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News and Editorials

A kernel for Dapper and Etch

This week there were discussions on both the Ubuntu-devel and Debian-kernel mailing lists about using the 2.6.16 kernel for Dapper and Etch respectively. Here are pointers to the thread on Ubuntu-devel and the thread on Debian-kernel.

Both of these distributions began their development prior to the 2.6.16 release, so both are based on slightly older kernels. Now, however, the kernel developers are targeting the 2.6.16 kernel for stabilizing and long term maintenance. If these distributions stick with 2.6.15 (or older), their kernel maintainers will end up backporting security and bug fixes for some time (five years for Dapper and possibly longer for Etch).

So why not just go with 2.6.16? Well, alert LWN readers may remember that 2.6.16 introduced some API changes; changes that will ripple through the rest of the system and cause other things to break. It's not a step to be taken lightly, and with only three weeks until the planned Dapper release it's far too late to make such a sweeping change. The Etch release is still a good six months out, so it's much more likely that 2.6.16 will be used for Etch.

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New Releases

SUSE Linux 10.1 is Done

SUSE Linux 10.1 has been declared final. At this writing the final version was not available on the mirrors, but should be by the time you read this. "Thanks a lot for all your testing, bug reporting, comments and encouragement through this especially long beta and release phase of SUSE Linux 10.1. I've heard early quite some critizisms but also in the end a lot of people saying that 10.1 is now a great release - and I would like to thank you for your part in making it great!"

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Ubuntu Flight 7

Flight 7, the latest alpha of Dapper Drake, is now available in Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu flavors. Click below for a look at some known problems and links to mirrors.

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Distribution News

Edubuntu Council Elected

The Edubuntu Council (EC) was officially appointed. Click below for the announcement. The EC will run similarly to the Ubuntu Community Council with five elected members. "The EC will therefore facilitate decisions on issues relating to the Edubuntu community, as well as deciding on new Edubuntu members - who will also automatically be granted an Ubuntu member status when becoming an Edubuntu member (Note that 3 quorum council votes are required for approval as a member)."

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Fedora Project Board meeting summary

A summary of the May 2 meeting of the Fedora Board have been posted. "As always, the archives of fedora-advisory-board are fully public. In addition, we're working on getting a read-only copy of that list set up, so that people don't have to poll the archives to see what's going on."

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Complete Fedora board named

Minutes from recent meetings of the Fedora Board have mentioned a "mystery member" who had not yet completed the necessary bureaucratic rituals at his place of employment. This shadowy figure has been unmasked at last: it is Matt Domsch, from Dell. The complete board is thus Max Spevack (chair), Jeremy Katz, Bill Nottingham, Elliot Lee, Christopher Blizzard, Rahul Sundaram (all from Red Hat), Seth Vidal, Paul W. Frields, Rex Dieter, and Matt Domsch. Minutes from Fedora Board meetings can be found over here.

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Unofficial Fedora FAQ Updated for Fedora Core 5

The Unofficial Fedora FAQ has been updated to include documentation for Fedora Core 5. "This was a HUGE update, which involved re-writing the instructions for almost every question. Now we have working instructions for yum, nVidia cards, ATI cards, NTFS drives, and much, much more."

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Announcing the Fedora Music list

A new mailing list has been announced for the discussion of getting Planet CCRMA into Fedora Extras.

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Trustix will Move Forward

Ajith Vargese Thampi looks at the future of Trustix Secure Linux. "Now its time to leave the past and to make the best of what is available to us, and to develop it to a level what everyone expects of it. Comodo Groupgives its support to making Trustix Secure Linux the most Secure and Stable Linux Operating System. The major support comes from the Community that has stuck through the turbulent times. Thank you Morten Nilsen, Vidar Tyldum, Matthias Subek and All the others who beleive in TSL."

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Debian participates in Google's Summer of Code

Here is Debian's Google Summer of Code announcement. "More than 50 development tasks cover general improvements, quality assurance, releasing and testing the distribution, package management, new applications, security, infrastructure and the improvement of particular packages. For these tasks students will be assigned a Debian developer acting as their mentor."

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Ubuntu Bug Day

This HUG DAY announcement notes: "Three weeks left until release, and counting, Bug Hunting became our favorite sport." But then why limit bug hunting to one day. Help squash Dapper bugs All Day, Bug Day, Hug Day and every day.

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for May 9, 2006 looks at interesting release names for packages, DebCamp in progress in Oaxtepec, Mexico, unified terminology for distribution names, moving irc.debian.org, an Etch release update, tracking forwarded bugs in the BTS, preseeding Debian installations, and several other topics.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 45

The latest edition of the Fedora Weekly News covers the new mail list for package announcements, the Fedora Music list, the Unofficial Fedora FAQ Updated for FC 5, a report from Linuxfest Northwest, The Increasing Importance of Community, Sporting goods retailer now sporting Linux, La-Z-Boy retailer revamps with Linux, and several other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of May 8, 2006 covers new and improved Ada support in Portage, Gnome 2.14 unmasked, and several other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 150

The DistroWatch Weekly for May 8, 2006 is out. "The long delayed SUSE Linux 10.1, which is expected to be released on Thursday, should be the highlight of the week, but FreeBSD 6.1 is also likely to hit the download mirrors within the next day or two. In other news, confirmation of the Debian "etch" December release date target, an introduction to an Ubuntu-based live CD with a collection of genealogy software, and an announcement by a project developing a range of Gentoo-based virtual machines for VMware and Xen. In the interview section, we talk with the two lead developers of Damn Small Linux about their new product - DSL-N. Finally, don't miss the chilling opinion piece by Robert Storey who appeals to all US citizens to fight against the newly proposed COPE legislation."

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Minor distribution updates

Familiar v0.8.4-rc2 released

Familiar, a Linux distribution for handheld devices, has the second release candidate for v0.8.4 available for download. This version improves support for the HP iPAQ h2200, hx4700, and h6300 series of devices and includes other bugfixes.

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RR64 Linux 3.0 RC1

RR64 Linux is a cutting edge live CD for 64 bit systems. It's based on Gentoo and includes the KDE desktop.

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Updates for Fedora Core 5: system-config-printer (new defaults in preparation for CUPS 1.2), ghostscript (update to version 8.15.2), system-config-netboot (bug fixes), bind (bug fixes), xterm (upgrade to version 212), anacron (bug fix), openoffice.org (improved fonts and translations), tzdata (update to upstream 2006f), gkrellm (build for FC5), yum (bug fixes), pango (update to 1.12.2), gnome-power-manager (upgrade to 2.14.2), vte (update to 0.12.1), gdm (bug fixes), gnome-power-manager (update to 2.14.3), hal (bug fix), libtiff (fix a problem with the previous patch), dbus (backport patch), cscope (bug fix), fetchmail (update to 6.3.4), libsepol (bump for FC5), selinux-policy (bump for FC5), isdn4k-utils (update to CVS-2006-02-13)

Updates for Fedora Core 4: dhcdbd (bug fix), system-config-netboot (bug fixes), xterm (upgrade to version 212), tzdata (update to upstream 2006f)

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Mandriva updates

Updates for Mandriva Linux: cpio (rebuilt with the correct CPPFLAGS), gzip (fix the zgrep wrapper script to pass all available options to grep).

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Slackware updates

The Slackware current change log shows upgrades to firefox, smartmontools, libpng, rsync, tcl, tk, mod_ssl, gnupg, apache, gmp, mysql and cdrdao, plus some patching and rebuilding in the x11 packages.

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Trustix updates

Trustix Secure Linux has various bug fixes available in iptables and pkgconfig for TSL versions 2.2 and 3.0.

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Edubuntu in Mexican Grade School Computer Lab

Here's an article about a new computer lab in the Manuel Dublan School in Nuevo Casas Grandes in the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. The computers run Edubuntu and LSTP. "LTSP is a dream come true in an educational environment. Now all the computers are running off of one server. When one of the students does something crazy to make their computer crash, we just reset and we are good to go. The students are free to use one computer during one class, and another computer during recess or the next class time, and still have access to their personal documents and desktop settings." (Thanks to James Call)

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Distribution reviews

Review: Trinity Rescue Kit (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Trinity Rescue Kit. "Anyone who dual-boots, runs, or manages a heterogeneous network with Windows and Linux workstations must occasionally contend with offline or dead systems. Of course, the open source world has plenty of good tools to help get these boxes back on track, or at least recover valuable data. Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) is a small yet powerful bootable Linux distribution that rescues, repairs, resets passwords, and clones dead Linux and Windows installations."

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My desktop OS: PCLinuxOS 0.92 (NewsForge)

NewsForge has an article from a PCLinuxOS fan. "The current version 0.92, released last November, comes with KDE 3.4.3 (with KOffice 1.4.2), X.org 6.9cvs, Linux kernel 2.6.12, and a host of applications. In addition to the normal download, developer Texstar offers ISOs fine-tuned for Nvidia and ATI chips."

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Review: Frugalware Linux (Linux.com)

Linux.com has a short review of Frugalware version 0.4. "Frugalware offers several installation options. The first is a network install based off a small, bootable ISO (x64 edition). All the program files you select are installed via Judd Vinet's pacman package manager and the Internet. The second installation option is to download one or both of the CD ISOs (not available for x64). You only need the first, but the second provides extra software. The third option is the DVD ISO (x64 edition), which is the route I took. It's a hefty download, but it comes jam-packed with software. If you want to help out a bit with server load, check out some of the torrents available."

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