Linux Archive

Linux is gaining market share in the retail industry. Use of the open-source operating system to run point-of-sale terminals in North America increased 185 percent last year, IHL Consulting Group said in a study released Wednesday.

Knowing that ArkLinux is the offspring of Bernhard "Bero" Rosenkraenzer (interview here), a former Red Hat employee and KDE hacker, should make it one of the more interesting and, arguably, credible new Linux distributions to hit the streets in recent seasons. With the rise of Lycoris, Lindows, and Xandros, among others, Ark Linux is certainly a far cry from a surefire success. Let's take a look.

The new Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 brings recent Linux user interface improvements to the PowerPC architecture. Smooth, anti-aliased fonts and the clean, refined style of Red Hat's Blue Curve theme make this a beautiful creation to look at. There are screenshots here, though they aren't big enough to really do it justice.

The hobby Linux distro CRUX 1.1 was released. Changelog.

LinuxInstall.org 3.0rc2 is now available. Changes: "Kernel 2.4.18-27.8.0 with NTFS support; security updates (Total 31); Mozilla 1.3.0; Evolution 1.2.3; complete set of Red Hat 8.0 manual documents in HTML; Acrobat Reader 5.06 with Mozilla plugin; Real Player 8.0 with Mozilla plugin; Flash Player 6.0.79 with Mozilla plugin; Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts for web; Xmms 1.2.7 (music player) with MP3 support; Xine 0.9.19 (DVD/VCD/CD player) with libdvdcss; dual-boot configuration with NTFS/FAT32 support..." Changelog, screenshots.

The popular Linux distro Knoppix which can be fully operated by simply booting it off a CD, has just released version 3.2 and it includes a number of new features.

"It has been several months since we began our quest to find the best desktop GNU/Linux distribution of the Fall/Winter 2002 batch. We have considered lots of distributions that attempt to innovated and streamline the Linux experience and now we consider who succeeded to push beyond the rest and win our award." Find out the results here.

The entire Source Mage GNU/Linux team would like to announce the release of their very first offical release, code named "Shillelagh". Source Mage is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of "casting" and "dispelling" programs, which the team refers to as "spells".

The PCQuest magazing folks have created their own distribution, PCQ Linux 8.0, based upon Red Hat's 8.0 Linux. Read the introductory article about their distro at PCQuest.com.

"UnitedLinux was designed by a group of Linux vendors to streamline their development and certification around a single Linux version. This server operating system combines technologies from each of its founding members. Released in November 2002, UnitedLinux is based on a wide variety of standards so that developers can design software that is portable across Linux platforms. UnitedLinux is a server operating system intended for Linux's primary growth areas — for enterprise and Web server applications." Read the article at TechUpdate.

Walter Kruse offers up his experiences with Peanut Linux over at DesktopLinux.com. Not talked about as often as more high profile commercial distros, this flavor of Linux is fast, lightweight, and suited to both new and advanced users. Kruse steps us through his reasons for making a move to Peanut as his distribution of choice and offers us some tips and links for customizing the environment.

This article is a followup to an article I wrote on 2-20-2003 about my experiences choosing a Linux distribution that would suit my needs and wants. My principal requirements for an OS are that it be powerful and up to date, easy to use and set up--I don't mind using the command line and I don't mind editing a file here and there, but I like doing this type of editing for fun, not because I have to. I also want an OS that is fast and looks nice on my PII 450 with about 350 MB of RAM.

OSNews reader Andreas writes: "Recent additions to 2.5 dev kernel (2.5.65 will contain the changes) that heavily improves desktop interactivity smoothness. It's easy to overhype so I won't but I'm running patched 2.5.64 and the difference are without a doubt more then just "noticable". Here's the story at KernelTrap."

"Things are looking up thanks to bridge software that lets it run Microsoft Office programs, but the Windows alternative has a long way to go." Read the article at SunSpot.net.