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A Look at Conectiva Linux 10

Last weekend, Conectiva Linux celebrated its 9th birthday since its humble beginnings in 1995. This is quite an achievement, considering that, as a strong believer in Free Software, the Brazilian company has always given its distribution away for free and released all of its own software, art work and documentation under the GPL. Conectiva Linux 10 was released to the public early in July. How does it compare to other, more widely-used distributions?

Going back in time by about one year, most people agreed that Conectiva Linux 9 was a disappointing distribution, a buggy product which received a full CD's worth of bug fixes within two months after its release. Luckily, the developers have learned from their mistakes and have implemented several measures ensuring better quality control. Firstly, the beta testing period of Conectiva 10 lasted seven months and consisted of two technology previews, two betas, and three release candidates before the product was declared final. A full set of ISO images of each development release was provided for download, together with comprehensive release notes, known issues, and public announcements; again, this was a departure from the past practice of simply maintaining a continuously updated development branch on the distribution's FTP servers. Finally, a public mailing list for beta testers was set up to discuss bugs and user suggestions during the development period. All of these factors have contributed towards the much improved final release of Conectiva 10

Conectiva uses its own graphical installer, a standard program not too dissimilar to most other installers on the market - except for two things. Firstly, the installer has the ability to use a native X server compatible with the system's video chipset, inclusive (unlike Red Hat's Anaconda) the proprietary NVIDIA modules. Secondly, Conectiva's front-end for apt, Synaptic, is fully integrated into the installer. This allows for the package selection to be fine-tuned as Synaptic offers the ability to search for packages and to define sources of installation, while providing means for automatic resolution of dependencies.

The release is highly up-to-date. It includes the Linux kernel 2.6.5, XFree86 4.4.0, KDE 3.2.3, GNOME 2.6 and most other packages were brought up to their latest versions at the time of the release. It is interesting to note that Conectiva is one of the very few distributions that is seemingly unconcerned about the license changes in XFree86 4.4.0 and currently has no plans to switch to an alternative X Window system. Also worthy of note is the fact that the NVIDIA driver is included even in the freely available FTP edition of Conectiva Linux; most other major distributions, such as Mandrakelinux, provide these drivers and other proprietary software in their commercial editions only, not in their freely downloadable editions.

What does Conectiva offer for system administration? Besides the standard KDE Control Center, the distribution also comes with another centralized system administration utility called "Conectiva Control Center". For the most part, this is nothing but a pretty front-end to all the individual KDE Control Center modules, but there are noteworthy additions integrated into the application; these include the Conectiva Personal Firewall and several Webmin modules. In fact, Conectiva's server administration seems to revolve quite heavily around Webmin, a utility missing from all recent releases of Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core. The Conectiva Personal Firewall is a simple graphical front-end for iptables, enabling home users to open certain useful ports, such as the SSH port, ports used by the BitTorrent client and several others. And as a curiosity, Conectiva still ships with Linuxconf (remember Linuxconf?), a system administration tool extremely popular around the times of Red Hat Linux 6.x and before, but later deprecated by most distributions.

In recent years, Conectiva has settled into a roughly one-per-year release cycle of its distribution. While this is probably more than enough for most home users, those who prefer to keep their systems up-to-date will be interested to know that they can track Conectiva's development branch, known as "snapshot". This can be done in the same fashion as one would track Debian Sid, Mandrake Cooker or Fedora Development - by pointing the package sources to the Conectiva's snapshot branch on the nearest mirror. This can be accomplished by adding the following line (select your preferred mirror) to /etc/apt/sources.list:

rpm ftp://ftp.tiscali.nl/pub/mirrors/conectiva/ snapshot/conectiva all

Alternatively, the location can be configured from within the Synaptic package manager. Needless to say, this is only an option for those users who are not afraid of dealing with occasional bugs, since the snapshot branch is in constant state of heavy development and is not meant to run on production systems.

Conectiva 10 features a well-designed desktop and menus, clearly simplified for novice users who might be intimidated by the cryptic names of some open source applications. Besides its native Brazilian Portuguese, the distribution also supports English and Spanish, although its comprehensive set of online books is only available in Portuguese. While Conectiva is obviously biased towards KDE (in a fashion not dissimilar to SUSE Linux), the latest GNOME desktop is available too, together with IceWM, Fluxbox and a number of other light-weight desktop environments.

Conectiva Linux 10 is a worthy contender on the Linux distribution scene. The hard work of its developers over the last 7 months has resulted in a product that has received plenty of positive feedback on public forums of many Linux web sites in Brazil. Although the distribution has yet to find great following outside of Latin America, with the quality of its latest product, and with the company's continued adherence to the GPL, as well as its ardent support for Free Software, Conectiva Linux is bound to attract new users in markets dominated by bigger and better-known distributions.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for August 31, 2004 looks at splitting the package files, using a 2.4 kernel for Sarge, Debian cloaks on Freenode, several Sarge release topics and more.

Martin Schulze covers the preparation of another stable woody release, version 3.0r3.

Steve Langasek presents an update from the sarge release team. The library transitions and toolchain fixes are done, the new installer is almost done and many RC bugs have fixed, however much work remains before sarge can be released.

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Mandrakelinux

Mandrakelinux has updated mkinitrd packages for ML 10.0 that fix a problem with scsi modules on 2.4 kernels.

Full Story (comments: none)

Slackware Linux

This week Slackware-current received upgrades to syslinux, alsa, distcc, libpng, iptables, samba, gaim and getmail. See the slackware-current changelog for complete details.

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Trustix Secure Linux

Trustix has a bug fix release of courier-imap, stunnel and postresql available for TSL 2.0, 2.1 and Enterprise Server 2.

Full Story (comments: none)

New Distributions

Xfld - new Xfce live demo cd

Xfld is 'Xfce live demo', a GNU/Linux operating system (derived from Knoppix) that can be run completely from CD. It features an up-to-date Xfce as desktop environment. The initial version of Xfld uses Xfce 4.1 and is derived from Knoppix 3.4.

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Octoz GNU/Linux

Octoz GNU/Linux is new project, based in France, aimed at creating a simple and reliable Linux distribution for beginners, with multi-media, office automation, consumer networks and Internet. The initial version (0.1 - released August 28, 2004) uses a 2.6.7 Linux kernel, and is installed using the Live-Octoz CD.

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Annvix

Annvix is a Mandrakelinux-based secure Linux server distribution that aims to provide a small, easy-to-use server with high security. Features include a secure kernel, gcc with SPP stack protection patches, and secure defaults for all services. It also includes unique features such as running all services under DJB's daemontools and auditing tools such as rsec (msec's baby brother), Tripwire, Snort, and chkrootkit. Annvix joins the list at version 1.0-CURRENT alpha2, released August 26, 2004.

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Minor distribution updates

AGNULA/DeMuDi 1.2.0-rc3 is out

The third release candidate of AGNULA/DeMuDi 1.2.0 is out. This release is going to be the final candidate. All developers of included audio applications are particularly invited to test the distribution to ensure that their applications work correctly with this release.

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Buffalo Linux

Buffalo Linux has released v1.4.0 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This major Buffalo update includes the latest 2.6.8.1 kernel, a switch to Xorg, icewm 1.2.16, abiword 2.0.10, two graphical login options (XDM/GDM), and many bugfixes, including a fix for sound using ALSA-1.0.6. GNOME-pilot was added to the GNOME package. Three window managers are now available: Buffalo ICEWM, XFCE, and GNOME. Version 1.4.0 is the first to use Xorg and the new 2.6.8.1 kernel."

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ClusterKnoppix V3.6-2004-08-16-EN-cl1 released

ClusterKnoppix V3.6-2004-08-16-EN-cl1 has been released. This release uses OpenMosix 2.4.27-om-20040808 and the latest version of Knoppix.

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Impi Linux 2 to be launched at open source Installfest (ITWeb)

ITWeb covers the launch of Impi Linux 2, at the Open Source Installfest at Dimension Data Campus, Bryanston SA, on International Software Freedom Day, 28 August 2004. "Impi Linux 2 is the next generation of original South African-developed open source software. Unlike the first release of Impi Linux 1, this latest version is not based on any existing Linux distributions such as Red Hat and Debian. It is purely South African-developed open source technology."

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stresslinux

stresslinux has released v0.3.0pre1 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The distribution base was changed from SuSE 7.3 to 9.0. Kernels are now running in recent versions (2.4.27 and 2.6.8.1), and now support Cyrix, K6, and Via CPUs. All included software is now up2date. sl-wizard was extended with many new mainboard configurations."

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Distribution reviews

Windows-to-Linux migration made easier? (LinuxWorld.au)

LinuxWorld.au takes a short look at the release of Lycoris PowerPak 1.4 which comes with CodeWeavers CrossOver Office. "James Governer, a software analyst at Red Monk, commented on the lukewarm reception he feels die-hard Linux fans will offer. "Most distros throw in everything including the kitchen sink when it comes to media handling, productivity tools and so on," he said. "SUSE, for example, packages pretty much every piece of relevant open-source code available. This is not an offering for Linux fans.""

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