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Distributions

News and Editorials

Whither Progeny?. Progeny Linux Systems has stopped development on Linux NOW and stopped publishing Progeny Linux, but the company remains viable. In this interview with Progeny president Steven Schafer on OSNews, Steve talks about the challenges of running a Linux distribution business, and Progeny's commitment to the Debian Project.

What can you tell us about Progeny's plans to continue promoting Debian and make it a more viable platform for commercial users.

Steve Schafer: Many of our Debian improvements have been submitted to the Debian Project and will appear in upcoming releases. Others are being revised to be Debian generic and will be submitted ASAP. We also continue to offer support for Debian (as well as other varieties of Linux). Since the main criticisms of Debian are ease-of-use and lack of a commercial entity behind it, we hope we are helping to answer both concerns.

EnGarde Secure Professional. Guardian Digital has announced the release of EnGarde Secure Professional Linux, the "enterprise" version of the EnGarde distribution. This version is oriented around providing secure network services; it also features web-based administration and access to the Guardian Digital Secure Network.

Also in the announcement is the "EnGarde Secure Workgroup Suite," which provides WebMail, VPN, and Windows domain controller support.

More counting. There has been a trend lately (at least in this page) to rate the popularity of various Linux distributions. Mandrake forum has an article with that theme. "So, measuered by "recent interest of writers", there RedHat, Debian, and SuSE rank almost equal, closely followed by Mandrake. Once more, Mandrake shows that it managed to "grow up" and become one of "top 4" in very short time: Mandrake share on the web doubles when only last 6 months are taken in accounts compared to the "all times" results!"

SuSE 7.3 in the news. SuSE has announced the availability of SuSE Linux 7.3 via FTP. Be sure to look at the list of mirror sites.

PowerPC users need wait no longer: SuSE has announced that its 7.3 distribution is now available for that platform.

Here are some reviews of SuSE 7.3:

• The Register: SuSE 7.3 rocks Red Hat and flips XP the bird. "Think of it this way: if you should break your sad dependency on Redmond's digital heroin and install something like SuSE 7.3, you'll be able to run your machine pretty much like a Windows box without a struggle from the git go; but on top of that, you might one day find yourself curled up in an easy chair with the documentation, as in some bygone age of elegance and style, and then it might just hit you what a convenient patsy you've been."

• NewsForge: Review: SuSE 7.3 Personal. "For me, getting SuSE 7.3 Personal installed and running was a lot like having a baby -- it was painful and took a long time. But baby, am I ever happy with the result."

• Network Computing Magazine: Special Report: SuSE Queues Up for a Clean Sweep. "Bottom line, SuSE impressed us enough to walk away with the Editor's Choice award in both the server and workstation categories. However, none of the other distributions was particularly shabby, especially on the workstation side, where the margin of victory was less than a point -- just 0.15. Note that the products are listed in order of how they placed in the server tests; on the workstation side the order was: SuSE, Red Hat, Caldera and Mandrake (TurboLinux opted out of our workstation tests)."

Distribution News

Debian News. Here's a freeze update. This is the last week for uploads of base packages.

The Debian Weekly News for November 14 is out. Covered topics include better keywords to help people find the Debian packages they need, SourceForge, and whether documentation licensed under the GNU FDL is free enough for Debian.

Mandrake Linux. Updates have been released for procmail, gnupg, and mktemp.

Red Hat. Bugfix advisories:

• Updated pam and usermode packages available
• Updated print drivers available

Turbolinux 7 To Power IBM NetVista Thin Clients. Turbolinux announced that IBM's new NetVista N2200 Thin Client Linux Express and IBM's newest, most powerful thin client, the N70 will be deployed with the Turbolinux 7 operating system.

Minor Distribution updates

ClumpOS. ClumpOS, a CD-based mini-distribution, released R4 on November 14.

Devil-Linux. Devil-Linux v0.5 beta3 has been released. This version uses version 2.4.14 of the Linux kernel and includes lots more updates and additions.

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol

Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.

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