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Distributions

Caldera

A bit of grumbling about OpenLinux 2.2 surfaced this week. A couple of the more prominent gripes were:

Some users lament the absence of Spanish language support. Given that a large part of the world speaks Spanish, they feel that maybe the language is worthy of a bit of attention.
The "libcrypt" library, needed for things like shadow password support, is missing. It is not clear whether libcrypt was left out due to crypto export law worries or for some other reason. Certainly other distributions (i.e. Red Hat 6.0) have managed to find a way to include libcrypt.

There has been no response from Caldera to either complaint.

Debian

The Japanese version of Debian 2.1 is out, read the announcement for details. It consists of over 200 packages providing support for Japanese-speaking users.

The Corel Debian installation scheme was aired in preliminary form this week by Dave Neil of Corel. See his posting for details. Essentially, they plan to put together a process that brings the system into a full X-window mode from the outset, before beginning the installation. Dave also followed up with a later posting pondering how Corel and Debian could work together on the upcoming "Potato" release. Corel seems determined both to make installation an easier process and to give their work back to the Debian distribution.

How better to coordinate Debian releases? Adam Di Carlo sent out this proposal on how to make the next Debian release go a little more smoothly than slink did. A lot of it has to do with better communications, especially between people working on the different architectures. To that end, there will probably be (yet another) mailing list created - called debian-release - which will hopefully get the various teams talking to each other more.

The Debian Weekly News from May 10 is also available.

Mandrake

Mandrake 6.0beta has been announced. It includes a number of new goodies, including a Windows installation option, both KDE and GNOME, a new sound configuration scheme (from the Lothar project), and lots of other goodies.

Red Hat

One other 6.0 gotcha that is worth keeping in mind: the upgrade to PostgreSQL 6.4 breaks any databases created with earlier versions. If you are upgrading a system with postgres databases on it, you'll want to dump out the old databases before the upgrade, so that the data can be reloaded in the new format...

SuSE

SuSE is getting into the games business. They have just announced that they will be reselling in Europe the games released by Loki Entertainment Software. They will be starting, of course, with Civilization: Call to Power, whose release is coming up shortly. Civilization can be ordered now at a cost of 49 Euros.

SSH for SuSE Linux is, of course, not available in the international edition due to obnoxious crypto laws in a number of countries. The good news is that SSH rpms can be found at a number of non-US SuSE mirrors. Lenz Grimmer suggested looking at ftp.gwdg.de first.

TurboLinux

Pacific HiTech has announced its high-availability clustering product for Linux. This system is claimed to be able to pull together up to tens of thousands of nodes into a high-availability system aimed at web serving and other corporate tasks. PHT seems to intend to release most of their high-availability code back in GPL form. Their kernel enhancements will be immediately GPL'd, of course. Some of their other tools may see a bit of a delay, as in the ghostscript model, before being released. (Thanks to Alan Robertson).

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

May 13, 1999

Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.

Known Distributions:
Caldera OpenLinux
Debian GNU/Linux
Definite Linux
easyLinux
Easylinux-kr
Independence
LinuxGT
LinuxPPC
Linux Router Project
Mandrake
MkLinux
muLinux
PROSA Debian GNU/Linux
Red Hat
Slackware
Stampede
SuSE
Tomsrtbt
Trinux
TurboLinux
uClinux
UltraPenguin
XTeamLinux
Yellow Dog Linux

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