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 Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsDebianShould Debian spend money on marketing at trade shows, in particular, by buying booth space and CD's to hand out? The Debian project, of course, is not rolling in money, and a trade show presence is expensive. So some folks on debian-devel are questioning whether trade show booths are really the best use of Debian's funds.The consensus seems to be that a presence on the floor is important. A lot of people don't know what Debian is, and being there can help to change that. Nobody, however, was in favor of buying an IBM-size booth in the center of the floor... Maybe they could get Corel to help fund a presence in the future? Chuck Peters will be the Debian liaison to the LPI certification program unless somebody objects strongly. Here's his posting on the subject. Debian would really like to see certification available free of charge, which does not quite fit with what the LPI is doing (they are aiming for as cheap as possible, but do not believe it can be free). Reports from the Debian booth at Linux Expo were posted by John Goerzen. See his notes from Thursday and from Friday and Saturday. The Debian booth was a busy place... A new Debian package manager is in the works which will eventually replace dpkg. Here is a pre-pre-announcement for the project; things are still quite vague at this point. Debian will be probably adopting the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (part of the Linux Standard Base) soon. Julian Gilbey, who is pushing forward the policy change, has posted a callfor people to start thinking about what changes need to be made to comply with the FHS, and how those changes will be done. Policy moves. Joey Hess has posted the weekly policy summary describing current policy change initiatives and where they stand. EnochDaniel Robbins tells us he has just released the first verion of Enoch, a new Linux distribution. "Enoch is an advanced GNU/Linux distribution for the x86 PC Architecture, designed to bring your Linux experience into a new dimension. Or something like that."MandrakeWhat is Mandrake's future? This distribution, at the beginning, was identified primarily as a version of Red Hat with KDE integrated. Now that Red Hat sells a distribution with KDE, what is Mandrake's reason to exist? Users of Mandrake have pointed out some advantages they see with the system, such as its greater use of Pentium optimizations, more current software, and better responsiveness to its users. And, of course, Mandrake has a nicer system for the configuration of hardware as the Lothar project starts to bear fruit.But, in the end, can Mandrake survive as a prettied-up version of Red Hat? Some work on clarifying the goals and identity of this well-respected distribution seems to be in order. Red HatKDE users have been disappointed with Red Hat 6.0 due to the fact that Red Hat shipped a beta version that, for some people at least, has some severe stability problems. If you are one of these people, you may want to take a look at Benjamin Sher's instructionson how to upgrade your 6.0 system to KDE 1.1.1.SlackwareSlackware 4.0 has been released. It's got the usual goodies: 2.2 kernel, KDE, ... They have also put out a "Slackware 3.9" for people who want most of the new stuff, but want to stay with the 2.0 kernel for now. (Thanks to Peter Hull).Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
May 27, 1999
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