DistroWatch Weekly |
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 582, 27 October 2014 |
Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! GhostBSD is a desktop derivative of FreeBSD and Jesse Smith shares his initial impressions of the operating system below. In the news this week we talk about an interesting new project which may allow users of RPM-based distributions to convert their operating system into a release of openSUSE. Plus we discuss openSUSE merging its Factory and Tumbleweed repositories. Canonical launched Ubuntu 14.10 this past week and celebrated the distribution's tenth birthday. We share a look ahead at new technologies Ubuntu Canonical is working on and take a look back at the early stages of the Ubuntu project. We are also sorry to share news that one of Debian's developers has passed away and we provide the details of this sad event below. Speaking of Debian, this week we discuss the ongoing debate over Debian's choice of init systems and a potential fork of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Plus we continue our look at rolling release distributions and compare version numbers of key packages in the five operating systems in our trial. As usual, we talk about the distribution releases of the past week and look forward to fun, new technologies to come. We wish you all the very best and happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (45MB) and MP3 (51MB) formats
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Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Initial Impressions of GhostBSD 4.0
The GhostBSD project is a desktop oriented operating system which uses FreeBSD as a base. The project's website sums up GhostBSD by saying, "GhostBSD is built on top of the FreeBSD project. However, being a GTK desktop oriented OS, GhostBSD takes the FreeBSD system and pre-configures the most common software choices, fine-tunes the selection of applications for optimal performance, and provides an intuitive work environment without the need for extensive additional configuration."
GhostBSD 4.0 is available in just one edition as of the time of writing and this edition ships with the MATE desktop environment. I found GhostBSD is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds for the x86 hardware architecture and the project offers separate downloads for people using optical media and USB thumb drives. I chose to download the 64-bit build for USB drives and found the image file was 1.2GB in size.
Booting from the GhostBSD media brings us to the MATE desktop. The background is a soft shade of blue and the theme features bright icons and dark borders. On the desktop is an icon for launching the project's system installer. Shortly after logging in a window appears offering to switch our desktop to one of three different layouts. The available options are Classic, Enlightenment or Purity. Clicking these options alters the layout of the MATE desktop, moving the application menu, task switcher and optional quick-launch bar. The window that allows us to change the desktop's layout stays open after we make our selection and we can experiment with the three layouts as long as we like.

GhostBSD 4.0 - adjusting MATE desktop settings (full image size: 166kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
GhostBSD's graphical system installer appears to be unique to the project. The application starts by asking us to select our preferred language from a short list of European languages. We are then asked to select our keyboard's layout from a list and then we are asked to find our time zone in another list. Next, we come to disk partitioning and we are given the choice of manually dividing up our hard drive or handing over the entire drive to GhostBSD. The first time through I tried manual partitioning. I found the installer's partition manager a bit awkward and I was unable to find a way to re-size partitions. I also found it strange that a deleted partition would result in a block of free space that could not be reclaimed. There is a guided option on the manual partitioning screen that will make suggestions for us.
The first time through I created a root partition and swap space. When I attempted to proceed the installer claimed I had not created a root partition, though one was displayed on the screen. I took the guided option next which created almost an identical arrangement and moved to the next stage. I feel it worth mentioning GhostBSD's installer does not support ZFS, though the underlying FreeBSD operating system does. GhostBSD only supports UFS and extended features of UFS. The installer then asks us to set a password on the root account and we have the option of installing a boot loader. We are next asked to create a user account for ourselves. The system installer then begins copying its files to the local hard drive. The first time I went through the installer it failed, though the reason the installation process failed was not clear. I went back through the installer, this time giving it access to my entire hard drive and the installation completed cleanly. Once the installer finishes its work we are asked to reboot the computer.
GhostBSD boots to a graphical login screen with an attractive, wavy blue background. Signing into the account we created at install time brings us back to the MATE desktop in whichever layout we selected for it while we were using the live media. Or at least that is what happened when I ran GhostBSD in VirtualBox. I tried getting GhostBSD to run on my desktop computer and, when working directly with the physical hardware, GhostBSD would not boot. Even when asked to run in safe mode GhostBSD wouldn't start on my desktop machine.
In the virtual environment GhostBSD would boot, but I found the operating system wouldn't take full advantage of my display's resolution, even with VirtualBox's guest add-ons in place. This was in interesting contrast to PC-BSD 10.0.3 which I installed a few weeks previous to this trial. While I had to select an alternative video driver for PC-BSD, the operating system would run on this same hardware. On the other hand, while PC-BSD consumed a great deal of my host operating system's CPU cycles while running inside VirtualBox, I found GhostBSD required very little of my CPU's resources when it was run as a VirtualBox guest. I also found GhostBSD required relatively little memory, using just 160MB of active memory when logged into the MATE desktop environment.
GhostBSD ships with a small, but useful collection of desktop applications. We can find the Firefox web browser in the application menu along with the XChat IRC client, the Pidgin instant messaging software, the Thunderbird e-mail client and the Transmission bittorrent software. The LibreOffice productivity suite is installed for us along with an image viewer, a document viewer and the Shotwell photo manager. GhostBSD features the Cheese webcam utility and the Xfburn optical disc burning software. I found MPlayer was available for playing videos and the Exaile audio player is included too. GhostBSD ships with popular multimedia codecs, allowing us to play most media files out of the box. There is, however, no Flash support by default. Digging through the application menu further we find an archive manager, calculator, text editor and system monitor. The Midnight Commander file manager is installed for us too. Network Manager is included with GhostBSD and the operating system includes the FreeBSD 10.0 kernel and command line utilities.
GhostBSD uses the pkg command line package manager for updating software and for installing or removing packages. GhostBSD pulls software from the FreeBSD package repositories. Adding or removing packages worked well for me, but I ran into trouble when it came time to upgrade existing packages. Shortly after I installed GhostBSD I found 219 upgrades waiting in the repositories and these totalled 411MB in size. The package manager downloaded and installed these items for me without any problems, but when I rebooted the machine, I was dropped at a text console login screen. I was no longer able to launch the X display software and I could not get back to a graphical login screen. After trying to boot in safe graphics mode and trying to manually correct the problem with X I re-installed GhostBSD. The operating system worked well for me again until I performed another software update a few days later. Once again, installing updates disabled X, reducing GhostBSD to a command line only operating system.
Conclusions
Going into this review I truly wanted to like GhostBSD. I like what they are trying to do and I appreciate the idea of providing the world with an easy, home user, desktop oriented flavour of FreeBSD. While PC-BSD aims at businesses and workstations more than home users and PC-BSD is exclusive to 64-bit machines and offers every desktop environment under the sun, I feel there is a place for a streamlined, one-desktop, lightweight operating system built on the foundation of FreeBSD. GhostBSD is working with a good idea and strives to fill a niche that is mostly uncontested these days.
Unfortunately, I ran into several problems with this release of GhostBSD. The installer gave me some problems when I tried to manually partition my disk and I ran into some errors when I didn't take the automated partitioning option. Like PC-BSD, the GhostBSD operating system had trouble working with my video card. Unlike PC-BSD, I found GhostBSD didn't have an easy work around and that meant I spent all my time with the operating system running it in a virtual machine. To top it off, upgrading the operating system caused the graphical user interface to stop working, which was a frustrating turn of events.

GhostBSD 4.0 - running the Midnight Commander file manager (full image size: 157kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
There are aspects of GhostBSD I did enjoy. I like that the project is still supporting both 64-bit and 32-bit machines and I like the developers make it easy to transfer their images to both optical media and USB thumb drives. I appreciate the streamlined system installer, even if I did run into some problems with it. I like that the MATE desktop has a small helper problem that will let us change the layout so MATE can be easily customized to suit the user.
I suspect most of my problems with GhostBSD boil down to problems with video drivers, particularly where my desktop computer is concerned. Hopefully, people with different hardware will enjoy a better experience than I did. Lately I've heard a lot of people taking an interest in FreeBSD-based operating systems and I like to think GhostBSD could be a good fit for people who want to get up and running with a FreeBSD desktop system with as little effort as possible.
* * * * *
Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8 GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500 GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6 GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith and Ladislav Bodnar) |
Switching to openSUSE from another distro, Tumbleweed and Factory merge, road to Unity 8, Ubuntu celebrates 10th birthday, Debian says good-bye to valued team member
Hack Week is a time for developers to share ideas and propose interesting, strange or useful projects. One interesting idea to come out of SUSE's Hack Week this year is a project which attempts to take an existing installation of a distribution which uses the RPM package manager and convert that distribution into a functional openSUSE installation. The project's page explains: " A number of experiments suggest that it may be feasible to run zypper from an openSUSE 'live' media against a 'foreign' RPM based OS installation (eg. CentOS) and then 'zypper dup' to openSUSE. Thanks to satsolver, openSUSE's heavy use of pkgconfig, and our sometimes 'excessive' recommends, zypper always seems able to suggest a viable upgrade solution, replacing the foreign CentOS/RHEL packages with appropriate openSUSE ones." If successful, the project would make it easier for curious users to switch to openSUSE without losing their existing applications and configuration.
Back in August we reported openSUSE's Factory repository was being turned into an official rolling release distribution. This caused some confusion among openSUSE users as the openSUSE Tumbleweed repositories were already being used by many as a rolling release platform. The project has decided to merge its Tumbleweed and Factory branches to make one rolling release repository. The official, unified rolling release branch will be called Tumbleweed while the name Factory will be used to identify a repository of development packages. The announcement reads: "With the release of openSUSE 13.2 in November, two of openSUSE's open-source projects, the 'Tumbleweed' and 'Factory' rolling releases will be merging, and offered as a single openSUSE rolling release under the name 'Tumbleweed'. Factory will remain the name of the development process where openSUSE's new developments are integrated, with the tested, user-ready rolling release assuming the name Tumbleweed from November 4.
* * * * *
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu distribution, is working on a new version of the Unity desktop, Unity 8. While the current Unity interface, Unity 7, is designed for desktops, the new Unity 8 interface is expected to run on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Unity 8 has a long development cycle ahead of it and, while it is available for testing, Canonical currently doesn't plan to push out Unity 8 to desktop users until October 2015. Will Cooke, the Desktop Team Manager at Canonical, reports: "What we've decided to do this time is to keep the same, stable Unity 7 desktop as the default while we offer users who want to opt-in to Unity 8 an option to use that desktop. As development continues the Unity 8 desktop will get better and better. It will benefit from a lot of the advances which have come about through the development of the phone OS and will benefit from continual improvements as the releases happen."
Along with the new version of Unity, Canonical plans to provide application isolation and a separation between operating system versions and application versions. Cooke explains: "Traditionally a given release of Ubuntu has shipped with the versions of the applications available at the time of release. Important updates and security fixes are back-ported to older releases where required, but generally you had to wait for the next release to get the latest and greatest set of applications. The new desktop packaging system means that application developers can push updates out when they are ready and the user can benefit right away. Application isolation: Traditionally applications can access anything the user can access; photos, documents, hardware devices, etc. On other platforms this has led to data being stolen or rendered otherwise unusable. Isolation means that without explicit permission any Click packaged application is prevented from accessing data you don't want it to access."
The Ubuntu operating system, along with its related community distributions, is probably the most widely used GNU/Linux operating system in the world. When Ubuntu appeared on the scene ten years ago it immediately began raising the bar for ease of use and newcomer friendliness. Canonical started a free live CD program where people all around the world could order and give away Ubuntu discs and this did a lot to promote desktop Linux and expose new people to free software. Last week Ubuntu celebrated its tenth birthday and Scott James Remnant, one of the project's first team members, takes a walk down memory lane: "The surprising thing to me now, looking back, is how modest our goals were and how lofty they seemed at the time. Our goal was to be one of the top three Linux distributions after two years. I don't remember Ubuntu ever leaving the #1 spot for the duration that I worked on it. I don't think any of us really realized how popular Ubuntu was at first, since heads were back down working on fixing all the problems of 4.10 and getting 5.04 out of the door a ridiculously short six months later - the first hurdle being merging all of our changes with those made in Debian again."
To conclude the roundup of the Ubuntu news last week, here is the announcement about the project's next release, as published on Mark Shuttleworth's blog, written in typical mysterious, humorous and language-twisting fashion by the explorer of the cosmos: "This verbose tract is a venial vanity, a chance to vector verbal vibes, a map of verdant hills to be climbed in months ahead. Amongst those peaks I expect we’ll find new ways to bring secure, free and fabulous opportunities for both developers and users. This is a time when every electronic thing can be an Internet thing, and that’s a chance for us to bring our platform, with its security and its long term support, to a vast and important field. In a world where almost any device can be smart, and also subverted, our shared efforts to make trusted and trustworthy systems might find fertile ground. So our goal this next cycle is to show the way past a simple Internet of things, to a world of Internet things-you-can-trust. In my favourite places, the smartest thing around is a particular kind of monkey. Vexatious at times, volant and vogie at others, a vervet gets in anywhere and delights in teasing cats and dogs alike. As the upstart monkey in this business I can think of no better mascot. And so let’s launch our vicenary cycle, our verist varlet, the Vivid Vervet!"
* * * * *
It comes a decade too late, but it is finally here - the ridiculous "Microsoft tax" is finally gone - at least if you are lucky enough to live in Italy: "The Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) issued a judgment1 that bans the 'Microsoft tax', a commercial practice that discourages users from converting their PCs to GNU/Linux or other free operating systems by forcing them to pay for a Windows license with their PCs. PC producers in Italy now cannot refuse to refund the price of the license to purchasers that will not run Windows. The ruling definitively concludes the case filed in 2005 against a hardware producer by Marco Pieraccioli,2 with the support of the Consumer Association ADUC,3 and affirms Marco Pieraccioli's right to a refund for the price of the Microsoft Windows license." Of course, it's hardly surprising that it took more than a decade to grant a consumer the right to choose his/her operating system. Nevertheless, it's a victory, albeit a small one - maybe some Italian readers can tell us if anything has really changed in their local computer shops. Still, it's great to see that some countries do understand our frustrations. (Editor's comment: in all my years of travelling around the globe, I've only ever seen ONE instance where a computer shop offered the same hardware with different operating systems (Linux and Windows) side by side. It was in a small computer shop in Brunei. Given the hardware prices today, the Linux system was, surprise, surprise, substantially cheaper. Never mind the "freedom" part of the deal....)
* * * * *
Finally, we are sorry to share some sad news this week. The Debian project learned recently that contributor Peter Miller passed away earlier this year. Mr Miller had long been a contributor to open source, working on various free software projects for over twenty years. The Debian website reports: "Peter Miller died on July 27th after a long battle with leukemia.
Peter was a relative newcomer to the Debian project, but his contributions to Free and Open Source Software go back the late 1980s. Peter was significant contributor to GNU gettext as well as being the main upstream author and maintainer of other projects that ship as part of Debian, including, but not limited to srecord, aegis and cook. Peter was also the author of the paper "Recursive Make Considered Harmful". The Debian Project honours his good work and strong dedication to Debian and Free Software. Peter's contributions will not be forgotten, and the high standards of his work will continue to serve as an inspiration to others."
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Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Debian, systemd and forks
In the past we have touched on the systemd init technology. The systemd project is an attempt to revolutionize the way Linux starts up and manages services. In theory, systemd allows computers to get up and running faster and the technology offers some new methods for controlling system services. The project doesn't stop there though, systemd has also expanded to add binary logging, a userland text console and several other features. Some people see systemd as a unifying force that will reduce distribution fragmentation while decreasing boot times. Others see systemd as a project that is expanding unnecessarily outside of its scope while reducing flexibility and transparency.
Until the start of 2014 most of the Linux distributions that had adopted systemd as their default init technology had been relatively cutting edge projects. It was natural to see Fedora, always an early adopter of open source software, embrace systemd. Arch Linux, being a cutting edge distribution, also adopted systemd quickly. It was a little surprising to see Debian, a famously conservative distribution, vote to adopt systemd earlier this year. Fans of the Debian project usually prefer tried and true technologies to the latest and greatest. Fans of Debian are often also fans of choice. Debian claims to be the "universal operating system" and its many branches, architectures and ports speak to people who value flexibility. Last week we talked about a proposal to keep choice alive in the Debian project by enabling users to select their preferred init technology when setting up Debian. The proposal suggests systemd may remain the default init system, but administrators should be able to swap out systemd for another init technology.
But what happens if Debian not only adopts systemd, but also insists on making systemd a dependency, one which cannot be easily removed? Some people will adapt, learn the new init technology and continue on using Debian. Others have expressed an interest in migrating to more conservative projects. Another group has suggested Debian should be forked if systemd becomes a fixed part of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The Veteran Unix Admins (VUA) group has declared that they like Debian, want to continue using Debian and they hope systemd will remain a removable option. However, if systemd is here to stay, the VUA has declared their intention to fork Debian.
I had a chance to exchange e-mails with one of the VUA members and here is what they had to say about Debian, systemd and a potential fork of the project.
DW: Would this be a complete fork of the distribution with entirely separate repositories? Or would you mostly use Debian's existing repositories and just fork the low level components relating to start-up/init?
VUA: We are still evaluating the possibilities and analyzing dependencies of systemd and related components (d-bus for instance) to understand the span of this fork, which we still hope won't be necessary.
The majority of us involved in this early phase see it as a fork taking distance from Debian repositories, cutting down on packages maintained and eventually optimizing the governance model thanks to the fact we will start smaller.
DW: How many contributors does this potential fork have?
VUA: VUA is a group counting little less than 1,000 subscribers on private fora, obviously the debianfork.org initiative doesn't involve all of us. We are receiving an overwhelming quantity of e-mails with offers to help, about half of them are by people that seem to know well the issues at stake and to be well capable to give a hand.
DW: Popular projects like Debian need a lot of storage space, code repositories, mirrors, etc. How can people help with providing hardware/mirrors/donations? What resources do you have already?
VUA: Many of us are senior IT professionals and also considering our targets are sysadmins, infrastructure shouldn't be a problem. Of course we will not start big, but grow as needed. Having said that, this would be a challenging adventure for many reasons and we still hope it won't be necessary.
DW: Your website mentions the people involved in this potential fork do not have time to get involved with Debian's governance. What sort of governing body will the fork have?
VUA: It will be a governing body that puts the benefits of the users first, not the mystification of a "doacracy" delivering all the power to the package maintainers.
Originally, Debian was created as a universal operating system for the users. The Free Software movement itself is there to defend users' rights. Sgryphon explains it well in this thread.
We will likely reproduce the governing body of Debian to follow its original mandate, with the advantage of starting small and more focused, hopefully with less pressure from the interest of commercial developers.
DW: If Debian is forked, how long do you think it will take before we see a stable release of the fork?
VUA: Those that could be in need of a fork are in such a situation because they need well known and tested technology on production servers and cannot face such a big overhaul as a dist-upgrade to a systemd based Debian 8, also considering the quantity of customization on top of sysvinit that in many cases has to be dealt with. It is foreseeable that the majority of people in such a situation will likely rely on the long term support of Debian 7 even if a sysvinit updated fork is available.
The stable release of the fork should be in place at least as an installer alternative to Debian 8 and available in the same period: it should be an environment familiar to sysvinit Debian users who are doing a fresh install.
DW: Thank you and good luck.
* * * * *
When we talk about systemd one of the advantages often mentioned with regards to the new init technology is that it is fast. In the Debian debate two key points were raised in systemd's favour:
- systemd makes the boot process much simpler.
- systemd is incredibly fast. It was not designed with speed in mind, but doing things correctly avoids all the delays currently incurred by the boot process.
The Fedora project mentions boot times too as an advantage of systemd, stating: "Note that in the long run systemd will provide quicker boot up."
I've always found this argument interesting as I try out a different distribution every week and, to date, had not noticed a big gap in boot times between projects running SysV, Upstart and systemd init. After getting into yet another discussion about systemd recently I decided to experiment a little for myself to see what would happen if a person swapped out systemd for SysV init, leaving everything else the same. As our discussion this week concerns Debian, I decided to use Debian to test these two init systems.
First, I created an installation of Debian Jessie and booted it up a few times. My timer showed that, putting aside a brief pause at the boot menu, Debian running with systemd on my test system consistently took exactly 30 seconds to boot to the login screen. I then removed systemd and installed SysV init using the following commands:
apt-get remove --purge systemd libpam-systemd systemd-sysv apt-get install sysvinit sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
I then booted Debian again, without making any further configuration changes. When booting using SysV init my test machine consistently brought me to the login screen in exactly 30 seconds.
Fans of systemd will correctly point out my test isn't entirely fair. After all, I'm forcing systemd to use SysV init scripts rather than native systemd configuration files. I suspect systemd will be able to bring Debian up faster once Debian developers put new configuration files in place. However, the purpose of my test was not to find out which init technology is faster in theory or in the future. I am interested in the practical differences here, today. Strictly looking at start-up times and the practical aspects of managing services, SysV init and systemd are identical on my system running Debian.
Which I feel raises the question of how systemd performs on a distribution which ships with native systemd configuration files. Arch Linux adopted systemd quite early and, at this time, the start-up process has been switched over from SysV scripts to systemd configuration files. Arch is well known for having a clean and simple configuration where nothing unnecessary will get in the way. I happened to have a copy of an Arch ISO sitting around from my rolling release trial and so I wiped Debian Jessie and installed Arch. I set up Arch to have a fairly minimal feature set, with just a desktop environment and booted the distribution a few times. Arch, with systemd running a native systemd configuration, consistently booted in 40 seconds, 10 seconds slower than Debian running SysV init.
Obviously distributions are complex creations and your results may vary from one computer or distribution to another. However, based on my tests so far it appears as though systemd does not offer better performance than SysV init.
Have another test you would like me to run, comparing systemd and SysV init? Drop me an e-mail and put "systemd vs sysv trial" in the subject line.
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Rolling-release trial (by Jesse Smith) |
Rolling release testing - week 3
I am now in the third week of my trial with rolling release operating systems. The first two weeks were interesting and a few minor issues crept into my experiences. However, all three operating systems continue to function and my updating and testing processes have slipped into a rhythm.
Before getting into my experiences with running and updating my installation of rolling releases this week, I'd like to acknowledge the wonderful support and feedback I have received with regards to this trial. Several readers contacted me via e-mail or followed this experiment on Twitter and it's been great hearing suggestions and getting into discussions regarding this test. One aspect of this trial I especially wanted feedback on was the tests I should apply to each distribution after an update. Some people suggested testing wi-fi connectivity, 3-D video driver support and other hardware related activities. Unfortunately, to level the playing field and to save me from rebooting my test machine frequently, I installed these test distributions in virtual machines. This means testing hardware related features, such as 3-D video and wi-fi, aren't really practical. However, I did take the suggestion of testing multimedia support and added it to my list of tests. I also plan to list the version numbers of some key components, including the kernel, X, KDE, Firefox and LibreOffice.
Many people messaged me to suggest adding more distributions to the trial. Due to my limited time, this trial will remain fixed at five operating systems (Arch, Debian, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS and PC-BSD). That being said, many people suggested rolling releases or development branches of popular distributions and I think these would be interesting experiments. I am seriously considering running another rolling release trial next year. So, please keep your suggestions in mind and when I do another experiment like this I will run a poll ahead of time where people can vote for their favourite distributions.
Next, I appreciate people providing feedback on this experiment and other articles here, in the comments section. I like that it can get discussions going and spread available information. That being said, if you want to make sure I receive your suggestions, please also send me an e-mail at jessefrgsmith@yahoo.ca. I sometimes miss comments directed at me and don't always have time later in the week to check back. Thank you.
* * * * *
This week Debian, PC-BSD and PCLinuxOS all had entirely smooth upgrades, which is always nice to experience. All three of these operating systems also come with multimedia support enabled by default which meant I did not need to add any extra packages in order to test multimedia applications. Of these three projects, Debian shipped the most updates last week and I upgraded 164 packages, totalling 123 MB in size. The PCLinuxOS distribution provided me with 32 packages, which came to 60 MB in size. The PC-BSD package manager indicated no new software upgrades were made available this past week.
* * * * *
The openSUSE project provided me with plenty of new packages this past week. At first I tried to upgrade packages using the YaST graphical front end. Unfortunately when I asked to begin downloading the software upgrades, the YaST update module crashed. I next turned to the zypper command line package manager. Using zypper I was able to upgrade the waiting 83 packages which required 155 MB of my bandwidth.
Adding multimedia support to openSUSE Factory turned out to be a challenge. The openSUSE distribution does not ship with multimedia support by default and attempting to play an audio or video file brings up a window that offers to hunt down the codecs for us. However, multimedia codecs are not in the default repositories either and this automated search fails. When this happens openSUSE provides us with a link to documentation on enabling third-party support for codecs. Here I ran into another problem. The documentation claims that we can simply click a button and have this extra repository added to our system, the documentation specifically claims openSUSE Factory is supported. When I clicked the button to add the extra repository YaST reported the repository did not match the local distribution's version number and could not be used. I tried to manually add third-party community repositories through YaST, but none of the ones supported contained multimedia codecs. I determined that, short of bypassing YaST and configuring zypper's repositories via the command line I would have to consider multimedia not supported by openSUSE Factory.
Further on the topic of openSUSE, I mentioned during my initial week with the distribution that openSUSE does not support booting into Btrfs snapshots from the GRUB boot menu. One reader wrote to me to report they are also running openSUSE Factory and can, in fact, boot into old Btrfs snapshots, effectively rolling back their operating system in case it breaks. I double-checked and my installation does not include this feature. Perhaps this is because the snapper utility was not properly configured when I installed openSUSE. I checked the documentation for Btrfs snapshots and it says, at the time of writing: "The bootloader on openSUSE currently does not support booting from a Btrfs partition." So some people may have found a way to enable booting into Btrfs snapshots, but it seems the feature is not officially supported.
* * * * *
Arch Linux was the last distribution to get updated this week. I installed 55 new packages, totalling 140 MB, using the pacman package manager. These updates applied smoothly and there were no problems. I feel it is worth noting, for other users, Arch posted a notice letting people know the latest Java update requires manual attention. Something to keep in mind if you are running Arch.
When I checked multimedia support on Arch I found mp3 audio files played out of the box. Video files did not and so I added video codecs and a video player. During this time I found just how quickly Arch updates sometimes. The video player package could not be found at first and I determined that was because my local package database had fallen out of date just two days after my latest upgrade. Refreshing the package database allowed me to download a video player. Incidentally, I transferred media files to my test systems using the OpenSSH secure file transfer software. Arch Linux was the only operating system in my trial which did not ship with OpenSSH installed by default.
* * * * *
Below I have included the version numbers for some key packages on each operating system. I think it is worth noting PC-BSD uses the FreeBSD kernel, not the Linux kernel, which is why its version information is so different. I feel it is also worth mentioning different distributions report the versions of X differently. I suspect this is due to the way X is packaged, where components and general releases can be assigned different version numbers. For now I am including the version number of the X server (or the Xorg server "core" package, where applicable) rather than the release version of the Xorg meta package or other sub-components. (I am open to suggestions on how to maintain version number consistency with X across all distributions.) For that matter, each operating system uses different package names and different parts of X or KDE can ship with different version numbers.
This means there can be some variance between reported version numbers depending on which package we check. As an example, KDE's runtime package may report a different version than the KDE Dolphin package. The Xorg-server-core package may report a different version than Xorg-server. Each distribution bundles and names their software differently so it is difficult to make a true apples-to-apples comparison of version numbers. Finally, package versions can vary a little between what is reported by the package manager and by the application itself due to versioning conventions. In short, do not invest in version numbers, they may not reflect accurately on the status of the software and they do not give insight into what patches have been backported from upstream releases.
Package versions
Package |
Arch |
Debian Sid |
openSUSE |
PCLinuxOS |
PC-BSD |
Kernel |
3.16.4 |
3.16.2 |
3.16.3 |
3.15.9 |
10.0-RELEASE-p17 |
X Server |
1.16.1 |
1.16.1 |
1.16.1 |
1.14.6 |
1.12.4 |
KDE |
4.14.1 |
4.14.1 |
4.14.1 |
4.13.3 |
4.12.5 |
LibreOffice |
4.3.2.2 |
4.3.2.2 |
4.3.1.2 |
4.3.0.4 |
4.2.5.2 |
Firefox |
32.0.3 |
31.1.0 |
32.0.2 |
32.0.3 |
32.0.3 |
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Released Last Week |
Oracle Linux 6.6
Oracle has announced the release of Oracle Linux 6.6, an enterprise-class distribution based on the recently-released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6. "Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 6.6 for x86 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) architectures. Oracle Linux 6 Update 6 ships with three sets of kernel packages: Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 for x86; Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 for x86_64; Red Hat Compatible Kernel for x86 and x86_64. By default, both the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and the Red Hat Compatible Kernel are installed. UEK R3 includes the following major improvements over UEK R2: integrated DTrace support in the UEK R3 kernel and user-space tracing of DTrace-enabled applications; device mapper support for an external, read-only device as the origin for a thinly-provisioned volume...." Read the rest of the release announcement for a full list of improvements.
LXLE 14.04.1, 12.04.5
Ronnie Whisler has announced the releases of LXLE versions 14.04.1 and 12.04.5, two updated builds of the project's Lubuntu-based distribution made for older computers and featuring the LXDE desktop: "LXLE 14.04.1 and 12.04.5 released. The official release of the incremental update to LXLE 14.04 and 12.04 has undergone minor changes and a few bug fixes which are as follows: panel and menu layout adjustments were made to encourage checking for updates in addition to the automatically installed security updates; GNOME 2 Paradigm has been corrected, in the last release an oversight of the bottom panel was not transparent by default, now fixed; Bash has been updated with all the latest security adjustments available; desktop pager has been updated to allow movement of programs between active desktops and show icons of open windows; 32bit 'printscreen' keyboard omission/error has been corrected...." Read the release announcement for a complete list of changes.
Ubuntu 14.10
Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu 14.10, the latest version of the popular Linux distribution for desktops and servers: "Ubuntu 14.10, the latest desktop release is today available for download from Canonical. This release focuses on the developer experience, overall quality, and brings a number of important features and security enhancements. The Ubuntu desktop continues to be intuitive, easy to use and reliable for users all over the world. Ubuntu is a popular choice for developers targeting the cloud, mobile or devices because it is easy to use, fast and secure. Ubuntu 14.10 introduces the first iteration of the Ubuntu Developer Tools Centre, which makes it even easier to develop on Ubuntu. It downloads all the Android toolkits and their dependencies and integrates them with the launcher in a single command. This is first available for Android and will soon extend to other platforms such as Go and Dart." Read the official press release and the comprehensive release notes for more information.

Ubuntu 14.10 - the default Unity desktop (full image size: 1,017kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Xubuntu 14.10
Xubuntu 14.10 has been released. Xubuntu is a desktop Linux distribution focusing on usability and performance through its classic Xfce desktop. From the release announcement: "The Xubuntu team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 14.10. To celebrate the 14.10 code name 'Utopic Unicorn' and to demonstrate the easy customisability of Xubuntu, highlight colors have been turned pink for this release. You can easily revert this change by using the theme configuration application under the Settings Manager; simply turn Custom Highlight Colors 'Off' and click 'Apply'. Of course, if you wish, you can change the highlight color to something you like better than the default blue. Starting with Xubuntu 14.10, you should use pkexec instead of gksudo for running graphical applications with root access from the terminal for improved security." See also the release notes for a full changelog and a list of known issues.
Kubuntu 14.10
Kubuntu 14.10, the latest version of the Ubuntu variant made for fans of the KDE desktop, is out: "Kubuntu 14.10 is available for upgrade or install. It comes in two flavours, the stable Plasma 4 running the desktop we know from previous releases, and a tech preview of the next generation Plasma 5 for early adopters. Plasma 4 is our recommended stable offering and what you get from the default download, but is now in maintenance mode. It runs the software you are familiar with and will be getting updates and bugfixes but not new features from now on. Plasma 5, the next generation of KDE Software is still a work in progress. You can test it and install it from the Kubuntu Plasma 5 image but beware it will remove your stable software. We love testers but no support is offered. If there are problems you may need to reinstall to revert back to Plasma 4." Read the rest of the release announcement for a full list of features and screenshots.

Kubuntu 14.10 - running KDE Plasma 5 (full image size: 1,089kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Ubuntu GNOME 14.10
Ali Jawad has announced the release of Ubuntu GNOME 14.10, the latest version of the official Ubuntu flavour designed for users who prefer the standard GNOME 3 desktop: "The Ubuntu GNOME team is proud and happy to announce the release of Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn). Ubuntu GNOME is an official flavour of Ubuntu, featuring the GNOME desktop environment. Features: most of GNOME 3.12 is now included, the few missing bits of 3.12 are available in ppa; gnome-maps and gnome-weather are now installed by default, gnome-photos, gnome-music and polari are available to install from the Ubuntu archive; a set of 10 new high-quality wallpapers are included by default; GNOME Classic session is included - to try it, choose it from the Sessions option on the login screen; new themes (like numix) are available in the archive." See the release announcement and release notes for further information and known issues.
Lubuntu 14.10
Mario Behling has announced the release of Lubuntu 14.10, a new version of this lightweight variant of Ubuntu with a minimalist LXDE desktop and a selection of lightweight applications: "A new version of our operating system has been released. You won't notice many cosmetic changes, as this version is considered as a bug-fix release, preparing the way to meet LXQt. Here are some changes: general bug-fix release as we prepare for LXQt; many LXDE components have been updated with bug-fix releases; an update of the artwork (more icons, theme update, more compatibilities); the Ubuntu 14.10 release with 3.16-based kernel; Firefox is updated to version 33; GTK+ updated to version 3.12; X.Org 1.16 has better support for non-PCI devices." Here is the brief release announcement, with further details and important known issues provided in the release notes.
Ubuntu Kylin 14.10
Ubuntu Kylin is a special edition of Ubuntu tailored to Chinese speakers in mainland China. As has been the tradition over the past couple of years, a new version of Ubuntu Kylin has been released at the same time as Ubuntu 14.10: "We are glad to announce the final release of Ubuntu Kylin 14.10. In this release, we have improved system stability and have added more new features, which deliver a better user experience. The Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.16 based on the 3.16.3 upstream version. Unity is version 7.3.1. In this release Ubuntu Kylin Software Center has been upgraded to version 1.1.3. Also updated: Youker Assistant 1.3.1, Youker Weather 2.1.2, Youker Calendar 1.0.0, Youker Fcitx 1.0.0, Sogou IM 1.1.0, Kuaipan 2.0.0 and Wiznote 2.1.12. Meanwhile, we have done lots of optimization and enhancement for you, with new slideshow and new wallpapers from 14.10 the wallpaper contest." Here is the very brief release announcement, with further information delegated to the release notes.
ExTiX 14.2
Arne Exton has announced the release of ExTiX 14.2, a set of two Ubuntu-based distributions - one with GNOME 3.14 and the other featuring Razor-qt. Both are based on Ubuntu 14.10. From the project's SourceForge page: "All packages have been updated to their latest versions as of 2014-10-24. ExTiX 'GNOME' is now based on Ubuntu 14.10 'Utopic Unicorn. GNOME has been upgraded to version 3.14. (not in Ubuntu's repositories). Linux kernel has been replaced by kernel 3.16.0-21-exton (kernel.org's kernel 3.16.4). My new lighter version of ExTiX is now based on Ubuntu 14.10 'Utopic Unicorn'. It uses Razor-qt as desktop environment, Slim as login manager and kernel 3.16.0-21-exton. Razor-qt is an advanced, easy-to-use and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Log in as root (with password 'root') or extix (with no password)."

ExTiX 14.2 - running GNOME 3.14 on top of Ubuntu 14.10 (full image size: 1,241kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Lightweight Portable Security 1.5.5
Version 1.5.5 of Lightweight Portable Security (LPS), a privacy-oriented Linux live CD developed by Software Protection Initiative, has been released: "Version 1.5.5 of LPS is now available. Changes: updated Firefox to 24.8.1 ESR; updated Adobe Flash Player to 11.2.202.411; updated Firefox extension NoScript 2.6.9.1; updated Firefox extension HTTPS Everywhere 4.0.2; updated Java to 1.7u71; updated OpenSSH to 6.7p1; updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0o/0.9.8zc; updated NSPR to 4.10.7 and NSS to 3.17; updated PCSC-Lite to 1.8.12 with CCID 1.4.18; updated Thunderbird to 24.8.1 (Deluxe only); updated Bash to 4.2.48; added PuTTY under Connectivity; fixes to Broadcom wireless drivers; Linux Kernel version 3.10.58." Here is the complete changelog.
GParted Live 0.20.0-2
Curtis Gedak has announced the release of a new stable version of GParted Live, a Debian-based live CD containing a variety of disk partitioning and data rescue tools: "The GParted team is proud to announce a new stable release of GParted Live. This live image contains GParted 0.20.0 which improves resizing for multi-device Btrfs file systems. Also included is a patched version of Parted 3.2 that fixes a crash that would occur when resizing fat16 file systems. Items of note include: based on the Debian 'Sid' repository as of 2014-10-24; fixes bug 738258 - incorrect language title for locale pt_BR; fixes missing required syslinux-utils package; adds syslinux-efi package; improves descriptions and layout for exit dialog. This release has been successfully tested on VirtualBox, VMware, BIOS, UEFI and physical computers with AMD/ATI, NVIDIA and Intel graphics." The release announcement.
Quirky 6.2 "Unicorn"
Barry Kauler has announced the release of Quirky 6.2 "Unicorn" edition, a minimalist live CD compatible with Ubuntu 14.10: "This is the first of the 'Unicorn series' of Quirky 6.x. Quirky 6.0 was released in December 2013, followed by many improvements. Quirky 'Tahr' builds on the same ideas, except that it is constructed with binary DEB packages from the Ubuntu 'Trusty Tahr' repository. Quirky Tahr debuted at 6.0, though chronologically later than the above Quirky series. The latest Quirky Tahr is 6.0.5. After a hiatus of several months, I have created Quirky 'Unicorn', which is built from Ubuntu Utopic Unicorn (version 14.10) DEB packages. The 'Unicorn series' is debuting at version 6.2. There have been some bug fixes and improvements since Quirky Tahr 6.0.5, but most especially a heap of application, utility (and kernel) upgrades. Summarising: childproofing mechanism; new pop-up utility 'popup'; FreeOffice (free version of SoftMaker Office); Linux kernel 3.16.6 (user: p#up#py password: l#in#ux)." See the release announcement and release notes for more information.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
Summary of expected upcoming releases
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DistroWatch.com News |
Distributions added to waiting list
- Voyage Linux. Voyage Linux is Debian derived distribution that is designed to be run on x86 embedded platforms and low-end x86 perform computers.
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DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 3 November 2014. To contact the authors please send email to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
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Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Nouveau vs Nvidia (by Bob on 2014-10-27 18:05:53 GMT from Austria)
Once in a while I am having a brief encounter with Nouveau - at least before its compulsory replacemend with Nvidia. It is very difficult to imagine why anyone would prefer Nouveau to Nvidia. I might opt for OSS in some other cases, but Nouveau is trailing in performance by such a huge margin that it is completely unacceptable. Phoronix seems to prove me right: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_nouveau_utopic&num=3
2 • Thanks for the Research (by G Savage on 2014-10-27 18:09:42 GMT from Canada)
Thanks for checking into this whole systemd thing. It's all very curious to me. I install and use distros, not build them. There's an awful lot good ones. Mint and Macpup have been my workhorses. It troubles me to see infighting. It only benefits the big boys. (I'm still upset about Pear/Klementine.)
3 • GhostBSD (by :wq on 2014-10-27 18:40:45 GMT from United States)
"In the virtual environment GhostBSD would boot, but I found the operating system wouldn't take full advantage of my display's resolution, even with VirtualBox's guest add-ons in place."
It's a configuration issue with your xorg.conf. See: https://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox#Installing_Guest_Additions_for_FreeBSD_guests
"The package manager downloaded and installed these items for me without any problems, but when I rebooted the machine, I was dropped at a text console login screen. I was no longer able to launch the X display software and I could not get back to a graphical login screen. After trying to boot in safe graphics mode and trying to manually correct the problem with X I re-installed GhostBSD. The operating system worked well for me again until I performed another software update a few days later. Once again, installing updates disabled X, reducing GhostBSD to a command line only operating system."
Whatever the issue was, it might be resolved, as I was unable to reproduce it in VirtualBox via pkg upgrade.
4 • GhostBSD (by hotdiggettydog on 2014-10-27 18:54:04 GMT from Canada)
I could not get Ghost to boot on any machine of mine. Something about scsi. I soon lost interest. It did boot up on Virtualbox but Guest Additions was not available. I lost interest. I see the link posted earlier for installing guest additions. Might try again someday.
5 • GhostBSD (by AlanB on 2014-10-27 19:21:46 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have GhostBSD running on my spare pc ( AMD Athlon II, Nvidia graphics card ). It runs perfectly. I've also re installed 3 times in between installing other distros. Each time it installed without any problems. Indeed, I reckon it's one of the easiest and quickest installs of the many distros I've tried over the years. I must add that I let it use the whole of the hard drive for the install, and that it's the sole OS on the drive.
6 • PCLinuxOS kernel & GhostBSD (by M.Z. on 2014-10-27 19:42:17 GMT from United States)
I wanted to point out that I'm on kernel 3.16.6 on my copy of PCLOS, so the chart has another caveat. It is true though that upgrading the PCLOS kernel does require manually selecting a new kernel in Synaptic, so you can run an old kernel for as long as you want.
----
On the subject of GhostBSD, I had video card issues as well when I tried version 3.5 on a number of different systems. In fact the only thing I think GhostBSD 3.5 worked on was my laptop with Intel HD graphics, but of course then the Intel wireless didn't work. I've never had a desktop version of BSD just work with any computer of mine, but I may try again soon.
7 • openSUSE Factory multimedia (by AnklefaceWroughtlandmire on 2014-10-27 19:56:12 GMT from Ecuador)
The trick to get multimedia working for openSUSE Factory (soon to be called Tumbleweed) is here: https://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories#Packman
zypper ar -f -n packman http://packman.inode.at/suse/Factory/ packman
Or, if you prefer the YaST method, add a new repository by URL, the URL being "http://packman.inode.at/suse/Factory/" and you can name it whatever you want.
After creating the repository it's better to set it to a higher priority (unintuitively a lower number) and then use the YaST option to switch all installed packages to the versions in this repository. Then you can add any other additional multimedia packages that you can think of, Packman has EVERYTHING.
Hope this helps!
8 • Arch boot time and systemd in general (by Charles Burge on 2014-10-27 20:30:20 GMT from United States)
I'm really curious what kind of system is taking 40 seconds to boot Arch Linux. I have it installed on a 7-year-old PC (Lenovo ThinkCentre M55) and I just clocked the boot time at 17 seconds.
Having said that, I find it curious that fast boots are being touted as one of the most compelling features of systemd. The very nature of Linux is that well-suited to very long uptimes. For me, I like systemd for what Jesse calls the reduction in fragmentation. I've tried a lot of different distros, and to me it's frustrating that I always have to google the correct command for restarting sshd or apache or whatever, or turning off postfix (which always seems to be running by default even on so-called "minimal" installations that aren't called Arch). But with systemd, I always know what those commands are. I think it's great that there can be such variety in the way different distros look and feel, but when it comes to the under-the-hood nuts and bolts, I think the Linux world would really benefit from a little more homogeneity.
9 • GhostBSD 4.0 (64) (by Galasrinnion on 2014-10-27 21:06:51 GMT from United States)
Well....I must say that I found GhostBSD 4 (64-bit) stunning and stable !! That doesn't mean that GhostBSD doesn't need some touch-ups, like the package manager. From the posts I read on the forums, that is being addressed. Never the less with my NVIDIA graphics card, and for some reason BSD prefers these; there was no problem whatsoever. I haven't checked out you tube yet, but videos played just fine on NFL.com and MLB.com. Be sure you download the latest released ISO. Also watched some movies online. BRAVO again. With my desktop, because I use usb speakers, there was no sound at the get-go; so I needed to add: # sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=5 to /etc/sysctl.conf.; but after that, luscious sound on every boot-up. I too like Jessie, appreciate very much this effort and like the direction they are taking with BSD. I quickly made GhostBSD 4 a part of my system and found it to be more of a TREAT than a TRICK !! When they get the package manager issue resolved...LOOKOUT !!
10 • Re 8: systemd fast booting (by hobbitland on 2014-10-27 21:23:09 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi, I moved from Ubuntu 12.04 to Debian 7. One thing I miss is fast boot with upstart. But I am glad to rid myself of unity (even xubuntu has unity libraries).
I have tried Debian 8b2 and it does boot extremely fast. Fast boot & fast shutdown is important to me as we use mini PC connected to TVs. So they system is switched on and off a number of times everyday.
I enabled 1 second shutdown on my systems by forcing kernel to mount read only and power off on power button. System must shutdown in one second. I replace "/etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh" with
#!/bin/sh echo s > /proc/sysrq-trigger sleep 0.25 echo u > /proc/sysrq-trigger sleep 0.25 echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger
11 • GhostBSD package updates (by Galasrinnion on 2014-10-27 21:25:51 GMT from United States)
Check out the warning given here by the developers about package updates for 4.0. Warning:
Updating software using "pkg upgrade" will corrupt xorg and might corrupt GDM too. The solution is to use update the software that you want to update with "pkg install" , you can see the list of update by doing "pkg upgrade -n", "pkg install" automatically update software dependency. Be sure to not upgrade xorg-server, xorg-drivers, and any xf86 with "pkg" use "portupgrade"
12 • PCLinuxOS packages versions (by Ika on 2014-10-27 21:30:32 GMT from Spain)
Jesse,
Thanks for your nice work in all you're doing. I understand it's a massive work and time consuming... It would be nice if the tests would be made in a physical installation as this is what shows the real atributes of an operatind system...
With regard of PCLinuxOS' packages versions please note 1. As the poster #6 already pointed it out, the current kernel version is 3.16.6 (this has already 2 weeks). It is not automatically upgraded for obvious reasons, so it must be done manually. 2. LibreOffice is at version 4.3.2.2 (and shortly will go to 4.3.3) and it was already available when you started the test, so, please, run LibreOffice Manager to update it.
Peace and all the best. Ika.
13 • @1: Nouveau vs Nvidia (by Will B on 2014-10-27 21:34:56 GMT from United States)
I'm sorry you're having those kinds of issues. Sometimes it depends on the distro.
I'm running Slackware 14.1 and Nouveau on a semi-modern Nvidia GT 610 and it's very fast with good 3D performance when using SweetHome 3D. I haven't bothered to go with the proprietary Nvidia driver because Nouveau works great (and any glitches or latency would be immediately noticed...I'm very picky about that).
On Debian, I have tried Nouveau, but it's awful. Window borders and other visual elements are corrupted and the performance is slow on the same hardware.
I guess it just depends on how your distro patches and builds Xorg. :-\
14 • systemd boot times (by Paraquat on 2014-10-27 23:38:26 GMT from Taiwan)
A friend of mine who is a Gentoo developer took the time to compare systemd boot time with OpenRC (the default init system in Gentoo).
He actually found that OpenRC booted about one to two seconds faster. Boot times with OpenRC were between 9 and 10 seconds, systemd about 10 to 12.
It should be noted that OpenRC runs startup scripts in parallel, and should be noticeably faster than sysvinit, though my friend didn't test that.
Since Gentoo supports both OpenRC and systemd, my friend also did evaluate the latter. His big fear is security - systemd is simply too large and offers too great an attack surface for him to trust, especially on a server but certainly on a desktop too if you use it for online banking, credit card purchases, or even want to protect from snooping. The very feature that systemd developers brag about - the fact that it does so much more than simply provide init - greatly increases the potential to get compromised.
15 • boot time obsession (by cykodrone on 2014-10-28 00:06:11 GMT from Canada)
With my hardware ANY OS will boot in under a minute, that's not the issue (maybe for an obsessed few), the issue is stability, user control (user tweaking), security, developer openness, etc. I really don't care how long my OS takes to boot, but I do care what it does after it boots, that includes the possibility of secret or locked code. From what I've read in comments, systemd is supposed to handle networking, I'm not too comfortable with that.
16 • LibreOffice Manager? (by a on 2014-10-28 00:12:50 GMT from France)
@12, why does PCLinuxOS need a LibreOffice Manager? Why doesn’t LO get updated like all other packages?
Also not sure why the kernel isn’t updated as well. It’s certainly not obvious.
17 • @8 • Re: Arch boot time (by Rev_Don on 2014-10-28 00:36:53 GMT from United States)
"I'm really curious what kind of system is taking 40 seconds to boot Arch Linux. I have it installed on a 7-year-old PC (Lenovo ThinkCentre M55) and I just clocked the boot time at 17 seconds."
After much prodding, Jessie has been kind enough to list his system specs at the end of each review. While he doesn't state which computer he tried the test on, I would be willing to bet it is the one he uses for reviews so that info would be at the end of the GhostBSD review.
18 • Arch boot time (by linuxista on 2014-10-28 02:14:33 GMT from United States)
For what it's worth, I have Arch and Mint in partitions on the same SSD on a Lenovo x201.
Arch booting into Gnome3: 9.66 seconds Arch booting into i3: 6.04 seconds Mint booting into Cinnamon: 16.53 seconds
Mint is Upstart not Sysvinit, but that's all I've got right now.
19 • #16 (by Ika on 2014-10-28 03:08:36 GMT from Spain)
!why does PCLinuxOS need a LibreOffice Manager? Why doesn’t LO get updated like all other packages?"
Ask the devs why. :) The script just download and installs LO directly from libreoffice.org. Simple.
"Also not sure why the kernel isn’t updated as well. It’s certainly not obvious."
Let's say it will automatically upgrade. This means the old kernel will be removed, replaced by the new one. Now, what happens if that new kernel do not play well with your hardware and you're no more able to boot into your system? So, you can install the new kernel and, at the same time, keeping the old one too so you can boot the system with this if the newer gives you problems. I always have at least two or three kernels installed, just in case (besides the one(s) from the testing repos). Or, in a 322 bits environment, which kernel should be offered for upgrade: ,pae or non ,pae? Can a package manager guess your architecture? What if it'll ofer the "better" .pae and your processor is not .pae capable? Is it better an automatic kernel upgrade or a manually one? All this is about stability. Now, is it obvious? ;)
20 • a (by a on 2014-10-28 03:39:13 GMT from France)
@19
The way Arch "solves" the problem is by having two kernel packages: one normal, and one LTS. So if you have a problem with the normal one you can always boot on the LTS (well, assuming it’s working).
The way Ubuntu "solves" the problem is by never deleting any kernel.
It shouldn’t be that hard to add a post-install script that deletes old kernels, keeping a few ones known to work.
There is no need to decide which kernel to install (PAE or not…), just update the package that the user selected.
21 • Boot/shutdown times (by hsw on 2014-10-28 04:04:20 GMT from Taiwan)
I would see fast boot/shutdown times as becoming more important now that we hav hypervisor capability on many machines. I is not just the host boot to consider, but the VMs as well, I would sooner spin up VM to run browser instances than run them on the host.
22 • LXLE 12.04.5 installed (by Ben Myers on 2014-10-28 04:28:05 GMT from United States)
I installed LXLE 12.04.5 on an elderly 15" screen IBM Thinkpad R51 that I souped up (relatively speaking) with a 2GHz Pentium M and 2GB memory. Install went smoothly, and system runs responsively, way better than it did with a Windows XP boat anchor to slow it down. Because this distro plays nice with non-PAE CPUs (or a BIOS that masks out the PAE, because I installed a Dothan with PAE capabilities), it is certainly one to consider for older laptops. Despite the older Lubuntu LTS base, it does include the latest greatest versions of some major software like Libre Office, Firefox and GIMP. User gets choice of different desktop paradigms, looking variously sort of like XP, OS X, Netbook (holy tiles, Batman!) or Gnome desktops.
23 • The death of Peter Miller was in July! (by RJA on 2014-10-28 04:28:17 GMT from United States)
Just got in the news in October, like it was during the weekend!
24 • Systemd and Boot times - much do about nothing? (by Transform Humanity on 2014-10-28 07:45:38 GMT from India)
Most production machines probably don't care about boot times (If you are using Linux) probably because they don't get booted for years (months or may be the whole day depending on what you are doing). Most Linux systems don't crash every hour, nor do they present BSOD.
Someone tell me why there is so much fuss over boot times - honestly. Does it really matter if it boots in 20, 30 or even 40 seconds or more - except if you are a developer/ tester requiring to reboot every now and then. And then they could always virtualise to improve boot times.
25 • boot times (by hsw on 2014-10-28 08:41:02 GMT from Taiwan)
@24 I would like boot times to be very short say <2sec so that machines can be brought on-line quickly without having to wait tens of seconds. This would also apply to VMs since they boot just like a normal OS. VM may be slightly slower than the host since they have to access disk resources over an extra virtual driver. Given the current drive towards containers I might expect that we will see individual applications booted in their own VM (for security reasons), then it will be frustrating if every app needs an extra 40sec just to open. I am no longer sure that months/years of uptime is acheivable with the constant need to patch nowadays, we are just going to need more responsive to such things. Perhaps the host OS can be slower to be updated (unless its a bug in the hypervisor - then reboot the data centre). All a bit frustrating I think.
26 • Boot times (by Sam on 2014-10-28 12:38:03 GMT from Uganda)
I have manjaro and centos 6 on the same machine. My experience is that centos will give me the logging screen faster than manjaro. My manjaro is xfce and up to date. Systemd can talk about other things but not faster boot time.
27 • @25 (by Jason on 2014-10-28 12:54:21 GMT from United States)
you should only need to reboot when updated kernels are released, and that isn't too often.
28 • Boot times in Debian (by Barnabyh on 2014-10-28 15:01:20 GMT from United Kingdom)
I did exactly the same test as Jesse has done to replace systemd with the old sysvinit. On what started out as a Crunchbang install on an SSD sysvinit is very noticeably faster. Systemd init takes about 3 secs, sysvinit is just lightning fast in a little under a second.
Sadly there are other problems as now even networkmanager seems to depend on systemd so I have several packages marked as 'broken' on my system and it won't do an upgrade untyil rectified, that means until systemd is installed again. That, to me, is broken. Looking at how few alternatives are left I'll probably have to stay with Wheezy and backports until that is EOL and get back to using Slackware and Salix more. Sadly, 'cos Debian is very comfortable if you don't have much time.
29 • Funtoo (by a on 2014-10-28 16:14:10 GMT from France)
Well it’s decided, I’m gonna use Funtoo… my USE flags: "-systemd -pulseaudio -avahi". No problem so far :).
30 • Linux blocked by router (by Simon on 2014-10-28 16:36:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'm posting this issue problem here because I figure if anyone can help it is distrowatch readers/ commenter.
I access the Internet at a local "leisure centre" (Lochinver, Scotland) and everything has been fine up until some wifi 'hotshot' upgraded the service. I don't know what the idiot did (and neither does he, I think) but now only Windows and Mac OS's can access the Internet.
When a Linux system tries to connect, the Network manger claims to be connected but nothing can be accessed via a browser. I have a Debian-based system (Point), my girlfriend uses Linux Mint on her laptop, and all mobile phone users with Android are equally blocked.
Anybody got any ideas what could cause this, and could there be a workaround?
Thanks for reading :)
31 • Fast boot times and required hardware (by Ben Myers on 2014-10-28 19:10:29 GMT from United States)
If you want your system to boot fast, install the operating system on a solid state drive. I keep a version of Mint on an SSD for testing hardware, and it boots in about 20 seconds on most dual and quad core machines. The best and newest hybrid drives, a mix of spinning disks and flash memory, can come close. I suppose a 15000 RPM server drive might, too.
One more thing, if the OS had a modified hibernation file, and that file was written to contiguous hard drive sectors, booting from this file would be mighty fast. AFAIK, no operating system has done this yet. Or maybe some OS, and I just don't know about it.
32 • @30 Linux and wifi router (by Ben Myers on 2014-10-28 19:15:35 GMT from United States)
First, get the blaggard who messed up the router, flog him and tell him never to lay hands on the router again. There ought be a law against ignorant people mucking with technology they know nothing about.
I can only guess, but the wizard who messed up the router may well have set it up with a type of encryption that neither Linux nor the Droid know about. What about Apple iPads and iPhones?
Unfortunately, wifi standards provide too many options for setting up encryption and not enough advice for choosing a mode of encryption that works with everything.
33 • Missing a BSD (by Onederer on 2014-10-28 23:02:40 GMT from United States)
I wish that Desktop BSD was still around! I couldn't find any flaws in it. It was complete, and very well developed. I couldn't tell that I was running a BSD OS, with the GUI being in use. I had no problem with updates.
I was real sad when I found out that the OS was being discontinued and no one picked it up to continue updating it. Most of the work was already done, it would have been simpler to just make it keep up with the times. It sure would have beaten having to start writing a fresh new version form scratch.
The current GUI BSD's now all seem to be flawed. They have this or that missing or malfunctioning. They don't even come close to what I once enjoyed using.
34 • systemd fork (by takeitezsuitepc on 2014-10-28 23:33:15 GMT from Australia)
Been following the chatter on the interwebs, and it seems that the systemd fork devs are going to call their new project "Unevolve OS" :)
35 • Ubuntu (by Mac on 2014-10-29 00:42:02 GMT from Mexico)
¡Ten years! ¡Gracias Ubuntu!
36 • reboot and systemd (by hsw on 2014-10-29 04:19:36 GMT from Taiwan)
@27 true.
There are some critical programs: init, systemd, presumably any update to these will require an reboot since they are directly started by the kernel. Perhaps even /bin/sh would fall into this category as there might be a resident sh process started early in the boot that is exploitable.
Also have to remember to restart any affected daemons if either they, their plug-ins or dependencies were updated. If boot time is quick then reboot does flush out any old resident programs and ensures the machine can actually reboot.
If nothing else perhaps future LCD TVs will get faster boot times, then we'll look for the little "systemd inside" sticker :)
37 • @25 boot time (by greg on 2014-10-29 09:13:36 GMT from Slovenia)
boot of VM is not an issue as you can just save a snapshot. there is no need to reboot the os each time in VM. you just save the state of the virtual machine and then load the state. no reboot necesary,.since I have an old single core PC I use this function a lot. way faster than boot.
38 • Re: #1 Nouveau vs Nvidia (by Kazlu on 2014-10-29 09:23:44 GMT from France)
I am using nouveau on my 7 year old HP pavilion laptop and I am certainly not going back to Nvidia. Last time I tried both, it was when I ran a test drive of Mageia 4. When logged in the Xfce desktop, before opening any app, my RAM usage was at 750MB (!). I swapped the Nvidia driver for nouveau and memory usage dropped to 200-250MB. No performance drop observed, although I admit I did not play any game or used particularly graphics-hungry application. Actually the performance was a bit better but maybe the free RAM that could be used as cache for something else was the main reason for the performance boost.
"It is very difficult to imagine why anyone would prefer Nouveau to Nvidia." Besides what I said earlier that is only applicable to my specific case, don't forget that the Nvidia driver is not FLOSS and to some, THAT is not acceptable. Isn't user freedom worth a performance loss, if your system is still usable? Different people will have different answers.
39 • Systemd (by Darren Hale on 2014-10-29 09:25:01 GMT from New Zealand)
I have only opinion on this Systemad seems more appropriate. I will avoid it like a plague.
40 • Re 10: systemd fast booting (by Kazlu on 2014-10-29 12:14:02 GMT from France)
"Fast boot & fast shutdown is important to me as we use mini PC connected to TVs." How about using hibernation instead of shutdown/boot? On my computer, going to hibernation speed is about the same as shutdown, but wake up after hibernation is much faster than boot. Besides, if you have opened apps, like a video player in full screen on your TV, it gets restored, no need to relaunch it and wait a little extra time.
41 • Puppy et al (by G. Savage on 2014-10-29 12:34:46 GMT from Canada)
A shout out to Phil and the contributors to the latest Puppy. Puppy has fostered such an positive community with an incredible can-do attitude. I can't wait to try it out.
Just when I started to worry Linux might fade away with the decline in PC sales, I see a flurry of activity by so many who sacrifice so much time, and push through setbacks to release solid and polished distros. Thank you to them all.
PS I have great expectations for Ubuntu Touch for tablets.
42 • Linus not liking arrogant systemd developers (by cykodrone on 2014-10-29 22:41:01 GMT from Canada)
Linus telling one off... http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html
43 • @37 boot time (by hsw on 2014-10-30 04:27:37 GMT from Taiwan)
I seem to remember reading someing along those lines for embedded devices to achieve instant-on. I think is was something like bott the kernel and have it all initialised, then suspend, but save the suspended image to flash. Seems like that might be an option for "devices". Not sure if anything ever came from this technique.
44 • Boot times (by SImon on 2014-10-31 07:49:17 GMT from New Zealand)
Fastest boot I've ever seen was a trim Slackware box (using a handful of BSD-style init scripts): just under 8 seconds, and most of that was loading the kernel rather than running the boot scripts. Systemd is just Windows-like "let's make things more complicated" stupidity: it was more or less inevitable that they'd start jamming that kind of rubbish into the boot process now that there's so much rubbish to manage (useless services that are becoming necessary as more and more packages depend on them) all the time on a typical Linux desktop. It's a huge relief that people are forking Debian so that we can continue to use a reliable OS if we want to; but long term we might be better off jumping ship and switching to FreeBSD, where some of the developers still seem to be aiming for sanity rather than Windows-like bells and whistles.
45 • Veteran Unix Admins... (by debrouxl on 2014-10-31 14:45:48 GMT from France)
"cannot face such a big overhaul as a dist-upgrade to a systemd based Debian 8" is silly. That's not such a big overhaul, especially for so-called veteran admins...
Hopefully, DDs will be sane enough to punt the GR and let the Debian project (and its derivatives !) move full steam ahead, without counter-productive burden for maintainers (it will be shouldered by the VUA, should they keep proceeding in their will to fragment the Debian ecosystem), and marginalizing itself from the vast majority of other distros which only embrace systemd.
46 • Systemd (by Perico de los Palotes on 2014-11-01 18:53:10 GMT from Belgium)
Systemd is the way that governments and corporations have found to introduce backdoors and spyware in Linux (via severe code obfuscation). Well, this will hold true until the moment in which systemd will entirely replace the Linux kernel and distributions based on the Linux kernel will become a geeky thing with fewer users (provided the fact that the most popular ones will be systemd-based) and worse hardware support (provided the systemd will be a dependency for most drivers) than BSD.
47 • Dispel obfuscation (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2014-11-02 18:36:12 GMT from United States)
Shouldn't the 69-daemon complex of d's forming a system HAL API be named clearly, as distinct from some initialization daemon (Disk And Execution MONitor)? (After all, GNU's Not Unix, and "isn't the kernel", right?)
48 • @30 (by Jerry on 2014-11-02 19:50:09 GMT from United States)
Just wondering if the genius who updated the router closed the system to certain mac addresses or if even the encryption was changed from wep to wpa2 etc.
I would have been nice to have a notice with contact info in case of issues after any change in a closed system like that.
Number of Comments: 48
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