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Caldera

Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 has been officially announced. The software has been available on the Caldera ftp site for the past week, prompting many questions on the user groups. Apparently, this was because portions of OpenLinux 1.3 are required in order to run Sybase on OpenLinux 1.2 or older systems. Note that, as we've mentioned before, 1.3 has run-time support for glibc binaries, so glibc RPMs can now be installed. However, the 1.3 development environment is still libc5 by default.

Reports from Caldera Partners who have been using the new software for several weeks now are good so far.

The upgrade script that comes with COL 1.3 is only good for upgrading from 1.2 to 1.3. If you need to upgrade from an older version, you'll need to get the latest update.col script from the caldera ftp site. Check the 1.3 errata for more details.

There is no more Base, Standard, or Lite differentiation with OpenLinux 1.3. With Netscape's new involvement with Red Hat, the integration of Netscape's Fasttrack with Caldera has dissolved, so Fasttrack is no longer shipped as part of OpenLinux, for example. OpenLinux 1.3 has a more open licensing as a result; one copy can be purchased and then installed on multiple machines without any legal challenge, much as Red Hat has always been (excluding BRU and DR-DOS). The rumour is that Caldera will ship a new, higher end product in the coming months.

Debian

The proposed Debian voting procedure outlined in the (not-yet-voted-on) Debian constitution is getting a shake-down through a series of test votes. For your amusement, the results from a test vote on methods of eating steak is available. Although complex, the procedure and results did not seem to raise much comment on debian-devel, so presumably they will go into use soon for voting on the Debian constitution.

The Release-Critical Bugs Report for slink is now on-line. Eighty-six release-critical bugs were listed on September 30th, five were closed in the previous twenty-four hours and one new was was opened. Hopefully, this indicates that progress towards the release of slink (Debian 2.1) is going well.

Jens Ritter announced a crude hack for installing Debian thru the loopback device. For anyone wondering why you'd want to do this, it can be used to install Debian in a FAT partition.

MkLinux

The Generic #02 kernel has been announced. It includes support for the ATI 16 bit video, multi-button mouses, switchable PB1400 expansion bay, switchable video caching and a variety of other fixes.

A progress report on the PB1400/5300 SCSI driver for MkLinux has been made available. Help for tracking down some information has been requested.

Key portions of the mach kernel are now available via CVS. A password is required.

It was asked whether or not anyone was working on a 2.1.1XX kernel for mklinux. The response appears to be no, at least for the current time. Here's a project for the ambitious ...

Red Hat

Of course, the primary news for Red Hat this week is the investment in Red Hat Software, Inc., by Netscape, Intel and others. That is covered in-depth on our main page, so we won't cover it again here.

New releases of Red Hat's Rawhide distribution (pre-release, for testing and bug reports) are made every Friday. A question was asked on the redhat-devel-list why the latest gnome releases were not currently integrated with Raw Hide. The problem lies in the version of GTK+ required by GNOME. Apparently once everything has moved to GTK+ 1.2, the situation is expected to change.

S.u.S.E.

As mentioned on our daily page and also described in our commerce section, S.u.S.E. has announced a product they call Office Suite 99, which contains Applixware 4.4.1, integrated with ADABAS D 10.0 and also holding KDE, GNOME, fax software, GIMP and many other products. Here is the announcement as distributed to the S.u.S.E. newsgroups.

We hear from the lists that S.u.S.E.'s Office Suite 99 contains a base 5.3 system. This allows people buying the office suite to use it without having to purchase all of 5.3, if they wish, for example, to run on an older version of S.u.S.E. Additionally, it contains packages from other distributions, such as a glibc-based version of Applix for Red Hat 5.x. The version of Applix that ships with Office Suite 99 is newer than the version shipped with 5.3, as well. Indications are that Slackware, Debian and possibly other distributions are supported.

As a result of all of this support, the package is very large, from 350MB to 550MB depending on the language support you request. Fortunately, it can also be run directly off the CD, though it is not yet clear how fast it runs that way.

Due to popular demand, a beta version of a dhcp client for S.u.S.E. is now available.

Trinux

The Trinux micro-distribution now has its own webpage. Version 0.4 Beta has also been released.

October 1, 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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