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Distributions

Debian

Although the party is long over, the Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 'Slink' Freeze really began Monday, November 3rd. The details on why the Slink freeze was held up (or even that it was held!) were absent from the public Debian lists. Presumably the discussions were held on debian-private instead. Too bad ... the public nature of the Debian development has made it a particularly enjoyable distribution on which to report.

Lars Wirzenius posted some interesting, unofficial figures comparing the size of slink with the previous release, hamm. More than 70 million lines of source code ...

By the way, with the freeze of 'slink' finally official, the name of the next version of debian has been announced as well. It will be 'potato', taken from Mr. Potato Head in the movie Toy Story. Mitch Blevins suggested a possible logo for the new release.

Debian published an announcement that the web pages for Software in the Public Interest (SPI) have been updated. SPI is the non profit organization founded originally to collect donations or revenue related to Debian and disperse those funds. It now provides a monetary and legal infrastructure for several different projects, including Debian, GNOME and the Linux Standard Base.

If you are interested in references to Debian in the media, the Belarussian newspaper Computer News carried articles on installing and booting Debian. English translations are available from the author, Dmitri Borodaenko.

Red Hat

Red Hat announced version 5.2 of their distribution this week. We got ahold of a copy here at LWN Labs and gave it a try; here's our experience with and impressions of this release.

Chris Evans has started a new page to record bugs in Red Hat 5.2. Six open bugs are currently listed, some possibly simple permissions errors, while a couple of the others listed are more difficult, such as the X11 related problem, which really needs a response from the XFree group.

S.u.S.E.

S.u.S.E. happily announced a major upgrade to their ftp server. It is now connected to two major backbones, which should provide increased throughput and better download rates. You'll find it at ftp.suse.com.

November 5, 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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