masinick
Linux Guru
Joined: 03 Apr 2025
Posts: 8615
Location: Concord, NH
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 Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2025 6:11 pm Post subject: DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 343, 1 March 2025 |
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| Quote: |
Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! For many users, the combination of Slackware Linux and the Xfce desktop is the perfect blend of stability and speed, whatever the age of their hardware. But if Slackware itself is too much hard work, why not try one of its derivatives with a friendlier approach to the desktop and with out-of-the-box support for popular hardware and multimedia codecs? Bernard Hoffmann, an experienced Slackware user, has taken three Slackware-based Xfce distributions (Zenwalk Linux, Salix OS and GoblinX) for a test drive to see which one would be a best fit for a blazing fast and powerful home desktop. In the news section, Oracle confirms the continued development of OpenSolaris, Fedora delays the upcoming alpha release of version 13, Mandriva switches to nouveau with the latest kernel update in "Cooker", and Linux Mint prepares for an imminent release of its LXDE edition. Also in this issue, a link to a good summary of bleeding-edge repositories for Kubuntu and a brief talk about zombie processes. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the February 2025 DistroWatch.com donation is the Squid project. Happy reading!
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Content:
Reviews: Desktop comparison - Zenwalk Linux, Salix OS and GoblinX
News: OpenSolaris survives Oracle takeover, Fedora delays first alpha, Mandriva switches to nouveau, Linux Mint prepares LXDE edition, Kubuntu repositories
Questions and answers: Removing zombie processes
Released last week: PC-BSD 8.0, Igelle 1.0.0, Vine Linux 5.1
Upcoming releases: openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 3
Donations: Squid receives US$250
New additions: IPFire
New distributions: UKnow4Kids
Reader comments |
DistroWatch Weekly
Some interesting notes from this week's edition:
| Quote: | Mandriva's Frederik Himpe has published a new summary of the latest changes in "Cooker", the distribution's development branch. As elsewhere in the Linux distro land, nouveau has now replaced nv as the default driver for NVIDIA video cards: "The kernel is now updated to 2.6.33 final. The new nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards is now included in the kernel and is now used by default on Mandriva instead of the nv driver. DRBD, the Distributed Replicated Block Device driver, which is useful on High Availability clusters is now included in the kernel. There is a new experimental Compcache driver, which compresses part of the memory, effectively increasing the amount of memory you can use. Note that Mandriva does not yet include the user-space tools to effectively use this. The Anticipatory I/O scheduler was removed and there were the usual improvements to the default CFQ I/O scheduler. Of course there are also many improvements to hardware support, such as a new driver for WiFi devices with the Ralink RT2800 and Realtek RTL8192U chipsets." Other notable updates include GNOME 2.29.91, Bluefish 2.0.0 and Postfix 2.7.0.
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| Quote: | Judging by past comments made in this publication, many readers assume that Kubuntu is really just an Ubuntu remix with a specific set of packages. But the truth is not so simple. Apart from the standard Ubuntu repositories available for Kubuntu, the project's developers have been making consistent efforts at providing interesting updates of most new KDE applications. Clay Weber summarises the availability of extra Kubuntu repositories and discusses the implications of using some of the more bleeding-edge ones among them: "If you want the most stable releases, and don't worry so much about new features, then simply don't use any of the PPAs [Personal Package Archives] at all. For karmic, this equals KDE SC 4.3.2. If you are interested in finding perhaps a few bug fixes and a newer version that has been better tested, then enable the official Ubuntu Backports (the 'Unsupported Updates' option in KPAckagekit). This currently provides KDE SC 4.3.5. This is probably the best combination of new software and tested packages. Those daring enough to want to try out KDE SC 4.4 right away would want to then add Kubuntu Backports. This also provides Amarok 2.2.2, Digikam 1.0, and a few other new cool bits. Now, for those who live on The Edge will definitely want to use Kubuntu Beta Backports."
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melloe
Ultimate Member
Joined: 20 Mar 2025
Posts: 2263
Location: Southern Illinois
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| Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2025 3:45 pm Post subject: |
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Couple of interesting developments in distros that did not make the main pages.
new PLD Linux live for one thing. Did the last one, and it was interesting.
http://kde4.livecd.pld-linux.org/ and quite usable. In that size range, Vector or Slax are my preferences, but still a contender.
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mell0: 1. Kubuntu, XP, Sabayon 2. Mandriva,Mint, Mephis
Thor: 1. VISTA, Fedora 2. Chakra, Debian
Sam:XP, SuSE Zues: win7, SuSE testing
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masinick
Linux Guru
Joined: 03 Apr 2025
Posts: 8615
Location: Concord, NH
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| Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2025 5:59 pm Post subject: |
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| melloe wrote: | Couple of interesting developments in distros that did not make the main pages.
new PLD Linux live for one thing. Did the last one, and it was interesting.
http://kde4.livecd.pld-linux.org/ and quite usable. In that size range, Vector or Slax are my preferences, but still a contender. |
Along those lines, did you see the three way comparison of Slackware XFCE derivative distributions? All were considered usable, but the one that you recently tested, Salix, was thought to have a slight edge because it required less tweaking to "get it right" from the perspective of the reviewer, a long time Slackware enthusiast. |
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