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It makes a difference to me because I thought I'd pass a resume to anyone intersted in your excellent project. The first company did not look right, the second one provided me with no information.

Oh well. If you are bored after your marathon question and answer sesion here, have a flower, or a lizard or a spider. The flowers might be nice backgrounds for your corporate desktops. I had fun taking the pictures and hope other people enjoy looking at them. The flower page comes in handy when secretaries do nice things for me. =:>

Conectiva routinely releases patches that are months late.

Take, for instance, the most recent, CLA-2003:762, released October 14 for a glibc bug from August 14.

My all-time favorite, however, is CLA-2003:628, released in April 2003 for a vulnerability in vixie cron announced in March 2001!

So, if you count Conectiva, Gates is probably right about it taking a couple of weeks on average, even if everyone else does it in 24 hours.

760 days for Conectiva + 1 day each for 50 other distributions is about 16 days, on average.

Mandrake is a product of MandrakeSoft.

UnitedLinux is the parent company of SUSE, the European arm which produces SUSE Linux. There is also the Asian arm, TurboLinux, and the South American/Latin arm, Conectiva. Yep, all these major distributions fall under the same parent company. So you're pretty accurate in asserting that there's only a few big players as far as corporations go.

Debian can indeed be very political. I still don't understand their problem with the GNOME/Bitstream font licensing agreement, for one.

It's quite sad, really, watching innovation dies within Debian to be replaced by excessive political correctness. Debian used to lead in packaging (apt+deb) but now apt has been ported to RPM (see Conectiva and FreshRPMS), Mandrake has uRPMi, and the Fink project has co-opted apt/deb for binary distribution but added their parallel build-from-source-with-dependency system.

I have packaged quite a few RPMs in the past, mostly due to the lack of compatible RPMs after RH8 came out - but the horrible mess that is debian build scripts put me off. There are even some alternative packaging scripts for Debian, surely a sign of problems, but they never really take off.

Here's my wishlist as an ex-Debian, soon-to-be Fink user (for the second time, my first OS X experience was held back by the lack of vector instructions in G3):
- Peace among developers
- Debian Desktop to succeed in making Debian more customer-friendly
- Faster release cycles (I thought their new testing system was meant to do that)
- Compile from source a'la Fink

Peace,

apt-get install blah-blah-blah

Prefer GUI software install? how about this?

apt-get (the program) is now available for .rpm (the format). As a result, you can have all of the power of apt-get, its tools, the great dependency checking, etc., on a RPM-based system. More and more RPM apt-get-able repositories are coming on line every day.

See the above links for using apt-get to keep a RedHat 7.2 system updated to the very latest in a lot of popular packages. If a lot of good-quality RPM repositories become available (and you can imagine there will be), this might keep me out of Debian's clutches yet :)

I know Connectiva Linux has begun translating every bit of the linux documentation project writing into spanish and there seems to be one that is doing the same for korean but what about chinese and even indian? Could anyone link those projects if they know them here for people to send to these companies when replying to spam, thank you.

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.

hmmm, well, for starters you might wish to look at www.linuxdoc.org/linuxfocus/Castellano which I would assume is a repository of Spanish-language documentation for Linux.
There is also the Debian translation repository at: www.debian.org/international/Spanish

And if you're interested in a Red-Hat based distribution that is supposed to have a fairly complete collection of spanish instructions, check out: conectiva.com. These guys also have a spanish-language publication that you might be interested in looking into. You might even want to sign up your new admin for a year or so.

hmmm, it's amazing what you can find in 15 seconds with Google, isn't it?

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."

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

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?

Sure, it has imported some ideas from Debian (apt-get, alternatives) but current Conectiva is about as much a clone of Debian as it is a clone of RedHat ;)

Oh, and of course distributions like Debian and RedHat are also taking back in some of the work done by Conectiva. I guess open source must be working.

If you want a distro which is RPM-Based, RedHat compatible and has apt support, switch over to Conectiva Linux 7.0. Have a look at http://www.conectiva.com, and download an ISO from http://www.linuxiso.com (you only need the first CD). We have people on the KDE Team (and on the kernel, XFree and LinuxConf teams also), and KDE packages are released almost simultaneously with the official announcement.

One thing both debian and mandrake have in common is a convenient way to get security updates.

Indeed, if you're tied to a GUI. Don't get me wrong. I love Mandrake (and am typing this with it now), and have been using it for a few years (or so) now. The biggest thing I hate about any RPM based distro is the dependency hell that is easy to fall into.
Debian-based distribs have this super-easy-to-use-and-love-app called: apt. "apt-get install upgrade". What can be easier than that to get the latest updates? Well, guess what: Conectiva Linux (from Brazil) reworked apt-get to work with RPM. This is SO wonderfull. Not all distribs have caught on, but MDK was the first (that I noticed) to notice Conectiva's work.

Enjoy!

P.S.
Read the man page for use... (man apt-get)

The obvious connection between Brazil (and Latin America) and Rio de Janeiro, while natural, is not very helpful to the would-be Linux tourist in Brazil.

Most of the present key Linux places are located elsewhere. What follows is an incomplete list of the major places to contact about the state of Linux in Brazil:

- Conectiva is the largest South Amrican Linux distribution. Largely based in Red-Hat, they have made a large effort to translate lots of applications interfaces into Portuguese and Spanish. Conectiva distribution is today one of the top Linux distributions in the world. Their main office is in Curitiba, a southern, beachless city.

-Popular Computer Project, an under U$200 computer using a stripped down version of KDE (containing basically Konqueror, KOffice and the supporting apps). This is being developed by the University of Minas Gerais, Minas Gerais being one of the few brazilian states without direct access to the sea.

Projeto Software Livre, the project of the state of Rio Grande do Sul government (the southernmost brazilian state), to promote the use of free software in the state. This was the most publicized government project in this area, and the first time a state government declared anything about free software in Brazil.

As a sad note, today I got the news that the Federal government buying a large number of computers to brazilian schools throughout the country. They will be buying only Windows machines.

conectiva's translation conectiva has their own english translation....

Totally unlike RedHat which doesn't automatically install and run sendmail, apache, etc?

Are they still doing it ? One would think they should have learned about that by now.
Let me assue you that even tho RedHat is the biggest Linux distribution, they are not the only. One I'm sure don't do it (leaving every single service you install starting automaticaly) is Conectiva Linux, which happens to be the one I use.

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First, let me say this is a terrific idea, but:

"The people that make above a dollar a day, under three dollars a day, generally have some electricity. They've got television sets that run on car batteries, or they will have a little generator."

Where did he get this info from?
* Some one making $30 to $90 a month barelly can survive. So this guy has money to buy batteries (or take somewhere to recharge), or even worse, in the middle of a Petroleum crisis which the whole world is (gas price here in Brazil is going to the stars) this guy with $30~$90 still have enougth to buy gas to his genarator in order to wathc TV!

"Each part of the community has to do some different part of it. You would not come to Sun for good taste in designing attractive programs. We can make sure the networking works. All of our partners, meaning all of the high-tech companies in the world, ought to contribute their engineering knowledge,"

...and in a never-seen-before move every tech company in the world would forget about its difference and unity to help the poor people in far away places without looking for profits.

Gage said he has discussed the plan with the chairman of Sony and the president of the World Bank and decided that at least 100,000 modified consoles should be installed in schools and people's homes in poor country's

At what cost???
The only kind of money the World bank "borrows" to poor countries is charged in an interest rate that can never be paid back.


Sorry if I sound down. But it sounds too nice to be true.

Of course, if something like that ever happen I would feel really good knowing it. And Linux would grow with it.

Now on the other side, this is already happening in some places.
For example, The Linux distibution company Conectiva already gives parts of its profits selling the Conectiva Linux Box to CDI.

CDI is a non profit organization to help the democratization of tecnology among poor people/schools.
Good to see that some one at least is doing something.

I wonder if they've put apt-get in this new release, anyone can tell me?

In case you were wondering how to use apt-get in Redhat, please check here

Do you have examples? What exactly is better with the Debian packaging policy? Otherwise this is just trolling... you can't just expect anyone to listen to "uhm, yeah, the package policy is great because apt is great and apt is great because the policy is great because..." with no explainations, and expect anyone to take you seriously.

2.Due to this consistency, apt-get and so on are made possible.

How does a packaging policy make a technology possible? Please explain. Otherwise, I think common sense says it's the other way around.

I haven't tried the various tricks that are used to get apt-get working with rpm, but given my previous experience, I don't see them as being likely to work. I could be wrong here.

What isn't likely to work? Some people have already made it work for you.

ie, the policy enables the technology to work.

Again, please tell why. I think a lot of people agree with me that you build a policy around the technology used - because if the technology doesn't support the decisions you make in your policy, then what good is the policy? The technology is the foundation for all your policy work - it takes more time to change the technology than make a slight change in policy.

I assure you that I understand the difference between the two, but I am not convinced that you understand the link... make sense?

Yes, I understand the link, but not why you believe the relationship is reversed.

Mandrake's beta distribution (Cooker) is also using apt-get and various people have set up their own private apt-get archives for Red Hat.

This means that "apt-get vs rpm" is plain stupid, since they work together just fine. It should be ".deb vs .rpm", but those two are so similar that it doesn't make much sense to fight over ;)

Well we aren't talking about RedHat here (it would be embarrasing for them to do this, and counterproductive as well - they designed RPM for the needs of the market they are going after, and it servest them fairly well) but Conectiva - a very different distribution designed for a different market. It is Conectiva that desires the apt functionality - RedHat does not. And yes, it would be a pain to switch over in midstream, but it would be equally a pain to try and hack RPM into doing things that it's designers consciously eschewed - AND THEN deal with the support nightmare created by using what amounts to a different architecture by the same name - i.e. other rpms will no longer work, but there will be no readily apparent clue to the users that they won't or why they won't.

When a fundamental decision was made in mistake, correcting it after is always a pain. Every package in the distribution will have to be remade either way. Compatibility with packages from other distributions will be broken either way..

What's next, Linux Certification? Linux Certified Engineers?

Actually, RedHat has a Certification Program.

Latin american Conectiva has its own, also. I know one of their certified engineers.

(No, I dont work for them, I just happen to use their distribution.)