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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 292

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 23 comments
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Last week saw the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.0, a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution designed for both personal and business purposes. We take the live CD for a spin to see what it has to offer. In the news this past week, openSUSE develops Debian-like distribution upgrade functionality to their package manager, Red Hat looks set for a comeback to the desktop arena as it announces virtualisation plans that will centre around KVM technology, and Novell signs a virtualisation agreement with VMware over support for their products. Also in the news, the Linux Starter Kit from Linux Format magazine has been released for free and we link to interviews with lead developers of Linux Mint and Kongoni. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch.com February 2009 donation goes to Wolvix GNU/Linux, a Slackware-based desktop distribution and live CD.

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Comments (23)

3 earlier comments in the full thread.

Ah, a new word is invented. Doinate, all of yoin!

Where I live an i after an o is used to prolong the o, meaning doination is the same as dooohnation, meaning no actual difference. Anyway, since LXer is not Microsoft, you are ought to do your work right the first time, meaning SP2 for your topic heading ain't an option.
Isn't doinate something you'd hear in New York?
Quoting:doination


In my language "doi?" means "to milk". Kind of in reverse, I think. Or not, depending on at which end of this "doination" are you :)
Quoting:doi?


D'oh. LXer still doesn't like non-ASCII chars?... I meant this one little critter instead of '?': [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ć]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ć[/url]
Got the title fixed for you Caitlyn.
Thanks, Scott. I should have known some people would never let me live it down :) I wonder how many of those people have never made a typo. ;D

Anyway, my point was to highlight Wolvix and their upcoming release. If folks want to see how Wolvix 2.0.0 is coming along they can download Build 39. It's alpha code and has bugs so it isn't ready for prime time yet but it does give an idea where the distro is going: http://wolvix.oithona.com/downloads/wolvix-2.0.0-build39.iso
Never! Never! I never make tyops!

Ha. Just try to stay on topic. I dare you.
We are the masters (and mistresses) of derailment. Do you really think a helium leak is what shut down the LHC? We can derail anything, from photons to...

Oh, wait, I wasn't supposed to tell that, was I? Crap.
Typos, the bigger the hard time they give you the more you know they like you..maybe..lol!

Quoting:Wolvix has good ideas and good execution of those ideas but always seems to lack resources. Ladlislav's decision to donate to Wolvix in advance of their upcoming 2.0 release seems like a good choice to me. He's picked a promising distro than really could use a little help. They've added developers, notably by swallowing Ultima Linux. A little money certainly will help as well.
Also, there are New versions of VectorLinux, Foresight and SimplyMEPIS, as the LXer post from last week of the same name elucidates at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/116349/ Supporting NimbleX's Romanian developer Bogdan Radulescu would ALSO not be the worst action to take. - 'Portrait: NimbleX creator Bogdan Radulescu', http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/103316/ - 'NimbleX 2008 is speedy but flawed', http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/107239/

NimbleX is also not GPL compliant. Where's the source code?
I've spent quite a bit of time running Wolvix, and as I've mentioned also many times, it has an excellent mix of applications that seems to have just about everything I want in a distribution.

It's my favorite Slackware offshoot.

And the installer and configuration utility are among the best I've ever seen (and I've seen far too many).

Thanks to Ladislav for making the donation at a time when I know the distro (and its developer, Wolven) needs it.
Can anyone tell something about package management in Wolvix? Where can I compare it to?
hkwint: Wolvix uses Slackware apt (slapt-get and gslapt). I believe, much like Vector Linux, they are adding slapt-notifier in v. 2.0. Unlike Vector Linux or Zenwalk they use Slackware standard .tgz packages rather Tukaani lzma compressed packages with dependency checking (slack-required file) added. Wolvix has it's own repository but also pulls from the official Slackware repo for the version it's based on. Otherwise it's pretty much the same as what Vector Linux does, without the nightmare of adding gsb, the big mistake in Vector Linux 6.0.
slapt-get and Gslapt are pretty good. I don't "trust" them as much as I do apt, Aptitude and Synaptic, but for me they are must-haves when running Slackware or anything derived from it.
@Steven: What is the reason for your distrust? It seems to me that they have finally matured to the point of working as well as anything else. slapt-notifier added the one last missing piece to the puzzle.
Caitlyn, I'll have to admit that it is lack of knowledge on my part. I haven't run Slackware or Wolvix for about a year now, and while slapt-get/Gslapt seem to work fine, any uneasiness I had was more due to my comfort and familiarity with apt and Aptitude in Debian/Ubuntu than it was with anything going on in Slackware.

The reason there are so many great Slackware-derived projects — Wolvix, Vector and ZenWalk among them — is that Slackware is such a great base and an easy way to have a fast, stable system out of the box.

And my preference for Xfce over KDE makes all three of those offshoots very attractive alternatives.

I especially appreciate the strong repositories in Vector, Wolvix and Zenwalk, just as I appreciate how great Patrick and the Slackware security team are at maintaining so many releases. For me, slapt-get/Gslapt makes Slackware that much more usable in production. I've tried to keep a Slackware box patched with update-pkg, and it does tend to get away from me without slapt-get.

So it's really nothing more than a lack of knowledge on my part of the guts of slapt-get.

The other thing that I still can't quite reconcile in my mind is the philosophy on kernel updates in Slackware vs. Debian. Both Debian and Ubuntu seem to push patched kernels out fairly regularly. Slackware seems to do it only rarely. And in Wolvix, I recall Gslapt being configured by default NOT to check for new kernels.

I honestly don't know which practice is more secure. As I said, I have quite a bit of trust in the Slackware security team, but I'd love for someone to really spell it out for me.
Wolvix uses Gslapt as a gui front end to slapt-get. The number of packages available with all the dependencies resolved is fewer than in standard Slackware, but you can use all of the standard slackware tgz files as well.

getting help in the Wolvix forums is easy. Slackware forums are fantastic. Wolvix is much closer to slackware than Ubuntu is to debian.

Vector Linux 6.0 also has vpackager. a 'ports' like installer that builds from code: http://code.google.com/p/vpackager/wiki/Introduction
> The other thing that I still can't quite reconcile in my mind is the philosophy on kernel updates in Slackware vs. Debian.

A given version of Slackware gets security updates, but not version upgrades. So unless there's a security patch required for the kernel, you won't get a kernel update. If you want a newer kernel, you can always download the latest and compile it yourself. Slackware makes that comparatively easy to do.
...in large part because Patrick Volkerding uses the official Linux kernel sources, not patched versions that work only within one distro.

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