GMT from Germany)
Just wanted to confirm your claims and explain why Peter is of the opinion that Sid would become something like freezed. Sorry if that did not get clearer.
I have used Debian Stable for quite some time on my machines, too. At university it was the standard OS and all Computer Science laboratories.
I used Siduction, Aptosid and their predecessor Sidux, too, each for quite some time.
So I know what they are all about, too. And again, you are absolutely right: Sid / Unstable does never get freezed! As well as Experimental does not. Only Testing gets freezed and becomes Stable. Then Testing is re-codenamed to another character out of Toy Story. This is the way Debian goes. ;)
Greetings
92 • @37: Distro Hopping is for kids. (by forlin on 2013-05-11 20:05:58 GMT from Portugal)
Release early, release often, is the paradigm of evolution (see the Linux kernel release cycle). Likewise, freedom and freedom (freedom means the liberty to make choices) of choice is a Linux's paradigm.
Other than LTS you have Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, Oracle and many fine rolling release distros.
93 • @ #37 and #92 - Distro Hopping is for kids. (by Pierre on 2013-05-11 23:31:01 GMT from Germany)
Constant and fast evolution is one important reason of many that Linux has become a widely used free operating system because others often lack driver support for newer hardware.
For sure every medal has a down side. Especially Ubuntu sadly demonstrates at the moment that pushing out releases so often can result in buggy releases. That is a desaster especially for releases that are so unspectacular like the latest Ubuntu release.
Nevertheless the LTS releases are quite stable, Debian is even better, we have Enterprise Linux additionally and cutting edge rolling release distros like Arch, that manage to be on the edge while being stable. And maybe as one of the most conservative ones you should really not forget about Slackware.
So you can go with many fine distros out there without bothering with reinstalling all 6 month. Nevertheless distro hopping is not for kids only. It means to be open minded as well and it's good to always take a look into other distros or even other operating systems. And most important: It is fun to use new and different stuff from time to time while getting work done with it. ;)
94 • KDE apps - any good ones? (by gregzeng on 2013-05-12 00:29:13 GMT from Australia)
Gparted is better than the KDE version IMO (fewer keystrokes, etc to use it). But in Synaptic Package Manager, the KDE version can be accidentally installed, since it is not obvious from its name their that it brings in KDE libraries; only by fine-reading the last few words of the description.
Are their other KDE apps worthwhile? Generally I like lightweight operating systems. KDE-based distros tend top have multiple apps serving the same functions - some KDE and others better performing non-KDE apps. So I'm wary of KDE apps now.
95 • @94 (by fistrix on 2013-05-12 09:33:42 GMT from Spain)
My favourite an essential applications in KDE:
- Okular: PDF viewer. Better than anyone pdf reader I've used.
- Dolphin: Great file manager.. Love forever with ctrl+i
- Kate: Awesome text editor
- Yakuake: Console stuff
- Klipper: copy and paste with style
- digikam/Gwenview: Great imaging tools
- Krita: Best painting tool ever
- others: Marble, krdc, ktouch, kdeveloper, amarok, dragon player
96 • 91 • @ 90 by davemc Debian freeze (by mandog on 2013-05-12 18:40:41 GMT from Peru)
This was from the Siduction blog last month
I think this answers all questions about Sid it be in official freeze! but it is if there are no packages there
2013/04/02 in Blog by Ferdinand Thommes | No comments
Should you have wondered if siduction came to a grinding halt, let me asure you, that this is not the case. The fact, that there has been no posts here for a while has two reasons, one being that I am in the USA for two months on vacation and not being on the computer very much. The other is Debian still being in deep freeze and not much happening there. That can change any time now, as RC bugs are down to a mere 43 as of right now.
97 • Dumb on Debian (by Jordan on 2013-05-12 22:17:14 GMT from United States)
Downloaded and burned then tried to install the first disc and it would not detect the network hardware on this this HP M7 laptop during install.
Had to stop. I was surprised. All other distros at least detect the darned networking hardware.
But, I'm dumb on Debian because nearly all distros I use are tweaked and rebranded.. I guess they tweak them to detect the most common network hardware, among other things. ;)
98 • Debian 7 (by Narly on 2013-05-13 03:23:30 GMT from Kuwait)
I downloaded Debian 7 and gave it a try. I tried installing it on 3 year old Dell laptop with a Core 2 Duo processor. When the installation asked for a 3rd party NIC driver, I stopped the install and went back to my old OS Linux Mint 14. Then I tried installing Debian 7 on a 9 year Dell laptop with a Pentium M processor. The installation froze every time I tried it. It turns out Debian 7 requires a PAE kernel, not supported by the Pentium M i586 processor. So, Debian 7 had hardware incompatibility problems on both of my laptops. I have not successfully installed Debian 7 as of yet.
99 • 93 + @ #37 and #92 - Distro Hopping is for kids. (by forlin on 2013-05-13 03:54:36 GMT from Portugal)
Regarding Disto Hopping, there's one more point I'd like to add from @ 93. Other than their own convenience, people on distro hopping may also be very useful early testers by detecting and reporting bugs or presenting suggestions to developers and the communities.
100 • Distro Hopping? (by dude on 2013-05-13 05:49:20 GMT from United States)
I used to do lots of distro hopping. I tried Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Puppy, DSL, Qimo, Knoppix, Crux, CommodoreOS, Slackware, Backtrack, Mint and others. I always return to Linux Mint for several reasons:
No hardware issues
Always works with my laptop wifi adapter
I like the MATE graphical interface
Multimedia Codecs included
I like Synaptic better than RPM
Great repositories
No LVM by default
No Hassles!
Thank you Linux Mint! Keep up the good work!
Number of Comments: 100
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| • Issue 801 (2019-02-11): Project Trident 18.12, the meaning of status symbols in top, FreeBSD Foundation lists ongoing projects, Plasma Mobile team answers questions |
| • Issue 800 (2019-02-04): FreeNAS 11.2, using Ubuntu Studio software as an add-on, Nitrux developing znx, matching operating systems to file systems |
| • Issue 799 (2019-01-28): KaOS 2018.12, Linux Basics For Hackers, Debian 10 enters freeze, Ubuntu publishes new version for IoT devices |
| • Issue 798 (2019-01-21): Sculpt OS 18.09, picking a location for swap space, Solus team plans ahead, Fedora trying to get a better user count |
| • Issue 797 (2019-01-14): Reborn OS 2018.11.28, TinyPaw-Linux 1.3, dealing with processes which make the desktop unresponsive, Debian testing Secure Boot support |
| • Issue 796 (2019-01-07): FreeBSD 12.0, Peppermint releases ISO update, picking the best distro of 2018, roundtable interview with Debian, Fedora and elementary developers |
| • Issue 795 (2018-12-24): Running a Pinebook, interview with Bedrock founder, Alpine being ported to RISC-V, Librem 5 dev-kits shipped |
| • Issue 794 (2018-12-17): Void 20181111, avoiding software bloat, improvements to HAMMER2, getting application overview in GNOME Shell |
| • Issue 793 (2018-12-10): openSUSE Tumbleweed, finding non-free packages, Debian migrates to usrmerge, Hyperbola gets FSF approval |
| • Issue 792 (2018-1203): GhostBSD 18.10, when to use swap space, DragonFly BSD's wireless support, Fedora planning to pause development schedule |
| • Issue 791 (2018-11-26): Haiku R1 Beta1, default passwords on live media, Slax and Kodachi update their media, dual booting DragonFly BSD on EFI |
| • Issue 790 (2018-11-19): NetBSD 8.0, Bash tips and short-cuts, Fedora's networking benchmarked with FreeBSD, Ubuntu 18.04 to get ten years of support |
| • Issue 789 (2018-11-12): Fedora 29 Workstation and Silverblue, Haiku recovering from server outage, Fedora turns 15, Debian publishes updated media |
| • Issue 788 (2018-11-05): Clu Linux Live 6.0, examining RAM consumpion, finding support for older CPUs, more Steam support for running Windows games on Linux, update from Solus team |
| • Issue 787 (2018-10-29): Lubuntu 18.10, limiting application access to specific users, Haiku hardware compatibility list, IBM purchasing Red Hat |
| • Issue 786 (2018-10-22): elementary OS 5.0, why init keeps running, DragonFly BSD enables virtual machine memory resizing, KDE neon plans to drop older base |
| • Issue 785 (2018-10-15): Reborn OS 2018.09, Nitrux 1.0.15, swapping hard drives between computers, feren OS tries KDE spin, power savings coming to Linux |
| • Issue 784 (2018-10-08): Hamara 2.1, improving manual pages, UBports gets VoIP app, Fedora testing power saving feature |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the Star Lite, Star LabTop and more. Available with a choice of Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Zorin OS pre-installed with many more distributions supported. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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| Random Distribution | 
DoudouLinux
DoudouLinux was a Debian-based distribution targeting young children. Its goals are to make computer use as simple and pleasant as possible while also making information technology more accessible to all children on earth, without discrimination. DoudouLinux uses a heavily customised LXDE desktop with a simple navigation system that offers links to about fifty applications for education, fun, work and multimedia tasks.
Status: Discontinued
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