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DistributionsNews and Editorials Source Based Distributions, Part 1 [This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar] One of the great advantages of open source software is the availability of its source code. This, combined with free compilers and interpreters, gives us a relatively painless way to compile open source applications into executable binary files, nicely tailored to our hardware. The idea has caught on and we have seen an emergence of several source-based Linux distributions over the last few years. Indications are that they are becoming increasingly popular, especially among computer aficionados and home users.What makes one decide to use a source-based distribution, such as Gentoo or Sorcerer, over a more traditional binary distribution, such as Red Hat or Mandrake? These are the often cited advantages: 1. Speed. When you compile an application specifically for your hardware and with correct compiler flags, it should execute faster than an application that was compiled with more generic compiler flags to cover wide range of processor architectures. In the cases of large programs, e.g. KDE or OpenOffice, the increase in speed will be noticeable. 2. The freshness factor. The world of Linux is full of great software, and new releases are announced daily. If you use a binary distribution, you have to wait until binary packages for your distribution become available, which can take months. There is no such delay with source-based distributions - in most cases you will be able to run the latest version with all the great features within days of its release. 3. Painless software installation. Most source-based distributions provide a sophisticated infrastructure to download, configure, compile and install software (and its dependencies) with one simple command. In majority of cases this works surprisingly well. Have your heard people complaining how hard it is to install software on Linux? That's because they have never tried a source distribution. 4. No software restrictions. Source distributions have learned the art of by-passing restrictions imposed by vendors of useful, but proprietary software (such as the NVidia video drivers) or software illegal in certain countries (such as libdvdcss library for watching encrypted DVDs). Since they don't supply the actual software, only scripts that fetch the packages from the maintainers' web sites, they are not subjected to those restrictions. Most binary distributions are reluctant to include such software. Before you decide that a source distribution is perfect for your needs, consider some of the disadvantages. 1. Long and tedious installation. Getting your machine from empty hard disk into a full graphical environment with all the latest applications will more than likely take several days, even with a broadband connection and a fast processor. With a binary distribution, the same can be achieved within an hour after inserting the installation CD. 2. High maintenance level. Because of continuous and never-ending software upgrades, things will break. An innocent looking new library version can cause havoc on your system, due to new bugs or incompatibilities with existing libraries. It can be frustrating to work on a system which regularly lets you down. 3. Stability issues. Source distributions are notoriously reluctant to declare their releases "stable" and many of them seem perpetually stuck in a "beta" or "release candidate" state. As such, they are not suitable for production servers and their use is generally limited to workstations. 4. Fast Internet connection. While broadband is not a requirement, very few people will have the patience to maintain a continuously evolving source distribution over a slow, dial-up connection. There are four major and well-established source-based distributions: Gentoo Linux, Linux From Scratch, ROCK Linux and the Sorcerer group (which includes Sorcerer, Lunar Linux and Source Mage GNU/Linux). We will look at these in more detail in an upcoming issue of LWN.
Distribution News Debian GNU/Linux The April 1 edition of the Debian Weekly News is out. It looks at the Project Leader election, running Sid on a laptop, the Debian Desktop User's Guide, improvements in the new maintainer process ("it should now be possible to join the project within three days"), the possibility that Linux could be illegal to sell to minors in Germany, and quite a few other topics.Here are the results from the 2003 Debian Project Leader election. The winner is Martin Michlmayr, who beat Moshe Zadka, Branden Robinson and (present Project Leader) Bdale Garbee for the post. An announcement has gone out regarding Alioth, a SourceForge installation dedicated to the Debian Project. It's available to projects that are part of Debian itself, or which feature heavy involvement by a Debian developer. Martin Michlmayr provides a few Bits from the next DPL, as he prepares for the coming year as DPL. James Troup takes a look at some new sections in the Debian archive.
Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 13 As you read through this week's edition of the Gentoo Weekly News, it might be useful to remember that this is April 1st, 2003 edition.
The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7 Red Hat has sent out notification that versions 6.2 and 7 of Red Hat Linux have reached the end of their support periods. There will be no more updates (for security or other problems) for these distributions. "If you are looking for a Red Hat Linux distribution that has longer maintenance periods, check out Red Hat Enterprise Linux which offers lifecycles of 3+ years."
ROCK Linux approaches version 2.0 ROCK Linux is approaching it's version 2.0 release, currently planned for April or May. Prebuilt ISO images labeled 2.0-alpha of dRock, the desktop target for Rock, are now available.
Now available: OpenPKG in a box! The OpenPKG project announced the commercial availability of version 1.2 of its OpenPKG software product.
Trustix Secure Linux Trustix has released two bug fix advisories. A missing rmail script has been added to postfix and Fusion MPT device support has been added to the kernel.
New Distributions PlumpOS Released PlumpOS is the successor to Clump/OS, a well-known openMosix-based clustering system. It seems that Peter Willis started out to port Clump/OS, with the assistance of its author Jean-David Marrow. Along the way, PlumpOS turned into a complete rewrite.
Products from eQ France eQ France has some interesting products, starting with Linux/Epia, possibly one of the fastest Linux distributions in the world. Linux/Epia is installed on Q Rey computers, and will be used in some upcoming PDA products.
Minor distribution updates Astaro Security Linux Astaro Security Linux has released v4.002 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: This Up2Date fixes an SMTP Proxy problem with the email server from Microsoft or Lotus. It also fixes the Up2Date over HA procedure."
College Linux College Linux has released v2.1. This is the initial freshmeat announcement.
KNOPPIX KNOPPIX has released v3.2-2003-03-28 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Software updates and fixes."
MoviX2 MoviX2 has released v0.3.0pre2 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release upgrades MPlayer to 0.90rc3, adds back-complete OSS support and *exp* support for all USB devices to the kernel. The HW config files have been rearranged, all HD parts are now mounted by default, and all known filesystems are probed. The movix.pl script has been updated with VOP options, and a TV boot label. The OSS modules have been restored because of problems with the ALSA ones, and a few binaries, such as pump and matroxset have been added from MoviX. NVidia support has also been restored."
NPACI Rocks Cluster NPACI Rocks Cluster has released v2.3.2 with a revised BSD style License.
PXES Linux Thin Client PXES Linux Thin Client has released v0.5.1-35 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This can be taken as a 0.5.2 pre-release. Some important changes were introduced, mainly the ability to select Xfree86 3.3.6 or Xfree86 4.3.0, depending on your needs. Creating "multi session" images containing more than one cliet session code is possible. The session used can be decided at run time. Look and feel have been improved as well. This is perhaps the last step towards the "universal image" fitting almost all clients."
RxLinux RxLinux has released v1.3.1 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: Some crucial libraries missing in version 1.3.0 have been added. Libraries not used by the base operating system have been bundled in a separate package that will be deployed under /usr/lib as needed. busybox has replaced most of the standard Unix commands."
Server optimized Linux Server optimized Linux has released a desktop branch at v0.2. "Changes: This version includes GNOME 1.4 and 2.2, KDE 3.1 with multimedia extensions, tons of KDE 3.1 applications, OpenOffice 1.0.2, MP3 encoders, PalmPilot utilities, the ImageMagick graphic tools, the Gaim AOL/ICQ/MSN client, Licq, Gimp 1.3.13, TeTeX, and Mozilla 1.3."
Distribution reviews Red Hat Linux 9 Technical Changes Guru Labs provides a technical review of Red Hat Linux 9. For all those who asked for something more technical, this is it. "There were many changes between RHL7.3 and 8.0, for example, the use of root=LABEL=/ in the /boot/grub/grub.conf file, the replacement of Xconfigurator with the redhat-config-xfree86 program, and the new dhclient DHCP client daemon that skips trying to bring up interfaces that have no link. There are not nearly as many behavioral changes from RHL8.0 to RHL9, yet the ones that exist are significant." (Thanks to Greg Bailey)
Personal Review of Mandrake 9.1 (OSNews) A Windows user tries to download and install Mandrake Linux 9.1 in this OSNews article. "Hardware problems easily must be one of the most annoying and difficult things to work with in Linux. How do I get my Terminal Adapter and Bluetooth working? Looking at the GUI there is nothing that helps me here and browsing through the help I can't find anything helpful either. Of course, I could just open up a terminal window and type some clever phrases into it and I'm sure it would work, but that relies on two things, me knowing what to type and me knowing what's wrong. Neither of which I do know of course."
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