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By the time Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" is released next April netbook users will have three Ubuntu variants customized for their smaller systems. Development versions of the forthcoming Kubuntu and Moblin variants were released simultaneously with Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" in September. This week we take a look at the Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Technology Preview. Since the name of the release is more than a mouthful I'll refer to it as KNE from here on.

Me: “How could you tell they’d hacked it?”

Caller: “Well, when it booted, it didn’t say Windows or Microsoft or anything! It said something about Deviant Linux, I think, and the main screen looked nothing like my good, legal Windows screen at home! I think they hacked that, too!”

If you write something is the New York Times obligated to publish it? Must the Washington Post run a sharply worded op-ed? Can I compel Fox News to give voice to my liberal opinions? The answer to all these questions is an unequivocal no. Private media is permitted editorial control of their content. Websites and blogs are no different. They are simply a newer, different form of private media.

I am hounded, week in and week out, including three comments on DistroWatch this week, about my "refusal" to run Puppy Linux and my "crazy review". It never stops, it continues in e-mail and on every Linux forum where I write. Why are the Puppy Linux community members so obsessed with me? Here is the only reason I can think of...

...First, I must compliment the openSUSE developers. I've had great correspondence from Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier and Will Thompson, a developer in the KDE team in Nuremberg, which were truly first rate. These are Linux professionals who clearly are much more interested in solving problems and putting out a quality product than anything else. I'll be filing bug reports by tomorrow to try and help them resolve the issues that I found. While I'm very positive about the openSUSE team I must say that I am a lot less sanguine about some in their community. Some fans (or really fanatics) came out in force ready to attack the reviewer...

When Ladislav asked me last week if I'd like to review the new release of openSUSE I jumped at the opportunity. After looking at much improved releases by Ubuntu and Mandriva over the past two weeks I had very high expectations for Novell's community distribution. The upstream problems with common Intel video and audio drivers, which created so much grief in releases from earlier in the year, seem to be solved. In my work I support Novell's enterprise operating system offerings, including both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell NetWare. The releases of Mandriva 2010 and Ubuntu 9.10 both installed smoothly and work nearly flawlessly on my hardware. I had no reason to expect anything less than that from openSUSE.

Despite the similarity in name to SlackBuilds.org, GSB does not simply provide build scripts - it includes a complete set of Slackware binary packages for GNOME. It also optionally provides packages related to, but which are not part of, the GNOME project, including OpenOffice.org, the AbiWord word processor and Bluefish, an editor for web developers. The current stable version of GSB is 2.26.3. GSB 2.28.0 is presently under development. Packages are available for both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Slackware.

Yesterday, as anyone involved in computing knows, Windows 7 was released by Microsoft with much marketing hype and fanfare... Hewlett-Packard also did something yesterday, albeit very quietly. HP removed Linux entirely from the part of their website where the sell netbooks. The day Windows 7 became available the HP Mi interface appears to have died a quiet death. A visit to the HP Mini pages reveals that HP is only offering "genuine" Windows 7 and "genuine" Windows XP.

Suddenly I was surveying the market again for a good buy on a netbook preloaded with Linux. I found a wide variety of systems with Linux available from mainstream outlets and factory direct, at least here in the United States where I live. While I don't have updated market share figures it's clear, despite claims by Microsoft and their supporters, that Linux remains entrenched in the netbook market and is spreading out from there.

... On that Friday, with no warning, the little netbook failed to boot up. I couldn't even get to the BIOS. For the third time a Sylvania netbook I owned had suffered a premature hardware failure. The netbook had a one year warranty and it was only seven months old so I expected to send it in for repair at no charge.

[...] Despite this claim ease of use is something Slackware is just not known for. Even with improvements in Slackware 13.0 I still don't think there is anything easy about this distro for anyone other than advanced, experienced users who are extremely comfortable on the command line and with editing configuration files by hand. [...] Slackware also has a well-earned reputation for reliability and stability. Those are the areas where the distribution has always excelled and that tradition continues with Slackware 13.

Before I get into describing basic Linux authentication, the recent discussions made it abundantly clear that I need to first define what I mean by security. I also have to answer the most basic question which is why we need to bother with security at all. Some DWW readers claim to have all but ignored security without a single problem for many years. Those claims are undoubtedly true. That doesn't mean the potential for real problems isn't present. Kurt Seifried, in his Linux Administrator's Security Guide, writes: "You only need to make one mistake or leave one flaw available for an attacker to get in. This, of course, means that most sites will eventually be broken into." He adds: "All technical security measures will eventually fail or be vulnerable to an attacker. This is why you must have multiple layers of protection."

Just over a year ago I reported on the work of Dr. Andre Oboler for O'Reilly News, who had written a report on how Google Earth was delivering overtly politically biased information. A combination of negative publicity and a libel suit filed against Google resulted in changes to Google Earth which resolved the issue. Dr. Oboler published a new report on Tuesday and this time he has targeted Facebook and with good reason. Despite a prohibition in the popular social networking website's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, it's terms of service, Facebook has remained a happy home for Holocaust denial and racist "white pride" groups.

This week we look at an even smaller and more unusual distribution from Taiwan called xPUD. At just 51 MB total size, xPUD is almost as small as Damn Small Linux (DSL) was. xPUD, unlike DSL, is not aimed at legacy hardware with very limited resources. Instead it seeks to provide a very simple, kiosk-like desktop environment with just a few basic, modern tools run entirely from RAM. As a result the minimum RAM required to run xPUD is 384MB.

Writing honestly about Linux distributions is not a way to become popular or make friends. When a given distribution, any distribution, has problems and a reporter writes about it there are always fans who will circle the wagons and/or go on the attack. I am very used to that by now. It's no surprise at all that has happened with a few CentOS loyalists. What is surprising is that it is continuing more than two weeks after I last wrote about the subject.

Anyone who reads the Linux technical press, Linux blogs, or the comments section of DistroWatch Weekly knows that there has been a lot of discussion, dissatisfaction, and even anger over the state of Intel video drivers for Linux. In a nutshell and without going into the nuts and bolts, Intel made significant changes to the drivers for their chipsets, introducing new technologies that were designed to radically improve performance.

Back on December 1st of last year the DistroWatch Weekly included a report of a detailed case study of Pardus Linux which was published at OSOR.eu. It detailed how Pardus was being used in both the public and private sector in Turkey and how the distribution was saving Turkish taxpayers millions of euros. [...] I had read a number of positive reviews and comments about Pardus before that and I decided the next time the distribution had a major release I'd take a look at it. That release, Pardus 2009, came on July 18th and I've been running the distro ever since.

The following comment was posted in response to my business oriented article about the CentOS situation for O'Reilly Broadcast. It perfectly illustrates why I have made the decision I did: Peter Griffin wrote: "I've been running CentOS as a file/intranet server since 5.0 was released. I started becoming concerned during the protracted period that it took to get 5.3 out. Not about the "lateness" in getting 5.3 out, but the complete lack of security updates in the interim for my 5.2 system. This "No updates available" went on for over a month. My version of Firefox trailed behind Red Hat's by two versions."

The whole time the dispute between the CentOS developers was in the news development moved forward and patches were released. CentOS was never a one man show. It was perhaps in danger of forking or a name change but it never really was anywhere near point of death.

I no longer have CentOS running on my netbook. It won't be back. At the moment I am not recommending CentOS for anything, not even servers. On my netbook and on desktops in general it has very little to do with the overhyped and exaggerated claims that miscommunication between the developers would lead to the death of CentOS. I have a story I'm writing for O'Reilly Broadcast about that CentOS misadventure, a combination of self-inflicted pain when the developers aired their dirty laundry in public and some in the tech press sensationalizing a story. On servers that story actually does play a significant part in my decision making...