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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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't the climate make it difficult for them?
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!
Yeah, but how's a computer supposed to recognize all of that gibberish?
Seriously though you raise a good point, the hodge-podge of words from every language on the planet that is modern english is difficult to parse.
Something like Spanish or especially French would be good candidates for non-english speech recognition.
Lastly I think you mean homophones. Minute (60 seconds)and Minute (tiny)are homonyms but when spoken they sound much different.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
wrong.. what stop's joe sixpack is that his computer comes with windows pre-installed with a suite of apps that he will use and that is where joe sixpack leaves his computer.
99% of joe sixpack still has the default icons and annoying "helper" apps from the computer maker still installed.
joe sixpack is interested in a computer that he open's the box and uses it. he is not interested in buying software for it (see the dismal sales of software anf games at places like best buy, mediaplay, circuit city... EB games is 90% console games with a tiny rack for PC games in the back.
Everyone spreads this myth.... it might be because YOU and other gamers dont use linux, but joe sixpack likes solitare and minesweeper and his pc to act and run like it did the day he opened the computer box... he only add's software to fill an important need.. the only hole I see is Tax Software... so If someone can get taxact to run each year on linux under wine and make a click and drool installer (like the loki installer!) that will do the job for joe sixpack... that can be filled also...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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 just installed Half-Life (with Steam) and UT2004 on my Debian box with WineX. Go check it out.