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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."
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.
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.
I believe UserLinux is GNOME only...
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
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.
apperently not
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.
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 just installed Half-Life (with Steam) and UT2004 on my Debian box with WineX. Go check it out.