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Caldera

Joel Hammer reported a problem where LISA mounts a CDROM drive to /mnt instead of /mnt/cdrom, causing problems since the other mount points under /mnt are obscured. The problem was confirmed and is being officially reported.

Erik Ratcliffe posted a description of how Caldera boots, in response to a question by another user. The outline in his post is pretty nice, so if you are not already familiar with the Linux boot procedure, you may find this of interest.

Debian

Debian put out a pointer to this article on Virtual Network Computing, including both German and English versions of the article as well as information on Debian packages for VNC.

The German Magazine c't compared six Linux distributions in issue No. 19, which came out September 14th. The article is not yet available on-line, but Michael Below provided an English summary of how well Debian did. The article had some valid, specific criticisms to make, but did apparently end by describing Debian as a solid distribution for users well accustomed to Linux, offering a big choice of software and no license problems.

Mandrake

The Linux-Mandrake News for September 10, 1998 is in both French and English. It outlines plans for a "Linux-Mandrake Soho" version of Mandrake (Soho = Small Office/Home Office) which will be highly tailored and configured and will not be released until it can include the Linux 2.2 kernel. The news also reports that Linux-Mandrake has been ported to Sun Microsystems' hardware, though no details are included. Other bug fixes or upgrades planned for the next release are also mentioned.

S.u.S.E.

We mentioned last week that many people were reporting problems with the installation of S.u.S.E. 5.3, something that caused a great deal of concern, since S.u.S.E.'s reputation in general has been for having very high quality, well-tested releases. This week, we spoke to Scott McNeil, president of SuSE's North American group, about S.u.S.E.'s subsequent decision to stop shipments of the International version of 5.3.

Scott explained that, in addition to the sound problems we mentioned last week, there was a severe problem with the fdisk shipped with this version of S.u.S.E. which showed up only when S.u.S.E. was installed on a virgin disk (no partition table, no previous file systems) and then again, only with specific vendor hardware. They estimate that the problem affected only 3 percent of their customers, but this was enough to cause grave concern for S.u.S.E. We are anal-retentive. We sell lots of S.u.S.E. Linux to European business and they demand security and stability."

The problem with fdisk has been caught and fixed. New copies of disk 1 of the 5.3 installation disks have been pressed. These should be available either by the end of this week or by September 21st. Any customer who purchased 5.3 is entitled to the new updated disk 1. If you purchased a copy of S.u.S.E directly, you should have received an e-mail message about this. If you purchased through a reseller, either contact your reseller or fill out your registration card so that S.u.S.E. will know how to contact you.

Lenz Grimmer posted an easy fix which you might want to check out if you have a problem recompiling the kernel under S.u.S.E. 5.3.

September 17, 1998

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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