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See also: last week's Distributions page.

Distributions


Caldera

After months (years?) of seeing Red Hat take the heat for moving to glibc too quickly, it was interesting this week to see the pendulum swing the other way. Now there are fun applications out there that require glibc support, applications like StarOffice 5 and Oracle 8. So now we see Caldera users asking for better support for the glibc library under Caldera 1.3, for example. The timing is interesting, because both Caldera and S.u.S.E. have glibc versions "just around the corner." The question is, will they be out soon enough to prevent migration to existing glibc distributions such as Red Hat and Debian. Slackware, too, may be facing this issue in the near future.

Debian

APT version 0.1.9 has been released. The announcement explains why "0.1.9" is following "0.1.8". This version links against the upcoming Debian 2.1 ("slink") release. With this release of APT, Alpha systems are also supported, which is very good news.

Ian Jackson, the Debian Project Leader, will be speaking at the upcoming Internation SANE (Systems Administration and Networking) conference. Here is the official Debian announcement. (See the announcements page for more SANE '98 conference information).

Sun Microsystems has loaned three UltraSPARC systems to the Debian project to help them with their Sparc64 distribution.

Mandrake

Mandrake 5.2 is scheduled to be released in early december. It will be based on Red Hat 5.2 and hopefully KDE 1.1, presuming it is out and stable.

Red Hat

Red Hat has sent us a response to last week's review of their 5.2 release; it clarifies a couple of points we had raised. Look for it in the letters to the editor section. (The review can be found here for those who have not read it).

One other thing worth knowing for those upgrading to Red Hat 5.2: they have switched to bind 8 in this release, which means that your named.boot file will no longer work. This version of bind reads named.conf instead, which has a completely different syntax. For those who do not want to rush right out and learn the new configuration scheme, there is a perl script in the /usr/doc directory (bind-8.1.7 with the initial 5.2 CD) which will convert your old configuration file into the new format.

Another Red Hat 5.2 review appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. This review was quite positive, despite complaints about there not being not enough applications.

Slackware

Last week, we mentioned the BURKS (the Brighton University Resource Kit for Students) non-profit CD in our announcements section. The CD contains a Linux distribution, along with other resources, but we didn't say which. Jonathan Marsden wrote back to point out that he was able to quickly follow the links we provided and determine that the Linux distribution included is Slackware. This CD includes a complete Linux distribution (a binary-only version of the June 1998 Slackware 3.5 distribution) that you can install on your machine.

S.u.S.E.

HD Moore posted a note mentioning that S.u.S.E. 5.2 newly installed systems have backup shadow files that are world readable. The files include the original root password. If the files are removed, new backups are created with the correct permissions.

Trinux

A new FAQ for Trinux has been uploaded. Matthew Franz is looking for more questions to answer and add to the collection. See his post for more details.

Matthew has also uploaded New TrinuxHD Image, PCMCIA & v 0.45 packages .


November 12, 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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