Distributions

News and Editorials

Distributors and application configuration

The competing Linux desktop projects have been a favorite source of flamewars for years. Criticism of Red Hat, the largest Linux distributor has also been good for large amounts of inflammatory content. So it's not surprising that those who like to argue have gotten even more mileage than usual out of the combination of the two topics.

The problem? Red Hat, it seems, has gone out of its way to configure the GNOME and KDE environments in its "null" beta to look (and act) alike. Red Hat's reasoning is fairly straightforward: they want to improve their desktop by minimizing incompatibilities and making use of the best of what each desktop environment has to offer. Critics complain that features have been configured out, the default behavior of the desktop has been changed, and that desktop "branding" suffers as a result of the configuration changes and mixing of applications.

The problem with these complaints, of course, is that both projects have released their desktops as free software. Red Hat may have applied a heavy hand with some of its changes, but the software involved was released under a license which allows far worse. When you make software free, you explicitly give up a great deal of control over what others can do with that software. Microsoft is able to dictate the appearance of its desktop to resellers; GNOME and KDE have given up that power.

The fact that the software is free means that any distributor can make whatever changes it wants in order to provide (what it sees as) the best desktop for its customers. Red Hat's exercise of this right is a good thing, even if the resulting desktop is a mess. If enough distributors put effort into improving the desktop they ship, the quality of Linux desktops as a whole can only improve. Any good ideas from Red Hat's work should spread; the rest can be ignored. Red Hat is functioning as part of the development process for both desktops.

And, in general, it is the right and responsibility of Linux distributors to make the changes they see fit (within the licensing requirements) to improve their products. The diversity of distributions is one of the great strengths of Linux. Why would we want to change that?

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Distribution News

Debian Project updates

Debian Project Leader Bdale Garbee has sent out his first Bits from the DPL posting since May; it is mostly concerned with his extensive travels over the summer. The posting skips over some minor events that happened while Bdale was out of town, like the Woody release. So Anthony Towns has sent out a Bits from the RM message to fill in the gap; have a look for "some of the reasons sarge is going to blow you away."

And, as if that weren't enough, Martin Schulze has sent out Bits from the SRM describing where he is going with the Woody release. "The regulations for stable are quite conservative."

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Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter

The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter for September 12 is available. It looks at the second Mandrake Linux 9.0 release candidate, the availability of Mandrake-based systems at Walmart, the business case of the week, and more.

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The YaST2 Package Manager

One of the most anticipated new features in the upcoming SuSE 8.1 release would appear to be the YaST2 package manager. YaST2 is a completely rewritten interface to the (as always, RPM-based) package management system with a number of new features. The interface itself, as seen in the screen shots looks nice. The folks at SuSE seem to have put some serious thought into making package management easier.

One new capability is "taboo packages," the ability to block certain packages from ever being installed on a system. If a user wants, for example, to keep that other desktop (for whatever definition of "other") off of a system, making it taboo will keep it from ever being installed. Without this capability, it is easy to find that library packages slip in via dependencies even if they had been originally excluded.

Dependency handling in general appears (from the screenshots) to have received a fair amount of thought. Dependency problems can turn system management into an unpleasant task, especially when complicated conflict scenarios arise. YaST2 appears to have the ability to display conflict problems and to allow users to resolve them as they best see fit - including that all important "I know what I'm doing, just do it" option.

YaST2 has not been made available separately, so it will be necessary to wait for the 8.1 distribution to try it out. That release looks on track to happen before the end of September in Europe; those of us on the western side of the Atlantic will likely have to wait a little longer.

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New Distributions

Warewulf 1.0 released

Warewulf 1.0 has been released. "Warewulf is a unique Linux distribution for cluster nodes. It facilitates a central administration model for all nodes (residing on the master) and includes tools needed to build configuration files, monitor, and control the nodes."

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Minor distribution updates

CRUX 0.9.4

CRUX 0.9.4 has been released. This release transitions the distribution to gcc 3.2; see the changelog for the full list of updated packages.

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Gentoo Linux 1.4 RC 1

The first release candidate for Gentoo Linux 1.4 has been announced. "The Gentoo Linux 1.4 release candidate 1 is gcc 3.2-based, supporting optimizations for Pentium III, Pentium 4, Athlon (Classic through XP,) K6 (Classic through K6-3,) PowerPC G3 and PowerPC G4 with AltiVec. Also included is a new 2.4.19-based high-peformance kernel with IBM EVMS (enterprise volume management) support, countless enhancements to Portage and a new "live" bootable CD that boots directly into a runtime version of Gentoo Linux 1.4_rc1."

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Probatus Spectra Linux 1.2 released

Probatus Technologies has announced the release of version 1.2 of its "Probatus Spectra" distribution. Features of this distribution include "uDevix" and "uOffix" ("selected state-of-the-art commercial packages") and "uDoctrix," "a fully indexed knowledge base of essential Linux documentation in a transparently compressed CD-ROM format."

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Distribution reviews

Xandros Beta 3 Preview (OSnews)

OSnews reviews the third Xandros beta. "Installation Procedure This is a desktop OS, meant to be used by both Windows individual users and Windows-based corporations. The hard core geek Linux user is not what Xandros is aiming for. What I have seen so far from this beta 3b, is that this is meant to be an industrial design, carefully crafted towards people who would want to upgrade from Windows98/ME to Linux. Comparing this distro to Lycoris Build-50 beta or the latest Red Hat Null beta, well, it does not look as sexy or good-looking."

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