11.11.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 6:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why the imminent end of Windows XP is likely to lead to a lot of GNU/Linux adoptions, especially where it’s required by state law or other rules/regulations
A writer at CNET, which is part of CBS, recently started an Internet-wide discussion when he wrote about “[h]ow to decide if Linux is right for you” [1]. This discussion reached as far as its competitor, IDG, where a distro reviewer and relatively new pundit addressed the subject, rephrasing it as a question [2]. Security experts in Holland are certain that GNU/Linux is suitable and worth considering for replacing Windows XP [3,4], which reaches its End of Life (EOL) in a matter of months. Evidence suggests, based on this new article [5] from ZDNet (also part of CBS), that old computers with Windows XP can be refurbished “on a budget” with fairly full-featured distributions like openSuSE and Fedora 19. Interesting times are ahead because as a matter of compliance with the law (for governments) or guidelines (in businesses) many people will soon have to throw away their computers (incapable of running Vista and successors) or simply upgrade to a modern distribution of GNU/Linux. Microsoft extended the life of Windows XP many times (for long periods of time) because it knows this. It also lowered (significantly) the cost of Windows XP when it needed to dump it onto the market to push back GNU/Linux, especially in sub-notebooks (better known as netbooks). █
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This open-source operating system offers a Windows-like experience without all the hassles. Plus, it’s free. Should it be your next OS?
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Many folks using other operating systems sometimes wonder if Linux is right for them.
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I wish my government pointed the way. I would suggest they recommend Debian GNU/Linux. I find it more reliable than Ubuntu GNU/Linux and less expensive than Red Hat GNU/Linux.
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The Dutch government’s cyber security centre says that Linux is suitable for business users, as well as for personal use. It points to the Ubuntu or Red Hat open source distributions as a viable alternative for those that are currently using a decade-old proprietary operating system.
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Buying refurbished systems can save a lot of money and produce impressive results: here’s what I found when testing out openSuSE and Fedora 19 on a a refurbished Lenovo.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 5:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo credit: GCJKAGC
Summary: Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Fedora project and its 20th release as well
THE FEDORA project is one of the most innovative projects in the GNU/Linux world simply because a lot of effort and investment go into it. Red Hat pours money into Fedora in order to elevate strategic goals, e.g. [1,2], and 10 years after Fedora was officially born [3,4] we have a 20th release with new — and mostly unique — features [5]. Watch who GNOME 3.10 Test Day is tied to [6] and recall where a lot of graphics on our desktops come from [7]. Fedora is a silent giant in the GNU/Linux development world. Don’t forget Red Hat’s/Fedora’s role in KDE, GNOME, a lot of Linux (kernel) development and even Anaconda [8]. Aside from technical work there is also community work [9]. Rather than disparage distributions which only take and hardly give, let’s remember to celebrate Fedora’s often-forgotten contributions to the GNU/Linux desktop. Fedora is renowned for being relatively reluctant to put convenience above freedom (it preloads no blobs where these are easily avoidable) and it develops many Free/Open Source alternatives where there is urgent need to replace proprietary software, e.g. graphics drivers. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Docker is a server application/container deployment system, which nicely sidesteps a lot of the complexity with desktop apps (not having to integrate deeply with the desktop) which makes it a lot easier to deploy. Additionally, docker is more than a deployment system, it also has some interesting ideas about how to create and distribute applications.
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Docker (previously dotCloud) made a big splash this year when they open-sourced their software for creating “lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers” that powers their Platform-As-A-Service offering.
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Fedora is now 10 years old and is now one of the most beloved Linux distributions. When it was started, it was hated.
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Fedora is one of the most respected GnuLinux distributions around. It’s been used by leading Linux developers including the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds himself.
There are so many different elements that sets Fedora apart from the rest of the GnuLinux distributions – one of the most notable features of Fedora is innovation. Fedora is a cutting edge operating system which keeps it users at the edge by offering latest packages.
Second beauty of Fedora is heavy contribution to upstream – unlike many other GnuLinux projects which make changes downstream to benefit their own users, Fedora developers prefer working upstream so that everyone benefits from their work including products like Ubuntu.
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Fedora 20, the next version of the open source operating system sponsored by Red Hat, will bring several feature updates to the world of desktop Linux when it debuts December 17.
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I recently announced a call to action for GNOME 3.10 Test Day for Fedora 20 on Facebook and I got a response that caused me to think about how everyone from the general public to developers submit and fix bugs for an open source project.
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My first digital painting program was the Smurfs Paint ‘n Play for the Coleco ADAM. When we finally got a PC with a VGA card, I used Deluxe Paint II and the Disney Animation Studio painting programs. I used Photoshop and Gimp when I was in high school and was introduced to the Macromedia tools in college. My tools of choice in college were Macromedia Fireworks for almost everything, and Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Director, and Macromedia Flash for everything else. I followed sodipodi and I switched over 100% to FLOSS tools around Inkscape 0.39.
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As you may know, Fedora totally redid their Anaconda installer starting with Fedora 18. There are many reasons for it and I’ll not go into that here but one perception out there in Internet land is that the partitioning section of the newer Anaconda installer is a pain to use. I must admit that when I first started using it (installing Fedora 18 alpha and beta releases), I really did not like the changes. This dislike persisted for some time until I finally got used to it. Then time passed. Fedora 19 development started, ran its course, and then Fedora 19 was released. It offered some Anaconda refinements. Now Fedora 20 is approaching its beta release and there are yet more Anaconda refinements.
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Are you or do you know of a woman who is interested in getting involved in open source and would be available for a full-time internship running from Dec 10, 2013 to March 10, 2014?
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11.09.13
Posted in FSF, GNU/Linux, Kernel at 3:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Linux alone is not enough for freedom
Summary: Analysis of some of the latest news about Linux, the world’s most widely used kernel
OWING TO (or due to) increasing corporate control over Linux, user-hostile mechanisms and “Trusted Computing” are being phased in, requiring user intervention [1]. This isn’t a new problem, just a continuation thereof. See, now that Linux development [2] takes centre stage [3,4] and a bug-free Linux is foreseen [5,6,7] (part of Torvalds’ vision [8,9] as of late, having moved from technical issues [10,11] to more strategic and managerial issues), there is more emphasis on quality (often referred to as pragmatism) and not much on freedom. Some more blobs are being added to Linux, making it less freedom-respecting than ever before. Linux-libre, whose mascot is Freedo (shown above), is trying to fight back against those blobs.
The Linux Foundation, run by corporations which make proprietary software for the most part, has an enormous influence over Linux [12,13,14] and unlike the FSF it has not much interest in freedom, just in practical benefits of the kernel (file systems and such [15,16,17,18,19]). Lennart Poettering keeps changing Linux in controversial ways [20] which make it to the core [21] and groups which include Microsoft are now entering the Linux Foundation’s sphere of influence [22,23]. Leaping ahead to Linux 4.x, development of 3.0 is already being neglected somewhat [24].
When talking about Linux always remember that technical merit — not freedom — is the top priority. It probably doesn’t bother so many people, but the fact remains that those who wish to maximise computing freedom should follow the FSF, not the Linux Foundation. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Jon Masters summarises the happenings in the Linux kernel community around the release of the 3.11-rc1 kernel
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Linus Torvalds closed the 3.12 merge window when he released 3.12-rc1. tty layer and scalability improvements received a special mention in the release announcement. The tty layer cleanups lead to per-tty locking which will result in better performance on some work-loads.
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Linux operating system creator Linus Torvalds has proposed that Linux 4.0, an upcoming release of the open-source software, should be dedicated to stability and bug fixing.
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Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, but Linux founder and “keeper of the flame”, Linus Torvalds, has put developers and the rest of the world on notice that a Linux 4.0 is coming sooner rather than later, “I don’t want us to get to the kinds of crazy numbers we had in the 2.x series, so at some point we’re going to cut over from 3.x to 4.x, just to keep the numbers small and easy to remember. We’re not there yet, but I would actually prefer to not go into the twenties, so I can see it happening in a year or so, and we’ll have 4.0 follow 3.19 or something like that,” said Linus Torvalds in the Linux kernel 3.12 announcement.
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Linus Torvalds is going away this week. He’s not saying where he’s going, or why, but “the fact that I’ll be traveling with very bad internet connection next week” was enough for the lord of Linux to push version 3.12 of the kernel out the door on Sunday.
Torvalds made the announcement that 3.12 is now with us on the Linux mailing list , saying “I didn’t really want to delay the release” despite “a number of driver reverts, and … an annoying auto-NUMA memory corruption fix series, but none of it was really worth delaying 3.12 for.”
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LinuxCon 2013 Europe was this week… and videos from it have started being published. Here’s a video with our favorite Linux leader about the future of the Linux kernel. Enjoy!
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds took the stage today at LinuxCon Europe in Edinburgh with Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist Dirk Hohndel to discuss the present and future of Linux and answer questions from the community. They covered a range of topics including the upcoming 3.12 kernel release, the ideal characteristics of a kernel maintainer, the issues that keep Linus up at night, gaming on the Linux desktop, and more.
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The Linux Foundation has adopted Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) as one of its ‘Collaborative Projects’, to promote the development of the open source hypervisor KVM (kernel-based virtual machine).
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If you’re a Linux fan and a car enthusiast, then you might be a little jealous of Rudolf Streif’s job. As the director of embedded solutions for The Linux Foundation, Streif is in charge of helping to foster the adoption of Linux and open source in the automotive industry.
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There has been some urging for beta testers to try out “btrfs”. So I did. I tried it on one of my 13.1Beta1 installs. I would have tried it on two installs, except that the UEFI install had already given problems before I got to that point.
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With the Linux 3.12 kernel due for release in several weeks time but all major changes behind us now, here are some file-system tests from this forthcoming kernel update. Tested Linux file-systems for this Phoronix article include EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS. From these results, there are multiple instances of these file-systems running measurably faster than Linux 3.11.
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With the Linux 3.12 kernel due for release in several weeks time but all major changes behind us now, here are some file-system tests from this forthcoming kernel update. Tested Linux file-systems for this Phoronix article include EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS. From these results, there are multiple instances of these file-systems running measurably faster than Linux 3.11.
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We’re late into the Linux 3.12 merge window and other prominent file-systems were already updated but on Thursday evening the Btrfs updates for the 3.12 kernel were finally published. With the new Btrfs pull does come some notable changes for this next-generation Linux file-system.
With the Btrfs pull request for the Linux 3.12 kernel merge window are a large number of fixes, performance improvements, and clean-ups.
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I’ve found a disturbing trend in GNU/Linux, where largely unaccountable cliques of developers unilaterally decide to make fundamental changes to the way it works, based on highly subjective and arrogant assumptions, then forge ahead with little regard to those who actually use the software, much less the well-established principles upon which that OS was originally built. The long litany of examples includes Ubuntu Unity, Gnome Shell, KDE 4, the /usr partition, SELinux, PolicyKit, Systemd, udev and PulseAudio, to name a few.
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Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 207 and with it comes many changes.
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The open-source, Software-Defined Networking project, OpenDaylight, is starting to reveal features in its first release.
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Linux has become the 800 pound gorilla of the technology world. It is domination every single space it enters (including desktop where Chrome OS is gaining momentum).
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of Linux 3.0.100 on Sunday and with that he intends to end-of-life this long-term kernel series in the coming days.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 2:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The last CEO of Nokia, preceding a Microsoft mole pretending to be CEO
Summary: New evidence helps show that Stephen Elop was a Microsoft mole all along and that he is being rewarded for turning Nokia from Linux ally to Linux foe
“Stephen Elop,” explains Sosumi in IRC, “after crashing Nokia to the ground (baby!) is now positioned as one of the candidates for Microsoft CEO” (which wouldn’t be too shocking). Elop helped Microsoft amass a large number of Nokia patents, to be used offensively and sometimes get passed to patent trolls (for an assault on Android/Linux). Nokia, due to Elop’s intervention, turned from one of the leading developers of Linux into one of its biggest enemies. His first order as CEO was pretty much to dismantle all Linux efforts inside Linux. It became known as the “Burning Platforms Memo” and it is being referred to in this new analysis from Finland. Here are some fragments of interest:
“I came across this interesting article in Finland’s largest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (published more than a month ago on 29 Sept 2013) about Elop’s tenure while Nokia CEO (the article is in Finnish of course). It is mostly a biographical story of the departing Nokia CEO but it includes an interesting passage about the Burning Platforms memo, which may ring particular bells to our readers who were here in 2011 and lived throught its aftemath. Plus it sheds some light on the negotiations with Microsoft.”
Further down it says: “Also, no surprise from what we’ve seen of Elop’s style, but yeah, he clearly was doing his thing without bothering to tell the Board and the Board had to chase him afterwards about what he had been up to… So even more proof that yes, the actual damaging decisions and especially those damaging communications (Memo, timing of Windows announcement, sudden MeeGo death announcement etc) came before Elop had ‘remembered’ to inform the Board. Why was he doing this? He had his cool bonus that he was working towards.. Nice to ‘forget’ to inform your boss, eh?
“Lastly, we now know Elop was personally involved in the Microsoft sale – WOW what a conflict of interest and even Helsingin Sanomat speculates that Elop may have had private meetings on his regular trips to Redmond (because contrary to his original promise, he did not bring his family from Redmond to Finland.. the family was a convenient excuse to go meet up with his pal Ballmer, especially now that we learned that his marriage was so much a wreck, that the divorce proceedings were started already in 2012…)”
When people say something like “don’t pick on Microsoft employees” we should all think about Elop and the likes of him. Microsoft moles are a common problem in the industry and if we can’t recognise and speak about this problem, then we oughtn’t expect this problem to go away. Here in the UK, members of parliament are being named and shamed [1], which sure limits their ability to operate mischievously. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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MPs have come under attack for claiming £200,000 of taxpayers’ money to cover the cost of their energy bills. Some 340 MPs used the expenses system to pay for heating their second homes, according to the Sunday Mirror.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 6:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Dubious strategic direction at SourceForge and Slashdot, which are becoming more like Windows malware and Microsoft PR sites, respectively
LINKEDIN, a crowdsourced spying and surveillance network, tells me that Slashdot staff has been looking for information about me. Apparently they are curious to know who exposes their scams, including the propaganda they are beaming to longtime readers of the site. According to one of our contributors, Dice.com claims to have made a lot more money from Slashdot, but it doesn’t explain how. Does it get paid for PR? Is it selling users’ data? Nobody knows. But based on the following disturbing story, Dice.com treats visitors like merchandise.
To quote IDG, which quotes the GIMP project, the increasingly-Microsoft-friendly SourceForge is up to no good:
In the past few months, we have received some complaints about the site where the GIMP installers for the Microsoft Windows platforms are hosted.
SourceForge, once a useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications, has faced a problem with the ads they allow on their sites – the green “Download here” buttons that appear on many, many adds leading to all kinds of unwanted utilities have been spotted there as well.
The tipping point was the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.
So there you have it.
As lirodon put it in IRC, have “you heard about how the evil Dice.com is violating the trust of SourceForge users?”
He called the above “stupid “wrapped” installers with borderline malware,” then cited “their support of those stupid “guess the download button” ads.”
To clarify the obvious, Techrights never sold any data about visitors. It doesn’t even keep such data. The data gets deleted periodically, unlike troll comments (there will always be zero censorship). The same policy will apply at Tux Machines, which we officially take under our wing today. Susan takes time to prepare for her wedding while I take over as main site maintainer. The first and only change to the site is removal of the Slashdot feed (DistroWatch Latest Releases feed replaces it).
Remember that Dice.com is just a business. It is trying to ‘monetise’ the sites above, it doesn’t really care about truth, freedom, sharing, etc. █
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11.08.13
Posted in GNU/Linux at 1:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The demise of the grassroots nature of GNU/Linux
Summary: The founder of SolusOS may turn from rags to riches owing to GNU/Linux skills that he acquired through development, but there is more to the story and a much broader perspective
THE LESSON of history is that once a movement becomes popular enough it will get abducted by opportunists and businesses. Ask former hippies about it. We see that in the Free software movement, which was officially abducted when it get branched/renamed “Open Source”. The previous post gives away the fact that I have a full-time job (FOSS-oriented), which limits my ability to run this Web site. Likewise, the person behind SolusOS is going to call SolusOS off [1], making it all end despite great success [2]. As Christine Hall reveals, there is a reason for this premature death of SolusOS [3]. The developer, Ikey Doherty, just couldn’t afford to develop it anymore. Instead, taking into account what developers can earn in the software market these days [3] (especially with GNU/Linux skills [4]), Doherty decided to move on, just like several other distro developers and even authors of GNU/Linux sites. It seems like yet more authors have quit writing about Free software this year, including The H staff, Groklaw, and Susan Linton, the founder of Tux Machines. Are Michael Larabel, Sean Kerner and a few others the last men (or women) standing? Have corporations taken over the development and news regarding GNU/Linux? Are the Linux Foundation staff members (PR) the principal corporations-funded messengers (no poor people invited [6]) now that the operating system outgrew its grassroots nature? First they marginalise Richard Stallman and the FSF and now we are left with just one major desktop distribution that is spying on users in exchange for money from the CIA’s close partner, Amazon. When Richard Stallman got pushed out from the movement he had created it was warped into a more ‘business-friendly’ strand or trend. Likewise, when Torvalds lost his independence in controlling Linux (his wage is now collectively paid by TPM and DRM supporters) all of us lost, except the corporations. Think about it. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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That distros come and go is not a problem for most of us, because there are other distros to which we can migrate. No one weeps that startup businesses fail at a very high rate for similar reasons: too little capital, manpower, niche product, minimal advertising etc. That’s just the way things are. It’s healthy that people make the attempt. It’s a learning experience for them and the world will benefit from better ideas.
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Ikey has struggled for the past year or so…even to the point of putting food on the table. But even through his prolonged unemployment, Ikey worked steadily on SolusOS. Those of us who could donated money via his PayPal account so he could concentrate on his work.
Where I come into play within SolusOS isn’t news. Ikey approached me over a year ago and asked if I would like to help create a customized version of SolusOS for the Reglue project. In that our former Ubuntu LTS was speeding toward end-of-life, I jumped at the chance. I was a SolusOS user already so it was a great offer. Ikey and I became friends.
So what happened? What transpired between October 20th and October 24th that would make Ikey Doherty just slam the door and walk away?
If I were to guess, it would probably be a combination of a couple of things:
Ikey had recently landed a fantastic job. While it is public record for those who want to look, in the last conversation I had with Ikey he asked me not to make a big deal out of it.
So I won’t.
Suffice it to say that it’s probably Ikey’s dream job. I believe the demands of that position, along with the stress and constant shifting of SolusOS collaborators, finally took its toll. I believe that the combined pressure of these things rolled over him like a tsunami.
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linux jobsLinuxCareers.com announced today a new job portal for Linux professionals effective on January 14th, 2014. Employers of Linux talent are urged to join now in order to receive pre-launch benefits. For limited time only employers can be rewarded with free 10 job postings a month for the first half of 2014. To express your interest go to linuxcareers.com and fill up the simple registration form.
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Linux Australia, which runs the conference through various organisers in different parts of Australia, and occasionally New Zealand, is mum when asked what it intends to do to help pensioners and the unemployed attend the conference.
Its president, Joshua Hesketh, has not responded to a request for comment on this issue, which was raised on the Linux Australia mailing lists on October 16. Doubtless, Hesketh has a great many important things to attend to.
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Credit: Financial Times
Summary: So-called ‘analysts’, including some from Goldman Sachs, are serving Microsoft’s FUD campaign by claiming that Microsoft makes billions of dollars from Android (without any proof)
IN ORDER TO scare companies and keep them away from Linux, Microsoft needs them to believe that Linux is somehow expensive, with the same going for Android and GNU. For a number of years now we have seen purely speculative reports which try to quantify costs that we know nothing about because Microsoft’s racketeering operation makes secrecy part of the protection racket. This is a pattern of FUD which we are very familiar with, having seen it in the Novell era as well.
Right now we have yet another so-called ‘genius’ trying to tell us that he has an exclusive insight into the income of the racketeering operation. This serves nobody but the racketeering operation and it’s not the first time that we see so-called ‘analysts’ doing this, sometimes even analysts close to Microsoft, including Goldman Sachs. It’s always them, like marketers in suits. We urge people to ignore those so-called ‘geniuses’, who just like secret services [1] want us to sometimes believe that they have powerful and valuable inside knowledge, even when they’re not inside-trading, which is against the law. According to Business ‘Insider’, “Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company.”
What are his sources? Did Microsoft’s racketeering operation tell him to write that? And is so, can it be believed? The Microsoft which was caught engaging in financial fraud after an employee had blown the whistle? It would be the perfect FUD. Only speculations are still being passed as ‘fact’ by some shallow sites that try to make Android look risky. We can recall many such examples, spanning at least 3 years (an early analyst’s speculation was the cost of Android to HTC after a patent deal with Microsoft). Since Microsoft-hired lobbyists like Florian Müller play a significant role in relaying those numbers, we can safely suspect that there is agenda at hand. Previously, when he spread some FUD about payments from HTC to Apple, he was proven wrong by the head of HTC. Patent deals are as much about generating FUD as they are about generating income (if any). Microsoft, along with Apple, is generating Android FUD and suing Android by proxy now. That’s a different thing.
Watch the type of stuff Apple is patenting right now:
Apple granted patent for location-based camera phone disabling
Last week I was frustrated in my attempt to take a screen grab of a frame from the cartoon Gravity Falls, which I was playing in iTunes on my Mac. The screen grab image showed the player window as gray-and-white checkerboard. Next, I downloaded a 3rd party screen grab application, and it gave me the same result. I ended up taking a photo of the iMac’s display with my camera. (The photo is in this post — it’s the one with the cartoony occult symbols). Thanks to Apple’s bullshit deal with the studios, the image has crappy video artifacts in it.
This type of patents from Apple were mentioned here before. Apple will help crush protests and also impede legal sharing of data. It is worse than DRM.
Speaking of DRM, Microsoft’s allies at Netflix (deep links between those two companies) are going aggressive with patents, seeking a ban (through the ITC) of something which is not even a physical product. “A trade commission investigated Netflix, although it imports nothing,” Joe Mullin correctly pointed out. Perhaps we’ll return to covering patents like we used to (not enough time/resources), but this is just another example of software patents doing their damage. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what’s going on in ways that we don’t.
It doesn’t matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 11:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Mageia, OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS and others successfully succeed the success of Mandriva GNU/Linux
A LOT OF people forgot about Mandriva. Some key staff from Mandriva was hired by Red Hat and Google, the company’s ownership was moved to Russia, and some of the project’s successors took a very corporate-centric role, such as ROSA.
I first used Mandriva some time in 2002 and I later used it permanently in 2008 and 2009. It was one of the best distributions at that time and it received wonderful reviews. Many people these days tend to ignore Mandriva or simply dismiss it as inferior to Ubuntu and even Fedora. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Some might even think that it’s no longer possible to get one’s hands on Mandriva, even though several derivatives exist which are totally free with no strings attached. The most famous among those is probably Mageia, which gets favourable reviews [1], and it has just added an advisories Web site [2]. Mandriva itself has OpenMandriva [3], but due to its short life so far it is hard to say how much one can rely on it. The longest-running branch of Mandriva is actually PCLinuxOS, which is very much alive and well [4,5].
If you look for a distribution which is practical to use and is not necessarily free-respecting as judged by the FSF, give one of the Mandriva derivatives a try. Mandriva is still in the game. █
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Mageia 3 has been out for a while, and I’ve finally had time to do a review. Mageia is a fork of the Mandriva distribution, and offers quite a bit to desktop Linux users. It comes with a great selection of preinstalled software, and it is available in 32-bit or 64-bit versions on DVD (3.96 GB). You also have the option of getting it on CD (700 MB).
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The advisories published before June 2013 are not available on this website, but are still available on the wiki.
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According to this post, OpenMandriva Lx Beta 1 is now available for downloads.
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Now, armed with both Desura and Steam, this laptop with PCLinuxOS has turned itself into a nice source of entertainment.
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