A Look at Conectiva Linux

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

Conectiva, S.A., (conectiva.com.br), a private company located in Curitiba, Brazil, was founded in 1995 by Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo. As was often the case in those days, Red Hat Linux was taken as the base for the new distribution, whose main objective was to bring Linux to the vast numbers of Portuguese and Spanish-speakers in Latin America. Following rapid internationalization of many applications and documentation was the first stable release announced in October 1997 - Conectiva Linux 1.0.

Now if you happen to conclude that Conectiva is just another Red Hat clone with nothing much to offer to the Linux community, then stop right there. Because Conectiva is, in fact, one of the most avid contributors to the world of Free Software and one of the leading innovators in the industry. Examples abound:

1. Marcelo Tosatti, the 19-year old maintainer of the current stable Linux Kernel is in Conectiva's employ. These links provide some interesting information about Marcelo: Marcelo the Wonder Penguin, Interview: Linus's Latest Lieutenant by IBM developerWorks and 2.4 Maintainer Marcelo Tosatti Answers Your Questions by Slashdot.

2. Also on Conectiva's payroll is Alfredo Kojima, the creator of the popular Window Maker window manager. More in this Interview with Alfredo Kojima by Linux in Brazil.

3. While mentioning names, here is another Conectiva employee - Esveraldo Coelho. His original Crystal Icon Theme was released under GPL and later incorporated into KDE. It became so popular that many distributions now choose it as their default KDE theme.

4. Conectiva's best known software utilities are apt-rpm and its graphical front-end called Synaptic, Debian-like utilities for managing software installations with automatic resolution of dependencies. See An RPM port of APT and Is it time to change RPM? Both utilities are released under GPL and incorporated into an increasing number of RPM-based distributions.

Conectiva doesn't appear to be in a good financial shape. While this is hardly unusual as Linux distributions go -- even better-known Linux companies are struggling -- it does cast a shadow of doubt on Conectiva's future. Back in the days of versions 6.0, 7.0 and 8, Conectiva used to push its distribution internationally with some vigor. Besides its native Portuguese, the distribution has always fully supported Spanish and English. But a large portion of the Spanish and English language content on Conectiva's web site is no longer maintained. Even more surprising is the absence of any Spanish or English press releases about last week's release of Conectiva Linux 9. As such, the event was largely unnoticed by most international Linux news sites, and even many Brazilian Linux web sites have barely mentioned the release.

With version 9, Conectiva seems to have placed quantity above quality. The distribution now comes on 4 binary CDs, all of which are required for installation (surely, a strange decision from the inventors of apt-rpm!). While the installation is very straightforward and the desktop as pretty as ever, it seems that some obvious bugs have made it into the stable release (e.g. my tried and tested XF86Config file fails to bring up X Window and OpenOffice crashes every time I attempt to select a font from the drop-down box). The default menus are a hard-to-navigate mess and there is no relation between installed applications and their presence in the menus.

But perhaps the worst of all is the absence of a user community, a forum to ask questions and offer help, a place to share one's joys and frustrations. And no, Conectiva's own mailing lists will not come to the rescue -- the truth is that even there, Conectiva related traffic is far outnumbered by posts dealing with other distributions.

What can Conectiva do? Creating a user community should be the company's first priority. The web site needs plenty of work - documentation, FAQs, user-contributed areas... Forums and properly categorized mailing lists dealing with different issues are a must, tri-lingual ones would be awesome. Then some PR. These measures don't take much time and effort to implement and once they are done, users are likely to return -- to what is probably the world's most underrated Linux distribution.