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Distributions

Debian

Josip Rodin has written a draft of a Debian New Maintainers Guide. He is currently up to version 0.12 and has received a very positive response to the document so far. If you've been considering becoming a Debian Maintainer, check this document out.

As you might expect, the proposed changes to the license for the next release of Qt quickly became a hot topic on the debian-devel list. Some problems with the license were spotted and it is not yet clear whether it clears up all the problems with distributing KDE, but the license is at level 0.9 and the general impression was that Troll Development was interested in comments and hoped to make minor corrections to the license before it becomes final. The only changes they won't be making are ones that will detract from their ability to continue selling a commercial version of Qt for customers developing commercial code.

Mandrake

Gael Duval has sent out the latest Mandrake News. It mentions that Linux-Mandrake 5.2 (Leeloo) will be available next Thursday (November 26, 1998) for FTP download. They also mention that they are looking for new contributors and distributors.

Red Hat

Many, many messages are being posted reporting problems installing RedHat 5.2 from files downloaded via a non-Linux operating system to a vfat partition. The problem is that the 5.2 install procedure is apparently more sensitive to case than the 5.1 procedure. Misty Linville and others worked through a solution to this problem. Here is a post that describes how to deal with the problem fairly easily (or, if that one is not clear, here is another post that covers the same problem.

Slackware

The big news for this week is, of course, the release of Slackware 3.6. The announcement calls it the best release of Slackware yet. Slackware 3.6 is based on the 2.0.35 Linux kernel but includes 2.1.125 test kernels, and Linux 2.1/2.2-ready utilities. Also included is run-time support for glibc programs. That is excellent news for Slackware fans. New hardware support, new popular applications (such as the Gimp) and more complete this latest version.

The new release of Slackware also covers ZipSlack, Slackware's new installation option. They promise installation within 5 minutes and it can run on systems with only 4MB of RAM. That last capability may assure Slackware's continuance for many years to come as other distributions become larger and larger and therefore more difficult to run on older hardware.

S.u.S.E.

The problem with world-readable backup shadow files reported last week has not been confirmed. In fact, several S.u.S.E. boxes have been tested and failed to duplicate the behavior. Therefore, the problem report is likely to have been an isolated incident.

November 19, 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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