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Distributions

Caldera

Kurt Wall reported that his upgrade to Caldera 1.3 went smoothly with only a couple of minor problems.

In addition, much as we recently reported about the S.u.S.E. 5.3 released, Caldera has been overwhelmed with orders for 1.3. They are bringing on temporary staff and trying to ramp up quickly to deal with the load, but they were definitely taken by surprise by the increased demand for 1.3 over previous products. Perhaps in both cases, we are seeing the end result of the last six months of publicity for Linux, being reaped by the distributions as they put out their latest, stable releases.

Debian

Brian White reminded people that All packages destined for Slink must have been uploaded to master.debian.org's incoming directory no later than October 16th, 18:30 GMT.

The PowerPC port for Debian will not make the Debian 2.1 freeze date. Reported show-stoppers included a need for the 2.1.X (or 2.2) kernel source tree, more compiled packages, and an available debian-powerpc cd. ARM is nowhere near being release-ready, according to Jim Pick, along with gnu-hurd. UltraSparc will not make it either. The Alpha port is "near" ready, but some big egcs issues could derail the project before it can make the freeze. No official word on the Sparc port yet, but there is the possibility that none of the non-Intel ports might make the freeze.

Debian issued a press release announcing that It is now possible to boot the Corel NetWinder Computer with Debian GNU/Linux, thanks to the work of Jim Pick and the other team members of the Debian Arm port. This is good news for improving the development environment for the Corel.

And Debian also proudly mentioned the APC Highly Commended award, given to the hamm version of Debian (Debian GNU/Linux 2.0) by APC Magazine.

Be sure not to miss the upcoming Slink Freeze and IRC Party, tomorrow, Friday, October 16th. Of course, the party for the freeze will only be a fraction of the celebration when Debian 2.1 is actually released, but it is important to celebrate this moment, since it represents Debian's commitment to a more rapid release schedule.

Red Hat

Jose Romildo Malaqui wrote out an impressive list of reasons why Red Hat should include xemacs in upcoming distributions. Many other people appear to be making the same request.

We learned from the redhat-devel-list that work is happening on grpm, a gtk based RPM front end that will include the ability to connect to an RPM repository and automatically download software updates. Questions about grpm include whether it duplicates work already done by AutoRPM and whether or not the Red Hat developers are coordinating with the in-development Trove project, an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites.

Reports are also that Redhat's Contrib-Net is back underway (long overdue). That will be good news, particularly once Contrib-Net (Red Hat's new program for certifying contributors and contributed RPMs) is actually available.

Stampede

Scott Lewis wrote us to report that the Stampede distribution is making good progress towards an Alpha port. He provided us location for more details.

S.u.S.E.

S.u.S.E.'s German office moved over the past weekend, so if you were wondering why their servers were off-line, now you know it was because they needed a bigger office!

Meanwhile, problems with deliveries of 5.3 continue. Keep hope up! Many people report having the product in hand and others have mentioned that the replacement CD has started showing up as well.

Other than the above, the primary topic on the suse-linux-e list this week was the Debian and Red Hat decisions to drop KDE and whether or not S.u.S.E. should follow suit ...

October 15, 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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