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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. |
DistributionsThe growing ranks of Linux distributions attracted the attention of Christian Schaller at LinuxPower who wrote this article in response, asking whether the new distributions were a "Force for Good or Evil". "It seems that every week we are greeted by a new distribution popping up." The timing was amusing, coming as this editor was finishing up a talk on "Linux Distributions: Well-known through Unknown" for the Front Range Unix Users Group in Boulder, CO which addresses the same question. Clearly the topic seems to be of current interest. Please note that an updated and expanded version of this talk will be given at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in October, so comments, corrections and feedback on the slides will be welcome. A comparison of major distributions was published this week by CPUReview.com. It is a followup to their reviews of the various individual distributions and compares RedHat 6.0, OpenLinux 2.2, SuSE 6.1, Mandrake 6.0 and Slackware 4.0. MozillaZine's poll for the week covers the Distribution you use most. They took some flack for Red Hat-centric choices. A scan of alternatives mentioned in their forum that were not on the primary list showed up an unexpected (to this editor) number of LinuxPPC users, with Mandrake, mklinux and stampede being additional examples. The most used distributions from the actual list started with Red Hat, Debian, SuSE and Slackware, in that order. Eridani Systems responded to our use of their distribution in our July 22nd Distribution Summary as an example of a distribution that did not appear to be adding value to the base Red Hat distribution. They give a list of 20 or so additional packages that have been added to the base distribution, including the FTP version of Corel's Wordperfect for Linux. Our apologies ... we formed a mistaken impression based on the original announcement. DebianThe latest information on Debian's perl upgrade was posted on July 29th. It seems the perl upgrade is nearing completion with only a few packages left to be converted. The /usr/doc vs /usr/share/doc issue apparently continues to rage unabated in debian-policy, according to this note from Joey Hess. As a result, developers are urged to wait before modifying their packages to use /usr/share/doc. The Debian Weekly News for August 3rd is available and covers the past two weeks, since no issue was released last week. EnochEnoch Version 0.7 has been announced. This is their first non-beta release and includes improved initscripts. Five pgcc-optimized builds are provided for the Pentium, Pentium Pro/II/III and AMD K6.MandrakeMandrake has announced support for the KOffice project, specifically by financing David Faure, one of the KDE core-developers, to work on the KOffice and KDE projects. More details are described in this week's Linux-Mandrake News.Red HatRed Hat has announced their new FTP server setup, which greatly increases the available bandwidth for downloads. Even better, the new setup is directly connected to two distinct networks and will soon, they claim, be connected to three different networks, which should greatly reduce inaccessibility of the site due to Internet backbone problems.Non-security related updates from Red Hat over the past week will require quite a bit of disk space. Over 31 packages are included in their GNOME, gnumeric and enlightenment updates. There is also a linuxconf update. Atul Chitnis pointed out that they have now released updates for over 30% of the original 6.0 release. Please note that security-related updates will be mentioned on our Security Summary. SlackwareSlackware stable has been upgraded to use GNU libtool-1.3, according to the changelogs.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
August 5, 1999
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