[Comm-en] Personal review of ALT Linux Junior

[Comm-en] Personal review of ALT Linux Junior

[djbouley]

Just wanted to share with everyone a review I just completed of Junior 2.2.  I 
hope that it generates more interest in the distribution, especially in North 
America. http://www.virtualsky.net/altlinuxreview.htm

Feel free to link to the site or e-mail it out to as many people as you wish.

David.

-- 

============================================
(o_
//\
\/_/  E-mail powered by Linux
============================================
======

Re: [Comm-en] Personal review of ALT Linux Junior

[Alexander Bokovoy]

On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 12:08:46PM -0600, djbouley wrote:
> Just wanted to share with everyone a review I just completed of Junior 2.2.  I 
> hope that it generates more interest in the distribution, especially in North 
> America. http://www.virtualsky.net/altlinuxreview.htm
> 
> Feel free to link to the site or e-mail it out to as many people as you wish.
Some comments on first look:

You're completely wrong with "Junior is based on the Mandrake Linux
distribution, produced by MandrakeSoft. From what I can figure, it's
building blocks are taken from Mandrake 9.0, released last fall."

For your information: ALT Linux Junior is based on ALT Linux Master 2.2
which in turn is based on ALT Linux Sisyphus project which is being developed by 
ALT Linux Team for more than two years already. Its predecessor was a Mandrake 
Linux Russian Edition (RE), last version of which, Mandrake RE Spring2001
was released in March, 2001.  Before that time a number of people from ALT
Linux Team were working on i18n and l10n issues with MandrakeSoft and were
publishing Russian Edition of a Mandrake Linux. The same people worked on
i18n with SuSE btw during 1998-2000. But starting approx.  August 2000 we
were getting away from Mandrake due growning differences in approaches to
security, i18n, and overall infrastructure. And also some changes in
project's sponsorship by local Russian companies led to foundation of ALT
Linux company in a February of 2001.

We are still using Mandrake's installer (gi) and some of Drak utilities but
this is mostly due absense of noticeable requests from ALT Linux Company's
customers (and thus funding for it) to rewrite them from scratch. As you
might know, installer and system utilities are very hard to implement from
scratch when you don't have sufficient resources and also have a great
number of other -- more important -- tasks like security hardening and
dependency resolution for our more than 4000 packages.

However, the work for getting our own system configuration utilities is
under way. Currently the code is in alpha stage and isn't recommended for
general use. This is why we occasionally port some updates from Mandrake's
Draks. And this is why you saw some glitches with configuration utilities,
including Internet connection configuration.

So, regarding configuration subsystem bugs, things might change in near
future, I hope.

Thank you very much for overall positive review!

-- 
/ Alexander Bokovoy
---
Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.

Re: [Comm-en] Personal review of ALT Linux Junior

[Michael Shigorin]

On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 12:08:46PM -0600, djbouley wrote:
> http://www.virtualsky.net/altlinuxreview.htm

Umm... thanks, but it's a common misconception that ALT Linux is
being based on Mandrake: since Master 2.0 it isn't so.

The installer and (to large extent) configuration software is
still the heavily patched versions of older Mdk ones (8.x I'd
believe), but the whole distribution isn't _based_ on (and isn't
"parallel" to) some particular Linux-Mandrake release.

So telling "ALJ2.2 is somewhat based on Mdk9.0" is incorrect.

> Mandrake -and Red Hat for that matter- use the RPM software
> package handler

Umm... sounds like RH borrowed from Mdk and not otherwise :)

> Junior utilizes the Synaptic front end application; a huge
[...]
> As an extra bonus, Junior also has the capability
> of installing softare using the Debian based apt-get 

Ugh :)  Synaptic is exactly an APT frontend :)

> To update and upgrade the system files, I simply had to click
> on four icon buttons in sequence... Update List - Upgrade All -
> Dist. Upgrade- Proceed.

(in fact, "upgrade" before "dist-upgrade" would do all the
"usual" job -- dist-upgrade is really needed only with major
changes like going for another major release or tracking the
unstable tree, security updates are simpler and not "dist"-wide)

> If the software you want is not in the Synaptic list, you can
> always go to a terminal window and use Apt-Get.

Did you really find something via APT that wasn't accessible with
Synaptic?  It really shouldn't be so since APT is being used both
ways 8-O

> For those of you who prefer non-Windows look-alikes, Junior
> also gracefully supports Window Maker 0.80.2.

Thanks, there was a hot battle over whether to "bloat" distro
with WM :-)  but WindowMaker team won -- still the CD had to grow
to 700Mb.  BTW, seems there were no problems with that on older
CD-R drive?

> XRipper

Grip? :)

---

Overall: thanks David, I'm heading to LWN and friends with the
link in my hands :-)

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/