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See also: last week's Distributions page.

Distributions


Debian

A security alert for netstd in Debian has been posted. If you have netstd installed, they recommend picking up a newer version of the package.

Joey Hess has issued the first edition of the Debian Weekly News. The latest edition of the Debian Weekly News will be made available always at this URL.

Joey has done an excellent job of summarizing activity on the Debian lists this week, as this editor can verify, having scanned through all of them before finding his work. Look for yourself to hear about the primary topics on the lists this week. He noted the increased presence of Richard Stallman on the debian-groups, plans for a Debian presence at various upcoming Linux conferences and the reaction to a suggestion that the slink release be skipped all together, since it has taken so long to come out that many packages are now obsolete.

On that last topic, it appears that slink is very close to being ready for release, with approximately 50 release-critical bugs left. Hopefully a push will be made to get it out soon, even if that means removing some of the packages if their release-critical bugs cannot be resolved.

Independence

Project Independence has announcedthe first release (version 5.2-0.1) of their distribution. Independence has as its goal the creation of a distribution aimed at home users; thus ease of use and applications are high on their list of priorities. This distribution is based on Red Hat's, with additions such as KDE, some ease-of-use wrappers around PPP, and "software for everyday life." (Found in NNL).

Update: evidently, despite the presence of an announcement on the net, this release has not yet been made, and will not be for about another week.

LinuxPPC

The LinuxPPC folks have put up a new LinuxPPC 5.0 betawhich includes the pre-2.2 kernel.

This Techweb article talks about the reception LinuxPPC received at MacWorld. The response at the show has been enthusiastic, said Jason Haas, Web and marketing director for the company.

MkLinux

A new MkLinux kernel ("GENERIC-06") has been released; it's based on 2.0.36 and has a bunch of new good stuff. See the MkLinux kernel pagefor more. (Thanks to Roberto Murer).

Red Hat

Available new updates for Red Hat include New Boot Images, a fix for the pam problem mentioned in our Security Section and an update to the 2.0.36 kernel that contains updated drivers (including one for the Adaptec 7xxx cards and the 3Com905B ethernet card).

Our December 24 issue reported that Red Hat was no longer slipping updates silently onto new CD pressings, with the result that all 5.2 CD's are the same. Some folks at Red Hat took exception, however, to our statement that as a result it is no longer possible to get CD's with the updates included. In fact, for $499 per year, one can join the RHMember More program and get updated CD's in the mail every six weeks. Since updated CD's are offered "exclusively" to participants in this program, they remain unavailable to most users of Red Hat's distribution. Still, the current situation is better than what came before.

Slackware

The slackware-current changelog indicates that a small number of changes were made on January 5th, 1999, including the removal of the now-obsolete /etc/ttys file, the removal of '.' from the default paths (a result of a long series of discussions on the Bugtraq archive) and a change to /etc/securetty to restrict root logins to the console.

Please note that slackware-current is an unstable snapshot of Slackware, provided to allow developers to retrieve and test new versions of packages. Once stable, the packages are then merged into the current stable release.

S.u.S.E.

The German SuSE Linux page notes that their 6.0 release is already "Ausverkauft" - sold out. It will become available again on January 20. While frustrating for SuSE's customers, it can only be good for the company to have been so surprised by their sales. The page also notes that the international version of 6.0 will come out at the end of the month. (Babelfish translation here). (Thanks to Morten Welinder).

January 7, 1999

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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