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News and Editorials

Gentoo Seeds Project

One of the things that people like about Gentoo is that it is customizable. You can select the packages you want, in the versions you prefer, compile them with the options you select, and finally arrive at a system that is just the way you like it. What people don't like is that process is time-consuming and it can be difficult to duplicate the process for a number of machines. The comments attached to this article show exactly what LWN readers like and dislike about Gentoo.

The initial announcement for the Gentoo Seeds project came out this week, aimed at taking some of the pain out of Gentoo installs. Gentoo does offer staged installation. A stage 3 install provides pre-compiled packages for a basic installation fairly quickly. The Seeds project just takes that concept a step further.

The Gentoo Seeds Project is "currently exploring ways to quickly 'seed' fully-working copies of Gentoo onto boxes." That includes basic system configuration. Seeds are built using existing Gentoo tools such as catalyst, overlays, layman and custom profiles, so that each seed will provide a well-documented way of installing multiple servers with a similar setup. Different seeds will provide different setups.

The project is still quite young and the first seed under construction is a basic Gentoo LAMP Server edition. Hopefully this will become just one seed of many that people can choose to more easily install the same Gentoo system on multiple boxes.

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New Releases

Fedora Core 6 Test3 released

The third test release for Fedora Core 6 is out, click below for the details. The final FC6 release is scheduled for October 11, so now would be a good time for interested people to test it out and find those last obnoxious bugs.

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Slackware 11.0 rc5

Slackware has released a fifth release candidate for Slackware 11.0. Click below for a look at the change log.

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Ubuntu "Edgy" Knot 3 released

Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Edubuntu Knot 3 is out. This is the third in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Edgy development cycle. "The primary changes from Knot 2 have been finalising of feature goals and bugfixing. The current state of features targetted for Edgy is at https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/edgy/+specs . Common to all variants, we have changed the init system from the venerable sysvinit to upstart which is an event-driven init script system. In addition, all derivatives have new artwork, both for usplash as well as for login managers and default backgrounds. The keyboard layout handling on the console has been changed to use X keymaps."

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Distribution News

Announcement of Dunc-Tank.org

Dunc-Tank.org has announced its first fund-raising experiment: collecting donations to help Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codenamed etch, be released on schedule on the 4th of December, 2006. "Dunc-Tank.org aims to support Debian's efforts to meet its release schedule for etch by financially supporting the volunteers working on managing the release process, allowing them to devote their full attention to that task. The experiment's initial goal is to be able to raise enough funds to pay both release managers enough to work exclusively on the release of etch for a month each, having Steve Langasek available full-time during October and Andreas Barth available full-time during November, with the release expected to follow soon after in the first week of December."

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Debian news

Here's a report on the first Debian internationalization meeting, which took place earlier this month in Extremadura, Spain. "23 people from all over the world, representing various different scope in the Debian internationalisation and localisation effort, as well as representative from related projects participated to this meeting."

The second call for votes has been issued for the general resolution to address the procedures related to handling assets for the project.

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Unofficial Fedora FAQ

The Unofficial Fedora FAQ has been updated. Click below for a list of the most recent changes.

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Ubuntu 6.10 beta freeze imminent

The beta freeze for Ubuntu 6.10 is in effect according to the release schedule. "During this time, uploads should be made only for changes which are critical for the beta release, and must be approved by the release team. As we work to prepare the release, further information about these restrictions may be announced."

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for September 19, 2006 looks at various etch topics, GNOME 2.16 in experimental soon, a report from Come 2 Linux, moving toward DebConf7, the Hurd with WLAN and PCMCIA, and several other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for September 18, 2006 covers some openssl options, portage 2.1.1 released, cleanup of autotools wrappers, and more.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for September 11, 2006 covers Gentoo Council election results, a donation from Cloanto, support dropped for monolithic X, developer of the week Joshua Nichols, and several other topics.

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Ubuntu Weekly News #14

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for September 16, 2006 covers the release of Edgy Eft Knot 3, the passing of Rob Levin of Freenode, announcement of the next development summit for Ubuntu, changes in Edgy, Ubuntu in the news and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 169

The DistroWatch Weekly for September 18, 2006 is out. "It's a Mandriva week, no doubt. With the imminent release of its brand new version 2007, all eyes of the Linux community are now on the French distribution maker whose new product is likely to raise the usability and eye candy bar for desktop Linux distributions significantly. Can Mandriva regain its former glory? We'll find out soon. In other news: the development of the venerable RPM Package Manager is in deep trouble, Terra Soft announces Yellow Dog Linux 5.0, NetBSD continues its round of negative publicity, and a trial edition of Xandros Desktop 4 is now available for free download. In our "Tips and tricks" section we'll let you on some secrets about extracting package lists from various distributions, while the "Statistics" feature looks at the DistroWatch visitor numbers from the Middle East. A couple of site updates follow before the usual database summary concludes this issue."

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Updates for Fedora Core 5: kernel (bug fixes), pinfo (update to 0.6.9), dump (bug fixes), cups (bug fixes), tar (upgrade), nspr (update to 4.6.3), krb5-auth-dialog (bug fix), glibc (bug fixes), vixie-cron (bug fixes), frysk (new upstream version), kdelibs (bug fixes), perl-DBI (upgrade to 1.52), sed (bug fix), system-config-securitylevel (bug fixes), sane-backends (clean up), ORBit2 (bug fix), bridge-utils (bug fix), kdebase (bug fixes), openssh (sync with FC6 version), jessie (bug fix), anacron (bug fixes).

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Mandriva updates

Updates for Mandriva Linux 2006.0: ipsec-tools (update to 0.6.6).

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rPath updates

Updates for rPath Linux 1: conary, conary-build, conary-repository, conary-policy (Conary 1.0.31 maintenance release).

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Trustix updates

Updates for Trustix Secure Linux 2.2 and 3.0: openswan, perl-dbd-mysql, php, php4 (various bug fixes).

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Ubuntu updates

Updates for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS: flashplugin-nonfree_7.0.68~ubuntu1~dapper1, amarok_1.4.3-0ubuntu6~dapper1, openoffice.org 2.0.3-6dapper3, k3b_0.12.17-1ubuntu3~dapper1.

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Miscellaneous Articles

Debian Network Utilities and tools With Examples (DebianHelp)

Debian Help covers Debian network utilities and tools for administrators and users, including tools to check the network related traffic and monitor the network. The article is in two parts. Here is part 1 and part 2.

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Distribution reviews

Going Live With Apodio And Dynebolic (Linux Journal)

Dave Phillips tests the Apodio and Dynebolic live CD audio distributions in a Linux Journal article. "In this entry I'm going to introduce two audio-optimized Linux distributions, Apodio and Dynebolic. Both systems can be run in "live" mode, i.e. you put the distribution disc in your CD drive, you reboot, and voila, you're booted into the system. Basically the live mode runs itself from a RAM disk and the distribution CD. The process is transparent, except for the occasional disc reads. The systems can be installed to a hard-drive, but to keep things simple for myself I've tested them only in live mode."

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Mandriva's new server Linux does virtualization treble (ZDNet)

ZDNet looks at Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0. "Corporate Server 4.0 uses the 2.6.12 Linux kernel and includes MySQL 5.0, PostgreSQL 8.1, Apache 2.2 and Samba 3.0.22. It also features the newest version of Mandriva Pulse, a provisioning ad configuration management tool that can manage both Linux and Windows systems. It is fully compliant with the Linux Standard Base, meaning it's interoperable with other LSB-compliant operating systems."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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