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What is UserLinux?

Bruce Perens posted an early draft of the UserLinux Manifesto late last year. Since then UserLinux has generated considerable press coverage, much of it laced with a profound misunderstanding of what this not yet released distribution is all about. (The first beta release is due out September 1.) So, let's take a look at what UserLinux is, and what it isn't. See also Brock Frazier's definition of UserLinux from his post to the UserLinux mailing list.

UserLinux is not a fork of Debian, it's a Custom Debian Distribution aimed at the business market. UserLinux is currently a subset of Debian Sarge. All packages are taken from main, none from non-free, and where Debian provides a choice of about 9000 packages, UserLinux streamlines that down to one web browser, one mail transfer agent, one desktop, and so on, without a bewildering array of choices. There are currently three different flavors of UserLinux; the enterprise server, the enterprise desktop, and the SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) edition. Each one defines a subset of Debian Sarge packages that will create a simple system tailored to the desired task.

Most experienced Linux users are used to having a wide array of competing packages to chose from, but for most businesses such choice is often confusing and it adds to maintenance costs and security risks. UserLinux chooses packages based on stability, usability, licensing, compatibility and adherence to open standards, to create a distribution that is simple, stable and easy to maintain.

Since UserLinux is Debian Sarge, any sysadmin with some knowledge of Debian will be able to add additional packages or modify the package list, if desired. A business with a skilled Debian sysadmin in-house will be able to download and use UserLinux without any support contracts or licensing fees. Many businesses will not have a knowledgeable sysadmin in-house, and will instead contract with a UserLinux vendor for installation and support. If the customer is knowledgeable enough to have a preference for some package not included the default UserLinux install, they are free to negotiate a modified package list with their vendor. Most customers should find the default UserLinux install to be adequate for their needs.

Will it sell? Only time will tell for sure. Vnunet says: the big companies aren't getting in line to offer support for UserLinux. True enough, for now. What big customer wants to request a pre-beta OS? Bruce Perens wasn't fazed by the article, and for good reason.

The first stable UserLinux release will follow closely on the heels of Debian's Sarge release. After that, who knows.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for August 17, 2004 is out. This week's topics include an offer of 24x7 support for Debian GNU/Linux with HP Extensions from Hewlett-Packard, where to find online changelog files, plus several Sarge release topics including a Sarge security checkup, open season on RC bugs leads to 0-day NMUs, best practice QA uploads, synchronizing Skolelinux with Sarge, and more.

John Goerzen provides a brief SPI update, which includes the news that Bdale Garbee and Branden Robinson were elected to a 3-year term on the SPI Board and the following officers have been selected by the board: President, John Goerzen; Vice President, Benjamin Mako Hill; Treasurer, Jimmy Kaplowitz; and Secretary, David Graham.

Steve Langasek reports on the status of the libtiff transition. "Now that the gcc blockage has been addressed, it's possible to get a clearer look at what's needed to complete the libtiff transition for sarge. The answer is: quite a lot, really. What follows is a summary of the packages we know to be involved in this transition."

Another release task is sorting out sid updates that need to be in Sarge. All package maintainers should ensure that any bugs that have been fixed in sid are also fixed in Sarge.

Debian Sarge Bug-Squashing Week runs August 16 - 22. Help squash those release-critical bugs if you can.

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Fedora

Issue #15 of the Fedora News Updates is out. This edition covers the announced end-of-life for Fedora Core 1, many new updates in the Docs project, and plenty of talk about porting Fedora to other platforms - Intel IXP2400, SGI's Altix (ia64), and even Alpha. There is also some developer talk about updating current releases, as well as developing test suites for Fedora, and more.

Fedora Core updates:

• desktop-file-utils: fixes the issue described in Bugzilla #90724 (FC1)
• ghostscript: provides shared libraries. Ghostscript was then remade because the hpijs packages had the wrong release number (FC1)
• system-config-date has been rebuilt for FC2.

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Mandrakelinux Community Newsletter -- Issue # 94

The Mandrakelinux Community Newsletter for August 16, 2004 is out. This edition covers the release of Mandrakelinux 10.1 Beta1 and other topics.

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New Distributions

clive - Conectiva Live

Conectiva has announced (click below) the first beta release of Conectiva Linux Live CD, based on CL 10. It comes in two flavors, KDE and GNOME.

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Minor distribution updates

distccKNOPPIX

distccKNOPPIX has released v0.1.0 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: distccKNOPPIX now contains gcc versions 2.95, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4. There are now four different downloads depending on which gcc version you wish as default. (although all gcc versions are on each ISO) The distcc version has been updated to 2.16. You can now pass boot options to the kernel to specify which gcc you wish as your default. You can also change the gcc version at the command line with update-alternatives --config gcc. You can also run from hard drive or RAM using the "toram" or "tohd" boot options. Smarter detection of the node's IP address was added as well."

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GeeXboX

GeeXboX has released v0.98 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release switches MPlayer to 1.0pre5, has better WiFi support and drivers for RT2400 and ACX100 chipsets, adds control through joysticks, support for SPDIF output, software decoding of DTS audio streams, a chapter selector for DVDs and Matroska files, fixes the TV-Out problem with nVidia cards, and adds support for external USB SmartMedia and CompactFlash card readers."

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MoviX

MoviX has released eMoviX 0.9.0rc1 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Most 0.9.0pre1 bugs have been fixed. Many remotes have been imported from MoviX, and all text handling (subtitles and filenames) is now based on utf8. TrueType fonts are now used in the MPlayer menu, and translations in several languages have been imported from MoviX."

MoviX2 v0.3.1rc2 is also available. "Changes: This release includes the ability to adjust the size of the GUI fonts, NIC selection when more than one NIC is detected, improved PCMCIA support, and a few minor bugfixes."

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Distribution reviews

Install Slackware Linux 10.0 (LinuxIT)

LinuxIT.br has step-by-step instructions (in Portuguese) for installing Slackware 10.0. (Thanks to William da Rocha)

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