Distributions

News and Editorials

It's a LINI

Each week I think that I will test some cool new distribution (or at least the latest version thereof) that I've been reading about. Each week I have the best of intentions, but no follow-through. This week, at least, I have an excuse. I was distracted with new hardware.

It's the end of the year, and as sometimes happens there was some money leftover to spend on hardware. LWN editor Forrest Cook did most of the research, the ordering, and has plans to talk about the hardware in detail in some future article, but we both got new systems this week. Mine arrived yesterday, but the promise of its arrival was enough to discourage me from installing anything new on my old and oh so slow secondary test box, a 350 Mhz Pentium 2. Instead I spent extra time making sure that I had good backups to transfer to my new system.

So yesterday I got home with the new box and then applied admirable restraint by first processing the Tuesday security updates, finishing up the rest of the daily page updates and even spent an hour or so updating entries in the Distributions list before diving into the box and setting up my new LINI PC with the Antec Aria Cube case. It's small and super quiet and it came with Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" installed on it's 200 GB hard drive.

This frees up my current work box, a 1.4 Ghz Athlon system, for testing purposes. The old Pentium 2 box will probably be turned into an IP masquerade box/dhcp server, allowing me to connect more than one host to my cable modem without a time consuming reboot/power cycle operation. Next year I resolve to spend more time playing around with some subset of the over 400 distributions on our active list.

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New Releases

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1r1 released

The first stable update to Debian 'sarge' has been released. This release includes nearly 200 security updates and several other important fixes; click below for the details.

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Edubuntu flight 2 CD

Edubuntu joins Ubuntu and Kubuntu in "dapper drake" Flight. That is to say, a beta release of Edubuntu 6.04 is available for testing. Click below for a mirror site near you, plus a look at what's new and some known issues in this release.

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First Arabic KDE Live CD (KDE.News)

KDE.News looks at the first release candidate of Arabian Linux, a live CD with full support for Arabic and English languages. ARL 0.6 RC 1 (Brick in the Wall) was released December 18, 2005.

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Distribution News

Ubuntu Asia Business Tour

Mark Shuttleworth with be leading an Ubuntu business tour of India, China, and many other Asian countries during January and February. "We will be hosting breakfast or lunch presentations for companies and leaders in the free software community, to introduce the Ubuntu project. It would be great to meet any of you who are in the cities we will be visiting!" Click below for more information about the schedule.

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Ubuntu meeting minutes and locales restructuring

Reinhard Tartler has provided the minutes for the first official Meeting of the MOTUMedia team. Some of the topics discussed include Skins for MPlayer, testplans for media players and support of Codecs in Ubuntu.

Daniel Holbach has released the minutes of last week's Desktop Team Meeting. Topics include the dbus transition, bug days and general workflow.

Martin Pitt looks at locales restructuring and why a dist-upgrade might break. He also explains why this isn't a bug.

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Fedora Core 5 Test 2 slipping until January 16

As the title says, Fedora Core 5 Test 2 has been delayed until January 16, 2006. That also means a delay in when Fedora Core 3 support transfers to Fedora Legacy.

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GR: Declassification of debian-private, First call for votes

The voting period on the general resolution: Declassification of debian-private is now open. Debian developers have until the end of the year to cast their votes.

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Debian Installer team monthly meeting minutes

Here are the meeting minutes for the December 14, 2005 Debian Installer Team meeting. Topics include beta2 plans, the graphical installer (G-I), G-I meeting in Estremadura, and more.

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New Distributions

GenieOS

GenieOS has been added to our list, thanks to this DebianPlanet article. GenieOS is a Debian based system that aims to provide a new-user-friendly install while remaining compatible with Debian repositories. Version 0.5 was released December 18, 2005.

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Studio to Go!

Studio to Go! a live Linux CD with integrated music software such as Rosegarden, Ardour, LilyPond and so much more. While not 100% free software (speech or beer), Studio to Go! will be a good addition to any musician's repertoire. Studio to Go! v1.50 Download Edition is currently available. (Found on Synthtopia).

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for December 20, 2005 is out, with a look at the most important events in 2004, version 2.9 of FAI, Debian on one DVD, the fourth anniversary of debianforum.de, the ballot for declassification of private mail, Simon Bienlein receives BIENE Award, a new apt-get and dpkg guide, LSB conforming init scripts, and more.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 26

The latest issue of the Fedora Weekly News contains an Interview with Red Hat's New CTO, Special Promo Code for SCALE, Beginer Tutorials needed for SCALE, Uninet Fedora Conference, Fedora Ambassadors Meeting Minutes, NetworkManager WPA Status, GNOME 2.13.3 Development Release, Fedora Time Bug, and other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of December 19, 2005 covers a Gentoo documentation project status update, Gentoo Summer Camp 2006 organizer forum, Gentoo home media center, KDE.news on Gentoo server, and several other topics.

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Ubuntu Desktop News

The first issue of the Ubuntu Desktop News is out, with a look at GConf should be faster than ever, Simplified menu for the user, How to install a .deb file? Double-click on it!, All your translations are belong to us, New logout dialog, What's new in the Dapper desktop?, and more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 131

The DistroWatch Weekly for December 19, 2005 is out. "The renewed GNOME versus KDE flame war and Xen virtualisation are the two leading topics in this issue; these are followed by a few interesting links, including a timeline of Perl, which celebrated 18 years of age on Sunday. Has Ubuntu Linux been dumbed down? With omission of some of the vital utilities from the latest release, Robert Storey wonders where this increasingly popular distribution is heading. Also in this issue: an interview with Robert Tolu of the GenieOS project, an update on FreeBSD release schedule for 2006, and a handful of interesting new distributions."

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Fedora Core 4 updates: system-config-nfs (bug fix), arts (update to 1.5), kdelibs (update to 3.5), kdebase (update to 3.5), kdeaccessibility (update to 3.5), kdeaddons (update to 3.5), kdeadmin (update to 3.5), kdeartwork (update to 3.5), kdebindings (update to 3.5), kdeedu (update to 3.5), kdegames (update to 3.5), kdegraphics (update to 3.5), kdemultimedia (update to 3.5), kdenetwork (update to 3.5), kdepim (bug fix), kdesdk (update to 3.5), kdeutils (update to 3.5), kdevelop (update to 3.3), kdewebdev (update to 3.5), kde-il8n (update to 3.5), caching-nameserver, gjdoc (mostly a bug-fix release), system-config-bind (bug fixes), system-config-netboot (bug fixes), postgresql (update to PostgreSQL 8.0.5), mysql (update to MySQL 4.1.16), arts (don't crash if kdelibs is not installed).

Fedora Core 3 updates: perl (bug fix), caching-nameserver, system-config-bind (bug fixes), system-config-netboot (bug fixes).

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Mandriva update to digikam

This update fixes flaws in the printing functionality of DigiKam in Mandriva 2006.

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Slackware updates

Slackware now has gcc-3.4.5 packages available, according to the slackware-current changelog.

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Distribution reviews

Review: Tao Live CD (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews the Tao Live CD. "Tao and I got off to a good start. As it happened, the first day I saw Tao on DistroWatch one of my instructors at university expected us to bring in a SUSE live CD for our GNU/Linux course. I brought in the requisite SUSE CD, but I downloaded and used a Tao live CD instead. My fellow students started to complain about SUSE when I was already at the desktop and they were still only halfway through the loading screen."

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Linspire Review: Part Four (Lockergnome)

Lockergnome finishes a four part review of Linspire. "For my money, this OS has saved me both time and headaches in many regards. While it needs to look at some of the points mentioned above, I believe for the most part it is doing good things as its people work to bring Linux to the masses. Most important, doing so in a real world environment - not one designed for hobbyist geeks."

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