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erm... You have to RTFA to understand what "smart" is about.
I will translate but you better mod me up ;)

Smart's Screenshots

smart is a new package meta-manager written by Gustavo Niemeyer from Conectiva, and is to APT as APT was for its predecessors. These are the screenshots of the developing version, wich will be launched soon, running on a machine with Fedora Core 3.

Note that smart can be run in text mode (smart install ), via GUI (smart --gui), or even a mixture of both (smart --gui install ), besides an interactive text mode (smart --shell).

A documentation is available online and is worth reading. It explains, for example, some cases where smart resolves some broken dependencies which APT could not.

(that is not the oficial page of project The text below is my opinion.)

pic 1

Smart is highly agnostic when it comes to distributions e repository formats.
Works even mixing; accessing the fedora repository as a YUM repository (RPM MetaData) and Livna as APT, for example. Just works. Besides, the option "RPM Directory" points to a directory with packages. Doesn't need a special indexing procedure as APT and YUM require. Creating repositories more easily then that is impossible.

pic 2

Tipical view: you can list the packages by group (Applications, Development, etc.), by repository (Fedora Core, Livna, etc.) or mixing both. Green squares are the installed packages, white squares are the available packages. With the context menu, it is possible to stop packages from ever being dealt by smart.

pic 3

All software should have the option to "fix all problems":) But smart is allot more intelligent and can even recover the system from situations that APT cannot fix.

pic 4

The mirror system is very cool. You define which URLs can be used as alternatives to a main URL.
When it is necessary to get some archive, smart automatically searches the mirrors, does simultaneous downloads, etc. If a mirror is broken, incomplete or dated, smart automatically lowers the priority of that mirror and tries the next one. On the other side, quality mirrors with a fast connection are used more frequently.

pic 5

Priorities are an interesting resource. Can you have several repositories with identical packages? With smart you can establish who has priority over who, and avoid your local packages from being overwritten by packages in remotes repositories, or by third repositories which overlap the official repositories.

pic 6

Downloading packages.

erm... You have to RTFA to understand what "smart" is about.
I will translate but you better mod me up ;)

Smart's Screenshots

smart is a new package meta-manager written by Gustavo Niemeyer from Conectiva, and is to APT as APT was for its predecessors. These are the screenshots of the developing version, wich will be launched soon, running on a machine with Fedora Core 3.

Note that smart can be run in text mode (smart install ), via GUI (smart --gui), or even a mixture of both (smart --gui install ), besides an interactive text mode (smart --shell).

A documentation is available online and is worth reading. It explains, for example, some cases where smart resolves some broken dependencies which APT could not.

(that is not the oficial page of project The text below is my opinion.)

pic 1

Smart is highly agnostic when it comes to distributions e repository formats.
Works even mixing; accessing the fedora repository as a YUM repository (RPM MetaData) and Livna as APT, for example. Just works. Besides, the option "RPM Directory" points to a directory with packages. Doesn't need a special indexing procedure as APT and YUM require. Creating repositories more easily then that is impossible.

pic 2

Tipical view: you can list the packages by group (Applications, Development, etc.), by repository (Fedora Core, Livna, etc.) or mixing both. Green squares are the installed packages, white squares are the available packages. With the context menu, it is possible to stop packages from ever being dealt by smart.

pic 3

All software should have the option to "fix all problems":) But smart is allot more intelligent and can even recover the system from situations that APT cannot fix.

pic 4

The mirror system is very cool. You define which URLs can be used as alternatives to a main URL.
When it is necessary to get some archive, smart automatically searches the mirrors, does simultaneous downloads, etc. If a mirror is broken, incomplete or dated, smart automatically lowers the priority of that mirror and tries the next one. On the other side, quality mirrors with a fast connection are used more frequently.

pic 5

Priorities are an interesting resource. Can you have several repositories with identical packages? With smart you can establish who has priority over who, and avoid your local packages from being overwritten by packages in remotes repositories, or by third repositories which overlap the official repositories.

pic 6

Downloading packages.

Conectiva is the biggest linux player in Brazil and it also has some recognition around the world - you probably remember Marcelo Tosatti worked there, right?

Well, being a Brazilian company and having a heavily localized distro has helped them get a strong hold in the market here, but it works twofold, as it also helped spread linux among people and business that would not try a non-localized distro.

Any company in Egypt pursuing this marked opportunity currently? Or you think it would not work there (and if so, why?)

Thanks!

As an actual link: Connectiva's Technology Preview Page

In Brazil (at South and Sao Paulo mainly) Linux is gaining ground. Conectiva Inc. is a good example, as well all Brazilian Federal Universities

I belive the main reason WMP will be used is that Microsoft have offered some "advantage" fearing the Linux and Free Software menace.

By the way, the sitcom that produced "The Normal Ones" is the 5th bigger TV company over the World, "Globo Organizations". That might have influence on the case.

APT4RPM was developed (ported to RPM systems would be more accurate) by Conectiva about three years ago and was adopted officially on Conectiva Linux 6.0.

It's very mature by now, has a strong community (check the project page and the mailing list) and has a lot of cool features that are not (yet?) available on Debian systems (like LUA scriptable interface, apt-shell, meta-repositories, instalation of packages by filenames, etc.).

There's an article on LWN about it in particular which is worth reading for anyone who already knows it from Debian: "New features in APT-RPM".

APT4RPM was developed (ported to RPM systems would be more accurate) by Conectiva about three years ago and was adopted officially on Conectiva Linux 6.0.

It's very mature by now, has a strong community (check the project page and the mailing list) and has a lot of cool features that are not (yet?) available on Debian systems (like LUA scriptable interface, apt-shell, meta-repositories, instalation of packages by filenames, etc.).

There's an article on LWN about it in particular which is worth reading for anyone who already knows it from Debian: "New features in APT-RPM".

Go here for FTP and HTTP mirrors of the site.

More likely his mother, who is very beautiful. This could be his wife

Linus started new trend, huh? Here are his photos:
one and
two.

Linus started new trend, huh? Here are his photos:
one and
two.

I found it.

... you're wanting to leave your production servers to HIM??

Right there in the same league with Red Hat and Suse is Brasil's own home grown Linux, Conectiva. Not as well known in North America, yet it is perhaps the most popular Linux in the Southern Hemisphere of the Americas.

One thing I want to know is what the so called SCO Partners, like Conectiva and SuSE (the whole Unitedlinux shebang) is going to do about it.
Conectiva, at least, has issues a very vague stated saying they don't agree with SCO. But they are still working with them.
I'm sure there are many other companies that say they support the Linux comunity and the GPL, and are still working with SCO. Is that supposed to mean something ?

If you pay $1500 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, you sure as hell expect great tech support.

You may expect it, but your expectations do not dictate reality. When I asked for RHL AS tech support from Red Hat, they sent me on a 3-day goose chase, then told me they wouldn't help me because, in effect, great tech support "doesn't scale". (It *does* scale to only say you give tech support and not deliver, apparently.) This is in a shop with a good number of paid-for copies of Advanced Server.

I've gotten much better response from mailing lists where I haven't paid a dime than from paying huge fees to Red Hat. *This* is what Brazil can really take advantage of, especially as it builds up its own culture of Free Software, and gets a critical mass of helpful Free Software types.

BTW, I would expect the RHEL/SLES support to be far superior to the support of proprietary OSen, as it is *the* thing you are asked to pay for, instead of the special privilege of using the OS

I can't speak for SuSE, who, last I checked *does* in fact have proprietary components, but I've personally received better support from Sun for Solaris, and Veritas for Volume Manager and Cluster Server. Both proprietary, but with good support. I'd even go so far as to call Veritas' support *great* for the products I've called about.

Of course, there are other proprietary vendors whose support is absolutely dismal, especially considering they're usually under 5-6 figure/year support contracts.

Anyway, I would suspect Linux Mandrake or Conectiva to capitalize most in Brazil. Mandrake sent some of their team out to Brazil a while back to demonstrate the distro's capabilities there, to a warm response, and Conectiva is the locally-produced equivalent to Red Hat.

I can personally vouch for Linux Mandrake's support - I've had excellent experiences with its vibrant community. Their tech support system is also such that you can purchase guaranteed-response incidents from the company itself, or get community support with the option of tipping (in a ticket-tracking-style system)

That's a truly nice thing about Free Software. If Red Hat decides to operate just as another loser software company with regard to customer care, you have the option of easily migrating over to offerings from someone who offers something more in line with both your expectations and your budget. Or, you can just have your own guru who will help you, and who isn't hobbled by someone else holding all the source code.

Disclaimer: I'm a System Administrator of Solaris, Linux and *BSD, and am posting this from a Linux Mandrake workstation at home. I haven't been to Brazil. My opinions do not reflect those of my cat. She thinks I should be playing with her or feeding her instead of writing this reply.

I just read on the conectiva linux site, their position on the SCO X IBM court case.

"There is no evidence that any piece of the Linux Kernel, from version 2.4 up, is of SCO intellectual property."

I just wonder if there is anyone out there that supports SCO in its claims.

Meet Conectiva, a brazilian distro.

Lindows is based off of the Debian code and uses apt-get to install software from the Click-n-Run repository.
What is in place to keep people from changing the apt-get sources from CnR to the Debian sources and install something like Synaptic (and getting newer, updated packages for free) instead of paying the $99/year (with a few execeptions)?

I live in Brazil and Conectiva, leader in the (tiny) local market of Linux, got a great contract with the Navy to develop VPNs and things like that. The militaries wanted to make sure the software they were installing didn't have any secret tricks planted by alien governments (yes, these guys build a career out of paranoia feelings).

In some cases OSS can be cheaper, if you can pick in the internet a robust project with many contributors from around the world. But in other cases it can be more expansive, eg, if you can buy a closed source software off-the-shelf but choose to develop and open source program.

(...) both SuSE and TurboLinux keep some of their own software (such as SuSE's YaST installer) non-free. (...)

Conectiva appears to be the odd one out; they're a fully free distribution as far as I know.

Man, if they drop Conectiva's Synaptic in favor of a proprietary installer I (and many many more) will be MAJORLY pissed. Synaptic is free, and it rocks.

Conectiva announced this week that it's going to sell Caldera products here in Brazil.

Use the fish, luke.

Conectiva announced this week that it's going to sell Caldera products here in Brazil.

Use the fish, luke.

• Marcelo Tosatti's homepage is here.
• There is also the Marcelo The Wonder Penguin site that has some info about him, but is currently down (Google cache).
• Advogato personal info
• Slashdot interview from December.
• Freshmeat has his comments on the kernel (scroll down a bit).

the pic says it all:

Here's a picture of marcelo wearing FreeBSD horns

I'm fireproof so don't bother with flames. I'm just having a good time, you know.

Publish your software on an APT repository. APT now supports RPM packages and works very well, performing the same functions that Red Carpet does.

See my earlier post in this article to get download locations and existing soruces to test if yourself. Than go here to create an APT respository with your packages.

Isn't Connectiva largely based in South America? Yup. I thought Brazil was founded by Portugal, but that site looks like Spanish (of course, I have no idea what Portugeuse looks like, so...)

Oh. Here is the Spanish link. Start there. You don't have to load Debislackhat on their machines.

I know this really, shouldn't matter; if you're qualified, you should be given a chance. But this person looks *very* young. He must have spent quite a significant part of his life in front of a CRT. That's not a good way to make a balanced human being.

The spelling is Conectiva, with a single "n" because it is Portuguese, the language spoken in Brazil, and Portuguese avoids redundant letters. (But, of course, Portuguese has quirkiness of its own.)

I've never used it, but Conectiva looks like a good distro when you need to support users in the three languages it supports. The web site is in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

From the English web site: "... the company provides consulting services, training and technical support in all Latin America through its own service centers and certified partners."

--
Senator Biden (and Osama bin Laden) say that the Saudi government cannot continue without U.S. support: What should be the Response to Violence?

they wanted me to go through these two Excel spreadsheets of volunteers to weed out duplicates and it looked like a dauntingly tedious process, so I converted the spreadsheets to comma-delimited text files and booted the Dell I was given to work with to a Linuxcare CD, mounted the disk, and used cat and grep to go through the list at several times the speed I was expected to go at. If I were a "Perl Monk" I am sure that I could have blown through it in even less time.

Or you could have done the same with tools written for Windows, only replacing type for cat and loosing the CD boot/mount thing.

Of course, I see your point. Unix is inherently more flexible when it comes to doing non-standard things, and utilities talk to each other much more seamlessly. What I want to note is that there is an enourmous world under Windows beyond what Microsoft offers, some of it open source. If a staff is already comfortable with an OS, I don't think it would be wise to migrate, except if there are at least two people proficient with Unix (which might well be the case) and time and budget for training. OTOH, maybe your example sprung up to my eyes just because I'm so used to using Borland's grep that I'm beginning to feel it's part of the OS!

A note on distributions: I imagine the situation in Africa as being similar to the one in Brazil as far as hardware is concerned, that means a lot of cheap/old cards that may not be supported by many distros. If you (the submiter of the original question) face that kind of problem, try Conectiva Linux. They have paid special attention to that aspect.

He works for Conectiva. And yes, they pay him to work on Linux, just like they pay Rik van Riel.

They didn't mention the fact that CL 7.0 comes with a lot of packages fragmentation.

By "package fragmentation" I mean splitting XFree, Gnome, KDE, glibc and all other big software in a lot of small packages, keeping the compatibility with other distros and with the old CLs.

Example:
Number of packages
Software CL 6.0 --> CL 7.0
glibc 03 --> 65
XFree86 34 --> 79
kde 60 --> 276
gnome 32 --> 66
koffice 01 --> 19
linuxconf 56 --> 70
-devel 127 --> 373
rpm 03 --> 05


This is very useful when installing the distro in a machine with little disk space and specially when doing a remote upgrade (you don't have to download big packages with functionalities that you don't use).

A complete article: "Fragmentation of Packages on Conectiva Linux 7.0" can be found here, but it's in Brazilian Portuguese (I'm sorry).

- Ademar
"Unfortunately, no-one can be told what Linux is.. you must see it for yourself."

THIS

Since you asked, and everyone else will want to know..

Here is some info on our new maintainer..

Marcelo works for Connectiva. He lives with "Rik". He looks like this.

His weblog is here.
His "homepage" area is here

And I gotta say.. impressive to get that level of responsibility at his age..

Since you asked, and everyone else will want to know..

Here is some info on our new maintainer..

Marcelo works for Connectiva. He lives with "Rik". He looks like this.

His weblog is here.
His "homepage" area is here

And I gotta say.. impressive to get that level of responsibility at his age..

Maybe anyone?

Surely apt-get is an app that sits on top of dpkg

That's not rigt. Read the apt design docs, and look here afterwards. (42? coincidence? I don't think so)

Finding an article at Slashdot over brazilian efforts to make computing and information systems available to the poor is very nice, but isn't surprising or amazing. No at all.

I work for an Open Source development company in Brazil, Async Open Source and we are making good money providing low cost open source software, such as Stoq to brazilian companies and institutions.
The message I want to make through is: open source and poor countries are a special combination. We have an incredible number of companies running ilegal copies of Windows, SQL server and all the proprietary software they might need. The technological gap of the solutions provided along with those platforms, when you look at the latest applications available to the rich country nations is huge. It all together make Open Source a excelent way of getting rid of licensing problems as well as a shortcut to lessen that gap.
Every day, more and more companies are realizing that Open Source might be a good option, and they are spending money to help companies like Async to develop and deploy software they need.

Goverments part has been very important. This notice over almost cheap hardware is just one among many decisions that have been made in the last 2 years. There is a law submitted to the national congress which says that public institutions must try to adopt free software (like they say here) instead of proprietary solutions. There is also banks and data processing companies sucha as Banrisul and Procergs which are making heavy use of Open Source.
The most famous success case is Conectiva a brazilian Linux distribution which have grown from a small Red Hat portuguese distro version to one of the biggest Linux players in Latin America.
People from other coutries, and specially those involved in Open Source should stop looking at Brazil as a forest populated with poor monkeys and start thinking about coming to work and make profit here. The opensource movement must see that Brazil might be a valuable adition to its cause.

I just updated ~10 workstations and ~25 production servers from RHL 6.0 and 6.1 to RHL 6.2. It went fine, no troubles [kernels were already upgraded earlier]. Workstations had ~600 packages (1 GB) worth of RPM's, the servers ~300 (400 MB). :-)

For connectiva package management - you'll need THEIR RPM'S! - I wish you all the best luck to go out and find your favourite RPM in their format.

Most of the content in Conectiva's site is in http://distro.conectiva.com.br, including news, projects, updates, security annoucements and a webcam.

Most of the content in Conectiva's site is in http://distro.conectiva.com.br, including news, projects, updates, security annoucements and a webcam.

Unfortunately, the main site (www.conectiva.com) is well behind the portuguese site, but all the updates can be found at http://distro.conectiva.com.br/atualizacoes/ (just select english on the right top menu to see these in english).

But seriously ... personally I think it is good to have different flavours of Linux that cater to the many different tastes people have.

On the other hand, I also think it would be good if all the distributions would be compatible enough that you can install the same 3rd party software packages on each system...

I hope that Conectiva 6.0 with its apt-get for RPM will bring us a step in the right direction. The main reason I hope lots of people will be using Conectiva 6.0 is that a whole bunch of my friends have spent a large amount of time working on it ;)

But in the long run the only thing that's really important to me is that every computer user will have the opportunity to run that system that (s)he likes most while still being compatible with the rest of the world. It's about usability and freedom of choice...

Disclaimer: I work for Conectiva and even run a Conectiva 6.0 ftp mirror...

But seriously ... personally I think it is good to have different flavours of Linux that cater to the many different tastes people have.

On the other hand, I also think it would be good if all the distributions would be compatible enough that you can install the same 3rd party software packages on each system...

I hope that Conectiva 6.0 with its apt-get for RPM will bring us a step in the right direction. The main reason I hope lots of people will be using Conectiva 6.0 is that a whole bunch of my friends have spent a large amount of time working on it ;)

But in the long run the only thing that's really important to me is that every computer user will have the opportunity to run that system that (s)he likes most while still being compatible with the rest of the world. It's about usability and freedom of choice...

Disclaimer: I work for Conectiva and even run a Conectiva 6.0 ftp mirror...

It took the people here a few months to clean up all the dependancies of every package, but now we've finally got a nice RPM-based distro which has all the dependancies right ...

For me personally (I'm just doing kernel hacking and no distro stuff) this has caused no end to my joy ... since the distro folks got all the dependancies right I'm using apt-get and don't have to bother with system administration of my box any more ;)

Disclaimer: I work for Conectiva and even run a Conectiva 6.0 ftp mirror...

This should be good news for the people who are afraid that apt-get for RPM is a problem for Debian ... the fact that apt-get has been ported to another package format simply means more apt-get frontends will be available soon, one for everybody's tastes. And the fact that Debian and the RPM-based distro's are closer together now means it'll be easier for everyone to choose the distro of his/her taste without having to choose for (in)compatibility with other stuff at the same time.

Disclaimer: I work for Conectiva and even run a Conectiva 6.0 ftp mirror...

People often get fooled by the idea that Linux companies only want to advance their own distribution, but the reality is that different distro's simply appeal to different tastes (like different tastes of ice cream) and that the Linux companies make most of their their money by services, not by selling boxes of CD's...

In fact, a lot of the apt-rpm things were developed in good communication with the Debian people and most developers here aren't all that happy with the fact that marketing let one "Conectiva invents apt-get" press release out ... they've since been cluebatted and all the other press releases list Debian too like they should ;)

Disclaimer: I work for Conectiva and maintain a conectiva 6.0 ftp mirror... (but since I could get a job pretty much anywhere, I'm keeping my loyalty with the Linux _users_, not with any particular company!)

Oh, BTW, Conectiva, a commercial Linux distro from Brazil, is working on a port of apt that uses RPM instead of dpkg as a backend. Check it out, the guy working on it is a friend of mine ;-)
--

Yeah, I know that reasoning didn't help Jon Johanssen much, but I'd like to believe all the world is NOT territory of the USA. BTW, what is Jon's current status? Is he clear regarding Norwegian law or what?