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Just to note that you can search the pakage descriptions in Synaptic. If you go to package/find you get many search options.

Synaptic is great!

I don't know what they have done but those fonts look really really good.

Even though I'm starting to get a little tired of everyone and his dog making linux reviews this was a good introduction to a distro that I've never even considered trying out before. After reading this I will consider trying it out in the future, but it doesn't seem to offer me much that my Mandrake 10 install hasn't got.

Hmm, I've seen better. The Microsoft fonts look really good, I guess they can't bundle them ;-) Bitstream Vera are good too.

Mostly the problems with crummy text is the fonts, not the renderer. These days everyone is using Freetype2.

Before anyone gets excited and downloads Conectiva 9, you should know that the version 10 betas have recently been released. If you're interested in trying Conectiva, you might want to wait a few weeks for the new vesion.

I live 5-10 minutes away from their big grey headquarters with the big Conectiva logo here in Curitiba.

Here in Brazil, in general, Conectiva is the first natural contact with the Linux world. Thank you for the great review...

I made a link from this review onto brazilian PortalVOL, thanks again.

Link: http://www.portalvol.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=468...

Here in my Country, Chile, Conectiva used to have officess until they broked 2 years ago.
I dude they are the "most popular" distro in SA. But apt-rpm, which make fedora a lot better, and Synaptic are great tools.
Thx for that

I'm from Brazil and I'm worried with conectiva's future. No matter what people can say, the greatest strenght of any linux distro/OS is the community build around it. Conectiva has failed in building a large, passionate userbase, like Mandrake (to cite an example) did.

The main web site is poorly designed, and makes difficult for newbies searching for help, because no infrastructure is provided for this (forums, easy and well structured on-line documentation). The beta testing program needs lots of improvement, and more people should know about it. There are many other problems that needs to be addressed.

Conectiva is missing a great opportunity to build a huge community of users (and a huge market also), that would help a LOT on development process.

I'm not trolling or flaming here. I know that conectiva's staff is small and overloaded - I'm not criticizing them. The owners of the company needs to figure out this community issue, spending more resources on building a good infrastructure of end user services.

However, I wish to them good luck, and I hope that the current problems can be solved with time.

(I've tried to do my best with writing this in english - I really hope that you will be able to understand this )

I agree with your position and I think that Conectiva fails with its proper poor marketing. The propaganda's policy puts Conectiva in such a way far of the users.

Agreed. On the other hand, Kurumin and Kurumin-based distros are gaining more and more userbase everyday, i think it's going to be the great brazilian (and maybe Latin American) distro.

Victor.

Dunno, but it seems that Conectiva sells its distro and the knowledge on it (thru Linux classes available in many cities of Brazil). It may be very profitable, but not open enough to attract a community.

As a former Conectiva Employee, I have tried it a few times :-)

I have not used 9, but even version 7 could resize VFAT partitions. Sure, it was not obvious... you just edit them from the partition tool in the installer, and they resize.

As mentioned here, APT (and synaptic) do search in package descriptions, I have no idea why this didn't work for the reviewer.

And I am pretty sure there are tools for confuguring network and X other than xf86config.

A couple of years ago, it came with xf86cfg (not just xf86config) and XF96Setup, as well as linuxconf.

> Even though I'm starting to get a little tired of everyone
> and his dog making linux reviews

But, of course, you have the option not to spend your time reading them!

I've tried Conectiva 10 beta2. Installaition broke my 2 ntfs partitions . I hope the "full" 10 release will be much better =)

(sorry for my English)

Your english is perfect, and your comment scares the crap out of me. I'll skip the betas and wait for the final to try it out, because I really don't want to kill my XP partition.

Um. Weren't Crystal icons created and maintained by Everaldo? Or is he a part of Conectiva?

Maybe the most popular distribution in Brazil*, and -to some extent- well-known in South America, but definately not the most popular distribution in South America.

* May be not: http://www.distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20031201

Perhaps it's true in Brazil, but at least here in argentina Mandrake, Fedora, Debian, SuSE, etc., are by far more popular.

I have a few kernel 2.6.x based distro to installed on my machine (Mandrake 10+Cooker, Mephis Beta, ArkLinux Alpha 11, Slax, PCLinuxOS, and of course Conectiva 10 Beta 2). True enough at first it wasn't easy to set up, until I figured out how to start webmin, since than I am constantly upgrading my Conectiva with kynaptic the KDE version of synaptic. I belive they were the first to come out with the KDE 3.2.2 rpm's, the upgrde is very easy two click with the mouse, or apt-get update;apt-get -y dist-upgrade from the command line.
I find this beta very exciting for the simple reason that it is far the fastest of all the 6 above mentioned distros.
My only "problem" with Conectiva, that their website all portugise to me.

Just to note that you can search the pakage descriptions in Synaptic. If you go to package/find you get many search options.

Thanks for pointing that out! Unfortunately it's not much use in a lot of cases. Take the package description for OpenOffice; it's a one-line summary of the Mission Statement with no mention of the words "word processor", "spreadsheet" or "presentations".

I have not used 9, but even version 7 could resize VFAT partitions. Sure, it was not obvious... you just edit them from the partition tool in the installer, and they resize.

Oops. My mistake 8-)

And I am pretty sure there are tools for confuguring network and X other than xf86config.

There may well be, but they're not linked to from KCLControl.

Um. Weren't Crystal icons created and maintained by Everaldo? Or is he a part of Conectiva?

My understanding is that he was payed to create the Crystal icons for Conectiva, who were happy for him to release them under the GPL.

"Um. Weren't Crystal icons created and maintained by Everaldo? Or is he a part of Conectiva?"


Everaldo first started the Crystal Icon set while he was working for Conectiva.

. That said, it is still worth evaluating, especially for Portuguese and Spanish users, for whom the distribution is really aimed at

wrong, Connectiva is aimed at Brazilian Portuguese users not Portuguese. At most portuguese users would use Caixa Magica (http://www.caixamagica.pt), but they dont too . Im not wrong if i state that the same applys to Spanish users and perhaps even hispanic ones.

This distinction is important since it shows the aim of this great distribution, Latin American market only.

About Connectiva future, im aware of their current trend with Lula presidency, since this man's opensource views in government was seen in connectiva headquarters as a good and positive sign for their rule in providing buziness and services to Brazilian's public/gov institutions etc. But it seems "some" boycoted it on the permisis that putting the solution in connectiva products would make an even worst monopoly. Despite i really dont get it, "some" ppl prefer microsoft monopoly it seems. (Who understands politics?) On the end it was a missed oppurtunity for connectiva to lift up on their (already poor) economic situation. The unitedlinux deal was a counterback to this too.

Following a previous comment, what connectiva misses now is a massive user base, at least in brazil. I know many brazilian linux users, and most of them dont use connectiva. The answer they give is that, "its always missing something". The something that they end to find on others distributions, manly US based like debian/redhat, europeans like suse/mandrake or some more non mainstream like slackware (braz linux community users massively use slackware as their distro of choice).

Dont take this as a flame towards conectiva, i used conectiva 6, 7 and tryed 8, for a peak, last year. Its great, and since i catch up the drill and new features on 9 with this review i can fairly state is a great and complete distro. They just need to redefine their aim and market position.

Could be possible that Jason Prince do on these days a review of Conectiva Linux 10 Beta 2 or RC1, I would prefer RC1, because I believe that CL9.0 for me is so old, besides Conectiva Linux is starting to do a big effort to win space into South America and is better to show the latest job of them.

There's already a initiative from Conectiva Linux users called "Comunidade Conectiva Linux Brasil". It's page is located on http://www.ccl-br.com.br . There's a Forum and a news publication system. You can contribute sending articles or helping other users in the Forum.

One thing I can tell: Fedora won't become #1 distro in Brazil because of its name, which in portuguese means sthg that could be translated like "Stinky".
Funny, isn't it ?...

what the yeti said its true
but, "fedora" doesnt exists in portuguese language, what exists is "fedor" and "fedor" means "stink"

English speakers dont say "fedora" the way pt/br speakers say it, in english is like fiiidouura,

"im a leiinux fiidouura user"


but i dont see that as problem, its more like a funny aspect, and despite, we had the opel/vauxhall ascona cars and that is even worst than having a fedora distro.

10.0 RC1 hadn't been released when I started planning the review (about a month ago) and I try to avoid reviewing beta software.

Conectiva was once huge in Brazil. They are responsible to bring Linux to our hands by setting contracts with computer magazines to distribute it nationally. In the beginning, they had cloned the famous Red Hat Linux, then slowly as time went by, things started to change. But yet, they did not value the community. They have done many mistakes and have taken for granted many of us brazilians.

It´s not a bad distribution - it's much better than Mandrake (what a *PIGGY* frigging piece of shit!).

The problem with Conectiva is that they hire the wrong people and invest in wrong goals. Could they ever hire a *REAL DAMN FRIGGING* linguist capable to sane all distribution language issues? It's not like all employes need to be C coders and english/portuguese rookies. Hire some decent staff. But the language thing is an issue. If you notice there's a few applications that aren't even correctly translated into portuguese due to average portuguese knowledge. What could it be with english?

I wonder why Microsoft software has been always well translated...

It´s not a bad distribution - it's much better than Mandrake (what a *PIGGY* frigging piece of shit!).

I try not to go into distro comparisons in forums, but I do think that Mandrake has some strong points over Conectiva, including MUCH better graphical configuration tools. That's not to say Mandrake is actually better, because it's worse in some ways - it's much more bloated, and has even more dumb bugs than Conectiva.

The problem with Conectiva is that they hire the wrong people and invest in wrong goals.

What do you mean "the wrong goals" exactly? The language thing?

Could they ever hire a *REAL DAMN FRIGGING* linguist capable to sane all distribution language issues? It's not like all employes need to be C coders and english/portuguese rookies. Hire some decent staff.

*applauds*

But the language thing is an issue. If you notice there's a few applications that aren't even correctly translated into portuguese due to average portuguese knowledge. What could it be with english?

I don't speak Brazillian Portuguese, but it doesn't surprise me. That's why I gave it such a low credibility rating.

I wonder why Microsoft software has been always well translated...

Because they have the money to hire the top people?

I don't know how the author gets that figure...

Maybe the most popular southamerican distribution in South America is more closer to reality.

The most popular linux distribution within this side of the planet is probably Red Hat, followed with Mandrake, Suse...I don't know if for good or bad...

Anyways it seems I got to check next connectiva's release now...

Thanks for the review. Conectiva seems to be a distro that tries to be the distro for America combining, in an easy to use way, the most prevalent languages in the American Continent. Pretty interesting!

Guesswork, mostly, although an old review of version 6.0 said it first. Not being in South America I worked off the reputation.

Hi Jason, like you told me: "10.0 RC1 hadn't been released when I started planning the review (about a month ago) and I try to avoid reviewing beta software." well, today is available the Conectiva Linux 10 RC1, it is time for doing a review there is no any excuses. I will wait for your report.