Distributions

News and Editorials

Caldera International becomes The SCO Group

Earlier this week Erik Ratcliffe sent LWN a note, saying only to check out the Caldera International website. We did, and found the familiar Caldera logo gone, and a new SCO logo in its place. Caldera International is now, or will be after shareholder approval, The SCO Group. The change reflects where the company's money is made, explains this News.com article. Not in its Linux products, but in the proprietary Unix technology acquired from SCO 2000. A complete rebranding such as this can be expensive, but the company obviously feels that the SCO products will sell better, under their former names. So, SCO Unixware, briefly called Caldera OpenUnix, will once again be SCO Unixware.

What does this mean for Caldera OpenUnix? Well, it won't be called that anymore. The latest distribution, about to enter beta testing, is called SCO Linux 4.0 powered by UnitedLinux. Much of what was once OpenLinux will remain, but elements are changing. Exactly what and how much remain to be seen, but these changes will have less to do with the name change, and are very dependent on the UnitedLinux product. For example, SuSE's YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) program will be integrated with Caldera technology for the UnitedLinux (and SCO) installation and configuration program.

There will be a closed beta of SCO Linux (limited to a small number of testers) followed by an open beta. In this post to the Caldera user's group SCO's John Boland explains the process and how to get registered.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

Here is the Debian Weekly News for August 27, 2002. Topics include the Debian constitution, OpenLDAP, GCC 3.2, Python 2.2, Gnome 2, Wordlists, and the debian-installer.

We also have an update on the debian-installer status.

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Mandrake Linux

The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter for August 22, 2002 is now available. This edition contains information on the Beta 3 release; a summer special at MandrakeStore; Mandrake's LSB certification; Star Trek Actor Wil Wheaton recommends Mandrake; and much more.

Beta 4 of the upcoming Mandrake Linux 9.0 is available. Changes and improvements based on previous reports include:
* Drakconf: memory leak has been fixed. Additionally, Drakconf offers an improved look and feel.
* 'tinyfirewall' is now active.
* RpmDrake: Many improvements have been made including the ability to search package descriptions and the availability of 'noclearcache' option.
New software includes OpenOffice 1.0.1.

Mandrake has a new French language website for the discussion of Linux-Mandrake at Mandrakefr.org.

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Red Hat Linux

IBM developerWorks has a tutorial on Tuning Red Hat for maximum performance. Free registration is required.

Here's a Linux Journal how-to on getting Red Hat 7.3 running on a Compaq Presario 711 laptop computer. "Linux has made great progress on desktop systems. Installing a modern operating system like RH 7.3 on a desktop is almost easy enough for Aunt Minnie, as Jerry Pournelle likes to call the everyday computer user. But laptop installs are a different matter. The hardware on laptops is less generic than what's on the desktop, but with the move to ATX-style motherboards with integrated peripherals, this has become less of a problem."

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New Distributions

DOSSLACK

DOSSLACK is a bootable FreeDOS disk image which has been designed to boot into a Slackware 8.1 install. It can boot any of the kernels in the Slackware 8.1 CD's kernels/ directory. It supports most common ATAPI (IDE interface) CD-ROM drives. The Slackware 8.1 ISO image used a "no-emulation" boot image. Most recent BIOS's are capable of booting that CD, but many older (and some not-so-old) systems cannot. So if you have had problems installing Slackware 8.1, DOSSLACK may be the answer.

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Minor distribution updates

Arch Linux

Arch Linux has released 2.1 of the package manager Pacman.

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Cool Linux CD

Cool Linux CD has released v1.33. This version adds CDRW software, VoIP software, and the PSI Jabber client. There are also some changes to the bootup procedure.

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DMZS-Biatchux Bootable CD Distro turns to FIRE

The distribution formerly known as the DMZS-Biatchux Bootable CD Distro has changed its name to FIRE. The first release since the name change is FIRElite release v0.2b. (Thanks to JR Gimblet)

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NSA Security Enhanced Linux

NSA Security Enhanced Linux has released v2002082308 with minor feature enhancements, including kernel updates to 2.4.19 and 2.5.31.

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ROOT Linux

ROOT Linux has released v1.3 with major feature enhancements. "This release features big improvements to the installer, support for devfs and PAM, the latest versions of KDE and GNOME (3.0.3 and 2.0.1), GCC 3.2, and PureFTPd as the default FTP daemon. The 'agetty' program has been replaced with the smaller 'mingetty'. Non-free packages has been moved to a 'nonfree' folder."

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SmoothWall

SmoothWall has released Smoothwall GPL 2.0 beta1 (metro).

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TA-Linux

TA-Linux has released TA-Linux 0.2.0-Beta2 (i386) with minor feature enhancements.

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Topologilinux

TopologiLinux has released v1.0 with lots of shiny new packages.

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<tt>ttylinux</tt>

ttylinux has released v2.4 with minor bugfixes. including updating isdn4k-utils, modutils, and util-linux to their latest versions. The filesystem was recreated with less inodes to make some extra space.

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uClinux

uClinux has released v 2.4.19-uc0 with major feature enhancements, including an upgrade from 2.4.17 to 2.4.19.

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VectorLinux

VectorLinux has released 2.5 (SOHO). The SOHO branch containes preinstalled productivity software such as KDE 3.x, OpenOffice 1.0, and several other productivity applications. The installation program does not ask which packages should be selected, and instead simply installs its preselected set of software.

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Webfish Linux

Webfish Linux has released 1.2 (Fishwall) with minor feature enhancements.

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xbox-linux

xbox-linux has released v0.2 with major feature enhancements, including Framebuffer support..

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