Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Tuesday 4 August 2009, 10:26 AM
Good Things on the Horizon - But Use Caution!
We're getting far enough along in the development cycles of several of the major Linux distributions that you can just about see the releases coming over the horizon. I've been trying out several of them, and they look very good already. But, first and foremost, remember that these are test releases, and are likely to still have significant bugs, omissions and various quirks in them. They are not intended for use on production systems!
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha 3: This is probably the one that you have to be the most careful with, because they are changing the default bootloader from legacy GRUB to GRUB 2 (aka grub-pc), and that is a big, big change. If you don't have your system set up for multi-boot, you might not even notice the difference. If you multi-boot, it depends on how complex your setup is. If you are in the habit of editing your GRUB menu.lst file, as I am, it's a whole new world. The good news is, GRUB 2 can be configured to chainload from legacy GRUB, so you can install Karmic, keep your existing GRUB setup, and chainload to boot Karmic when you want to test/use it. Karmic also jumps to Linux kernel 2.6.31, from 2.29 in Ubuntu 9.04. It will include the usual array of package updates, such as the latest Gnome and KDE desktop versions. There is also mention of a KDE netbook version, but I have not tried that yet. See the release notes for all the details. One bit of good news for HP 2133 netbook owners (like me)... the kernel seems to get CPU frequency scaling right without requiring a manual edit of the boot command.
openSuSE 11.2 Milestone 4: I've been trying the openSuSE 11.2 development releases since Milestone 2, and this is the first one that I have been able to get installed and working - and it is a beauty. They have updated the installer, and it looks very good. There will be lots of updates in this one, of course, but it is still early days - they haven't even gotten to the "Alpha" stage yet. I'm quite impressed with how stable it has been since I installed it, though.
Mandriva 2010 Alpha 2: As is their norm in the development cycle, at this point only the Mandriva Free DVD (.iso) is available, there are no LiveCD images or Mandriva One version. That means a download of over 3 GB, but it is worth it. So far I have only installed it on the Dual Atom nettop, but installation was easy, it seems to work just fine, and there are, as always, a lot of updated packages - including the latest KDE, Gnome, Xfce and X.org.
So, there is lots of interesting and fun stuff coming up this fall!
jw 4/8/2009
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha 3: This is probably the one that you have to be the most careful with, because they are changing the default bootloader from legacy GRUB to GRUB 2 (aka grub-pc), and that is a big, big change. If you don't have your system set up for multi-boot, you might not even notice the difference. If you multi-boot, it depends on how complex your setup is. If you are in the habit of editing your GRUB menu.lst file, as I am, it's a whole new world. The good news is, GRUB 2 can be configured to chainload from legacy GRUB, so you can install Karmic, keep your existing GRUB setup, and chainload to boot Karmic when you want to test/use it. Karmic also jumps to Linux kernel 2.6.31, from 2.29 in Ubuntu 9.04. It will include the usual array of package updates, such as the latest Gnome and KDE desktop versions. There is also mention of a KDE netbook version, but I have not tried that yet. See the release notes for all the details. One bit of good news for HP 2133 netbook owners (like me)... the kernel seems to get CPU frequency scaling right without requiring a manual edit of the boot command.
openSuSE 11.2 Milestone 4: I've been trying the openSuSE 11.2 development releases since Milestone 2, and this is the first one that I have been able to get installed and working - and it is a beauty. They have updated the installer, and it looks very good. There will be lots of updates in this one, of course, but it is still early days - they haven't even gotten to the "Alpha" stage yet. I'm quite impressed with how stable it has been since I installed it, though.
Mandriva 2010 Alpha 2: As is their norm in the development cycle, at this point only the Mandriva Free DVD (.iso) is available, there are no LiveCD images or Mandriva One version. That means a download of over 3 GB, but it is worth it. So far I have only installed it on the Dual Atom nettop, but installation was easy, it seems to work just fine, and there are, as always, a lot of updated packages - including the latest KDE, Gnome, Xfce and X.org.
So, there is lots of interesting and fun stuff coming up this fall!
jw 4/8/2009
PreviousComments on this post
Can't wait for Mandriva to come out with their live CD one. I have converted several people at work by giving them this CD. I have 2009 installed on my HP mini, and it works great.
Hi Ator, If I recall correctly, Mandriva usually starts making a LiveCD when they get to Beta releases. The first Beta is scheduled for 20 Aug, but they have been running a bit late; I would expect it sometime before the end of the month.
jw
