 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 631, 12 October 2015 |
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Welcome to this year's 41st issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Modern computers and operating systems are complicated, yet hundreds of millions of people use them every day. This means distributions need to not only provide useful features, but it is also important these features be made accessible. This week we begin with a review of Parsix GNU/Linux, a Debian-based distribution which attempts to make Debian easier to use on desktop computers. In our Questions and Answers column we discuss how to easily send commands to multiple computers, making administration easier for both businesses and individuals who run multiple systems at home. In our News section we discuss Manjaro Linux's quest for fresh artwork, Debian dropping efforts to comply with the Linux Standard Base, rumours that Ubuntu may soon support ZFS file systems and conflict over communication styles among the Linux kernel developers. Plus we share the torrents we are seeding and provide a list of releases from the past week. We wish you all a fantastic week and happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (31MB) and MP3 (26MB) formats
• Music credit: Clouds Fly With Me by Matti Paalanen
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0
The Parsix project released Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 in September. The distribution is based on Debian and, in the project's own words, their goal is "to provide a ready to use and easy to install desktop and laptop optimized operating system based on Debian's Testing branch and the latest stable release of GNOME desktop environment."
Version 8.0 of the Parsix distribution is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. The 64-bit build of the latest release supports booting on UEFI enabled computers and the distribution ships with version 3.16 of the GNOME desktop. One thing I found strange about the project's release notes is that the first paragraph states Parsix 8.0 is based on Debian's Testing branch. However, the second tells us "This version has been synchronized with Debian Jessie repositories as of September 12, 2015." Since Debian Jessie is the latest Stable release of Debian, not Debian's Testing branch, it raises some questions about where Parsix packages originate. I think Parsix 8.0 is based on Debian Testing, since several key packages (including the GNOME desktop and Linux kernel) have version numbers which are more recent than the same packages in Debian's Stable repositories.
The live disc image for Parsix 8.0 is 1.2GB in size. Booting from this media brings up a menu asking if we would like to explore Parsix's live disc in graphics mode or text mode. There is also a menu entry which will check the media's integrity. Taking the graphic mode option boots Parsix and presents us with the GNOME desktop. The wallpaper is a beautiful photograph of the sky during sunrise/sunset. There are icons on the desktop for launching the project's system installer and opening a file manager. A panel at the top of the screen shows us the application menu, the current date & time and the system tray. I found that when I clicked on the application menu button the desktop would crash. Usually the desktop would automatically restart, but sometimes GNOME would display an error message indicating it could not recover and send me to a graphical login screen. I could sign back into the desktop from the login page using the password "parsix". Once I had signed back into the desktop, I found that sometimes I could access the application menu and other times the desktop would crash again. While I was still exploring the live desktop environment a notification appeared letting me know software updates were available in the project's repositories. I decided to ignore these updates until after I had installed the distribution.
Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 -- The settings panel
(full image size: 897kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Parsix offers users a graphical system installer. When the installer is first launched we are instructed to make sure an empty partition is available for the operating system. The installer then offers to launch a partition manager for us. The partition manager the installer opens is GParted, a program which provides a nice graphical interface for working with our storage disks and partitions. Once we have divided up our disk the way we want, we can close GParted and the Parsix installer moves on to the next step. We are asked if we are performing a fresh installation or upgrading an existing copy of Parsix. The installer next asks which partition we would like to use to house the operating system. Once we have selected a partition we are asked which file system we would like to use on our root partition. The presented options are ext3, ext4, JFS and Reiser. I found these file system choices to be unusual as they include perhaps the two most widely used and two least common file systems with nothing in between. The following steps get us to create a user account for ourselves and protect the root account with a password. Parsix then shows us a list of actions it will take and it asks for our permission to begin the installation. Once the installer has copied its files to our hard drive, its window closes and we are returned to the GNOME desktop.
I tried running Parsix on a physical desktop computer and in a virtual machine powered by VirtualBox. Parsix refused to boot on the physical computer, something which surprised me as this same computer was also running Debian at the same time as I was writing this review. I'm always a little disappointed when a child distribution doesn't run on the same equipment as its parent. I also noted Parsix, despite the release notes mentioning UEFI support, was not compatible with my system when running in UEFI mode (as opposed to BIOS compatibility mode). The distribution fared better in the VirtualBox environment. The distribution booted and its various components worked in VirtualBox, though I experienced some odd behaviour I'll talk about later. Parsix did not integrate into my virtual environment and I ended up installing VirtualBox's guest modules so I could run Parsix using my screen's full display resolution. The GNOME desktop tended to be slow to respond in the virtual environment and applications were usually sluggish to respond to input. When logged into the GNOME Classic desktop, Parsix used approximately 430MB of memory.
Booting our new copy of Parsix brings us to a graphical login screen. From here we can sign into one of four sessions, including GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, GNOME on Wayland and TWM. The TWM option launches a very minimal window manager which most people probably will not use, but it might be useful for performing system recovery if our main desktop stops working. Selecting the GNOME on Wayland option would cause the screen to go blank for a few seconds and then I would be returned to the login page. I tried the GNOME Shell session a few times, but I found every time I tried to access GNOME's Activities menu to launch an application the desktop would crash. Sometimes GNOME Shell would simply restart itself, but other times I would be evicted to the login page and I soon gave up on using GNOME Shell. This meant, for the bulk of my trial, I was using the GNOME Classic desktop environment.
The GNOME Classic desktop displays its Applications and Places menus at the top of the screen on the left side. Over in the upper-right corner we find the system tray. At the bottom of the display we find the task switching panel. The first time I logged into GNOME Classic, and a few times later during the course of my trail with Parsix, I saw a pop-up window after the login screen, but before the desktop appeared. This window would request my password in order to "set the network proxy" so the system could begin performing downloads. I have never observed any other Linux distribution display a password prompt after login, but before the desktop environment appears. Frankly, the pop-up window looks like common Windows malware and since no proxy was in use, the window should not have appeared at all. Another aspect of the GNOME Classic desktop I found annoying was that clicking the "Activities Overview" button (accidentally or otherwise) in the Applications menu would consistently cause the desktop environment to crash, sending me back to the login screen.
From time to time while I was running Parsix a notification would appear on the desktop letting me know there were package updates available in the distribution's repositories. I tried a few approaches to updating the software on my system. The first thing I tried was running the Package Updater program from the application menu. Unfortunately, Package Updater failed to launch and there was no error or indication of why the program was not working. Next, I tried another menu entry called Packages. This program also failed to load. Next on my list was the Software application, but while this program launches and it has a tab for dealing with software updates, there were no new packages listed in the updates tab. According to the Software program, my system was up to date. (I'll come back to talk more about Software later.) Finally, I opened a virtual terminal and used the apt-get command line program to update the system. Early in the week there were 35 new packages waiting in Parsix's repositories, totalling 43MB in size. These updates were all applied to the system without any problems. Parsix, I noted, maintains its own package repositories.
Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 -- Checking for software updates
(full image size: 389kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
On the second day of my trial I logged into my Parsix account and was greeted with another notification that said there were more software updates available. I refreshed my local package database and again ran apt-get to acquire the updates, only to learn there were no new software updates available.
Earlier I mentioned Parsix includes a software manager, appropriately named Software. The Software application deals with desktop applications (almost) exclusively and divides packages into categories such as Internet and Office. Clicking on these categories causes a list of of desktop programs in the given category to be displayed on the right side of the window while additional categories appear on the left. Each program is listed with its name, a short description and an icon. Clicking on a specific program brings up a page with a screen shot and some technical details on the software, such as the package's size. The user is presented with an Install or Remove button at the top of the page. I found I could install new packages easily enough, but I was unable to use Software to remove packages. Clicking the Remove button would bring up a window asking for confirmation the selected application should be removed from the operating system. Clicking the confirmation button simply returned me to the program's information page and no action was taken. I further found it strange that Software shows us such a small selection of programs. Each category typically only featured two or three items, which meant I usually had to use apt-get to install software, even common desktop applications. Earlier I mentioned Software deals with desktop software almost exclusively. The exception I found to this rule was a command line program for browsing the web via a text-only interface.
Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 -- The Software package manager
(full image size: 429kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
The distribution ships with a number of useful programs, including the Iceweasel web browser (with Adobe's Flash plugin), the Filezilla file transfer application, the Empathy messaging application and the Polari IRC client. Parsix also ships with the Transmission bittorrent software, LibreOffice, a dictionary and the Evolution e-mail application. Network Manager is available to help us get on-line. Parsix includes the GNU Image Manipulation Program and Inkscape in the default installation. We are also treated to a couple of small games. The Brasero disc burning software, the Cheese webcam application and the VLC multimedia player are included too. Parsix ships with multimedia codecs, enabling us to play most media files. The distribution provides us with the Midnight Commander file manager, a services manager and an application for managing user accounts. I also found a document viewer, an archive manager, system monitor and text editor on the system. Parsix ships with Java and the GNU Compiler Collection. The distribution ships with systemd and version 4.1.6 of the Linux kernel.
Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 -- The Iceweasel web browser
(full image size: 524kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Parsix presented me with a number of quirks during my time with the distribution. For example, about once in every three times I attempted to either shut down or reboot the operating system, Parsix would prompt me for my password. Of the other two-thirds of the time, when I was not prompted for my password, about half of those times Parsix would shut down properly. The remaining times, the system would simply ignore my shut down request and return me to the desktop.
Another quirk of the operating system presented itself when I opened the services manager. This application is available to help us enable or disable background services. Whenever I opened the services manager, no services were listed. The window was always blank, rendering it useless.
Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 -- Services manager
(full image size: 1.0MB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of running Parsix was the way the distribution handled my name. During the installation process, the system installer asks us for our name and, from the name provided, suggests a user name for our account. I zipped through the first time, using "Jesse" as my proper name. Once the system had been installed and I started using the command line I noticed that while my name appeared as "Jesse" on the login screen, my account's user name was "jjesse". I assumed this was a typo on my part. Later in the week, when I re-installed the operating system, I went through the system installer more slowly. I made sure my proper name was entered as "Jesse" and found that the installer then suggested that my user name be "jjesse". I'm not sure why this happens, but it was a little frustrating as it meant the first time I installed Parsix doing anything involving my user name required that I intentionally misspell my own name. The second time through I corrected the suggested user name in the installer and avoided the issue.
Conclusions
Running Parsix 8.0 was a disappointing experience for me. It seemed as though every aspect of the distribution had serious bugs of one kind or another. From the system installer mangling my user name, to the Software package manager not handling updates and only providing access to a small group of applications, to the distribution refusing to run on my desktop computer. I experienced regular crashes from the GNOME desktop environment and Parsix did not work with my computer's implementation of UEFI. The GNOME Shell desktop crashed frequently enough to be impractical to use and the GNOME Classic desktop was slow to respond in my virtual environment, even with video acceleration enabled.
Perhaps the only nice feature Parsix presented was the default selection of software. The distribution ships with several useful desktop applications and multimedia support. It is unfortunate that these programs are mixed in with programs which simply refused to work, such as the Package Updater and the Services manager which, strangely, does not list any available services.
Quite often when I have poor experiences with a distribution readers will e-mail to ask if I checked to make sure the installation media wasn't corrupted while others might suggest my hardware was not working properly. I would like to head off those questions up front. I checked and then double-checked that the Parsix media not only passed its own integrity test, but the installation media also matched the project's published checksums. I perform the installation three times during the week to try to rule out problems during the install process. While I was trying to test Parsix 8.0 on this machine, and in a VirtualBox environment, I also ran Debian (Parsix's parent) on the same machine and in a virtual machine powered by VirtualBox. Debian displayed none of the issues I experienced with Parsix. Debian, in fact, worked smoothly and quickly on the same hardware Parsix was unable to boot on, which I found curious.
I ended up cutting my trial with Parsix short after five days. The system was too slow and too unstable to be practical for work and clicking on the wrong menu item would sometimes log me out, losing whatever I had been working on at the time. A few years ago I felt as though Parsix was one of the better Debian-based desktop projects available, but I'm sorry to say Parsix 8.0 caused me one headache after another.
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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 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Manjaro Linux seeks new artwork, Debian drops LSB support, Ubuntu considers ZFS support and two Linux kernel developers resign
The Manjaro Linux team has announced they will soon be changing the distribution's artwork and have invited members of the community to submit new designs. "Manjaro will get some great innovations soon and maybe also a new logo. We are asking our great community to help us choose a new design. If you are a designer or you have some graphical skills, please feel free to propose a logo draft. Help us and send us great logos, ideas and choose your favourite designs. Although the inspiration for the name originates from Mount Kilimanjaro. Maybe we can include a mountain into the new logo as we already tried in our drafts." Sample artwork is available in the project's blog post.
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The Linux Standard Base (LSB) is a set of guidelines which distributions can follow in order to give software developers a common platform to target that will be the same across multiple distributions. Over the years, most distributions (and application developers) have generally ignored the LSB and the Debian project appears to be dropping support for the standard. Didier Raboud suggested scaling back Debian's LSB compliance, noting that the standard is seldom used: "The crux of the issue is, I think, whether this whole game is worth the work: I am yet to hear about software distribution happening through LSB packages. There are only eight applications by six companies on the LSB certified applications list, of which only one is against LSB >= 4. Amongst the distributions, RHEL 7.0 is LSB 4.1, and Oracle 6, RHEL 6.0 and Ubuntu 9.04 are LSB 4." The Debian developers are planning to make small adjustments to insure software continues to work on their distribution while dropping time consuming efforts to comply with the specific guidelines in the LSB.
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Last week rumours swirled around the idea that the Ubuntu distribution may soon include out-of-the-box support for the advanced ZFS file system. ZFS includes many attractive features, including file system snapshots, on-line resizing of storage volumes and easy manipulation of multiple drives. The rumours all appear to be derived from a series of mailing list posts, one of which is from an Ubuntu user asking about adding ZFS support to Ubuntu Core and a response from Ubuntu's founder, Mark Shuttleworth, saying, "If it's ZFS you're after, it will be included in Ubuntu as standard in due course." Though not exactly official, this does follow Debian's investigation into the legal status of ZFS and confirmation that Debian, Ubuntu's parent distribution, could legally ship ZFS support enabled by default.
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Some less happy news came to light last week when Sarah Sharp, the developer who introduced USB 3.0 support into Linux, announced her resignation from kernel development citing "This came about after a very long period of thought, and a lot of succession planning. I didn't take the decision to step down lightly. I felt guilty, for a long time, for stepping down. However, I finally realized that I could no longer contribute to a community where I was technically respected, but I could not ask for personal respect. I could not work with people who helpfully encouraged newcomers to send patches, and then argued that maintainers should be allowed to spew whatever vile words they needed to in order to maintain radical emotional honesty." Later in the week, Matthew Garrett also posted that he would avoid communicating on the Linux kernel mailing list: "In the end it's a mixture of just being tired of dealing with the crap associated with Linux development and realizing that by continuing to put up with it I'm tacitly encouraging its continuation, but I can't be bothered any more." These resignations from Linux development follow a similar exit from Con Kolivas a few years ago who was lead developer on a process scheduler which optimized desktop performance. These exits have raised questions regarding the management style of the lead kernel developers and Linux's vaguely defined code of conduct.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
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Sending commands to multiple servers
Managing-many-servers asks: I have started maintaining multiple servers and it's tedious to connect and type commands into each one, one after another. What tools can help with this situation?
DistroWatch answers: There are a number of tools that can help you work with multiple servers (I'm going to assume Linux and/or BSD servers in this case). The specific tool you will want to use may depend on exactly what you are trying to accomplish and just how many servers you are looking after.
For instance, if you want to run a single command that will be performed on a relatively small number of servers and you want to collect the output from the command, then you might want to use Distributed Shell (dsh). The dsh command will connect to a group of servers over secure shell, typically one at a time, perform a single command and then display the output on your local terminal.
Using dsh is fairly straight forward and the software is available in most distribution repositories. Essentially we create a file, ~/.dsh/machines.list, with a list of hosts we want to connect to. Place the names of the servers in the file, one server per line. Then we can run a command on all the servers in the machines.list file and see the resulting output by running "dsh -a" followed by a command. This example connects to each computer in our machines.list file and displays the uptime for each server:
dsh -a uptime
A similar, but more powerful tool, is ClusterSSH (cssh). The cssh command uses a similar setup to dsh. We begin by creating a text file in the location ~/.clusterssh/clusters. This file contains groups of servers we may wish to connect to. For example, let's say I have two groups of servers I manage. One group at home and another at an office. I might have a clusters file which looks like this:
home 192.168.2.10 192.168.2.11 mynas
office web.mywork.com mail.mywork.com storage.mywork.com
With the above file in place, I can connect to either group of computers by running a command such as:
cssh office
The above command will open three terminals on my desktop. These terminals will show my secure shell connections to the web, mail and storage servers in my group of "office" computers. I can then type commands in the cssh window and the keystrokes will be echoed on each of the remote computers. ClusterSSH is especially useful in situations where I want to perform some simple maintenance on a group of computers and make sure everything is proceeding as planned.
While Distributed Shell is good for performing status checks, such as running "uptime" or "df -h" to check on system resources, ClusterSSH is better for making changes to the system, such as performing software upgrades on every server at once or changing the same configuration file on twenty different computers at the same time.
However, often times what we really need is not a way to send the same commands to multiple servers, but a way to make sure each server has the same up to date configuration. Ideally, once a server has been set up, we should not need to connect and run commands on it all that often. Instead, we usually want to automate daily tasks with cron jobs and have a way to automatically push new configurations to each server. One simple and free tool to do this is git. While git is usually used as a way to manage source code, it does a pretty good job of handling any text files, including configuration files. Setting up a git repository and having each server pull configuration changes from the repository will likely save a lot of time in the long run. More information on using git can be found in the project's documentation.
Finally, though this is not a tool I have used personally, I have heard several people recommend Puppet for managing large scale deployments. Puppet is quite a bit more involved than the other utilities I have mentioned and probably only makes sense when dealing with dozens or hundreds or servers. However, Puppet Labs offers a good deal of documentation and virtual machines to use as learning tools. For people dealing with a large amount of infrastructure, this is probably a good tool to have in the toolbox.
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Last week we mentioned a command line trick for finding unaccessed files buried in the hidden directories of a user's home. One of our readers asked:
In your last DistroWatch article this command was used: "for i in .[^.]?*; do find "$i" -depth -atime +365 -type f -print; done"
I'm not very good with regular expressions. Can you put a few words
around why the [^.]? exists in your regular expression? I don't understand what they filter or include.
The .[^.]?* expression basically looks for any directories where...
- The directory begins with a dot. We want to work with hidden directories only.
- The second character is not a dot. The [^.] combination is a fancy way of filtering out the "." character. This avoids including the ".." directory.
- The question mark means we want to only find directories which start with a dot and then include at least one more character. This means the current directory "." is not included in the searches, it's too short. And ".." is not included because the second character is a dot. But ".a" would be valid since it starts with a dot and then has a non-dot character.
- The trailing "*" matches anything beyond what we have already specified. So not only would ".a" be okay, but ".a122334abc" would also match.
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Past Questions and Answers columns can be found in our Q&A Archive.
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
Bittorrent is a great way to transfer large files, particularly open source operating system images, from one place to another. Most bittorrent clients recover from dropped connections automatically, check the integrity of files and can re-download corrupted bits of data without starting a download over from scratch. These characteristics make bittorrent well suited for distributing open source operating systems, particularly to regions where Internet connections are slow or unstable.
Many Linux and BSD projects offer bittorrent as a download option, partly for the reasons listed above and partly because bittorrent's peer-to-peer nature takes some of the strain off the project's servers. However, some projects do not offer bittorrent as a download option. There can be several reasons for excluding bittorrent as an option. Some projects do not have enough time or volunteers, some may be restricted by their web host provider's terms of service. Whatever the reason, the lack of a bittorrent option puts more strain on a distribution's bandwidth and may prevent some people from downloading their preferred open source operating system.
With this in mind, DistroWatch plans to give back to the open source community by hosting and seeding bittorrent files. For now, we are hosting a small number of distribution torrents, listed below. The list of torrents offered will be updated each week and we invite readers to e-mail us with suggestions as to which distributions we should be hosting. When you message us, please place the word "Torrent" in the subject line, make sure to include a link to the ISO file you want us to seed. To help us maintain and grow this free service, please consider making a donation.
The table below provides a list of torrents we currently host. If you do not currently have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found here. All torrents we make available here are also listed on the very useful Linux Tracker website. Thanks to Linux Tracker we are able to share the following torrent statistics.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 119
- Total data uploaded: 16.0TB
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| Released Last Week |
Proxmox 4.0
Proxmox, a company which builds commercial computing solutions based on Debian GNU/Linux, has released Proxmox Virtual Environment 4.0. The new release includes support for Linux Containers (LXC), Bash shell completion and IPv6 support. "We are proud to announce the final release of our Proxmox VE 4.0 - based on the great Debian Jessie. Watch our short introduction video, What's new in Proxmox VE 4.0? Linux Containers (LXC): The new container solution for Proxmox VE is fully integrated into our frameworks, e.g. this includes our advanced storage plugins like ZFS, Ceph or even DRBD9, full IPv6 support and much more. LXC works with all modern and latest Linux kernels. Bash completion: All our CLI tools support now advanced bash completion, Linux experts will just love it! New Proxmox VE HA Manager for High Availability Clusters: The new HA manager dramatically simplifies HA setups - it works with only a few clicks on the GUI, test it! And it eliminates the need of external fencing devices, watchdog fencing is automatically configured." People who are already running Debian Jessie can install Proxmox Virtual Environment 4.0 on top of their existing installation. Further information can be found in the distribution's release announcement.
Quirky 7.2
Barry Kauler has announced a new release of the Quirky distribution, a sister project to the popular Puppy Linux distribution. This release includes mostly package updates, including a move to version 4.1.7 of the Linux kernel. This release also reorganizes the files of the Xorg graphical software to better match the organization of other distributions. "The latest incarnation is version 7.2. A brief statement about this release: Since the previous release of Quirky, there have been steady improvements, nothing really dramatic, but lots of things here and there. As well, various packages have been updated or improved. Significant updates include SeaMonkey and Samba, and a new application, Dia. One new minor application is PupWhoIs, a front-end for the 'whois' utility. A major structural change is the doing-away with /usr/X11R7, the path where T2 compiled Xorg into -- now, Xorg is in /usr, in line with all other distros. The kernel has been upgraded to version 4.1.7." Further information can be found in the project's release announcement and in the release notes.
Quirky 7.2 -- The welcome screen
(full image size: 88kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
NetBSD 7.0
The NetBSD Project has announced the release of NetBSD 7.0. NetBSD is a highly portable operating system which runs on most CPU architectures. The latest release features several improvements, including better graphics performance, multiprocessor ARM support and NetBSD has been tested on Raspberry Pi 2 and BeagleBoard mini computers. This release also includes the blacklist daemon (blacklistd), a service which protects network services from brute force attacks. "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.0, the fifteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system. This release brings stability improvements, hundreds of bug fixes, and many new features. Some highlights of the NetBSD 7.0 release are: DRM/KMS support brings accelerated graphics to x86 systems using modern Intel and Radeon devices. Multiprocessor ARM support. Support for many new ARM boards: Raspberry Pi 2, ODROID-C1, BeagleBoard, BeagleBone, BeagleBone Black, MiraBox, Allwinner A20, A31: Cubieboard2, Cubietruck, Banana Pi, etc. Freescale i.MX50, i.MX51: Kobo Touch, Netwalker, Xilinx Zynq: Parallella, ZedBoard..." A full list of changes and improvements can be found in the project's release notes.
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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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| Opinion Poll |
Favourite productivity suite
Many of us use productivity suites, either at work or at home. Some of us like to get lots of features, others like to keep things simple and light and some like to be able to customize their productivity software. This week we would like to know: what is your preferred open source productivity software?
You can see the results of last week's poll on acquiring installation media here. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Favourite productivity suite
| Calligra: | 75 (3%) |
| GOffice: | 39 (2%) |
| LibreOffice: | 1900 (77%) |
| OpenOffice: | 101 (4%) |
| The default on my distro: | 99 (4%) |
| Other: | 146 (6%) |
| None: | 104 (4%) |
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| DistroWatch.com News |
Glossary of open source terms added
In the open source community we tend to throw around a lot of technical terms. We talk about software licenses, computer hardware, different package formats and kernels. Newcomers to the community can be understandably overwhelmed with the jargon and we frequently encounter people who want clarification on what certain terms mean.
In an attempt to make things easier on people who are new to our community we have created a glossary of technical terms people tend to use in the open source community, especially in relation to Linux and BSD. This glossary can be accessed through the Glossary link at the top of this website.
The glossary is still a work in progress, so please feel free to send us suggestions for new technical terms which can be added to the list.
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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, 19 October 2015. 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)
- Michael DeGuzis of Libre Geek (podcast)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • productivity suite (by Frank on 2015-10-12 00:27:15 GMT from North America)
Great review as always Thank you!!
For me WPS office works way better than libreOffice or any other!
2 • Noisy resignations; possible survey questions (by Kragle von Schnitzelbank on 2015-10-12 00:40:35 GMT from North America)
Ah, memories of a petulant kid stomping home, taking owned play goods, bellering complaints for any audience in earshot; usually another wannabe person-of-influence (bully?) who didn't achieve the desired level of dominance.
Perhaps an entertaining survey question would be just what to do with an ISO after acquisition?
3 • @1 suite (by erinis on 2015-10-12 00:40:57 GMT from North America)
So it's Kingsoft without the logo and branding ? No thanks. Enough said . Thanks
4 • Con Kolivas and the Kernel (by Mario on 2015-10-12 00:46:26 GMT from North America)
Con Kolivas may not be directly involved with the Linux Kernel, but he's still updating his patch set. Both his patch set and bfs are available against both Linux 4.0 and 4.1.
5 • Abiword, productivity suite ... (by Greg Zeng on 2015-10-12 01:41:46 GMT from North America)
On the fastest & "lightweight" distros, Abiword is the chosen "productivity suite". Surprised that this was omitted.
If others are offered, I remove them, to replace with Abiword. In standard work environments, the bulkier, more powerful brandnames are required. But normal home or amateur use, or for those who value storage space for apps, then Abiword in enough.
6 • Glossary (by albinard on 2015-10-12 01:46:51 GMT from North America)
Do you want to include exclusively open-source terms, or would things like terminal and console (and the similarity/difference between them) be described? It's just that someone new to Linux could easily also be new to the little black screen where the good stuff gets done.
7 • Dignity and Respect? (by Ben Myers on 2015-10-12 02:24:10 GMT from North America)
Maybe some of the Linux kernel developers need to pick up a dictionary and read the definitions of the words "dignity" and "respect", treating others accordingly? Or simply adhere to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?
8 • Parsix 8.0 (by Alan Baghumian on 2015-10-12 02:25:47 GMT from North America)
Hi Jessie,
First of all, thank you very much for taking time and reviewing Parsix. Little clarification here, Parsix has been based on Debian Stable for a few years now. Apologies about the error on the release notes, that has been fixed.
I'm sorry to hear that you had issues with it. Just wanted to mention a few things:
1) As it is stated in release notes, if you are having crash issues in virtual environment such as KVM or VirtualBox, you need to turn of "User Themes" extension in Gnome-Shell. That should make the shell stable.
2) We do not officially support GNOME fallback or flashback mode and this mode has not been tested. Flashback mode is an outdated technology and it is normal to see things like "Services" screen does not work. "Services" is designed to work with sysvinit and not systemd that Parsix is using. Same applies to shut down and other operations. I'm not sure how the old flashback mode interacts with systemd.
3) We have several UEFI test systems including a UEFI KVM based VM and have not experienced any issues with those. I would greatly appreciate if you could let us know what exactly happens during the boot process.
4) Gnome Software which is a new universal package manager, does not show all available applications. There is an alternative tool called gnome-packagekit which provides access to full package listings. There was this exact discussion in pkg-gnome-maintainers Debian mailing list.
Sorry for the issues again, hope you have a better experience with Parsix next time.
Cheers,
Alan
9 • Parsix 8.0 (by Alan Baghumian on 2015-10-12 02:28:14 GMT from North America)
One more thing, the installer expects you to type in your full name and suggests a user name consisting of your first initial and last name. Typing first name only, will cause it to make that jjessie suggestion. :-)
10 • removed on 2015-10-12 02:52:35 GMT from Asia)
(deleted)
11 • @10 - Re: Lightweight (by Will B on 2015-10-12 05:13:48 GMT from North America)
@10...classy :-\
I really enjoy some lightweight distros. Just because a lot of folks have monster processors and tons of hard-disk space these days doesn't mean lightweight distros are unneeded.
KDE, Gnome and Cinnamon certainly have their places for less technical / less experienced users, but 'lightweight' enthusiasts like me are fine with just Fluxbox or Openbox and maybe Tint or LXPanel...and you'd probably get some people *still* saying those are too heavy. :-P
Please think before declaring 'most' lightweight distros as garbage. You don't speak for me (or others), and I certainly don't agree with your point of view.
[ Productivity apps ]
I use LibreOffice for most of my productivity needs. It has everything I need. I would like a 'lighter' version that is almost as capable, but haven't found anything that works for me yet.
12 • Respect and correctness (by Herold von Haitabou on 2015-10-12 05:32:31 GMT from Europe)
7. Dignity and Respect?
Quote--10 • Lightweight = shit (by Ujang Kenyot on 2015-10-12 02:52:35 GMT from Asia)
@5: most 'lightweight' distros are shit; they can't be used as a benchmark of usability or correctness.
There are many reasons why users may use lightweight distributions. maybe some are not so good for some people on some machines or for you. To describe those as excrement is not a positive way to communicate or encourage improvement or innovation.
A lot of people have spent many hours developing and testing distros for special needs, respect that.
If you can do better please submit your work to prove it.
13 • Re Lightweight (comment # 10) (by dhinds on 2015-10-12 05:48:56 GMT from North America)
Ujang Kenyot's opinion is poorly defined and doesn't jive with my experience. Lightweight distros are often based on Slackware, Debian or Arch but can be derived from openSUSE, Fedora or Gentoo if they employ either a less massive Desktop Environment like Xfce or LCDE/LXQt or a Window Manager such openbox, Awesome and many more.
This is being posted using CrunchBang Plus Plus (Debian Stable plus Openbox), with all of the above (Slackware, Arch openSUSE, Fedora and Gentoo Xfce) installed and working well on this notebook computer.
I no longer use KDE or Gnome, at all and find no reason to do so.
14 • 7 • Dignity and Respect (by Somewhat Reticent on 2015-10-12 06:27:49 GMT from North America)
Respect
A Political-Correctness Bully (PCB) can be toxic to community, just like a troll enabled as a moderator or administrator. A different bullying skillset would be involved. No less vicious.
Marketing hype is ubiquitous, and should be gently but firmly corrected, in a civil manner.
Lightweight
Some promoters conflate "lightweight" with minimal; relative RAM 'overhead' rarely tells a useful story, but makes an easy metric (and less work?). Easy to see through, though often repeated. What matters is how well your tool works for you, how effective you are while using it.
15 • dignity; productivity (by Arkanabar on 2015-10-12 12:40:28 GMT from North America)
@2: Sometimes, when people stomp off the playground saying "Those people are so mean to me!" it is because, in fact, there is a particular set of people on the playground who are being mean or even cruel to them, without any apparent cause. Other times, it is a lot of offensensitivity. But in the latter case, they tend to trigger pretty quickly, not after three or more years, and they often try to make their dramatic exits cause as much trouble as they think they've suffered. Sarah claims to have ensured that her work will be carried forward, and she's been on that mailing list for years, so I tend to doubt she left because her self-entitled demands that everyone conform to her own standard of good manners were declined.
I used to like Abiword, a lot. It is both quicker and lighter than LO, my preference. But it also tends to interpret the filetype formatting standards (e.g. bullet lists) a bit differently from MS Office, which I pretty much have to presume my audience will be using. And I am from time to time stuck in Windows, so LO's greater cross-platform consistency is also important to me.
16 • Abiword (by a on 2015-10-12 12:48:49 GMT from Europe)
I used to have Abiword installed, but removed it when they switched to gtk3.
17 • Abiword / Lightweight (by Walt on 2015-10-12 13:10:11 GMT from North America)
My memory isn't what it used to be, but I seem to recall that Abiword was loosely bundled with Gnumeric in some lighter distributions as gOffice, which is what I initially assumed the poll was referring to, although there was apparently also a commercial product of the same name.
With regard to lightweight distributions, I tend to prefer them, even though I have plenty of RAM and hard drive space. I'm currently running Peppermint 6 because it does not install things I do not want or use (therefore, I don't have to spend time removing them) and allows me to install only the things I want and need.
18 • lightweight distros (by nolinuxguru on 2015-10-12 42:10:01 GMT from Europe)
I use a lightweight distro: Devuan [Debian8 less systemd]. But in what kind of parallel universe can a Debian-based distro be considered "lightweight"? Well, I replaced the stock init system with Sinit [suckless.org; 220 lines of code], and replaced the myriad processes started by Debian with just the ones i needed. Then I use the cool but frugal XFCE4 for a desktop environment. This starts out at 300mb, but adding a Chromium session and using it a bit gets memory use up to 1gb. With 4gb RAM, I don't need a swap file.
OK, replacing the init system is not for everyone, although it is just a matter of changing GRUB with an "init=/etc/sinit/sinit" clause. Not rocket science, but a pity that someone smarter that me can't package it up for a wider audience. Maybe people have become used-to putting up with what they are given, and not getting their hands a little dirty.
Many of the truly lightweight distros use things like BusyBox and collections of lightweight [sometimes obscure] applications. But why put up with second tier desktop environments, web browsers etc.?
19 • Regular expression (by Didier Spaier on 2015-10-12 13:18:35 GMT from Europe)
.[^.]?*
is problematic IMHO as the POSIX specification states:
"The behavior of multiple adjacent duplication symbols ( '+', '*', '?', and intervals) produces undefined results." cf:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap09.html#tag_09_04_06
Additionally I prefer to use basic regular expressions whenever possible, although they be arguably more difficult to read.
In this case I would have written instead:
.[^.]\{1,\}
Just my two cents, of course ;)
20 • Re.: Regular Expressions (by luvr on 2015-10-12 14:06:29 GMT from Europe)
Both the question and the answer to the question appear to be confused about the type of expression that occurs on the "for" statement. The expression ".[^.]?*" is NOT a Regular Expression, but a Shell Filename Pattern instead. If it were a Regular Expression, then it would, indeed, be problematic, as Didier Spaier @19 pointed out.
Given that the expression must be interpreted as a Shell Filename Pattern, it doesn't work entirely as the answer describes it. For instance, as written, it will NOT match a directory name with only one character following the dot (such as ".a"), because it requires at least TWO such characters.
The correct explanation is as follows:
- The first character matches a literal "."; in other words, the name must begin with a dot.
- Next comes the "[^.]" construct. Enclosed in the brackets is a list of characters against which the next (i.e., in this case, the second) character of the string must be matched. Since the list begins with a caret (i.e., "^") the list is negated; in other words, any of the remaining characters in the list should be rejected. In other words still, in this case, the second character should NOT be a dot.
- Then, the "?" will match any character. In other words, the third character of the input string can be anything.
- Then, the "*" will match any number (possibly zero) of arbitrary characters. In other words, the fourth and following characters if the input string are optional, and may be missing.
So, ".a" won't match: The first character is a dot, which is OK, the second character is not a dot, which is also OK, but the third character is missing, which is NOT OK (since the "?" in the pattern cannot be matched).
A corrected version of the Shell Filename Pattern (assuming you want to match a name that has only one character following the initial dot as well) should drop the "?", as in:
for i in .[^.]*; do echo $i ; done
(Actually, I did learn something new myself, too: I hadn't realised that the "^" to negate a list of characters between the brackets worked in shell patterns.)
21 • Sending commands to multiple servers (by far2fish on 2015-10-12 14:36:41 GMT from Asia)
I think it is worth to mention that tools like Puppet and others are more declaritive, so once you get to know the syntax you have better cross platform support than you do with homegrown scripts. A basic example would for instance be to install software. Which commands to use differs greatly from distro to distro. With a declarative tool you just specify what software you want and which version you want, and let the tool worry about the rest.
With a cross platform homegrown script you would have to manage a lot of conditional statements, and do extensive testings everytime to change the script.
Puppet and similar tools are the way forward IMHO. Often in combination with other tools like Docker or Vagrant.
22 • Regarding "resignations": (by the card says "consultant" on 2015-10-12 16:25:45 GMT from Europe)
Is it really a "resignation" if you've been "Rip Van Winkle"-ing it for a year?
(Or, is it just a tantrum, when nobody's noticed?)
If "management" has an effect, then what's wrong with the "product" that requires changing it by changing "management"?
(Of course, if "management" has no effect, then why expend resources to change it?)
23 • re: 7 * Dignity and Respect? (by Ben Myers on 2015-10-12 02:24:10 GMT from North (by the card says "consultant" on 2015-10-12 16:26:20 GMT from Europe)
> "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?
And, if they are?
24 • re: 15 * dignity; productivity (by Arkanabar on 2015-10-12 12:40:28 GMT from Nor (by the card says "consultant" on 2015-10-12 16:26:59 GMT from Europe)
> not after three or more years, and they often try to make their dramatic exits cause as much trouble ...
Ah, the "Take this job and shove it!" soliloquy. People who expect to continue being paid usually avoid that.
25 • Productivity suite (by rsd on 2015-10-12 16:30:12 GMT from Europe)
There can only be one, LibreOffice. WPS is unstable, the rest are lacking in features. Only LibreOffice has the flexibility and compatibility that can compete across all distros, and beyond. And by beyond, I am meaning Windows and Mac.
26 • Productivity suite (by fox on 2015-10-12 16:43:40 GMT from North America)
As is often the case, no checkbox accurately records my answer to a poll. If you work in a collaborative environment with Microsoft Office users, using any of the Linux office suites incurs a heavy penalty. While the translation functions are getting better with each new version, they are still not 100% compatible with Microsoft-created files. In a recent example with a docx file, Libreoffice (version 5) garbled table fonts, table placements and line numbers. Some of these elements fared better in both WTP office and Softmaker Office, but neither could translate formulas made with the MS equation editor. I'm trying to switch from Mac to Linux, and this is the biggest impediment. Fortunately, MS Office 2010 usually works in Wine, Play-on-Linux and Crossover Linux. I wish I didn't have to resort to this but right now it is my only semi-reliable solution.
27 • Poll (by Gekxxx on 2015-10-12 16:46:47 GMT from Europe)
My favorite productivity suite is Bluefish. Great with html5.
28 • Multiple servers? Use Puppet (by Tom on 2015-10-12 16:53:26 GMT from North America)
I agree with the person who said use Puppet to manage multiple servers. Yes there was a learning curve to learn the puppet language and syntax, but it was well worth it. With it I've gone from being able to manage a few dozen servers to a farm of thousands. Standing up new servers is as simple as configuring out PXE boot to run puppet after it is done.
Add in vagrant and virtualbox to create an identical development environment quickly on my workstation and my productivity has skyrocketed.
29 • Productivity Suite (by Peter086 on 2015-10-12 16:58:34 GMT from Europe)
Though I've long ago switched to LibreOffice, as it works well and I find it reasonably easy, I find that WPS imports MS Office documents faithfully, so I use both, depending on the circumstances. I must add that the latest 5.0 version has improved importation a bit (still not ideal) and speed (now my wife's happy). Once you turn off Java execution and reduce the undo steps to a reasonable number, it starts up much faster than previos builds.
30 • WPS is hopeless (by Arjay on 2015-10-12 17:03:59 GMT from Europe)
I thought I would try WPS on my Extix linux system running kde and plasma 5 after a couple of positive comments here. Fooled again. It would just about be OK to write a one paragraph letter to my Aunt Jane in capital letters - but handle a reasonable Word 13 docx file? No way.
I just opened the last document I had written for a client to see what happened. Might have known: two inserted powerpoint slides (perfect in Word 13) completely disappeared. Other diagrams just dumped in any old paragraph miles from their placeholders. A page break inserted to change from portrait to landscape for a table didn't work, other tables misaligned and who knows what else.
I have a lot of admiration for those who spend endless hours trying to mimic MS Word or Excel but guys (and gals) give it up and get a life, or else stop putting software out there that is simply not fit for purpose.
31 • Lightweight distros ( even the dormant or discontinued ones) are Gems. (by Tran Older on 2015-10-12 17:24:55 GMT from Asia)
Please consider old machines gaining dust or being used as door stops or paperweights which can be revitalized by and put to good use by deploying suitable lightweight distros. The list would include pre-iMac Apple PowerPCs, or i586, i686 and Cyrix PCs. This is being posted using Igelle. Igelle, not iOS:-)
32 • Productivity Suite (by Gary on 2015-10-12 19:19:32 GMT from North America)
WPS. May try Calligra if it runs on Linux Mint.
33 • Prefer Libre Office 5 (by muthu on 2015-10-12 19:28:30 GMT from Asia)
I prefer Libre Office 5 as my Productivity Suite. The latest version 5 is similar to the Microsoft Office and works very fast. Try the Latest version of Libre Office if you want a new and latest productivity Suite for you.
34 • Productivity suite (by Dave Postles on 2015-10-12 19:47:55 GMT from Europe)
@5 Re-Abiword, 17 is surely correct that it is in GOffice.
I've no complaints about LibreOffice. For the best product, I use Writer as a base, then transfer it all into LyX. It takes a lot of fiddling to reformat, but it is worth it for the output. I find it hard to use LyX directly.
As for spreadsheet and statistics, I use Calc by default for some stuff, but gretl for more sophisticated stuff. I'm sad that Rcommander no longer supports R in Linux - it's such a bore to have to go back to the man for the command line.
35 • Multiple servers (by Ricardo on 2015-10-12 21:13:23 GMT from South America)
Since I administer mostly CentOS servers a tool like dsh or clusterssh is enough for now for me, but I'm partial to pssh (https://github.com/pkittenis/parallel-sshhttps://github.com/pkittenis/parallel-ssh) as it also has a parallel scp and can be programatically used fomr Python.
Other good tools similar to Puppet are Chef (www.opscode.com/chef/), Ansible (http://www.ansible.com/) and Salt (http://saltstack.com/community/).
I'm starting to learn ansible, as it's the simplest of that group, here's a very good article and comments comparing these tools:
http://ryandlane.com/blog/2014/08/04/moving-away-from-puppet-saltstack-or-ansible/
36 • pssh (by Ricardo on 2015-10-12 21:14:44 GMT from South America)
I mangled pssh's URL:
https://github.com/pkittenis/parallel-ssh
37 • @5 Abiword - Productivity Suite (by Rev_Don on 2015-10-12 21:23:32 GMT from North America)
Abiword is a stand alone word processor. It is not, and never has been a Productivity Suite nor has it been bundled as part of one. Some distros have included it and a stand alone spreadsheet program like gnumeric, but it was never considered a Suite. That would be why it wasn't included.
38 • @30 wps (by mandog on 2015-10-12 22:49:34 GMT from South America)
To be honest if I had wasted my hard earned cash on Ms office I suppose I would be defending it like you
But instead I saved a bunch installed WPS, a long time ago in 3 Arch systems for the price of free along with abiword.
Guess what never a crash never a compatibility problem between word and WPS for docs shard between the education system here.
In fact I get more problems with the local schools windows systems communicating between the various Ms doc formats than wps.
Strange is it not when Ms office is not compatible with earlier versions but its a sin if
Libra office is not, Of course you can always waste your money upgrading Ms, helps with the profits does it not.
39 • Linux Kernel Development (by G. Savage on 2015-10-12 23:26:11 GMT from North America)
That is deeply saddening. There seems to be a definite lack of professionalism and workplace ethics. It seems some of these designers/integrators/programmers have failed to grow up and their negative actions on others go undisciplined. When Linux looses people who have passion for their work, Linux looses; as do we.
40 • 39 • Meritocracy community (by Kragle on 2015-10-12 23:53:24 GMT from North America)
"… their negative actions on others go undisciplined."
Yes, the group put up with Sarah's harassment for a time; they were gentle while firmly mentoring her development. Eventually she disciplined herself, as well as could be expected.
41 • LibreOffice & glossery terms (by M.Z. on 2015-10-13 00:03:37 GMT from North America)
As with most others I run LibreOffice. In fact I have version 5 installed beside the older default version in Mint Debian. I liked OpenOffice before that, but I think it's fallen behind LibreOffice. I've also played a little with Calliga, though I have the impression that such projects aren't too likely to ever catch up with LibreOffice.
----------------
On the topic of the glossary, I was a bit surprised not to see the term swap in there given the definition of things as generic as 'operating system'. The first time I ran into the term it was a bit of a head scratcher for me as a (then) windows user, as I had only ever heard of virtual memory on windows & never the Unix equivalent. Much of the rest looks useful for new users.
42 • Productivity Suite (by lashley on 2015-10-13 02:07:11 GMT from North America)
I use LibreOffice, in the past used both OpenOffice and WPS. Find Calligra a little behind and the others aren't as developed as LibreOffice5, which is an excellent suite for any Linux user.
Choice is there for whatever need or preference, that is good for Linux and the user.
43 • Children of the Kernel (by The Mahatma on 2015-10-13 03:28:45 GMT from North America)
I have 35 years of UNIX software development experience. And one reason I don't contribute anything to the Linux community is that I don't have the time and patience to deal with children. Apparently, this is true of the kernel more than anywhere else.
I have seen some of the ranting and name calling done in the kernel community. It makes them look like cowards. Maybe when Linus and the boys grow into men, they will understand why.
Until then, I applaud Sarah Sharp, Matthew Garrett, and Con Kolivas for the stance they are taking. They're doing the right thing. Software development needs to be rid of this adolescent bullshit.
44 • 43 • Tender Feet (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2015-10-13 03:44:36 GMT from North America)
You'd have serious challenges adapting to many cultures. Children may fight; adults spar. Self-discipline is required.
I have less sympathy for "stance"-taking. An examination of context would reveal an abundance of hype, hypocrisy and immaturity there.
I've smarted from a bit of discipline liberally applied to myself, but keeping composure and remaining civil carried me through and earned respect.
45 • My feet are really sore, but I think... (by The Mahatma on 2015-10-13 03:52:47 GMT from North America)
"keeping composure and remaining civil carried me through and earned respect."
A wonderful thought. Any chance Linus and the boys take it to heart?
46 • Productivity Suite (by Hoos on 2015-10-13 04:02:17 GMT from Asia)
I think from version 4+ of Libreoffice onwards, compatibility with Microsoft Office (especially .docx) has improved a lot. Most of the time I use LO, 4+ or 5, depending on the distro I'm on.
However, it's good to have a fallback, for pesky MS documents that don't display properly in LO, e.g some Excel spreadsheets and .docx documents with complicated formatting and and many levels of numbering. So I often have WPS as well, but I don't use it as default.
At work I have both LO 4+ and MS Office 2013 on Win 7. I try to stick with LO, and the documents I create are .doc by default.
47 • RE: Kernel Developers Resign (by 2damncommon on 2015-10-13 04:24:56 GMT from North America)
It is perhaps unfortunate that no kernel developers posted that the persons leaving "should not let the door hit them in the ass."
48 • The best DW issue ever (by GuntherT on 2015-10-13 06:17:55 GMT from North America)
I was in tears by the end of the Parsix review. It feels good to laugh that hard. The quote from Didier Rebound was icing on the cake...comedy at its best. The Sarah Sharpe story lead me to a lkml email thread that was highly entertaining to read. Bravo, Jesse. I love Linux, but at the same time, "Linux Sucks". This was a great issue. I'll be back next week.
49 • RE: Kernel Developers Resign (by Matthew Fletcher on 2015-10-13 10:31:22 GMT from Europe)
I think some perspective is needed on 2 kernel developers resigning for there own reasons. Many, many others dont seem to have such problems.
"1,569 developers have contributed to 4.2. Of those developers, 279 have made their first contribution to the Linux kernel."
See https://lwn.net/Articles/654633/
50 • WPS for me (by John on 2015-10-13 11:27:52 GMT from North America)
I've used linux on and off for the past 20 years and tried pretty much all the Office suites, but for me, WPS on an Ubuntu based distro (currently Elementary) works best. It handles all the funky formatting that Libre Office chokes on and works great. Granted it might take a little more work to get up and running (like finding and installing symbol fonts) but the end result is best.
51 • LibreOffice and MS Office formats (by Kazlu on 2015-10-13 12:26:53 GMT from Europe)
@30 "I have a lot of admiration for those who spend endless hours trying to mimic MS Word or Excel but guys (and gals) give it up and get a life, or else stop putting software out there that is simply not fit for purpose."
In response to this ant to others: You miss the point. LibreOffice is not meant to work *with* MS Office formats, it merely has an *importation* function to try to recover as much as possible from a file which design is not known to the public. Then you have to go on using opendocument formats. LibreOffice warns you about this when you save a document: if you insist saving your work in a MS Office format, your work may not be well rendered by someone using another software.
Either you want to use MS Office formats, and in this case your only viable solution is to use MS Office, period. Be my guest, as far as I am concerned I don't want to touch that piece of crap outside of work where I have to. Or you can use opendocument formats and in this case, if you have existing MS Office files that you need to work on, at least you can import them in LibreOffice. The result will not be perfect and you may need extra work to recover a complete document, but it's still easier than to start over...
LibreOffice has NEVER tried and is not trying to work entirely with MS Office formats. It's not possible, Microsoft makes sure of this by regularly modifying its file formats (that is also the reason why documents are not always well rendered from one version to the other of MS Office. Go ahead and buy the new one! #38 mandog mentioned that already). LibreOffice is a free and libre productivity suite that allows you to do paperwork using free and libre file formats, and it is very good at this. In addition, it loads with a function of importation of MS Office formats to *help* you switch from MS Office formats to opendocument. It even has an imperfect "save as doc" function so you have a possibility to switch back to MS Office formats without starting your documents over. It is not always fast, but very complete. MS Office is not always fast either and has a lot more drawbacks, including being proprietary software, so why bother if you have the choice?
As for WPS, I tried it once but it did not import doc files better than LibreOffice, plus it's not libre, so I don't have any interest in it. But if Some people like it, fine, it's good for everyone to have different options to choose from!
52 • @8 Parsix 8.0 (by Kazlu on 2015-10-13 12:44:02 GMT from Europe)
Hello Alan,
Thanks for your comment here and for the good mood! I would like to react on the GNOME fallback/flashback topic:
"2) We do not officially support GNOME fallback or flashback mode and this mode has not been tested."
Then, why do you include it in Parsix? The technical explanation about the "Services" makes sense, but why include this session mode if it is not supposed to work in the first place?
Cheers
53 • offices (by Tim Dowd on 2015-10-13 14:33:25 GMT from North America)
I think LibreOffice is very good. I'm at the point that it's actually my favorite word processor. It does have some limitations however, notably in Calc.
@51... MS Office isn't a piece of crap. It's utility is especially apparent in Excel versus LibreOffice Calc. The graphing features of Excel are far superior, and at least the last time I checked (about a year ago) LibreOffice only allowed for linear regressions in the curve fitting department, whereas Excel allows a wide variety of functions to be fit.
That might not be a big deal for many, but as a high school science teacher it really matters to me and to my students, who I'm trying to teach how to handle scientific data. The quality of Excel is the only reason I teach my kids on anything other than completely open-source software.
I'm sure I'll get some scorn for this stance, but remember that most kids in the US are taught to maniuplate scientific data using far and away the worst abuse of a proprietary technology: the TI-84 graphing calculator. It's still running a Zilog Z80 and yet costs more than two Chinese android tablets, each of whose processor is approximately a million times faster than the Z80.
54 • LIbreoffice (by lupus on 2015-10-13 14:56:47 GMT from Europe)
@51 Kazlu, thank you for taking the time to explain the obvious cause I don't have the patience to explain the difference to the technically challenged ;)
It should be obvious that proprietary document formats ie. doc docx etc. are bad for you for me and for everyone. I always tell those nitwits in corporate Zombieland to use the open free or libre formats in order to be free and more open to the rest of the world. But even my employer finds it to complicated to remember to use 'safe as' !
People are uninformed and too lazy and everything is supposed to just work which btw it often doesn't. The greater scheme of things is completely lost on them. When I calculate the amount of money we keep spending on proprietary software for stupidest tasks like a hundred letters here or a spreadsheet there I get nauseous. Not to mention in the older times each new Windows needed new hardware so more money down the drain. And why???
Mainly because Word integrates so nicely in my (utterly useless and absolutely blown out of proportion) Powerpoint Presentations. Oh my god I'm ranting again...
just my 2cents Bye Lupus
55 • @53 MS Office (by Kazlu on 2015-10-13 15:09:50 GMT from Europe)
Oh I didn't mean MS Office was a piece of crap from the functionnality side. I dislike the ribbon style interface, I find it messy and I always have trouble finding what I am looking for with it, contrary to LibreOffice's menus, but that's personnal, I get other people like it better and I'm fine with it. MS Office has a lot of useful functionnalities. Even on the technical side, I would not dare saying any longer that MS Office is crap, since I met similar stability problems - and satisfactions - with both MS Office and LibreOffice. No, what I meant is that MS Office and its file formats are a foul enormous pile of shit philosophically speaking. You have to run (and therefore, buy) the latest MS Office AND the latest Windows if you want to exchange documents with others, just because other prople made the switch and your old version os MS Office is not compatible any longer. But if you upgrade, you will have trouble with your 5 years old documents. This is ridiculous. If MS Office had at least some kind of support, even basic, for opendocument, that would solve some problems and could even start making MS Office a possible choice for productivity. But I don't expect it to happen, I see why Microsoft does not go this way, it makes sense economically speaking.
Oh and I don't know since when, but LibreOffice 5 allows several types of curve fittings like logarithmic, exponential or polynomial. I suppose it is not the only functionnality you expect from a productivity suite, but I suppose it is still good to know ;)
56 • libre office 5 (by Tim Dowd on 2015-10-13 15:37:57 GMT from North America)
@ 55
Your news about Libre Office 5 has just made my day. I'll check it out tonight- I'm running Debian testing on my home computer so I have a copy waiting to go. That was the last piece of the puzzle for me- and most importantly it means I can tell kids to go get a copy if they can't afford Office
Yeah, I agree with you about the formatting. Nothing was worse than the problem when Word 2007 came out and it made word 97-03 images all turn black. It amazes me that corporate clients didn't bail after that.
57 • Running new versions of LibreOffice (by M.Z. on 2015-10-13 19:47:26 GMT from North America)
@56
It's also worth noting that you should be able to install new versions of LibreOffice beside the older versions that ships with on most Linux Distros. As I mentioned above, I did this exact thing on my Mint Debian install after hearing about the capability from a LibreOffice developer on a podcast. It should be easy for most Linux users to run a newer version of LibreOffice if they decide there are features worth downloading & you can still use the installed distro specific version if there is a problem with the new one (which could easily happen if you install a beta). I think it should be easier to get LibreOffice 5 running on Debian Stable than to run Debian testing, given they way the dev talked about installing versions 4.x & later next to older copies of LibreOffice. If you're on a Debian related OS you just download & extract the latest LibreOffice, open the folder created during extraction in the terminal & type the following into the command line:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
Type you password in & wait a little bit & you should have the latest LibreOffice on you system. There are also instructions on the LibreOffice website about doing the same for most other distro families; however, the info is outdated compared to what they dev on the podcast says because it was written about the 3.x line. See the two for more info:
http://mintcast.org/2015/06/04/mintcast-225-libreoffice/
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Install/Linux
Just remember that the LibreOffice site was written for older versions so the advice about installing two different versions no longer applies. Both the Mint Debian default install & version 5 seem to work fine beside each other on my laptop & some user on the podcast site claims to have 3 versions coexisting happily. If it works as easy on other distros as it did on my Mint Debian system there should be no problems running version 5 of LibreOffice on any version of Linux, although I did hedge by bets by leaving the only the default version of LibreOffice on the other distros on my laptop.
58 • Debian drops LSB (by cykodrone on 2015-10-14 05:01:02 GMT from North America)
...and the slide to proprietary obsolescence continues. Between the *buntus and a certain corporate distro (that *init* developer), there really is no point to Debian anymore.
59 • @51 (by Smellyman on 2015-10-14 11:17:47 GMT from Asia)
~Standing Ovation~
60 • 53 • offices (by Tim Dowd) (by zcatav on 2015-10-14 12:04:34 GMT from Europe)
@53
Please consider using R, instead of Excel. It's worth it for your mentioned purpose.
61 • @52 (by Alan Baghumian on 2015-10-14 14:52:14 GMT from North America)
Hey Kazlu,
It is not included in Live CD, but you can install it from repositories. KDE can also be installed from repositories, but again, we do not officially support it. Our continent repository has everything that Debian archive has. Honestly turning off user-themes should have done the trick to avoid the flashback mode. Thanks for comments.
62 • Multiple Server Management (by RO on 2015-10-14 23:33:08 GMT from North America)
I used a scheme making use of the "screen" program for running sessions on multiple Solaris servers to manage them when I needed to start/stop/modify up to 20 instances of Oracle Application Server (Java web server platform). I would use one RHEL or Solaris server running screen with a disconnected session for each other server I wanted to manage. With each screen session logging to a file, I could watch the terminal sessions from additional Putty terminal sessions by tailing the logs as I sent a "blanket" command from the original session that started each of those disconnected sessions.
This was a fall back when I could not run my usual set of VNC xterms, all driven from a RHEL server for this kind of situation (weekly stops/starts of an OAS cluster, in staged manner to keep from locking up the DB each instance was hitting hard at startup). I had to use xterms or disconnected screen sessions on a server since I could not depend on VPN-connected PC-based Putty sessions not to lose connectivity at a critical time in whichever process I was managing.
It was kind of complicated to set up initially, but once I worked out the arrangement for a a few, the rest were just "increments" on the concept. It has been a year or more since I did this, and I have retired since then, so do not have access to my scripts/docs for the details, although I might have saved them to bring home with me for my own benefit.
63 • Productivity Suites (by Platypus on 2015-10-15 07:54:54 GMT from Oceania)
I still use MS Office 2010 in Crossover Office. And at times when I need extra power/features I have to run it in a Windows Virtual Machine. Libre Office just can't do what I want, and some functions are a pain in the butt to achieve. It is just easier to stick with MS until Libre Office catches up and makes interoperability more seemless.
64 • @63 interoperability (by Kazlu on 2015-10-15 09:00:27 GMT from Europe)
"It is just easier to stick with MS until Libre Office catches up and makes interoperability more seemless."
I'm not sure I get you right. Are you talking about interoperability with file formats? Are you suggesting LibreOffice has to do all the work for interoperability with MS Office formats but it's okay is MS Office does not care about opendocument?
65 • Lightweight vs. Heavyweight. Productivity, distros. (by Greg Zeng on 2015-10-15 09:47:07 GMT from Oceania)
Heavyweight, from the earlier comments here, is:
Windows-10, Ms Office (latest), KDE, Cinnamon, Gnome3, etc.
Lightweight is everything else? That means incompatibility with the heavyweights, expecially the latest Ms Office.
It is well known that Ms Office is buggy, has malware cracks, and is incompatible with itself, especially the older versions of Ms Office. Their "doc" format is so incompatible, you need to carefully select which year-version of "doc" is intended.
Is this how Ms holds the planet to randsom, by forcing the planet to always stay with hardware upgrades and to always upgrading to Ms products?
What upsets me most is that the producers of lightweight software are aware of how their products are not heavyweight, but generally refuse to tell us the limits of performance of their lightweight products. My apologies for my mistake in thinking that Peppermint, Watt-OS, and other lightweight Ubuntu-based distros had inbuilt productivity software. In my retirement years, I do not use Powerpoint nor complex Excel spreadsheets.
66 • @64 (by fuumind on 2015-10-15 09:52:31 GMT from Europe)
I second that! MS needs to learn to adhere to common standards instead of bullying everyone into doing things their way. They are a pain in the ass to deal with for sure.
67 • @64 (by Smellyman on 2015-10-15 10:35:15 GMT from Asia)
People can't seem to figure out this concept. After all these years the beat goes on.
People need to just stop using it. Starts at home and with young people. Nobody needs MSOffice for home use. NOBODY. Then it can chip away and business and that is already starting, in governments at least.
68 • So NetBSD 7.0 is finally here! (by keysinparadise on 2015-10-15 12:06:57 GMT from Oceania)
I hope it comes with better support for wifi cards.
Both OpenBSD and FreeBSD support my Ralink, although on FreeBSD it is flimsy.
I also hope that pkgsrc allows easy installation of either Lazarus or the Free Pascal IDE and its units, not just the compiler; unlike OpenBSD. Its like I need to find out where Linux installs these units, replicate them in a similar directory structure on OBSD, and link them to the compiler. I guess I don't mind the workload, but I don't know every advanced thing about these systems. Its a frustrating learning curve.
69 • offices and r (by Tim Dowd on 2015-10-15 13:58:48 GMT from North America)
@60
I just don't have the time, unfortunately. My wife has used R extensively in the past and love it. As a physics teacher, I have so much content to get across that when I use computer technology I have to be careful with what I choose to take the time to teach. I had a college math class that forced us to buy a subscription to MatLab and then got around the learning curve by just pretending we all knew how to use it. I don't want to do that to my kids, even if R is libre and gratis.
Spreadsheets are a valuable tool for high school kids because they are used extensively in the sciences, and can help the kids in everyday life with budgeting, etc.
It's always amazing to me that my 16 year old students will come into my class and only half of them will ever have seen a spreadsheet. But the reason is the lock on math classes that Texas Instruments has, at least in the US. A math teacher here can be reasonably certain that if (s)he teaches how to use a TI-84 that her students will have one and that they'll be able to use it on standardized tests. Thus it's still the de-facto standard in data manipulation. There's actually probably no more cynical monopoly in tech than this, as every kid is forced to buy, learn, and use technology that has no real world purpose. The Desmos people are trying to fight this and good luck to them.
70 • @69 Mathlab clones (by dbrion on 2015-10-16 09:28:47 GMT from Europe)
Have you thoght about octave (or maybe scilab, which is very ressource hungry). I prefer R, but recommand octave to colleagues who were trained with matlab.... (then , they may look at R and prefer it -object oriented, more stats- or not -more ressource hungry-)
71 • openSUSE and SUSE Linux (by Kazlu on 2015-10-16 10:35:52 GMT from Europe)
Following the news of openSUSE Leap 42.1 hitting RC1, there is something I don't get about Leap: it is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise... But SUSE Linux Enterprise it itself based on openSUSE... How does it work now? How will the project move forward if the two are based on each other?
72 • #71 openSUSE Leap (by RollMeAway on 2015-10-16 15:49:26 GMT from North America)
This page explains it well:
https://en.opensuse.org/Lifetime
73 • @72 openSUSE Leap (by Kazlu on 2015-10-16 16:11:41 GMT from Europe)
Actually, no: this page explains how long a given release will be supported but does not deal with the "based on" relationship between openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise.
74 • OpenSUES (by M.Z. on 2015-10-16 20:59:45 GMT from North America)
@71/73
It sounds a little like this specific version of OpenSUSE is playing the role that CentOS does for Red Hat, if that makes sense. For Red Hat the creation process goes Fedora rawhide -> Fedora -> RHEL/CentoOS. It looks like they pulled in some heavily test downstream components for this specific release, but it does seem odd from what I know about OpenSUSE. I noticed in poking around that they explicitly do not offer enterprise level support:
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Strategy#openSUSE_does_not:
It still sounds a bit perplexing given the relationship of the two distros, but it also seems very similar to CentOS.
75 • Productivity (by zykoda on 2015-10-17 07:07:45 GMT from Europe)
Python: flexible and easier than the complexity of R/S. The gap narrows.
76 • Linux runs WWW, but which Linux? (by Greg Zeng on 2015-10-18 03:21:29 GMT from Oceania)
http://www.zdnet.com/article/can-the-internet-exist-without-linux/?linkId=17978008
http://www.w3cook.com/os/summary/
In "Linux", the biggest brand-name is Centos, followed by Ubuntu. Is this the Ubuntu using the Unity interface, or Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Cubuntu, etc, are all of these? http://www.w3cook.com/os/linux
Danger - the Apple fanboys are looking closely, since the Apple-god is master of everything!
Apple is from BSD, which is also Unix-derived.
> "While a great deal of the Internet networking infrastruture runs on Cisco iOS, much of it also runs on Linux-based switch operating systems, such as Cumulus Linux, Big Switch's Switch Light, and VyOS, the open-source fork of Vyatta." - from the url cited in the original post: http://www.zdnet.com/article/can-the-internet-exist-without-linux/?linkId=17978008
The "Cisco iOS" cited below is not from Apple, but:
> "Cisco IOS (originally Internetwork Operating System) is software used on most Cisco Systems routers and current Cisco network switches." - cited from: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cisco_IOS
77 • No DE on servers (by M.Z. on 2015-10-18 04:03:10 GMT from North America)
@76
There is generally no DE of any kind on servers, so it's almost always command line regardless of whether you're talking Centos or Ubuntu. I think it would be very rare indeed to find a server with Unity even among those using Ubuntu. There are probably some home servers here & there running a DE, but those would likely be few & far between compared to corporate servers running CLI.
78 • @76 - Origin of OS X? (by Ben Myers on 2015-10-18 21:50:41 GMT from North America)
"Apple is from BSD, which is also Unix-derived." Isn't OS X derived from the Mach operating system, by way of Next?
79 • FreeBSD derived (by M.Z. on 2015-10-18 22:47:17 GMT from North America)
@78
No OS X is mostly BSD with Mach & other components added in. See these two links:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Porting/Conceptual/PortingUnix/background/background.html
They were linked references #11 & 105 here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD#Derivatives
80 • @ 77 - No DE on servers???? (by Ben Myers on 2015-10-18 23:01:24 GMT from North America)
In this year of 2015, a server that does not have either web-based or menu-based administration is somewhat behind the times. Why whack away at an error-prone command line when there are screens to do the same? Sure, there are shell scripts to automate repetitive tasks across users or groups of users, because the menus can become tedious.
81 • No DE on servers (by M.Z. on 2015-10-19 00:05:39 GMT from North America)
@80
So a web based interface counts as a DE? I think not. The question refereed to DEs, which until I hear otherwise from a reliable source I'm still guessing are few & far between on most servers. See just a few of the completely DE free options for servers here on DW:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=coreos
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=nethserver
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=turnkey
Number of Comments: 81
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