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DistributionsNews and Editorials Distributions in 2004With this being the last issue of LWN in 2004, let's recap some of the more interesting events of the past year on the Linux distribution scene.Red Hat's Fedora Core continued its successful transformation from Red Hat Linux, despite worries in some circles that it would be a (possibly broken) test bed for the company's main commercial product - Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Although Fedora Core 2 was indeed somewhat buggy, this was due to an ambitious move to kernel 2.6 combined with the inclusion of SELinux functionality, rather than sloppy work, and most of the problems were ironed out before the release of version 3. The current stable release has formed the base for the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (currently in public beta testing), which is expected to go gold during the second quarter of 2005. An interesting side effect of the split between Red Hat's community and enterprise products was the emergence of several distributions developing "new" products by recompiling source RPMs that were used to build RHEL 3 - these include CentOS, Lineox Enterprise Linux, Scientific Linux, Tao Linux, White Box Enterprise Linux, and a few others. Mandrakesoft continued its financial recovery after the disastrous previous two years that almost saw the popular distribution maker going out of business. This was at the expense of the distribution's status as a truly free product in both senses of the word - now those users who cannot or do not want to join the €60/year Mandrakeclub have to wait weeks before they can put their hands on (a limited set of) Mandrakelinux ISO images. The company also implemented a new development model, whereas a final and bug-fixed "Official Edition" is released about a month after a "Community Edition"; however some users tend to view the latter as just another (potentially buggy) release candidate, despite frequent explanations and claims to the contrary by Mandrakesoft's officials. Nevertheless, the new release model seems to be working and both Mandrakelinux releases of the year - versions 10.0 and 10.1 - received positive reviews in the media. Despite the company's acquisition by Novell in late 2003, SUSE continued in its usual twice-per-year release cycle of SUSE LINUX. Somewhat unexpectedly, it also released a full and installable ISO image of SUSE LINUX 9.1 Personal for free download, and although the company has not repeated the generous giveaway after the recent SUSE 9.2 release, this exercise probably helped SUSE gain much market share, especially among home users. Version 9.1 also formed a basis for the all-new SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) 9 and Novell Linux Desktop, both of which targeted enterprise users. SLES 9 was seen as the first viable alternative to Red Hat's own enterprise range of products, with full support for all popular processor architectures and backed by a large company. Novell Linux Desktop is currently being used and tested by Novell in a large-scale internal migration of its desktop computers to Linux. For a second year in a row, the developers of Debian GNU/Linux failed to produce a new stable release. This has resulted in heavy criticism of the release process - not only by users and fans of the distribution, but also by some of the Debian developers. Although the argument that Debian's stable releases are designed primarily for servers and therefore do not need frequent upgrades is valid, the fact that the time needed to produce a release is getting longer is worrying (hamm to slink - 7.5 months, slink to potato - 17 months, potato to woody - 23 months, woody to sarge: 29+ months). Nevertheless, development continued at high speed and Debian has now become the most widely-used base for new and remastered Linux distributions, overtaking Red Hat/Fedora in this role. One of those was Ubuntu Linux, a new project funded by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African Internet millionaire. Ubuntu Linux was probably this year's most pleasant distribution surprise; after promising stable and up-to-date biannual releases based on Debian Sid, its user base increased rapidly in a very short time. Following a dramatic growth in popularity during the previous two years, the source-based Gentoo Linux has now matured into a mainstream, yet unique distribution that appeals to many technical users. Its adoption might be slowing down, though - not because Gentoo's founder Daniel Robbins is no longer with the project, but rather because most binary distributions have improved their package management to the point that dependency issues are no longer as annoying as they used to be. Also, some users have found that maintaining and updating a Gentoo system is time-consuming and not entirely fool-proof. Still, Gentoo has emerged (pun intended) as one of the most prominent and innovative Linux community projects, with unparalleled documentation, active community involvement, and ongoing work on support for new hardware architectures. Other popular distributions continued with regular releases. Slackware Linux 10.0 came out in the middle of the year and indications are that 10.1 (still based on the 2.4 kernel series) is not far off. There were concerns about the state of health of Slackware's founder and maintainer Patrick Volkerding, but according to a recent update in the current change log, he is feeling much better and is able to continue work on the distribution. In the meantime, Knoppix has further solidified its position as the king of Linux live CDs, prompting many articles in the media and even catching the eyes of publishers at O'Reilly Media, who brought out a book called Knoppix Hacks. Earlier this month, Xandros put out the third release of Xandros Desktop OS in as many years and, like the previous two versions, reviewers seem highly impressed. However, Xandros's own code remains proprietary and closed, and with a price tag attached to the product, many users find it more acceptable to install and use one of the other user-friendly, but free distributions, such as MEPIS Linux or PCLinuxOS. What is there to look forward to in 2005? Fedora, Mandrakelinux, SUSE, Ubuntu and Gentoo are likely to continue with their twice-per year release schedules. Debian 3.1 Sarge will hopefully come out early next year, soon to be followed by other Debian-based products, such as Linspire 5.0 (currently in heavy development), Progeny Debian 2.0 (incorporating Componentized Linux), as well as the inaugural release of UserLinux. Another project worth watching is Specifix Linux founded by former executives and developers at Red Hat. Many of the leading distributions have been providing AMD64 ports of their main products and the support for this fast growing platform is expected to increase considerably during the course of the year - not only on the application level, but also by improved support for AMD64 binaries in the new GCC 4.x compiler series. Now that the challenges associated with migrating to kernel 2.6 are mostly a thing of the past, focus will be on integration of new applications, such as the upcoming Qt/KDE 4.0 or OpenOffice.org 2.0. As always, expect a few pleasant surprises along the way.
Distribution News Patrick Volkerding returns homeA Slackware changelog notice has gone out with a note from Patrick Volkerding. He is, he says, back in California and feeling much better. "I offer my thanks and gratitude to the many people who sent me kind words and good advice, or indeed anything at all. I figure it was all for a reason, and that there were always lessons to be learned. Hopefully I'll learn them now! ;-)" Another round of updates has been released.
Fedora Extras, Fedora Core CVS Open!The long-awaited Fedora CVS repository is now open. Here's the announcement. There are actually two repositories, one for Fedora Core, and one for Extras. Congratulations to the Fedora team for getting this important piece of infrastructure into place. The Fedora Project has also officially launched Fedora Pre-Extras, to work alongside Fedora Core 3 for i386 and x86_64 based platforms.
Announcing RosettaRosetta, a web-based translation portal for PO files, is available at the UbuntuLinux wiki. "The Rosetta Translation Portal team is pleased to announce that the portal is now ready for widespread use. Rosetta's goal is to make the process of translating free software as easy as possible for both translators and software maintainers. Maintainers can send us PO Templates and PO Files, which will be published through the web for translation. PO Files can then be downloaded at any time."
Debian GNU/LinuxIan Murdock has created a mailing list for the discussion of how Debian can engage the Linux Core Consortium and vice versa. You can subscribe here.Andreas Barth provides a Sarge release update covering kde3.3, upload targets, and infrastructure. "After almost three weeks since the last update, the status of the release is as follows. We would have liked to present sarge as a Christmas present, but regrettably that didn't work out. We still hope that those of you who celebrate Christmas have a Merry Christmas, and we wish you all a Happy New Year."
Fedora Core updatesFC3 updates: selinux-policy-targeted (fix problems with winbind, nscd, apache and others), xcdroast (fixed frozen progress bars), udev (fixed a case where reading /proc/ide/hd?/media returns EIO), postgresql (update to PyGreSQL 3.6), namazu (security fix release), pam (resolves various minor bugs), glibc (work around rpm bug some more), gnumeric (bug fixes), selinux-policy-targeted (several updates to fix problems with Apache, Squid, postgresql), abiword (backport bug fixes).FC2 updates: postgresql (update to PyGreSQL 3.6), namazu (security fix release).
Mandrakelinux updatesUpdates for Mandrakelinux 10.1 kde (lots of bug fixes), wget (fixes a problem with downloading very large data files), urpmi (fixes a bug in the parallel ssh extension), urpmi (previous package was incorrectly signed for x86).
SUSE Linux updatesSUSE Security Summary Report SUSE-SR:2004:005 addresses a buffer overflow in ncpfs. In this update to SUSE-SA:2004:044 missing 9.2 kernel RPMs are explained.
Regarding End of Life on Trustix Secure Linux 2.0Support for Trustix Secure Linux 2.0 ends on December 31. Users should upgrade to TSL 2.2 soon, if you have not already done so.
Trustix Secure Linux TSL-2004-0067A variety of bugs have been fixed in anaconda, mailcap, mkinitrd, vim, postgresql, ntp, sqlgrey, db4, rsync and postgresql. Click below for details.
Distribution Newsletters Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of December 20, 2004 is out. This edition covers the call for speakers for Gentoo UK 2005, the new mailing list for catalyst, a call for translators, and more.
Debian Weekly News - December 14th, 2004Somehow we missed the Debian Weekly News for December 14, 2004. This edition has links to Bruce Byfield's short introduction to apt-get, Jason Boxman's guideline for using Exim 4 and Courier IMAP on a Debian system, a constructive critique of Debian on DesktopLinux, plus a look at the Debian women sub-project, and more.
Debian Weekly NewsThe December 21 Debian Weekly News is out; this week's topics include a sarge release update, a HURD update, unattended installations, the AMD64 port, and more.
Mandrakelinux Community NewsletterThe 99th issue of the Mandrakelinux Community Newsletter is out. The top story looks at Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official and the second beta Multi Network Firewall is in the cooker. Click below for the latest Mandrakelinux news.
DistroWatch Weekly Issue 80The DistroWatch Weekly for December 20 is the last issue for 2004. "We will look at the newly launched Fedora Extras, newly released PCLinuxOS Preview 8, and newly introduced Ubuntu Rosetta internationalisation infrastructure. The featured distribution of the week is Linux From Scratch. Happy reading!"
Minor distribution updates APLINUX.com.br Mail Server 2005APLINUX.com.br has announced that APLINUX.com.br Mail server 2005 Beta 0.0.2 is available for download.
Aurox 10.1 US BetaAurox Lld. has published a new verion of Aurox 10.1 US Beta. It is available for download from mirrors in the US. "It offers full support for multimedia, special packages for education, internet communicators, office application: OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 and many apps for any purpose: Ximian Evolution, KMail, GIMP, Mozilla, Kget, Psi, Xine, XMMS, OpenSSH..."
Enterprise Linux 4.2.3 for routers availableVersion 4.2.3 of ImageStream's Enterprise Linux is now available as a general availability (GA) release for all ImageStream router customers. Click below for the release notes.
New Quantian release 0.6.9.3 availableQuantian 0.6.9.3 has been released. "Quantian 0.6.9.3 extends the Quantian series based on Knoppix 3.6 and the corresponding clusterKnoppix release. Several new packages (Rpad, clustalw, seaview, iraf) were installed, a number of packages (Octave 2.1.64, Scilab 3.0 among them) were updated, and the CRAN packages were updated as of December 11."
Newsletters and articles of interest Linux in Government: Security Enhanced Linux - The Future is Now (Linux Journal)Tom Adelstein talks with Bill McCarty, author of SELinux NSA's Open Source Security Enhanced Linux, on Linux Journal. "If a must-have, must-know innovation exists for Linux's future viability, you might place all bets on Security Enhanced Linux. Vastly misunderstood and underrated, SELinux provides a marketing differentiator that could carry Linux deep into infrastructures that so far have shown lukewarm acceptance of the open-source operating system. SELinux transforms standard Linux from a cost-effective and secure operating system into a behemoth."
Adding Permissions Using SELinux (O'ReillyNet)Bill McCarty covers adding permissions to SE Linux, on O'Reilly's Linux devCenter. "At this point in the development of SELinux, it's common for policies to contain small bugs that cause operations to fail when applications or programs are used in unusual ways unanticipated by policy developers. As an SELinux administrator, one of the most frequent SELinux policy customizations you're likely to perform is adding permissions to coax the security engine into accepting an operation. Let's consider an actual situation based on Fedora Core 2's SELinux implementation and see how it's resolved. The procedure we'll follow isn't the only procedure or best procedure. Creating new policies typically entails a generous dollop of troubleshooting, which tends to be relatively unstructured. So rather than see our procedure as the universal norm, you should see it as merely an illustrative example."
Distro Quickies: KDE 3.3 on Every Desktop Distribution (KDE.News)KDE.News takes a quick look at some KDE-centric distributions including Xandros Desktop OS 3, Knoppix 3.7, PCLinuxOS Preview 8 and ProMEPIS 2005 Beta 2.
Distribution reviews Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0 - Deluxe Edition Review (LinuxLinks.com)LinuxLinks has a review of Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0. "Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0 is billed as "an intuitive graphical environment that works right out of the box and offers unrivaled compatibility with Microsoft Windows". So it's pretty clear what the market of the product is - all the millions of Windows users that are fed up with an unstable operating system, want something for email and web browsing, and be able to create, edit and send the boss their Word, Excel and Visio files."
FreeBSD 5.3 is 'stable' but not production-ready (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at FreeBSD 5.3. "Since the introduction of the FreeBSD-5 branch, FreeBSD enthusiasts have been eagerly awaiting the day when the new codebase would stabilize. After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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