alll about linux

BeleniX is the first live CD based on the OpenSolaris source base that boots into a full graphical desktop (with XFce). Developed at the India Engineering Centre of Sun Microsystems in Bangalore, BeleniX is trying to popularise OpenSolaris in the growing open source user and developer community in India and abroad.

It grew out of a variety of considerations:

1. An easily available OpenSolaris distribution is needed to popularise OpenSolaris among the BIG Indian Open Source community.
2. In interactions with the community, it was pointed out several times that a LiveCD initially and a full distro later on will go a long way in spreading OpenSolaris.
3. Official Solaris is now an Open OS. In fact it is a complete OpenSolaris distro that has lots of testing, stability etc. Many people will want to use this. However there are many folks in the OSS community: students, hackers, power users and professors who are qute interested in having a distro developed by the community for the community. They are always willing to try out bleeding edge stuff not bothering about stability etc.
   So I developed BeleniX as community member in an attempt to meet this interest.
4. No technical documentation was available on how to go about building bootable LiveOS CDs for OpenSolaris, or even, what is required to have self-hosting pure OpenSolaris environment without depending on Solaris Express - This was the situation when I contemplated this project.
5. No open-source tools and scripts were available that enable people to easily build OSS packages on OpenSolaris and generate CD images as well - Again this situation existed when I began.

Latest version available as of today is 0.2. I am definitely going to continue tracking this project. Here‘s a screenshot showing Firefox 1.5 Beta2 (Deer Park), XFce Settings,XFce File Manager and a couple of Rxvt terminals all compiled from source on BeleniX using gcc 3.4:

Give it a try, no matter whether you have used Solaris or not.
The bzipped BeleniX iso image can be found here.

The Free Software Foundation is just weeks away from announcing the roadmap and process that will govern the release of the first draft of the rewritten GNU General Public License. Eben Moglen, the general counsel for the FSF and who is authoring the first rewrite of the license in some 15 years with its creator Richard Stallman, told eWEEK in an exclusive interview ahead of the OSBC East conference in Newton, Mass., next week that it would also be releasing within the next month a process document that tells people exactly what the rules are going to be for the discussion and comment submission process around GPL version 3. >>>>

You may not be ready to welcome Linux onto your organization’s desktops, but that doesn’t mean that desktop Linux isn’t ready for you.

eWEEK Labs reviewed Canonical Ltd.’s Ubuntu 5.10 and Novell Inc.’s SUSE Linux 10.0, both of which began shipping in October, and we were impressed by the maturity, polish and, yes, innovation that these Penguin banner bearers displayed.

Novell’s SUSE Linux has long been one of our favorite distributions. Release 10.0—the first from Novell to ship in freely available as well as boxed retail editions—impressed us enough with its completeness and usability to earn an Analyst’s Choice award.

Ubuntu 5.10, also known by the code name Breezy Badger, is the third in a line of Ubuntu releases that has grown to become one of the most prominent Linux distributions available on the strength of a solid foundation in Debian GNU/Linux and a tight focus on desktop usability. >>>>

The Smart Package Manager project has the ambitious objective of creating smart and portable algorithms for solving adequately the problem of managing software upgrading and installation. This tool works in all major distributions, and will bring notable advantages over native tools currently in use (APT, APT-RPM, YUM, URPMI, etc).

Smart supports the following repository formats as source channels:

• RPM repositories

  • RPM System Database (locally installed packages)

  • APT repositories for .rpm

  • RPM-MD (used by YUM)

  • Red Carpet (used by Ximian/Novell)

  • RPM Header List (used by RedHat and Conectiva installation CDs, probably others)

  • RPM Directory (a directory with a bunch of RPMs in it, no indexing required)

  • URPMI (used by Mandriva)

• DEB repositories

  • DEB System Database (locally installed packages)

  • APT repositories for .deb

  • DEB Directory (a directory with a bunch of DEBs in it, no indexing required)

• Slackware

  • Slackware installed packages database

  • Slackware repositories

• Mirrors

  • up2date (used by RedHat/Fedora)

  • Conectiva-style mirror description formats

I have used Smart in several occasions, from 9.1 to 10.0 in SUSE, and still find Apt/Synaptic combo being superior to what Smart has to offer right now, especially when it comes to frontend GUI. For example, when updates are available, in this case for SUSE core files as well as other installed applications, it is much easier to see them in Synaptic’s GUI compared to Smart’s GUI.

Second one is when you want to install new application available via repositories. As Apt fetches updates only from Apt repositories (much more than what Yast repositories have to offer) and Smart does so by fetching from several available, i.e Yast + Apt + individual + Yum (from 10.0 of SUSE) repositories, you end up having several versions of the same application, as well as several of the same applications of same version in different channels, which in turn creates confusion especially to new users to Linux. Heck, it even does to me! There is no way to see which repository has the latest available from one click. Also, for Smart you end up adding most of the repositories manually, as is the case with Yast, but not with Apt. For Apt there is a utility known as “install-apt4suse” (from version 0.2.2 there is support for SUSE 10.0), which apart from updating all the available and newly added repositories, by running a single command “install-apt4suse –update-srclist”. It also automatically adds all the experimental and unstable repositories to blacklist (i.e. not to be used).

I have been talking about Smart for quite sometime now, and was also kind of pushing it to be used with SUSE, as it can reside next to Yast and does actually compliments Yast. But all in all I would still recommend new users to Linux, as well as SUSE, to use Apt/Synaptic rather than Smart. I have writen a HowTo on Apt, which can be found on www.susewiki.org. I personally have been using Apt as my primary package manager from SUSE 9.1. But Smart has potential to become very powerful, reliable and versatile for SUSE distro. This will require current repository maintainers to provide information on adding their repository in Smart, probably a separate section, as some do for their Apt and Yast repositories. Or a section on opensuse.org, with a list of all repositories that are available for Smart. The best thing would be to create a small utility that automatically adds all the available repositories, once some command such as “–update-srclist” is run.

One thing for sure, Smart has to work on their frontend GUI. I have heard rumors that Apt might be removed from future releases of SUSE, as it was included with SUSE 10.0. If this is going to happen, I’d like to see Smart implementing a better GUI, at least what Synaptic has to offer right now, if not a superior one. BTW, have you seen Autopackage - another package manager.

Pascal Bleser maintains SUSE RPMs for Smart.

“linux_learner”, a moderator from one of SUSE forums has done an excellent job on writing a HowTo on installing and using Smart on SUSE. Visit his HowTo on susewiki.org for further details. If you need help, you can find him on Freenode.org IRC #sl-support.

For the mean time I am going to continue using Smart from time to time, and see what is the progress.

The Smart FAQ is here.
The Smart SuSE wiki is here.
The Smart web page is here.

Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. is aggressively pushing to get Xen virtualization technology included in the Linux kernel as quickly as possible.

Brian Stevens, the newly appointed chief technology officer of the Raleigh, N.C., company, said that previous efforts to merge Xen into the kernel ran out of steam when nobody stepped forward to drive them. Red Hat is now stepping forward, Stevens said.

This move comes as Microsoft Corp. is pushing its own virtualization products and recently relaxed some of its licensing requirements around Windows Server 2003 to facilitate more pervasive adoption and use of those technologies.

Part of the Red Hat emerging technology team’s efforts will be to drive the Xen virtualization technologies as part of the Linux kernel rather than as part of a sidebar project, as is currently the case, Stevens said.

“My goal is to get this done in the most collaborative way possible with anyone in the community who wants to participate,” Stevens said, adding that Red Hat is committed to putting on this project enough of its staff who have the technical knowledge necessary to get the work done.

Have you ever had interest or curiousity of running another “desktop environment” on SUSE, apart from KDE, Gnome and XFCE. There is a nice article writen by Scott M.Morris on Novell’s Coolsolution page titled “Enlightenment .17: Here Comes the Eyecandy”, explaining on how to install one on SUSE. It is actually very easy and simple. You just need to add Guru’s repository to your Yast and that’s it.

Being frank, I have never tried running Enlightment on my desktop, though have experience. I prefer to go with XFCE4 when I need light desktop. Since this is so easy to install, I will give it a try, and then later decide which is better for me - XFCE4 or E17. I am not saying bye to KDE or Gnome of course. These are perfect desktops when you want to play games for instance, letting games to have more system resources available, or running very old or low spec notebook. Though I am still not quite sure how it compares to XFCE4 in terms of system resources for it to run smoothly. Any words on this? If you have experience with this desktop, let me know your thoughts.

Just remember that E17 is still under heavy development and not everything works as expected, but it is a beautifully designed desktop with plenty of eye candy.

Seems like wordpress.com is facing quite a few serious system failures for the past week or so, and this is not the first time. I feel sorry for the team behind wp.com as they didn’t forsee the popularity for their project and hence the reliabilty of their servers and the service. I understand it’s free, but you have to have certain quality consistency in service you are providing.

I really hope that this is not going to become a regular thing - the system been crashed and database being lost. Keep it up guys.

CosmoPOD.com offers free remote KDE desktops over NX. Anyone can sign up to have their own desktop accessible from any computer with a network connection. CosmoPOP uses KDE’s Kiosk framework to ensure security for their system. To find out more about the service and why KDE was the chosen desktop, KDE Dot News spoke to the man behind CosmoPOD, Stephen Ensor. Read on for the interview. 

You get free 1GB online to store and edit your emails, office documents, calander, organizer, photos and files, chat to friends play games surf the web even faster and more from any computer on your own personal online desktop and access it from anywhere in the world.

• 100% free
• 1GB of email and online file storage free
• Secure
• Virus, Spam, Popup, Phishing, Pharming, Spy and Ad ware protected

 More on this project from developers at KDE.News site.

Another good news for gamers on Linux. Some month - Cold War, Quake 4 and now America’s Army 2.5.0. Apart from these, I am really looking forward to runnig the newly released Civilization IV via Cedega, as it is not available for Linux, same as Call for Duty 2 isn’t (btw, if some one was able to launch Civilization IV, let us know).

America’s Army is a tactical 3d shooter commissioned by the US Army.
The release is only available as a full installation, because an update would have had nearly same size. So you have to uninstall your former installation before installing 2.5.0.

Ryan “icculus” Gordon released a native linux port again. You can download it from a mirror or use the provided Torrent.

Remember a year or so ago when you could probably name most of the open-source companies in the market? Try doing that now when the number of start-ups has skyrocketed to several hundred. While this massive growth appears reminiscent of the dot-com boom before the bubble burst, experts in the field stress that the second wave of the open-source revolution, Open Source 2.0 if you like, is unlikely to play out in quite the same way. However, that’s not to say there won’t be some upsets along the way.

“There are absolutely too many [open-source] companies,” Jo Tango, a general partner at VC Highland Capital Partners, wrote in an e-mail response to questions. “I predict a venture capital backlash against open source. There are simply too many companies right now raising money with the approach: ‘We’ll give it away for free and make it up in the back end with high volume services/support revenue.’” For example, with three open-source database companies emerging this summer, there just isn’t room in the market for a fourth, he added. >>>>