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Conectiva Linux 9 Review
JigSaw writes "Here's an english review of a popular Linux distro in the Latin American countries: Conectiva Linux 9. Jason Prince investigates its installation, the desktop usage, the package manager (synaptic) and some of the problems he met on the way."
No matter how good Linux is and how bad Windows is, people first have to know what Linux is. Once Desktop adoption in any country is over 10% or so, then it is a very slippery slope for MS. That is one reason why they are fighting so hard to keep >99% or so of the i386 desktop.
Aquí está una revisión inglesa de un distro popular de Linux en los países americanos latinos: Conectiva Linux 9. El príncipe de Jason investiga su instalación, el uso de escritorio, el encargado del paquete (sináptico) y algo de los problemas que él resolvió en el way.
Conectiva Linux 9 is already rather old...
The 10th release is arriving soon.
They were the first with apt-get for rpms. Pretty cool distro.
Ad-free version
Conectiva Linux 9 - The Latin American Distribution You Should Know
Posted by special contributor Jason Prince on 2004-04-15 06:12:20 UTC
Conectiva Linux, developed by Brazilian vendor Conectiva S.A., is the most popular distribution in South America, so it's quite surprising that there aren't more reviews of their products online. This is really quite surprising - while you may not have heard much about Conectiva Linux itself, you almost certainly know quite a lot about three of their most important contributions to the open source community - the Conectiva Crystal icon set, apt-rpm, and Synaptic.
Conectiva Linux, Page 1/4
Conectiva Linux 9 is the most recent release from Conectiva S.A., barring some technology previews and the first two betas of their upcoming version 10. It originally came on four CDs, but in the middle of last year Conectiva pulled a huge set of updates together and released Update 1 on another CD, taking the total to five. When patched from the Update 1 CD, the distribution includes a respectable set of core components, including kernel 2.4.21, Xfree86 4.3.0, KDE 3.1.2, Gnome 2.2.0, and OpenOffice 1.0.3; and, of course, apt and Synaptic. The hardware detection is provided by Red Hat's kudzu, which is generally excellent. Three languages are available to choose from: Spanish, Portuguese and English.
Installation
The Conectiva installation utility, mi (for Modular Installer) is a little different to the other Linux installation programs I've seen over the years; although it bears some similarity in construction to Debian's. Something that greatly impressed me about mi was the ability to slipstream the updates right into the main installation, instead of having to install the base distribution, followed by the updates. You just boot straight off the Update 1 CD instead of the original installation CD1 - the process is exactly the same, but the resulting system is pre-patched.
(As a side-note, you can also use the Update 1 CD to patch an existing installation of version 9.0; this is as easy as starting Synaptic, selecting Actions, Add CD-ROM and following the prompts, and then clicking the big Dist Upgrade button followed by Proceed - Synaptic does the rest. I was very impressed when I tried this.)
Once you get past the initial booting process, the entire process is graphical by default; a text-based installer is provided as a backup. You select a language, read the release notes, and then configure your mouse, keyboard and network. The mouse is usually automatically detected, and you just have to click the Next button, while the keyboard and network dialogs are also fairly self-explanatory. The partition table is then initialised, and you can select an installation profile. By default, you don't get to select individual packages, which is a good thing for most users.
You are then prompted to create the necessary partitions to install Conectiva Linux 9. The first message you'll get if you don't have any unpartitioned free space is that automatic partitioning has failed, which is very unintuitive for new users. If you do have any free space, the partitioner will attempt to create a swap partition (if needed) and a single ext3 partition for files. Normally I would expect the swap partition to be created at the end of the drive or free space, not at the beginning, but there doesn't seem to be a problem with the reverse approach. Other than this, the partitioner is fairly standard, if a bit dated; like Red Hat's Anaconda, you aren't able to resize existing partitions.
Following partitioning the installation of the base system begins, which takes about ten minutes. When the base system has been installed, the installer exits without warning, something that gave me a considerable jolt when I first saw it. The installer displays an ascii logo of Tux while it remounts the partitions in some way and then starts the graphical front-end again. Once restarted, the packages you chose earlier are installed.
Synaptic is
Was really nice see this review of Conectiva 9 even now near release of next one. For everyone interested in help with next release development, go to https://moin.conectiva.com.br/TechnologyPreview ( English link ) and see download directions to latest test release.
Any expert opinions??
As an actual link: Connectiva's Technology Preview Page
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Seems like all the major distributions now are either solely KDE based or a KDE+Gnome combination. Anyone know of a Gnome only distribution? I currently use Fedora but I am concerned that Redhat doesn't have much focus on the home desktop market.
Absolutely brilliant. This can only be a good thing, the latest numbers I saw indicated that a large amount of spam came from rooted linux boxen. Make it easy for those noobs to be patched, and they will be. Make it hard, and they won't bother. I wonder how much spam it would save us all if all the major distros did something like this.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I installed apt-get and Synaptic on my laptop running Fedora 1. I absolutely love them, everytime I fire up my machine and the RHN applet tells me I need to upgrade, I use Synaptic to do it. Easy, painless, and fast.
What exactly to you mean by focus? What do I need Linux to do that I don't? And vice-versa.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Holy shit, that is one of the most incomprehensible posts I have ever seen lol.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Poorer countries such as the United States could go to WalMart and buy a system running the JDS. Is that linux cheap enough for you?
Next time, wait until after you post to hit the bong.
...why go with Linux? There's nothing worthwhile to run on it!
Seriously. I'd thrown on a pirated version of Windows before Linux any day. You're not gonna make Linux headway in countries where EVERYONE pirates stuff. It doesn't matter that Linux costs nothing, so does Windows, for all practical purposes. And since both are equally free in cost, it makes beter sense to go with the one that has the real apps written for it.
Linux will only be attractive in places where licenses have to be bought. And with Linux insurance now being something business must seriously consider, this makes Windows use even more attractive.
Face it, OSS has lost the game. In the short and long run, Windows is cheaper.
You may commence to crying.
How can I trust it when he is overlooking something so obvious as the 'Find' option in Synaptic?
I quote: it won't let you search the apt catalogues using natural language queries. For example, searching for 'word processor' returns no results; a more experienced user would know that they had to search for 'OpenOffice' or 'Abiword' to display the packages they were seeking. It would be great if Synaptic could search the package descriptions, as well as the title.
Now, in my Synaptic install (Debian unstable) I see the following: in the right top corner is a search box that does an incremental search on package name only. In the Package menu I find an option named Find (shortcut Ctrl-F, as a Windows/IE user would expect it) which allows me to search on all fields of the package. By default the search dialog that comes up searches on both package name and description.
Otherwise I would say, Synaptic rocks! It is the nicest package manager I have ever used. I still do apt-get install for individual packages, but for finding packages and just browsing the tree, I use Synaptic. The daunting aspect the reviewer notes is due to the sheer amount of packages available, some 5500 on Conectiva, and some 14000 on Debian.
Just try it. Get synaptic (and if you're on an rpmbased system, apt4rpm) and give it a whirl. You won't go back.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
As a south american geek i have to say that i have never meet someone who use Conectiva. I've use Linux for.. i dont know... 6 years, and in my personal experience RedHat and Debian are the most common distributions- at least in Chile.
Conectiva is well-known -as in TurboLinux well-known-but-not-much-used.
That would seem to be a good way to sell it--don't they have less silly vocal homonyms than English? Right! Not left? No, right!
-I am an elective eunuch.
Doesn't the climate make it difficult for them?
Hey fuckhead, it isn't very nice to put someone's email address in the SUBJECT LINE OF YOUR COMMENT when that person has taken the TIME to put in their USER PREFERENCES THAT THEY WANT SPAM ARMORING!!!
Too bad you posted that as an AC, or I would feed your address to the Google bots too.
In case you're wondering, Google doesn't index low-scored comments, so some negative moderation would help here.
Asscork.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Here in Venezuela i don't know anyone using it either. The prefered ones seem to be:
:)
Mandrake, Debian, Suse, Slackware, Gentoo, and Knoppix.
And i personally love FreeBSD
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
There's a banner at the top and a sidebar ad or you can hit the "printer friendly" link and get a version with no ads.
These ads arn't objectionable.
(Note: I don't see pop-ups and anybody who wants to block those can do it with exactly zero technical know-how, so if there are some they don't count.)
That's a whole lot of text. Is there a point in there somewhere?
It's a troll, I understood. :)
Bless you,
need a hankie?
Conectiva is quite well known in Brazil. I think this is because of the language barrier. While Spanish and Portuguese are similar enough that reasonably intelligent speakers of the two can communicate with each other, there are significant differences.
However, the size of Brazil's population and its economy make it the most economically important nation in Latin America. It is a nation of 190 million people with a large and rapidly growing economy. Many economists believe that the nations that will dominate the 21st Century economically are the so-called "BRICs:" Brazil, Russia, India, and China. I mention this because I'm sure Mexicans will get upset seeing me say that Brazil is the most economically important nation in Latin America. Anyway, even if Conectiva were to only have its distro widely installed here in Brazil (and I'm not sure if that's the case), it could still be the most popular distro in Latin America. Consider that even though all the nations of Latin America except Brazil speak Spanish, a majority of people in South America speak Portuguese (the population of Brazil is larger than that of the rest of South America combined). I believe that Portuguese is narrowly not the language of the majority of Latin Americans because México has a large population.
Anyway, I am in the process of founding a company for industrial production of food (I prefer not to be more specific right now), and I intend to use Linux on our computers-- not just the servers, but the desktops too. Because of its native support for Portuguese (developed by native speakers too... heh) and because of the presence of Conectiva right here in São Paulo, I am almost certain to use the Conectiva distro. Yes, people like my office manager, who know only Windoze, will have to learn to deal with a new GUI, but she's smart enough, and I am planning for training of all workers who will use computers. The cost of that training comes out cheaper than paying MS licenses.
I am trying to build a "Values-Led" business, and I like that we will be supporting another Brazilian company and keeping the profits from our software expenditures here in our community instead of sending them to Redmond. It's also nice that the technical support will be from people here in our city (M$ phone support in Portuguese is reached by dialing a toll-free number here in Brazil, but the people who answer are Brazilians working in Redmond... strange but true). I love that we will not be treated like criminals by our software suppliers and will never have to undergo a license audit. I also love that my employees will be able to take Conectiva CDs home or download the images at home and be able to install exactly the same software at home as they use at work. Even if we upgrade the machines at work, the employees who use computers at home will be able to keep pace. Contrast this with the Windoze situation, where people use Windows 2000 or XP at work, but typically use Windows 95 or 98 at home.
It's also cool that some well-known kernel hackers have worked at Conectiva, including Marcelo Tosatti (he left and is now working elsewhere, but he was at Conectiva when he was asked to maintain the then-production kernel) and Rik van Riel.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
One of the things that stops Joe Sixpak from using Linux is its inability to run decent games.
Is it possible that Linux will become the professional OS and Windows will be religated to being for hobbiests?
it's like buying a couch, obviously the $300 one at the brick is a bit better than the 10 year old ripped up cum stained couch in a back alley. it's the same with windows and linux. but im sure you already knew that if you knew anything at all.
But it's penguin cum, and that makes a difference!
Vote for global prefs bug
As a a geek living in latin america, I can tell you I've never seen or heard of anyone using Connectiva Linux.
Everyone uses redhat, lots of debian, etc... just like in USia
Don't marginalize spanish. Despite brazil's population, there is still every other country in central and south american toconsider... even if brazil had twice the population, this wouldnt' change.
To imply that brazil speaks for or represents all of latin america because it has more people than the rest is rediculous. Brazil is Brazil... and as cool as it is, it's not Colombia, or Venezuela, or Nicaragua, or Costa Rica, or Argentina.... and the people in those countries still speak Spanish.
It's great that this software is locally made and used... but that's not the same thing as saying it's used in all of latin america.
tha'ts like saying that because China has more people than the US, a chinese version of some cookie is "preferred" among the two.
Conectiva is just bad, and that's pretty much a consensus in the brazilian Linux community. If that wasn't enough, their solutions are overpriced, and they're pulling political levers to get government contracts instead of Microsoft - even though their product is _more_ expensive than what Microsoft produces.
Just a few months ago, they got the current left-leaning party to push for a change in public contractor law that put a "priority for Free Software solutions" above other criteria in public contracts.
I mean, they're just out to leech out taxpayer money with some lame nationalistic excuse.
My attempts to get this on the frontpage keep getting rejected, but the brazilian distro to watch is Kurumin, a noppix variant that fits on a mini-CD and includes just SO MUCH fucking software in 180 megs, and so much functionality.
This might seem overstated in bandwidth-abundant America, but it's way easier to download 200-odd megs to try out this new-fangled kool linux thang than the 4x600Mb downloads the new distros have been requiring.
Disclaimer: I'm in no way affiliated with Carlos Morimoto or the Kurumin crowd. Yes, I'm a brazilian taxpayer.
I've know about them since their first version, which was RedHat translated to Portuguese. The main reason for its popularity in Brazil was and still is the Portuguese language. This makes it popular with people who don't speak English and don't want to learn - which is simply a stupid move for someone working in IT.
Conectiva has undoubtedly matured in many ways but they're not as easy as Mandrake or as popular as RedHat (even in Brazil) or as power-user oriented as Debian or as Unix-like as Slackware.
It is a fairly popular distro in Brazil, but mostly among domestic users. Not many corporate users. AFAIK their biggest client is the state government of the state where they're based and it usually makes sense for a state government to favor local companies.
About the translation, it's extremely heterogeneous. Since it was done by contributors and not very well edited or verified, you find everything from great translations to simply incomprehensible ones. As a consultant in Brazil, I have come across a few companies using Conectiva over the years and more than once I've had to open the original RedHat man page alongside the translated Conectiva just to make heads and tails of it.
My genral impression has always been that Conectiva is a good way to start using Linux if your only language is Portuguese and if you know nothing about Linux and Unix. I don't know of any mission critical or big private companies using Conectiva.
What people use here is Red Hat/Fedora, Mandrake, Slackware and (sometimes) SUSE. Conectiva, people never heard about it.
I am aware that Conectiva is fairly well known in Brazil, but Brazil != South America. To call Conectiva "...the most popular distribution in South America" is quite a stretch,and nothing but a stupid marketing hype statement
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
There is a explanation for conectiva and linux scuess in Brazil: the fight agains piracy. We had a tax os 90% until the 80's, now the tax is just a big above 50%, mostly of domestic users, in the companies the rate is much more like 20 or 30%. This let to some companies start evaluating linux because they simply can't afford windows licences. Conective did a big help in this transformation, they even had a nice ad "seja legal, use software livre" - "be legal (legal means nice in portuguese too), use free software", and give support for companies changing to linux. Now, the fear of using linux is motly gone in Brazil, and people simply try it and see if it works for them. Conective is a very smart and nice company, even that I don't like their distro.
I'm tired of reading always the same stuff.
What's the point of grabbing articles from OSNews and Newsforge? Aren't there less known journals and web logs ?
There are so many other good articles that are not published here. Anyway...
Regarding Conectiva, I think that in Brazil people use it because it is in Portuguese basically. People who use Conectiva many times don't install it, IT people do it for them, whem it's used for call centers for instance. Then, why not just installing better distros with the default language pt_BR, it would be just better, and when you work with IT if you don't read English you're out of the race.
I have seen a lot of red hat, fedora, mandrake, suse boxes but never one with connectiva
I believe that the point here it's that, compared to Brazil, the other countries in South America are rather irrelevant economically speaking.
> I don't know of any mission critical or
> big private companies using Conectiva.
We chose Conectiva 9 for a roll-out (of servers designed to offer some desktop functionality) last year because of the flexible package support, the ability to run on ridicously underconfigured hardware and apt-get.
It has exceeded all expectations - I can't say fairer than that.
It was the price of a download for someone lucky enough to live in bandwidth-rich Europe.
Can you get access to free software (e.g. distros) in public libraries in Brazil? Not a troll - a genuine question.
Ok, according to
http://www.penguins.cl/penguins-region.htm
there are 5 million pairs in Antartica, and 3 million in Patagonia, and I don't see any sizeable populations anywhere else, so I was wrong that Patagonia rules the world in penguins, but it surely shares the honor with Antartica.
I am a Conectiva user since 2000. The first distro I tried to use was 5, the first I actually installed and used was 6. The reasons why I am still using Conectiva are manifold:
;-) And about languages: it isn't true that Conectiva only has three language options (pt_BR, en and es). These are the installation options. After installing you have all the languages that are available to any distro, and with the same completeness.
1) It was the first distro I managed to install by reading the documentation (others simply lacket it or were obscurely documented).
2) It is usually less resources-demanding than "bleeding-edge" distros (Mandrake is especially heavy) and my computer is an AMD 450 with 196 MB RAM.
3) They've got apt-get and synaptic. I got addicted to them and cannot bear using a distro that lacks any of them. I even used Mandrake for 4 months, but when the updates piled up I gave up and returned to Conectiva.
4) Their package repository is quite big (now).
However, I realise that many people hate them because:
1) There are programs (abiword one of them) that you simply won't run smoothly, even if you compile them yourself. Some important packages are missing and are usually uninstallable (pyGTK-2.0 is one).
2) Their mailing list is full of clueless newbies making silly questions and pretentious gurus giving rude answers. And good questions sometimes are not answered at all.
3) Conectiva has merged their desktop and server solutions, now their distro is "more-or-less" for both uses.
4) Some packages are not updated often (mozilla the most painful one).
5) Some of their packages are broken (I had to compile my own fontconfig to stop having strange output in my font selection boxes).
But in the overall I think that they deserve more attention and I will give them a 9.0 mark. It will be very sad for me if I eventually am forced to use another distro.
Spanish speakers of Latin America, please: don't bash Conectiva only because it's a Brazilian distro. Brazil does not want to colonise you; US does.
P.S. The Brazilian government will compare prices before buying -- and it is unlikely that they'll hire a company to do the whole job: there are too many "brains" working for gov institutions, like Unis and Tech Centres. They'll probably make their own distro, like China. That's why the government is switching to Linux, it has nothing to do with funding Brazilian companies, but with restarting autonomous technological development.
Excuse me, please, for the long post.
I installed it once just to check it out but I didn't like it. By then, I was a RedHat user. Now I only use Debian since it fits my needs (often).
I recommend Knoppix and Mandrake for end users here.
http://arhuaco.org/
Would you want to help the BSA, or whoever, crack down on software piracy here if it forces people to seek out alternatives?
One of the earliest cases of a company in the U.S. switching entirely away from MS was Ernie Ball. The BSA raided them, and discovered that they did not wipe the drives when moving engineering PCs to secretarial work, so there was much loaded but unused and unlicensed software. Rather than giving the company notice and some time to clean up, the BSA handed them a very large bill, and talked to all the news outlets about it. Ernie Ball settled for $100,000, and then removed all MS software from the company.
The story is here. I like this part:
QUESTION: But there's a real argument now about total cost of ownership, once you start adding up service, support, etc.
ANSWER: What support? I'm not making calls to Red Hat; I don't need to. I think that's propaganda...What about the cost of dealing with a virus? We don't have 'em. How about when we do have a problem, you don't have to send some guy to a corner of the building to find out what's going on--he never leaves his desk, because everything's server-based. There's no doubt that what I'm doing is cheaper to operate.
The BSA is our friend. They make businesses think of MS as the enemy.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.