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DistributionsNews and Editorials First Look at Mandriva Linux 2005 (x86 and x86_64)After publishing a brief review of the x86_64 edition of Mandrakelinux 10.1 in January this year and highlighting some of the problems we encountered while testing the product, we received many heated emails arguing about some of the issues mentioned in the review. One of them was an email from the then Mandrakesoft's PR department which insisted that "what you've tested was a half-baked, unofficial product which is a bit unfair to the work we've done". Yes, we would certainly agree with the "half-baked" part of the above statement, but as for the "unofficial" part, it was hard to tell - we downloaded the distribution from the directory labeled as "Official", so it wasn't immediately obvious to us that it was, in fact, an "unofficial" product. Besides, what sane software company would upload a "half-baked" product to public download servers for the whole world to see?It has been 4 months since the controversial review and we decided to take another look at the company's latest product release - Mandriva Linux 2005 Limited Edition. Have the developers addressed the criticism? To our extreme delight, they did; as a matter of fact, every single issue we mentioned in our review of Mandrakelinux 10.1 was fixed in Mandriva Linux 2005! These included the geographical anomalies in the installer, location of FTP/HTTP mirror sites and, most importantly, the problem we had with setting up update sources to keep the distribution up-to-date with security and bug fix updates. Mandriva, which is the company's new name after Mandrakesoft's merger with Conectiva, has gone even further with this release. While the x86_64 edition of Mandrakelinux 10.1 was only available in the form of a boxed product for €120 (or as a "half-baked" FTP/HTTP install), this time the company released an ISO image of Mandriva 2005 for free download. This is obviously not the same as the 3-CD ISO image set for the i586 architecture, but it is progress nonetheless. The single CD packs as many of the most important software packages as possible (all the big applications suites, such as GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org are there), but if users need more, the installation program provides an easy way to configure a remote FTP/HTTP server for downloading and installing additional applications. In fact, the installation program includes a long list of available download servers so all we needed to do is to pick a nearby mirror and the installer downloaded the relevant software lists and automatically added them to the urpmi configuration file. We installed the i586 edition of Mandriva Linux 2005 on a Pentium 4 machine with an Intel 850 chipset and 384 MB of RAM, while the x86_64 edition found its home on a system powered by an AMD64 3500+ processor, with an MSI K8N Neo mainboard and 2 GB or RAM. Neither of them had any problems with detecting and configuring the included hardware. We used the i586 edition extensively for about a week and we have yet to find any problem with the distribution. The AMD64 box did not get to run the new Mandriva Linux much, but the installation process was trouble-free and a quick look around the desktop gave an impression that the 64-bit edition of the product is equally solid. Perhaps the best indication of the quality of this release is the low number of post-release bug-fix updates - after installing the distribution, complete with the GNOME and KDE desktops, but without any server software, the online update utility listed only a handful of packages that needed an update (some of the recent Mandrakelinux releases provided as much as hundreds of megabytes of bug-fix updates within a few weeks after the official release). Nevertheless, there were users on the distribution's mailing lists who reported problems under certain hardware configurations, so not even Mandriva Linux 2005 is perfect. What's new in Mandriva's first release under the new name? Although the included applications are less up-to-date that those in the recently released SUSE 9.3 or Ubuntu 5.05, both of which come with KDE 3.4 and GNOME 2.10, Mandriva 2005 has its own set of tricks up its sleeves. Besides the usual improvements in hardware support and package upgrade, the developers claim to have increased the performance of KDE by up to 10% - by compiling the KDE packages with the -fvisibility option. This is said to produce substantially improved binary code and is able reduce the load times of dynamic shared objects. The -fvisibility option has been introduced into GCC 4.0 so it seems that Mandriva compiled some of its binaries with a pre-release versions of GCC 4. Two other new features worth mentioning are the inclusion of NdisWrapper for utilizing Windows wireless network drivers, and a new ALSA package with sound multiplexing. Although Mandriva Linux 2005 has been released only recently, developers are already preparing for version 2006, currently scheduled to be released in September 2005. Some ideas for the new release have been discussed on the distribution's Bugzilla, Wiki pages and mailing lists, including a complete switch to UTF-8 encoding, work on reducing boot time, incorporation of RAID 10 support into the partitioning stage of the installation program, support for iPod, integration of OpenMosix utilities into the distribution, and many other features. There is even talk about building Ubuntu-style installation and live CD image sets for beta testing as well as final release. Of course, these are just ideas at this stage and it remains to be seen which of them will be accepted as new features in Mandriva 2006. Despite its status as a "transitional" release, we found Mandriva Linux 2005 an excellent, "fully-baked" product that is a delight to install and use. Compared to the previous version, it is also much more polished and comparatively bug-free. The fact that the developers have read our last review and made an effort to fix the problems reported in it is an extra bonus - it shows that the company listens to its users and is willing to improve its products based on users' feedback. Overall, a very impressive product in all departments, highly recommended.
New Releases Fedora Core 4 Test 3 releasedThe third Fedora Core 4 test release is out; click below for a list of mirror sites. If all goes well, this will be the final test release; Fedora Core 4 final is due on June 6.
QiLinux 1.2 releasedQiLinux, the Italian distribution completely made from scratch, has released version 1.2. Click below for a list of important changes and download information.
Trustix Secure Linux 3.0 Release CandidateA release candidate for Trustix Secure Linux 3.0 is now available. Click below for a list of new features or download it from a mirror near you.
White Box Enterprise Linux 4White Box Enterprise Linux version 4 has been released. "This release is starting out with i386 (ia32) and AMD64 (x86_64/ia32e) ports built from the exact same source package set, which is RHEL4 updated with all errata released through April 30." Click below for more release notes.
YES Linux 2.2 Build 3 availableThe YES Linux Release Team has announced the immediate availability of YES Linux 2.2 Build 3. Click below for release updates and download information.
Distribution News Debian AMD64 Archive MoveHere's an updates on the Debian AMD64 port. It is available, it is (mostly) working, it does not include non-free. "The Future? This archive will follow sarge with all point releases and what else might happen to sarge. Thats for sure. :)We will drop the unstable/main part of it, as soon as amd64 gets included into debian. We intent to provide a timeframe of about one or two weeks prior to the deletion, counting from the day on amd64 hit the 95% rate of built packages in Debian."
Debian Project Leader report for 2005-05-08Branden Robinson has posted (click below) the Debian Project Leader report for May 8, 2005. This report looks at the Sarge release, challenges and progress, hardware infrastructure issues, Woody security updates, Debian assets, a Leadership Team status report, and more.
Minutes from FDSCo (03-May-2005)These are minutes of the Fedora Documentation Steering Committee (FDSCo) meeting held on May 3, 2005. Click below to find out who was there, how to your name in lights or at least how to get starting writing much needed documentation, how to find out what documents are most needed, and much more.
Unofficial Fedora FAQ UpdateClick below for the official update (as of May 7, 2005) on the Unofficial Fedora FAQ. The update lists what's new or changed, new translations (Polish and Spanish) are now available, plus how to contribute to the Unofficial FAQ.
Trustix Secure Linux EOL remindersMaintenance of Trustix Secure Linux v1.5 and 2.1 ends June 30, 2005. These TSL users should plan on upgrading to TSL 2.2, which is the current stable version. "Note that this does apply to Trustix Secure Linux 2.1 only and not other products like Trustix OS - ES 2 (formerly known as Trustix Secure Enterprise Linux 2). Trustix OS - ES 2 is to be maintained to March 2007."
Goals for the Ubuntu 'Breezy' ReleaseA set of preliminary goals for the Ubuntu 'Breezy Badger' release has been posted. The Ubuntu developers cannot be faulted for lack of ambition; if they achieve a substantial portion of those objectives, Breezy will be a nice release indeed.
Distribution Newsletters Debian Weekly NewsThe Debian Weekly News for May 10, 2005 covers the Sarge freeze, the Debian ARM port, a licensing issue with Quagga, APT migration status, recent surveys, and more.
Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of May 9, 2005 is out. Gentoo is recruiting printing experts, there's some news from the forums, this week's featured develeoper is Danny van Dyk, also several other topics are covered in this edition.
Mandriva Linux Community Newsletter #103The Mandriva Linux Community Newsletter for April 29, 2005 looks at the name change, the availability of Mandriva Limited Edition 2005, a Mandriva Club naming contest, and more.
Ubuntu MOTU report - Issue 3Click below for the third issue of the Ubuntu MOTU (Masters of the Universe) project, a group of volunteers maintaining most of the Universe and Multiverse packages.
DistroWatch WeeklyThe DistroWatch Weekly for May 9, 2005 has a mini-review of Gentoo and features Frugalware Linux.
Package updates Fedora updatesUpdates for Fedora Core 3: system-config-bind-4.0.0-11 (new, completely rewritten version of system-config-bind), dhcp-3.0.1-42_FC3 (dhclient-script no longer automatically honors $GATEWAY setting), lapack-3.0-26.fc3 (fixes problems in some lapack libraries), system-config-bind-4.0.0-12 (bug fixes), util-linux-2.12a-24.2 (bug fixes), libexif-0.5.12-6.fc3 (prevent infinite recursion), ethereal-0.10.11-1.FC3.1 (new release, several security flaws fixed).
Mandriva Linux MDKA-2005:023 - pwauthMandriva Linux has updated pwauth packages available for ML 10.2 (LE 2005) that fix apache support.
Trustix Secure Linux updatesTrustix updates are available for TSL 2.1, 2.2 and Trustix Operating System - Enterprise Server 2 for bind, bittorrent, bzip2, clamav, hwdata, ppp, spamassassin and apache, bzip2, dhcp, proftpd.
Newsletters and articles of interest My Workstation OS: Kanotix LiveCD (NewsForge)Here's a NewsForge article about Kanotix. "For my purposes, Kanotix LiveCD is ideal. Hardware detection is the best I have seen. Application software is well-considered and easily extended. Releases are frequent -- every two to three months -- and free for downloading. The user forum is active and helpful. There's also a #kanotix IRC channel on irc.freenode.net."
Distribution reviews Review: Kate Linux 2.0 (NewsForge)NewsForge has a review of Kate OS. "Kate is a lightweight, free GNU/Linux distribution from Poland released with the goal of allowing people to play games, watch movies, listen to music, and surf the Web. While it does do these tasks, it requires a lot of handholding, manual configuration, and knowledge on a user's part. A single-CD install (with an optional second CD) is all it takes to get you up and running with Kate, but you may need to have a computer nerd handy for the setup."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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