![[LWN Logo]](http://old.lwn.net/images/lcorner.png)
![[LWN.net]](http://old.lwn.net/images/dist.png)
|
|
|
 Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions On the Desktop Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Linux History Letters All in one big page See also: last week's Distributions page.
Lists of Distributions |
DistributionsPlease note that security updates from the various distributions are covered in the security section. News and EditorialsDistributions based on your existing installation. After quite a lull, where we were beginning to think that the flood of new distributions had permanently slowed to a trickle, a huge number of new distributions showed up this past week, in part thanks to contributors such as Fred Mobach and Gratien D'haese. In fact, so many showed up that we haven't even included all of them in this page; a few of them have been held back and will be listed next week instead. Getting so many new distributions at the same time gives us a good chance to look for patterns. We didn't find a lot. One distribution for handhelds/PDAs, one for the PA-RISC architecture, one distributed with a German magazine and a couple floppy-based distributions. However, we did find two distributions that shared a common theme. In this case, both distributions base themselves not on a specific distribution, but on an existing installation, meaning that they build themselves using the kernel, modules and applications installed on your current computer. The two distributions are MkCDrec and Mindi Linux. MkCDrec, as the name suggests, builds a CD-based Linux distribution. Mindi Linux builds a floppy-based distribution. In both cases, they could also be considered toolkits rather than distributions, because they pull the actual kernel and applications off your existing system rather than from a software repository. MkCDrec was of particular interest to us because it is specifically tailored to disaster-recovery. In addition to creating a bootable image based on your existing system, it will create a backup of the entire system, either onto the bootable CD, if there is room, or onto a multi-volume CD set. As a result, if your system fails, you'll have everything you need to restore it completely. Of course, the restore will be only as up-to-date as the last time you created your backup. Still, it is nice to have your backups be bootable -- it should make it easier to test backups, to make sure they are working properly and eliminates one step in the disaster-recovery process. Disk-cloning is also supported. PA-RISC Linux Version 0.9 released. HP has released version 0.9 of PA-RISC Linux, a version of the Debian distribution for the PA-RISC processor. Although we knew that HP has been working on Linux for the PA-RISC platform for sometime, we had no direct link to the project on our list. With this announcement for the latest release of PA-RISC Linux, we've also added them officially to our list. Support for both 32 and 64 bit systems is included in the new release, along with support for large memory systems (up to 16GB). "This release is the result of several years of work by developers in the Free Software community including developers from The Debian Project, Hewlett Packard, and Linuxcare". Linux-Mandrake for Itanium. Thanks to Bob Finch for pointing out to us that Linux-Mandrake is available for Itanium-based systems. The ISO images can be downloaded now. This distribution was announced on May 29 with the others, but we managed to miss it. Fully Automated Installation 2.0 released. Thomas Lange has announced the release of FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) 2.0. This package is intended to ease the installation of the Debian distribution on clusters, but can be used in any situation where multiple systems need to be installed. Redmond Linux, deepLinux merger. Redmond Linux and deepLinux have merged to form the Redmond Linux, Corp., according to the press release. "The deepLinux acquisition brings Redmond Linux additional expertise, product lines, and a presence in the Silicon Valley". ThinkNIC in Europe. The ThinkNIC has passed European Certification and is now available for sale in Europe. Distribution NewsRed Hat News. XFree86 4.1.0 rpms are now available on Rawhide. Note, however, that updated kernel modules will be required before these will work well. Meanwhile, for those of you interested in running ReiserFS under Red Hat on big-endian machines like the IBM S/390, check out this post by Jeff Mahoney. He has a very large patch that you are going to need. Debian News. Anthony Towns noted that the Debian Freeze is still on hold indefinitely, because they do not yet have a set of boot-floppies that work for all the i386 installs listed in their archives. A new version of the Debian Policy document has been uploaded. This will be of interest primarily to developers, since it defines what must be done to make their packages compliant with policy. A new Kernel Cousin Debian Hurd was published on May 30th. Hurd F2 ISO images are now available and major progress using XFree86 was reported. Last but not least, master.debian.org is down with disk failures, resulting in the loss of many services, including mail to anyone at debian.org. It went down Wednesday, June 6th and will presumably be up as soon as humanly possible. Linux-Mandrake News. The second Linux-Mandrake Community Newsletter is out. Topics covered include MandrakeSoft's presence at Linux Expo Montreal, Linux-Mandrake for the Itanium, the Single Network Firewall product, and more. MandrakeSecurity "Single Network Firewall" has been released. Check the newsletter for detailed features. Meanwhile, in news from MandrakeForum, a new version of drakfont was released to fix a problem importing Windows fonts. Meanwhile, the reports from road trips in Germany and Brazil are worth reading as well. Slackware News. Most of the progress this week took place in the Intel development. Speakup support (a speech synthesizer/screen reader) was adding in under 2.2.19. Sendmail was upgraded to 8.11.4 (fixing a security issue, see this week's security section) and XFree86 4.1.0 is now the default. Some interesting bugfixes went in, along with updates to vim, zsh, fvsm, guile, gnome-print and lesstif. Most interesting was the comment, "I'm still looking it over to see, but we can't be far from a freeze now". The SPARC and Alpha ports saw much less activity. Both of them got upgraded versions of autoconf, cvs and libtool. The 2.2.X kernel series under SPARC was upgraded to 2.2.20pre2 due to an nfs bug under SPARC that can cause kernel panics. OpenBSD 2.9. OpenBSD 2.9 was released this week. It promises major improvements in filesystems speed, support for Alpha architectures, new drivers and more. Of course, it comes with OpenSSH 2.9. In addition, it will run both on the Alpha platform and on the new Apple Titanium PowerBook G4. Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 teaches Mac new tricks (ZDNet). Yellow Dog Linux extends support to older Mac hardware that the new Mac OS X can't reach, according to this ZDNet report. "If somebody has a [Power Mac] 8500, they can't run Mac OS X. They may need the robustness of Unix, but Mac OS X just doesn't run on their hardware. With Yellow Dog Linux, they can say, 'Look, I've got this old machine, and suddenly it's useful again' as a server." kmLinux 2.0, a German distribution for schools. kmLinux is a Linux distribution for schools out of Germany. It is of particular interest since it is sponsored by the Landesbildungsserver Schleswig-Holstein, a German governmental organization in cooperation with the Verein Freie Software und Bildung e.V. (Union for Free Software and Education). kmLinux 2.0 has just been released with a new installer that has the ability to automatically resize an existing windows partition. Included you will find the Linux 2.4.4 kernel, XFree86 4.0.3, KDE 2.1.2 and KOffice 1.1beta2. ReviewsReview: Red Hat Linux 7.1 (ZDNet). ZDNet reviews Red Hat's latest Linux release, Red Hat Linux 7.1. "Managing multiple user accounts and passwords can be a significant burden for a systems administrator. On the client side, Red Hat Linux lets you specify which NIS, LDAP, or Kerberos server you'd like for user authentication. Red Hat's support for client- and server-side centralized user authentication is an attractive option for organizations looking to minimize the number of passwords that users are required to remember." Linux-Mandrake 8.0 (CNet). CNet reviews Linux-Mandrake 8.0. "Simply put, no other distribution beats the polished user experience offered by Linux-Mandrake 8.0." NetBSD 1.5 (Duke of URL). The Duke of URL turned his attention this week to NetBSD 1.5. "If you took a poll on who has used NetBSD -- a lot of people would probably respond that they've never touched in, when in fact, it's closer than many may think. Today, NetBSD is not only competing in the *BSD arena, but it's also making inroads with users who don't even know they're using it. Apple's Mac OS X and the more-obscure OpenBSD both utilize the NetBSD core, which has been both praised and put down by many in the industry". New DistributionsThis was definitely "New Distribution" week. It has been a long time since we got so many new distributions within such a short amount of timeEnter Runix: Linux for the PlayStation (ZDNet). Runix, which is coming from a Czech company, is set to be released under the GPL in order "to make the PlayStation2 a low cost PC," according to this ZDNet story. ViraLinux_II. Rick Hohensee, author of the cLIeNUX distribution, sent us a pointer to ViraLinux_II, a floppy-based Linux distribution. "It's an uncompressed minimal Linux that can boot with no HD or ramdisk, i.e. it can boot with / on the floppy. It has about 300k of space free on the floppy for the user to write programs. It has ash, eforth with 160 Linux syscalls, and my 3-stack language with 50 Linux syscalls. How is this possible in 1.1 meg? No libc". UltraLinux. UltraLinux is not a commercial distribution, but instead a central point for sharing information in support of Linux on SPARC and UltraSPARC platforms. It provides links to all of the full distributions that provide Sparc versions. [Thanks to Fred Mobach]. Go!Linux. Go!Linux is a German distribution that comes with the magazine PC!Linux, though you can also purchase it directly. [Thanks to Fred Mobach]. Familiar Linux. Handhelds.org is now hosting a new Linux distribution, Familiar Linux. Designed from the ground up to run on the Compaq iPAQ, Familiar Linux uses the ipkg package system (modeled on Debian's dpkg). The name "Familiar" stems from the meaning of the word as a noun, not as an adjective. In this case, a "familiar" is an intimate companion, "a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve a person". Version 0.4 of Familiar was released on May 14th and the website has some nice screenshots. Check this week's Front Page for more in-depth coverage [Thanks to Richard Cohen]. Distribution Updates
Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 7, 2001
| |
Copyright © 2001
Eklektix, Inc., all rights reserved
Next: On the Desktop