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 Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsAnother site with a long-standing, long list of distributions is Kernelnotes.org (formerly LinuxHQ). As of last count, it has over 116 different distributions listed. In addition, their list is already categorized by type of distribution and contains a description of the distributions. While we have continued to add distributions that people have sent to us, it may be that the number of existing distributions is simply too large for us to use as a list of links on this weekly report. We'll be taking a look at some of our options in the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, here's some brief descriptions of distributions that people pointed out to us over the past week. Mastodon is a Slackware-derived distribution pointed out to us by Navindra Umanee. It uses the older libc 4.8.0 (a.out) library, but has moved to the /etc/rc.d structure of startup files. He is also building his own collection of scripts to administer the system without "getting his fingers dirty" directly editing files. This is a work-in-progress, for those that are interested. Black Cat Linux is another Ukrainian/Russian distribution that Andrey Kolov told us about. We don't have many more details because the website itself is (understandably) not in English (or any other language for which we have local experts). Continuing in the area of specific language support, Best Linux is a distribution localized for Finnish and Swedish. [Thanks to Jan Ekholm] And Vincent Renardias pointed out eXecutive Linux, based on Red Hat Linux 6.0 under the French language. Next, Bruce Harada gave us pointers to three separate Japanese distributions, Vine Linux (RedHat 5.1-based), Plamo Linux (Slackware-based), and Stataboware, a set of Alpha-only tarballs. For those Italian-speakers among us, Bad Penguin Linux has been dubbed "La distribuzione Linux italiana". Back in the area of mini-Linux distributions, a couple of different people pointed out Floppix, a subset of Debian that fits on two floppies, developed by Professor Linda MacEwan, Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, Ontario, Canada. In addition, covering two separate categories, nanoLinux II is both small enough to fit on three floppies and supported primarily in Italian. [Ottavio G. Rizz] CalderaCaldera Systems has announced its new "OpenLinux Developer Network." This network seems to be set up mostly as an information channel for people developing applications on OpenLinux, with the opportunity to buy discounted products as well.DebianAnother vendor has chosen Debian on which to base its products. Linux Laptops, Ltd has announced its choice of Debian as the only distribution that they pre-install on their line of Laptops.French-speaking? You may be interested in this brief interview (in French) with Christophe Lebars, who is responsible for the project to translate Debian into French. Check out the Debian Weekly News for additional Debian topics. It includes news of a draft of Debian policy 3.0.0, a major update to Debian policy. Hard Hat LinuxJust announced this week, Hard Hat Linux is a distribution specifically aimed at embedded systems, particularly embedded and applied computing applications in telecommunications, Internet and industrial control. Here is the press release that describes the new distribution.KRUDOur friends up at Tummy.com have announced the KRUD (Kevin's Red Hat Uber Distribution) distribution. KRUD is the latest Red Hat with all of the latest errata (currently well over 100mb) applied and a set of extra packages added. KRUD can be bought on a monthly subscription, making it easy to keep up with the updates.LinuxPPCThe LinuxPPC User Guide has been updated. In addition, the list of ftp mirror site has been expanded and the LinuxPPC port of the SheepShaver MacOS runtime environment has gone beta.MandrakeThe Linux-Mandrake development version is now being made available in real-time. Check out their announcement for more details.MkLinuxLarry Kollar sent us a news update for MkLinux, with a report on their status regarding their upcoming release.Additional MkLinux news can be found in this article at Linux am Mac. Red HatNew PHP packages are available from Red Hat. Their advisory indicates that the original version of PHP shipped with Red Hat Linux 6.0 (mod_php3-*-3.0.7) had problems with glibc2.1. The packages released previously to fix these problems in turn had a problem with postgresql. The latest packages should fix both of these problems (mod_php3-*-3.0.9-1).Red Hat has also released a new talk package (talk-0.11-2) which works with ytalk and apparently allowed them to close out several bug reports. See their errata for more information. We mentioned Dan Anderson's RPM 3.0 Signing HOWTO last week. Dan has put together an updated version this week. RPM 3.0 (as present in Red Hat 6.0) includes a number of incompatible and undocumented changes; this HOWTO is Dan's attempt to fill in the information gap. SuSEIn last week's Distributions Summary, we mentioned a rumor that SuSE was planning to stop "splitting releases into multiple versions". This "rumor" came from a misreading of a message posted to their mailing list. We have now exchanged mail with Lenz Grimmer and can give a more accurate story.SuSE will continue to have separate German and International versions, due to the standard legal issues with ssh, SSL and other cryptographic software. However, they will no longer be issuing a second version of a release. Previously, they've issued second versions as an opportunity to include bug and security fixes, as well as newer versions of some packages. From now on, they will only re-release the original master, making security and serious bug fixes available as separate packages only. This policy has been changed by request of their resellers (who don't want software already on the shelf to become obsolete before they have a chance to sell it) and customers, presumably because of the confusion as to what package is or is not part of a specific release. It is not an uncommon situation. Similar issues have been discussed for Debian, Red Hat and other distributions as well. TurboLinuxTurboLinux has announced "TurboLinux Workstation 3.6." This release runs on the 2.2.9 kernel, offers both KDE and GNOME, and has WordPerfect bundled in as well.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 1, 1999
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