A Look at Conectiva Linux 10

Last weekend, Conectiva Linux celebrated its 9th birthday since its humble beginnings in 1995. This is quite an achievement, considering that, as a strong believer in Free Software, the Brazilian company has always given its distribution away for free and released all of its own software, art work and documentation under the GPL. Conectiva Linux 10 was released to the public early in July. How does it compare to other, more widely-used distributions?

Going back in time by about one year, most people agreed that Conectiva Linux 9 was a disappointing distribution, a buggy product which received a full CD's worth of bug fixes within two months after its release. Luckily, the developers have learned from their mistakes and have implemented several measures ensuring better quality control. Firstly, the beta testing period of Conectiva 10 lasted seven months and consisted of two technology previews, two betas, and three release candidates before the product was declared final. A full set of ISO images of each development release was provided for download, together with comprehensive release notes, known issues, and public announcements; again, this was a departure from the past practice of simply maintaining a continuously updated development branch on the distribution's FTP servers. Finally, a public mailing list for beta testers was set up to discuss bugs and user suggestions during the development period. All of these factors have contributed towards the much improved final release of Conectiva 10

Conectiva uses its own graphical installer, a standard program not too dissimilar to most other installers on the market - except for two things. Firstly, the installer has the ability to use a native X server compatible with the system's video chipset, inclusive (unlike Red Hat's Anaconda) the proprietary NVIDIA modules. Secondly, Conectiva's front-end for apt, Synaptic, is fully integrated into the installer. This allows for the package selection to be fine-tuned as Synaptic offers the ability to search for packages and to define sources of installation, while providing means for automatic resolution of dependencies.

The release is highly up-to-date. It includes the Linux kernel 2.6.5, XFree86 4.4.0, KDE 3.2.3, GNOME 2.6 and most other packages were brought up to their latest versions at the time of the release. It is interesting to note that Conectiva is one of the very few distributions that is seemingly unconcerned about the license changes in XFree86 4.4.0 and currently has no plans to switch to an alternative X Window system. Also worthy of note is the fact that the NVIDIA driver is included even in the freely available FTP edition of Conectiva Linux; most other major distributions, such as Mandrakelinux, provide these drivers and other proprietary software in their commercial editions only, not in their freely downloadable editions.

What does Conectiva offer for system administration? Besides the standard KDE Control Center, the distribution also comes with another centralized system administration utility called "Conectiva Control Center". For the most part, this is nothing but a pretty front-end to all the individual KDE Control Center modules, but there are noteworthy additions integrated into the application; these include the Conectiva Personal Firewall and several Webmin modules. In fact, Conectiva's server administration seems to revolve quite heavily around Webmin, a utility missing from all recent releases of Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core. The Conectiva Personal Firewall is a simple graphical front-end for iptables, enabling home users to open certain useful ports, such as the SSH port, ports used by the BitTorrent client and several others. And as a curiosity, Conectiva still ships with Linuxconf (remember Linuxconf?), a system administration tool extremely popular around the times of Red Hat Linux 6.x and before, but later deprecated by most distributions.

In recent years, Conectiva has settled into a roughly one-per-year release cycle of its distribution. While this is probably more than enough for most home users, those who prefer to keep their systems up-to-date will be interested to know that they can track Conectiva's development branch, known as "snapshot". This can be done in the same fashion as one would track Debian Sid, Mandrake Cooker or Fedora Development - by pointing the package sources to the Conectiva's snapshot branch on the nearest mirror. This can be accomplished by adding the following line (select your preferred mirror) to /etc/apt/sources.list:

rpm ftp://ftp.tiscali.nl/pub/mirrors/conectiva/ snapshot/conectiva all

Alternatively, the location can be configured from within the Synaptic package manager. Needless to say, this is only an option for those users who are not afraid of dealing with occasional bugs, since the snapshot branch is in constant state of heavy development and is not meant to run on production systems.

Conectiva 10 features a well-designed desktop and menus, clearly simplified for novice users who might be intimidated by the cryptic names of some open source applications. Besides its native Brazilian Portuguese, the distribution also supports English and Spanish, although its comprehensive set of online books is only available in Portuguese. While Conectiva is obviously biased towards KDE (in a fashion not dissimilar to SUSE Linux), the latest GNOME desktop is available too, together with IceWM, Fluxbox and a number of other light-weight desktop environments.

Conectiva Linux 10 is a worthy contender on the Linux distribution scene. The hard work of its developers over the last 7 months has resulted in a product that has received plenty of positive feedback on public forums of many Linux web sites in Brazil. Although the distribution has yet to find great following outside of Latin America, with the quality of its latest product, and with the company's continued adherence to the GPL, as well as its ardent support for Free Software, Conectiva Linux is bound to attract new users in markets dominated by bigger and better-known distributions.

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