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Distributions

News and Editorials

The Common Linux Installer Group. LWN received an announcement for the "Common Linux Installer Group," an organization which is trying to develop a standard, GPL-licensed installer for Linux distributions. The group is being supported by the folks at Blue Linux.

Normally LWN is all in favor of standards and this is, in fact, no exception. Nonetheless, we think it is doomed to failure. Why? Because the installation procedure is a stamp of individuality for many of the leading distributions. Reviewers will install an OS, run a few of their favorite applications, and then write the review. How the installation goes will often determine whether its a good review or a bad review. Just as there is no consensus on how packages are presented (rpm, apt, tgz, etc.) there will be no consensus on installers.

We suggest that Blue Linux start with Red Hat's Anaconda, or another of the already GPL'd installers and go from there, instead of waiting for the major distribution vendors to agree on this one.

Progeny Debian is no more. Progeny Linux Systems has announced the end of development on the Progeny Debian distribution. "The primary motivation for this decision is our desire for convergence with Debian proper. From a technical perspective, nearly all of the features we introduced in Progeny Debian have found or are finding their way into Debian, and it is thus becoming increasingly unnecessary for us to continue investing the resources required to maintain a separate 'Progeny enhanced' version." Progeny says it will continue to develop for Debian, and will continue to offer technical support.

Distribution News

BearOps Linux certified by Linuxcare. Alta Terra Ventures has announced that its BearOps Linux distribution has been certified by Linuxcare for installation on systems from Dell, HP, and IBM.

Caldera. The Caldera 3.1.1 Workstation product is now in open beta.

KDE 2.2.1 is included in this maintenance release which focuses on getting L18NUX certification ready, newer drivers (kernel, xfree), security updates, and other important stuff.

Debian Weekly News. The October 15 Debian Weekly News is out, with news on automake problems, the search for a Debian Conference 2 leader, how packages get into 'testing', and much more.

Mandrake. The xcin package released with Mandrake Linux 8.1 had a problem with the bimsphone.so library which was linked against the wrong db version. Because of this, certain Input Methods (IME) would not work properly.

NSA SELinux third release. The third release of the NSA's Security Enhanced Linux is out there. It adds some new security-related capabilities and bug fixes, and comes with the 2.4.12 kernel.

Terra Soft Unveils Yellow Dog Linux 2.1. Yellow Dog Linux version 2.1 has been released.

"While, on the surface, version 2.1 might seem like a minor update, there are some substantial improvements. The 2.4 kernel is now default and we are pleased to be the first PowerPC Linux vendor to provide NVidia GeForce 2 video support," states Dan Burcaw, CTO of Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.

Trustix. There are several bug fix advisories for Trustix Secure Linux. While these are not classified as security bugs, it is recommended that you upgrade your system. For TSL 1.5 and some previous versions:

• The bind package. No new security bugs have been reported since 8.2.4, but bind is something best kept up-to-date.
• The TSL rpm of Apache was missing a dependency on the mailcap package which could lead to the http deamon not starting up.

• The previous mod_php4 mail security fix broke mail support altogether, so you might want this fix.
• There was a problem with the netatalk package giving out incorrect file permissions.
• Also the Postfix RPM had incorrect permissions for the maildrop directory preventing use of "sendmail -oi" and similar stuff.

Minor Distribution updates

Coyote Linux. Coyote Linux v1.31 is available for download. This release fixes a few small bugs in the floppy creator script, adds ISDN support and has the start of a web administration utility.

Sorcerer GNU Linux. Sorcerer GNU Linux is a source-based ix86 Linux distribution designed for advanced Linux adminstration. Aside from a bzipped bootable ISO9660 installation CDROM image, no binaries are downloaded. It features menu and command line interfaces that enable sysadmins to easily and quickly download, compile, and install source tarballs directly from the software authors' homepages. It is fast, lean, and current. Version 20011012 released October 12, 2001.

ThinkBlue. On October 11, 2001 ThinkBlue/64 7.1a was released. This is a respin of ThinkBlue/64 7.1 with all updates integrated.

Proprietary Distribution products

2-Disk Xwindow System. The 2-Disk Xwindow System is a small Linux distribution which includes libc2.1, busybox, tinylogin, e3, pppd, several daemons, X, alloywm, chimera, and xpaint. The kernel (2.4.6) supports umsdos, ext2, initrd, floppy, iso9660, ppp, and networking. Version 1.0rc050 was released October 13, 2001.

Astaro Security Linux. Astaro Security Linux is a firewall solution. It does stateful packet inspection filtering, content filtering, user authentication, virus scanning, VPN with IPSec and PPTP, etc. It is based on a special hardened Linux 2.4 distribution where most daemons are running in change-roots and are protected by kernel capabilities. Version 2.012 was released October 15, 2001.

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol

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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