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News and Editorials

On SuSE's Dramatic Rise and Mandrake's Uninspiring Lethargy

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

These are good times for Linux. The frequency of news releases about Linux adoption in governments, educational institutions and private companies has increased spectacularly since the beginning of this year and hardly a day goes by without a success story. Relax and smile, Linux is winning.

Two weeks ago, we covered SuSE's achievement as a major force behind Munich's decision to switch 14,000 computer systems from Windows to Linux. By mentioning SuSE again, we are breaking the unspoken rule of providing balanced coverage of various Linux distributions; yet SuSE has been in the media so often recently, that it is hard to refuse its courting. If for no other reason than for the fact that SuSE is -- wait for this -- recruiting new employees.

Yes, in these times of layoffs and downsizing a Linux company is seeking new personnel. Unbelievable, perhaps, but true, at least according to this announcement, which appeared on the main page of SuSE's German language web site earlier this week. Even better, most of these openings are technical positions for software engineers and project managers. Refreshing news indeed.

SuSE appears to be the main driving force behind the positive Linux sentiment. At first, it was the Munich deal which caught media attention, but the good news didn't end there. An internal memo from Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, warning about the Linux challenge, was widely publicized around the world. The sudden rise in stock prices of several Linux companies, followed by a second major price cut of Microsoft products in as many weeks were taken as a further indication of the Linux revolution finally happening. SuSE's subsequent announcement about the release of its new, enterprise-level product called SuSE Linux Desktop was seen as yet another proof that Linux is now a serious competitor -- not only on servers, but on desktops too.

The immaculate timing of all these events was further complemented by a report in ITNews:

Expect a new media frenzy as soon as one of those Fortune 100 companies makes the correct decision.

In sharp contrast to SuSE's continuous presence in the media, things have been extremely quiet across the border in Paris, the headquarters of MandrakeSoft. The company was in the headlines in January this year when it filed for protection from creditors and again some three months later, when it released Mandrake Linux 9.1. "Good product", was the general consensus shared by most reviewers. But once the new release hysteria died off, so did Mandrake's appearance in news feeds. If anything, news wasn't good: "Wal-Mart replaces Mandrake PCs with SuSE PCs", claimed OSNews last week, while PCLinuxOnline reported earlier that "Deno is about to leave MandrakeSoft". This is a major blow for Mandrake as Denis Havlik was the initiator of the financially successful MandrakeClub subscription service and the sole maintainer of Mandrake's web sites for several months.

Now, why is it that one Linux company is on a major success path, while the other appears to be barely limping? Why is it that SuSE's sales force has managed to sign up Munich and Debeka, while Mandrake's marketing department has nothing exciting to report? If Munich can switch to Linux, why not Marseilles? Of course it can. But for that to happen, the Mandrake sales team has to go out and demonstrate the viability of its products. There has never been a better time -- Linux sentiment is at its highest since late nineties, the OS has matured and there are success stories to show. Mandrake has to conceal its pride, learn from SuSE and get customers. If they don't, they might wake up one day and find out that Marseilles is indeed running Linux. Unfortunately for them, not Mandrake Linux.

Comments (8 posted)

Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for June 10, 2003 is available. Topics include Debian X Strike Force Subversion Repository; Freedesktop Menu System; Status of Sarge Release Issues; Version Control for Packages File; Problems Linking to OpenSSL; Debian's 10th Birthday; Recommendations for Knoppix DVD; a Call For Votes; and much more.

Registration for Debconf 3 and Debcamp will close June 16. "People who want to participate in deb{conf,camp} but prefer not to register by the 16th of june are welcome anyway, but should not expect accommodation, food, tshirts, books, nametags, printed conference materials, cars or personal conference hostesses."

Linmagau has an article on Compiling Kernels The Debian Way, with a step by step walk through the process of getting kernel source, configuring, compiling and building a custom kernel package that can be installed using dpkg. (Found on DebianPlanet)

DebianPlanet reports that significant progress has been made using the GNU C library as a base instead of FreeBSD's libc. The result has been a great improvement in portability.

Comments (4 posted)

Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 23

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for June 9, 2003 is available, with a look at the Gentoo platform on MacOS X; Hardened Gentoo; and more.

Full Story (comments: none)

Slackware Linux

Slackware Linux reports numerous changes to slackware-current. As usual the changelog has all the details. Perl has been recomplied for i486/i686 arch; python has been upgraded; DBI and DBD-mysql modules were added by popular request; lots of other upgrades to tcl, gimp, lprng and other packages.

Footnotes, the site for Gnome Desktop News has declared Dropline GNOME 2.2.3 fit for society. This version of Slackware's GNOME desktop includes the very latest GNOME 2.2-series software, fully i686-optimized.

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SOT Linux 2003 and SOT Office 2003 released

SOT has announced the release of SOT Linux 2003 and SOT Office 2003. "SOT's 2003 releases mark a shift in the company's philosophy towards a purely open source platform. All proprietary software in earlier SOT Linux releases has been replaced in the new version with open source equivalents."

Full Story (comments: none)

New Distributions

Aurox Linux

Aurox Linux is an international distribution, hailing from Poland. Aurox CDs are published with "Aurox Linux" magazine available in several language versions, including Polish, Czech, German, French and Spanish, in 9 countries of Europe. Aurox Linux is based on Red Hat Linux and Aurox Linux 9.0 (based on RHL 9) is the most recent offering.

Comments (1 posted)

CDLinux

CDLinux is a CD based mini Linux distribution, which runs from a CDROM. It aims to be an administration/rescue tool for Eastern Asian (CJK) users. CDlinux is also highly user configureable, and supports a wide range of hardware (PCMCIA/SCSI/USB). Version 0.4.3 was released June 10, 2003.

Does the name CDLinux sound familiar? An old project called CDLinux was aimed at creating a Chinese Debian. That project has not been active in over two years.

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System-Down::Rescue

System-Down::Rescue is a free downloadable live distribution. It is designed to recover damaged file-systems, copying the data around other physical discs or networks, or burning them on a CD-ROM using cdrecord. It features a working hardware detection system. Version 1.0.0pre4 was released June 9, 2003.

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Minor distribution updates

Bonzai Linux

Bonzai Linux has released version 1.7. More information is available in this DebianPlanet article.

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Coyote Linux

Coyote Linux has released v2.0.0-pre4 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release implements the 2.4.20 kernel, iptables, a caching DNS proxy, and a full Web administrator. A switch to the uClibc core system libraries has allowed the entire distribution to be loaded onto a 1.44Mb format floppy with room to spare."

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Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux has released v0.3.10 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release updates Naim (AOL, ICQ, and IRC client) and Links-Hacked (an enhanced version of gLinks). Links-Hacked now has tabs. Also new is VNCviewer, the client for Virtual Network Computing."

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freevix

freevix has released v0.7 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The entire system was recompiled aginst uClibc. A full copy of Perl, an OpenSSH server/client, crond, and pure-ftpd were added. The startup script environment was improved, and other minor changes were made."

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KNOPPIX

KNOPPIX has released v3.2-2003-06-06 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Software updates, a new version of loop-aes, and hardware detection updates. apmd is now always started."

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LoopLinux

LoopLinux has released v3.0 with code cleanup. "Changes: This release has been updated to work with Slackware 9.0. The software has also been updated."

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openMosix

The openMosix Project has released openMosix kernel patches version 2.4.20-3 and Userspace Tools 0.3.2. "RPMs and Source, plus for the first time, DEBs can be downloaded from the files section of our website. Gentoo ebuilds are also available from the Gentoo mirrors."

Full Story (comments: none)

Quantian 0.3 released

Version 0.3 of Quantian - a scientifically-oriented Debian offshoot - is now available. Quantian is now based on clusterKnoppix (which gives it OpenMosix support) and has even more scientific applications (GRASS, Comedi, gri, etc.).

Full Story (comments: none)

TA-Linux

TA-Linux has released v0.2.0-beta4 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: The packages were updated. An MTA and DHCP support were added. XFree86 was updated to 4.3.0. The collection now contains over 450 packages."

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ThinStation

ThinStation has released v0.92rc2 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Refined Samba support, new "group" configuration files for better handling of large groups of thinclients, a new sv keymap package, and other minor changes."

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Trustix Secure Linux

Trustix Secure Linux has released version 2.0 Beta 3 (Lightning). "The main focus of this release is to get a test of the few packages that did not get fully tested in the previous releases."

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Distribution reviews

Latest Red Hat Delivers Key Apps (TechWeb)

TechWeb reviews Red Hat Linux 9. "I tested some of version 9's feature-rich applications--OpenOffice Productivity Suite, Gimp, Ximian Evolution and Mozilla--and they worked like a charm. OpenOffice provides word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, and is similar to Microsoft Office. In fact, it can open Microsoft Office documents and save its documents in a Microsoft Office format. Gimp, an image-manipulation tool, is similar to Adobe Photoshop. The Ximian Evolution e-mail client lets you read and send e-mail, manage and search various mailboxes, and filter or create different views. Mozilla, an open-source Web browser, is similar to Netscape and lets users surf the Web, access newsgroups, send e-mail and create Web pages."

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