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Conectiva Linux 7.0 is Out
rsd writes: "Conectiva Linux 7.0 is out. Here is the original announcement. And here is the babelfish translation. They are already shipping Portuguese box and will start the english soon. However the CDs (iso for what matter) are available in english already. Their main ftp server is overcrowded. Hoever, Rik VanRiel provided us with a really
fast server. I will not describe every feature on it but the main change is the
Synaptic tool, which in my opinion is the best APT frontend ever written."
Well, it's always nice to see an alternative to over-used under-developed tools. Synaptic seems stable and reliable, although I've only used it for about 10 minutes, but it looks vary solid. Well done gentlemen! (developers)
This distro is new to me. Does anyone have usage/popularity numbers for it?
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I remember the first time I installed Linux. It ate me over and over again. This was back in the days of Red Hat 4.1. But I had to install Linux on the server it was going on, so I had no choice. I had to learn it, and had to make it work correctly.
:-)
To me it sounds like you don't "need" Linux running on your mahcine. I may be wrong, so I apologize if I am. However, the learning curve is steep, yes, but it is steep because the OS is not designed for being "user-friendly," rather, something designed for reliability and performance.
I assure you, the day you NEED a Linux box, it will come to you...
Indeed. I meant the packaging format - LSB covers the format, not the application version. RPM 3.05 and 4.0 use the same package format (and a different back end database).
So yeah, RPM4 is good, and so is Connectiva.
Well, there is something pretty common here in Brazil... brazilian software developers and system administrators tend to see national software as being of low/bad quality and to rely more on international products and distributions than to give credit to local products. I have heard someone made incredibly good comments on the Window Maker, and going wide eyed by being told Window Maker is a Brazilian Software. And never again doing any comment about it, but replacing it by Enlightenment on their desktops. And also, more than once I have heard comments from many admins saying they wouldn't use Conectiva simply because it was a Brazilian distribution, preferring Slackware or RedHat instead. But Conectiva is managing to break that down. I am working with one guy related to the Conectiva project, and they are really doing much development locally, instead of just picking the best software around and bundling it in "yet one more distribution". And also, Conectiva is a commercial distribution, with a great deal of worry from Conectiva ( the company ) on supporting and training their users. So, I think it's time to give Conectiva a try, at least, before putting Debian back on my notebook. I can keep You all updated on what goes on, but I believe Conectiva grained a self identity, no longer being simply a RedHat 5.2 with some patches over it, like Conectiva 4.0 was. kisses, Jessica
Well, yes, it does. I use it for a while (been upgrading with apt) and it's great. In the installation process you choose which language to use (english, portuguese or spanish).
Patola (Claudio Sampaio)
Unix System Administrator
What I'd really like to see is people try to abstract the functionality from the UI. Take Mozilla. If you want a good Gnome interface, use Galeon. Presumably, someone could also make a KDE interface to keep consistency there. I hope we see a lot more toolkit-specific front ends with toolkit-independent back ends in the future.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Anybody ever heard the Gnome guy (forgot his name) talk about how much more expensive MS is for Mexicans (schools, small business...) and therefore how much more important it is for them to have a real alternative? I guess the same goes for Brazil. This make this distro somewhat more important to me than "just another" English one.
The product substitutes version 6.0 launched at the end of 2000, and will be presented in two editions: Conectiva Linux 7.0 and Conectiva Linux 7.0 Professional Server.
São Paulo, July 2001 - The new version of the open source operation system that is most used in all of the world, will be available starting at the next Fernsaoft (São Paulo computer show), which will be from the 30th of July to the 4th of August. The product substitutes version 6.0, launched at the end of 2000, and will be presented in two editions: Conectiva Linux 7.0 and Conectiva Linux 7.0 Professional Server.
The biggest new features of this version are the tools to facilitate the use of the RPM automatic upgrade utility, called APT. Thanks to resources which are exclusive to Conectiva, it is possible for each user to install only the packages which are suitable for them.
Another modification which Conectiva prepared for CL 7.0 was the extinction of the boot (startup) disks, seeings that practically all modern machines are able to accomplish this process directly from the CD-ROM. But, if necessary, the user can create their own boot disk with the utilities and images on the five CDs which are part of the product. They also bring a program to help in the creation of the diskette and facilitate the installation in machines with the Windows operating system.
According to the company's new strategy, which intends to show that Linux is now profession and has won a large part of the market, the design of the boxes has also changed. CL version 7.0 has a more simple appearance than the earlier versions, and maintains the predominance of the colour blue, whereas the Professional Server version also follows this 'clean' look, with an emphasis on the colour white.
Among the advantages of the new version, it is worth also mentioning the support and documentation, which is even more complete, and directed towards the user. Conectiva Linux version 7.0 documentation is composed of the "User's Guide" and "Quick Installation Guide", whereas the Professional Server version has the "Quick Installation Guide", the "Conectiva Linux Server Guide" and the new book "Understanding Conectiva Linux", which presents information about the operating system through pratical examples. In addition to the manuals, the package is composed of five CDs, one for installation (operating system and applications), one of extra applications, two with the source code of the first two CDs and one containing StarOffice for Linux in various languages.
To provide support, the user will have coupons in the packet which give the right to two hours of telephone support and three months via email. If the validity of the supports expires, Conectiva also offers extended support, in both versions, so that the user can adquire more time to resolve their questions.
Technical Characteristics
In this version, the automatic upgrade tool for RPM packages, the APT, has a system which is much more stable and better integrated with tools such as Synaptic. This, in turn, is a graphical interface created to simplify the remote installation and upgrading of programs through APT, without needing to resort to the command line. "To meet these objectives, various packages were rebuilt, being subdivided into smaller packages, for the purpose of economizing disk space and making them more flexible", explains Alfredo Kojima, creator of Synaptic and the WindowMaker graphical interface, and a member of the Conective development team.
In Conectiva Linux 7.0 it is worth mentioning as well the inclusion of the Kernel 2.4, which signficiantly improves the performance of the version, principally on servers which run large applications and multiprocessing systems. This performance also helps a lot in the utilitization of Linux in the corporate environment. In addition to the Kernel 2.4, you can also choose the 2.2.19 Kernel.
XFree86, a Linux graphical interface server, is now in edition 4.03, which has new drivers for SiS and S3 cards, both very popular in Brazil. This upgrade resolves stability and performance problems which previously existed. In addition, it has 3D image support and anti-aliasing, a resource which smooths-out fonts on the screen for easier reading.
The standard graphical interface for Conectiva Linux 7.0 is KDE 2.12, which now has various upgrades and improvements in terms of security. KDE has integrated a series of applications, such as the e-mail reader KMail, the dialer KPPP, the browser and file manager Konqueror and the office suite KOffice, as well as other small tools.
As always, another advantage of the Linux operating system, which is repeated in this new version, is the better utilization of the hardware, make available constant investments in upgrades. In Conectiva Linux 7.0 there are four installation profiles available: minimum, standard, complete and personalised, each with a package of pre-determined applications. The standard installation occupies an average of only 510 MB, which is little when compared to other Open Source distributions. Also it is worth saying that the whole installation process has interactive help available.
Conectiva Linux 7.0 will be available for sale at the Fenasoft (computer show), at suggested prices of R$ 88,00 (around US $36) (Conectiva Linux 7.0) and R$ 225,00 (around US $105) (Conectiva Linux 7.0 - Professional Server).
here- I got this through the one built in to Mozilla.
I am relatively new to APT-GET as the only Debian box I have ever setup is a small P166 server sitting here by me at work. (A little off topic but Debian is quite an efficient distro!)
My main question is that Connectiva appears to use Apt-get as well, and from what I saw Synaptic presents a nice logical UI for all this functionality, but to where is it connecting?
On debian I connect to the main debian servers for updates, back home on my Mandrake machine I connect to the Mandrake mirrors with Mandrake Update, but is Synaptic generic enough that I could replace Mandrake Update with it? Could I install Connectiva, and then try to get packages from Debian?
Obviously you could get packages from any distro manually, but the important thing is whether or not they would be able to satisfy dependencies and run, and I was wondering how much Synaptic could help in that area.
Thanks in advance for anyone who has experience here and can clarify!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Linux doesn't necessarily need the learning curve that many people attribute to it. Sure, back in the Slackware-only days, installing, configure and using Linux required some knowledge and effort. But today, it really depends on what you want to do. If you just want to run a few office apps like most people do with windows, you never need to touch source code, or bother with the tricky stuff. Just buy a good distribution (like Mandrake or Redhat or [insert favorite here]), and install it.
Now, what makes Linux difficult? First, there is partitioning your hard drive and installing file systems in preparation for the install. This makes many users really nervous. But here's the reality. If you started with a blank hard drive and installed Windows from scratch, you'd still have to set up the file system on the hard drive during the install. You might not have to *partition* the drive, but you don't have to do that with some of the Linux distributions if you are running them without a dual-boot situation. Don't want to go through the trouble of installing it yourself? Do what most people do with Windows -- buy a machine with the OS preinstalled. While rare, you can find machines with Linux preinstalled.
The second difficult thing about installing Linux is the reported problems with recognizing hardware. Note that this is getting better and better, but you'll find that there are problems with devices designed specifically for Windows (WinModems and Windows Printers), and there are also problems with proprietary hardware in which the manufacturer has not opened the specs to Open Source developers. Want to avoid this problem? Make sure your hardware is fully supported by the Linux distribution BEFORE you install. Think consumers wouldn't go for this? Surprise! They did a few years ago when Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0. It was funny how all of those machines my former employer bought from Compaq weren't certified to run Windows NT, and when we had installation and reliability problems, we were outta luck. And these were high-end machines at the time.
While I'm rambling on, let me tell you where I see *real* problems with Linux. The problem is with user interface consistency. You see, one of the great Linux strengths is also a weakness. There are lots of choices for your desktop, and each has a set of applications tailored to it. Great! Nobody is going to tell me what desktop environment I have to use. But if my favorite applications require various environments, I have a slight problem. Yes, I can run all of them under my favorite desktop environment, but they look, feel and interact differently. In many cases, you almost have to know which libraries the application was written with to fully understand how to use it. This can be very confusing for the average user -- it's bad enough that they have to learn something different from Windows, but try explaining that they have to learn two or three different styles of user interface. It can be frustrating. I hope to see this improve. Perhaps authors of good applications tailored for one environment will port them to another. For example, if your favorite web browser is Konqueror under KDE, but your favorite desktop is GNOME with Enlightenment, wouldn't it be nifty to see a port that interfaces really well with GNOME? Maybe we'll see these kinds of things in the future.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I wonder why people bother posting babelfish translations. They are practically useless. :^) Interestingly enough, this one consistently misspells "launch" (as "launchn"). Somebody should send e-mail to Altavisa (pre-1999) er I mean to Digital, er, I mean Compaq, er I mean Altavista about this. :-)
There will always be a market for people who want to recompile the Kernal, and tweak this and that. This is good, but not for the Average user out there.
That is all I am trying to say.
A GUI that uses a flat file rather than digging through layers of arbitrarily grouped
"functionality"
//taxman
Unfortunately, I didn't write the problems up. Of the RPM distributions, I liked Mandrake best, except that I had to install it about 5 times because some programs simply wouldn't work. After a few hours I found out that the system didn't work properly because of the Finnish language setting given in the first screen of the installation. Well, got that fixed, but after failing to install newest version of KDE properly, I kicked Mandrake out. I think it had some other critical problems too, but can't remember what anymore.
I installed SuSe Linux on my employer's two notebooks. It was hell, because SuSe didn't have a rescue CD. I was frustrated like hell and just couldn't believe this. Yeah, it had 3,5" rescue disk, but the notebooks didn't have such drives. Finally I managed to get it installed by using the Mandrake installation CD's rescue mode... Why did I need a rescue disk? I had accidentally written the LILO to wrong partition (not MBR), and I didn't want to go through the package selection again. Also setting up the network was hell, and fought with it for hours. I was unable to setup my audio card (SB AWE32) on my home machine, even with hours of fighting. The "YAST2" setup tool is sh*t, and slow as hell (and has annoyingly stupid name - why not just call it "System Installation Tool" or something???). In the second installation I didn't select ALL packages during the initial installation. Thus, I was forced to select 600 packages one-by-one using a notebook nanny because the package manager didn't support keyboard properly. It took about half an hour to select them all. On the plus side, SuSe has the prettiest boot screen I've ever seen. ;-)
Corel Linux (based on Debian) had definitely the easiest installation! Everything went smooth, as it detected my AWE32 sound card and got even my exotic i740 video card and rare Viewpoint monitor working straight properly! Unfortunately, the support from Corel was non-existant, and there weren't any updates. I wanted to install new KDE 2.x, so I added some regular Debian sites to the update program. It went hell, as the Debian packages broke the system entirely.
I installed Debian on my home server/router/firewall. It was also hell, because I don't have a 3,5" disk drive, just CD, and Debian didn't have a bootable installation CD. It also didn't have a way to install it from RedHat. It took about two days to install it from RedHat, using chroot tweaks to run the installation scripts, etc. But that's nothing, then I had to fight with the package installations. I have to say that dselect has the most horrible user interface that I've ever seen in any program. Come on guys! Why can't you use "Esc" key for returning, but "Shift-Q"????? Aaaarghhh. Anyhow, using dselect and configuring the apt-get sources.list was horribly difficult, and I've been using Linux (RH) for 6 years and computers for 18 years. I can't even imagine how difficult it would be for a beginner. Choosing between the "stable" and "unstable" packages is also a hell to configure, and I still don't know how to do that in the source.list file, after using Debian for a few months. For some time the "unstable" worked, but then I started getting weird errors such as:
Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
apache: Depends: libdb2 (>= 2:2.7.7-4) but 2:2.7.7-8 is to be installed
E: Sorry, broken packages
Then I switched back to the stable - which means having outdated packages all the time. Configuring the APT system is really confusing and non-intuitive for even an experienced Linux (RH) user (and I'm not really a computer beginner after 18 years). Everything requires reading huge amounts of documentation and help files. That's just NOT the way modern software should be done. All programs should be tested on beginners. But Debian developers clearly have some tendency to make the system so complex that they can feel superior. That's just idiotic.
Finally, I installed RedHat 7.1 to my personal workstation. Can't remember all the problems anymore, but they were plenty, as always with RedHat installations. Why on earth RH still doesn't have ReiserFS??? They say "it's not stable enough", but I switched from ext2 exactly because of non-fixable filesystem corruption. And I don't want to wait 30 minutes for the chkfs for the 60GB drive. The new "up2date" updater is a joke. On the first update, it tried to update the up2date itself, but ran into depency problems with Python (it's written with Python I guess). Yeah, this was the out-of-the-box installation. No, the updater didn't inform which package conflicted with which, but just that there was "a conflict" with SOME of the 20 packages it tried to install. Of course it didn't tell which package conflicted and how. I had to trace and update them manually with rpm, after a lot of trouble. After resolving that problem, I was able to make up2dates for a month, and now there's again a conflict. No, I'm not going to use up2date again before the GUI is fixed PROPERLY.
Linux definitely is not ready for desktop, or for beginners. I believe the main obstacle is the attitude of the developers, who require that users use huge amount of time studying the documentations.
Even as a heavy user, and as a software developer, I don't want to spend months of my time on studying useless things. Most people don't, and if Linux developers require them to do that, everybody loses.
Considering that Brazil is the largest market in the southern hemisphere (okay, Australia is there too...), making a Portugese port of Linux makes a lot of sense.
Of course, porting and selling Linux hasn't yet proved to be a sustainable business plan.
Dancin Santa
"Until Somebody produces a Linus that is easy to install"
I agree. Last time I tried to install Linus, he kicked me in the nuts.
What makes this one different from other Linux distributions?
It combines the Linux Standard Base packaging system, RPM 3.05, with the most well known automatic software installation frontend, APT, a tight set of packaging guidelines, and a nice GUI for APT called Synaptic.
Also, most people don't live in North America or speak English, and internationalization for most general purpose distributions is quite poor.
Agreed on all points, especially the last one. Interface consistency is something that has frustrated even *me*, and I'm a died-in-the-wool UNIX old-timer. (Hell, I actually _like_ the way that Motif looks.)
That's why I find KDE so exciting. They are actually acheiving a level of consistency and quality in the interface that meets (or, in my opinion, exceeds) that of Microsoft, Apple, or really any other desktop I can think of.
What I'd really like to see is KLinux. A distro centered entirely around KDE, with no non-KDE apps available. At this point that might make the app selection just a little slim, particularly since KOffice is still not on-par with the functionality of something like StarOffice. But I think there are many users that would really appreciate the level of consistency that would be achieved by such a distribution, and the distro maintainers could focus on a 100% KDE-based system, hopefully producing a more integrated final OS.
I know that RedHat 7.1 has Spanish support, though RH7.1 assumes you are in Spain when installing in Spanish--a strange assumption to make, considering how big Latin America is. Note: RH7.1 doesn't support Portugese.
I would assume that Conectiva has Spanish support, but it would be nice to know this for a fact.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.