Distributions

First Look at Linspire 5.0

A new version of Linspire (formerly LindowsOS) was released last week. Unlike the previous versions, which were being produced and marketed at a furious pace, the Linspire developers and beta testers took their time with version 5.0 - it came out exactly 15 months after the distribution's previous stable release - Linspire 4.5. This would indicate that the company's strategy has undergone some changes - there seems to be less emphasis on marketing and hype, and more focus on true usability and feature enhancements to make the product accessible to non-technical users. And indeed, Linspire 5.0 is an excellent, user-friendly distribution with many new features and intriguing enhancements.

The release is available for instant purchase and download from Linspire's online store for $49.95. Current active members of the $5/month Click-N-Run (CNR) application warehouse can get it free of charge - either from one of the company's FTP/HTTP servers, or via BitTorrent. Interestingly, the CD image serves both as an installation medium and a live CD, and users have an opportunity to choose one or the other from the initial GRUB boot menu. GRUB makes its first appearance in Linspire 5.0 and it gives an early indication that the distribution now comes with a brand new installer - a more powerful one than any of the installers in previous versions. Naturally, the ultra-simple "take over the hard disk" installation method is still available, but the "advanced" installation option now lives up to its name; it not only allows users to choose a hard disk partition to install Linspire on, it also gives a choice between ReiserFS (default) and Reiser4 (experimental) file systems. Various boot options can also be configured here. Once done, the installer will simply copy the files from the CD onto the hard disk before prompting the user to reboot the system.

After rebooting we found ourselves looking at a long GRUB menu listing several operating systems (the installer is capable of detecting and setting up other installed operating systems, both Windows and Linux), as well as two other menu items: "Redetect" and "Diagnostics". The former is useful in case a new piece of hardware has been added to the computer, while the latter allows users to boot into a single-user mode for any troubleshooting, and even provides a diagnostics output that can be forwarded to the Linspire support personnel. The default option will boot into "ldm", a graphical login screen with entries for "Administrator", as well as any available user accounts. The only desktop on the Linspire 5.0 installation CD is a heavily beautified and customized KDE 3.3.2.

But underneath the pretty user interface it is still Linux (or Debian GNU/Linux, to be more precise), so what exactly differentiates Linspire from other major Linux distributions on the market? As one would expect from a beginner-friendly operating system, Linspire comes with some exciting usability enhancements. The "Linspire Web Suite" is one of the applications with added functionality compared to the stock Mozilla browser; these include a check-as-you-type spell-checking application (with suggested replacement words), as well as "Hot Words". Hot Words is an interesting technology that auto-highlights words on a web page and brings up a customizable context menu with quick links to search, news, dictionary, thesaurus and other relevant web sites. This feature is turned off by default, but once you get used to the concept, you might find that web browsing is suddenly an altogether different and more pleasant experience. Disappointingly, this feature is not available in Firefox or Konqueror.

Linspire has been developing its own set of applications to overcome some obvious difficulties in adoption of Linux on the desktop. The range of these L* applications now includes Lphoto, Lsongs, Lassist and LTorrent, complemented by a web authoring application called Nvu. Some of these have been nicely integrated into Linspire - as an example, Lphoto detects a digital camera storage device in the USB port and offers to import all images into the application. It also provides the ability to organize images into virtual photo albums, launch a slide show, or email images. Lsongs is a media player and a budding competition to iTunes, with options to buy MP3 music files from MP3tunes.com - a new business venture launched recently by Linspire's founder Michael Robertson. Some of these applications still need work before they mature, but as a general rule, they are easy-to-use and add to the overall desktop usability of Linspire.

As far as Linspire's view of computer security is concerned, not much has changed since earlier releases, and the default state is still "run as passwordless root". That said, a superuser password can be optionally entered during installation and new user accounts can be created from a configuration screen, right after the first boot. I had a lengthy email exchange about these issues with Linspire's president Kevin Carmony. He insisted that enforcement of passwords and user accounts is an annoying and inconvenient "hoop", similar to enforcing strict airport security or placing 12 extra locks on one's house. More interestingly, he also disclosed that Linspire was sponsoring work "at the file system level that will make the OS more secure than it has ever been before, and all without expecting grandma to jump through complicated hoops." And while on the subject of security, it is worth noting that encryption of users' home directories, a concept so nicely implemented in Xandros Desktop OS 3, is not available in Linspire 5.0.

There are many other small ideas that make Linspire 5.0 a truly great operating system for non-technical users. A set of Flash-based audio-visual tutorials guide new users through the very basics of computer usage. File extensions have been properly associated with default applications. Flash, Java, and media playback support are integrated into the default browser. Supermount for removable devices works reliably. The hardware detection and configuration is quite possibly the best in the industry - now also with support for wireless networking, 802.11g, and WiFi profiles. The CNR warehouse, with thousands of Debian packages available at a click of a mouse, nicely compliments the entire package. Even experienced Linux users would surely appreciate all these conveniences that greatly contribute towards more productive use of their computers.

Overall, Linspire gets a top mark for their effort at bringing Linux to the masses. Their latest release is not the fastest operating system on earth, but it is beautiful, well-designed, has excellent hardware support, and many small improvements that make computers so much more fun. Highly recommended - not only to grandmas, but also to users who value their time.

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Kubuntu Preview Released

The Kubuntu team has announced the preview of their first release. Kubuntu is a new distribution using Ubuntu and the KDE 3.4 desktop. This release follows the preview release last week of Ubuntu 5.04. The final release of Kubuntu 5.04 will be on April 6th. The preview release includes both install CDs and bootable Live CDs for three architectures.

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A new Mandrakelinux roadmap

Mandrakesoft has sent out an announcement detailing a few changes in how the Mandrakelinux distribution will be produced. The company is moving to an annual release cycle; the next scheduled Mandrakelinux release will be "Mandrakelinux 2006," due in the (northern hemisphere) fall. The company plans to have merged all the good stuff from Conectiva by then. There will also be one "transitional" release ("Mandrakelinux Limited Edition 2005") in a few months.

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Debian GNU/Linux

The first call for votes for the Debian Project Leader Election has gone out. All votes must be GPG signed (or PGP signed) with your key that is in the Debian keyring and should not be encrypted. A transcript of the debate is available as are the raw logs of the four channels involved in the debates. The platforms for the candidates are also available. The Vote Page is a good place to find all the available information on this year's election.

Enrico Zini has announced the results of the Survey on Debian Usage. "The presentation pages provide some views on the results, which I consider quite successful in giving various insights on our community, as well as some interesting ideas to direct further development."

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FRG-0.1.97 Beta GNOME 2.10.0 packages for Slackware 10.1 (GnomeDesktop)

New versions of the GNOME 2.10.0 packages for Slackware have been announced. "This is our 6th testing release of GNOME 2.10.0 packages for Slackware. The packages are stable. We wanted to annouce this release to get wider testing of the packages. So test them and send feedback. See the support section of the website for contact details."

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Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for March 22, 2005 is out. This week's edition looks at the license of the Linux kernel (GPL v2) with speculation about what happens after GPL v3 is released, the third release candidate for the Debian-installer, the Creative Commons 2.0 Licenses, resurrecting old PCs with Debian, and more.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of March 21, 2005 looks at additions to the documentation collection, difficulties with Acrobat Reader 7 for Linux, reasons for Gentoo/FreeBSD, a summary of PPC meeting, Xen, and several other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 92

The DistroWatch Weekly for March 21, 2005 is out. "Two "newbie-friendly" distribution releases appeared on the scene last week - one of them a very nicely designed product with superb usability and great, innovative features (Linspire 5.0), while the other is a promising new product, which is let down by a poor installer, obvious bugs and lack of polish (Ark Linux 2005.1). On the BSD front, a new initiative to create a BSD certification programme is under way. Happy reading!"

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Ark Linux 2005.1 Released

Ark Linux has released Ark Linux 2005.1. "Ark Linux 2005.1 is built around the latest desktop technologies, including KDE 3.4, OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 (a preview of 2.0 is also available on the Ark Extra Software CD), glibc 2.3.4, X.Org 6.8.2, and kernel 2.6.11." (Found on KDE.News)

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Devil-Linux v1.2.4 released

Devil-Linux v1.2.4 has been released. "The changes include a critical security fix for PAX, fixes for serial console support, various program updates and a few new Perl modules."

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Pingwinek GNU/Linux 1.0preview1

Pingwinek GNU/Linux has released the first preview of version 1.0 in a live CD with GNOME 2.10. (Found on GnomeDesktop)

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Gnome Live CD customized for Chinese Available (GnomeDesktop)

Gnome Desktop covers a live CD in Chinese with GNOME. "Base on Ubuntu Live CD to customize for Chinese is ready for download. This CD is especial suitable for Tradition Chinese user, and also Simpified Chinese user."

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Fedora updates

Fedora Core 3 updates: libgal2-2.2.5-1 (bug fixes and updated translations), libsoup-2.2.2-1.FC3 (upgrade with bug fixes), evolution-data-server-1.0.4-3 (numerous bug fixes), evolution-2.0.4-1 (numerous bug fixes), evolution-connector-2.0.4-1 (numerous bug fixes), selinux-policy-targeted-1.17.30-2.89 (backport rawhide changes, bug fixes), policycoreutils-1.18.1-2.10 (updates), gimp-2.2.4-0.fc3.3 (fixes some barfing and crashing), procps-3.2.3-5.2 (bug fixes), lsof-4.72-2.1 (src.rpm cleanup), lockdev-1.0.1-4.1 (fix lockdev errors), boost-1.32.0-5.fc3 (bug fixes).

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Mandrakelinux update MDKA-2005:015

Mandrakelinux has fixed several bugs in KDE for ML 10.1. Click below for the gory details.

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Trustix Secure Linux Bugfix Advisory #2005-0010

Trustix has fixed bugs in cpplus, setup and squid for TSL 2.2. Click below for gory details.

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For network security, build a m0n0wall (NewsForge)

NewsForge explores M0n0wall, a FreeBSD based firewall. "M0n0wall has a nice Web interface for configuring firewall settings. Most of the configuration can be done via the Web interface and all the values are stored in a single XML file. The configuration can be saved on a diskette, hard disk, or external storage card. This makes it easy to deploy several firewalls with a similar hardware setup."

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Linux in Government: Linux Desktop Reviews, Part II (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal takes a look at Novell Linux Desktop 9. "Novell has a long history of providing support, training, back-office functionality, innovation in managing desktops and networks and a significant partner ecosystem. Since the company embraced the open-source model with the purchase of SUSE and Ximian, it has transformed the open-source model into one of maturity."

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Arch Linux: Why It Rocks (OS News)

OSNews reviews Arch Linux. "Arch is an i686-optimized Linux distributions based upon the ideas of CRUX and Slackware. It incorporates their stability, speed and most of all, their keep-it-simple philosophy. When Judd Vinet started Arch towards the end of 2001 he did it because he needed n operating system that resembled CRUX or Slackware but with a package manager that had the ability to track dependencies. So he sat down, used LFS to put together his distro and wrote 'pacman' from scratch, his minimalistic and yet very usable, package manager."

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SUSE LINUX 9.3 Professional Review

Novell's Cool Solution reviews the current beta of SUSE Linux 9.3. "All the buzz about the release of SUSE 9.3 Professional got me excited. This very morning, I downloaded and installed SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional beta 4. The installation is similar to 9.2 though the screens seem crisper. It has definitely had some work, as it will do an md5sum check on the installation media to make sure it's not been corrupted. Also, when Grub was installed, it recognized the other bootable partitions. It put these partitions into the Grub menu automatically. It did not do this in previous versions. That's all I'm going to mention about the installation. Instead, let's take a look at some of the changes you'll in the newest version of SUSE when you are actually using it."

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My Workstation OS: Gentoo (NewsForge)

Here's a quick look at Gentoo, on NewsForge. "What separates Gentoo from other GNU/Linux distributions? It isn't really a distribution. It's more of a meta-distribution, a collection of tools that manage the "from scratch" approach. It doesn't have any packages per se, just ebuilds that describe where the source packages can be downloaded, and how to include your specified compilation preferences in the process."

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Linspire 5.0 raises the desktop Linux standard (Techworld.com)

Techworld takes a look at Linspire Five-0. "Linspire, the company once known as Lindows, has released its latest Linux version, Linspire Five-0. More than a year in the making and with more than 1,200 improvements, the company reckons the new product "boasts enhancements in every core application and provides the most secure, reliable and easy-to-use desktop Linux experience available for home, business and school users.""

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