[Desktop] ALT Linux 4.0 (was: re freespire)

[Michael Shigorin]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 09:13:17AM -0500, s wrote:
> On Monday 20 August 2007, Michael Shigorin wrote:
> > 	Hi Susan,
> > you might also have a look at ALT Linux Desktop -- there's public
> > RC available right now with the release being published "RSN"
> > they say.
> >
> > It's a distro from Russia which was one of the first (if not the
> > first) to come up with "1CD desktop" back in 2001, and it does
> > include what can be redistributed under copyright (software
> > patents don't exist in Russia, so MP3 and MPEG4 codecs are there
> > as well).
> >
> > There's basic CD and more involved DVD image.
> >
> > Interested? ;-)
> 
> I'm trying to download the final now in hopes of reviewing it for Linux.com, 
> but it's coming in so slow that it may not get here in time.   Do you have a 
> faster mirror that I might have access to in order to speed up my download?  
> I'm trying to pull in the full DVD for review.

Thanks for the review, it was quite interesting reading and most
weak/weird points are correct; the only thinkg that made me smile
was "a few telltale signs" since the installer was developed
completely from scratch during 3.0 and largely rewritten for 4.0
-- it's based on Qt4 and definitely borrows some features from
YaST2 but it's not based on its codebase at all; this also
accounts for relatively modest number and sophistication of 
the modules available.

The gfxboot which is used for initial DVD and HDD boot-up is
originating from SUSE as far as I know, so there's not much
surprise in it (different distros use different colour schemes
for the most part, but largely the same code).

Overall, I've hoped that as with Server, the final widely public
release would be 4.0.1, with bugfixes for issues found in 4.0.0
during initial assessment and deployment.  Seems like 4.0.1 is
being worked on but definitely still some time ahead.

Regarding broken ALSA package, seems like we really need to
include media check into DVD boot menu -- it's highly probably 
a fault of the image copy (less probably of actual media) but
one shouldn't know his way around synaptic to get at least clear
diags for that.

WPA supplicant issue is being actively worked upon right now,
at least half of the problem (process interaction part) seems
to be located.

Beryl case is something weird: a year or so ago I have set it
up by hand using some wiki page describing installation on
openSUSE, and got away with only 1/3 of instructions needed
(the rest was in place, just apt-get away).  It worked but
wasn't occuring like something immediately useful to me, at 
least not more useful than seven virtual desktops I use daily.
Folks on mailing lists rather concur that Beryl is somehow
broken at the moment though.

"nv" with older Nvidia cards is known with "nvidia legacy"
packages being available in backports; this is something that's 
going to see some more work to just function out of the box
though.  There were also fglrx-related troubles that so far
seem like #1 problem in 4.0.0 to me.

The keyboard issue seems unknown, I'll check with Alterator
module maintainer (and bugzilla.altlinux.org).

It would also be interesting to know what distros would score
"above average" or "excellent" performance rating given your
hands-on experience with probably lots of them?

---

If you or anyone around is also interested in server distros,
I'd like to propose looking at Server 4.0 too.  It includes
OpenVZ out-of-box, complete with web-based tools for virtual
environment creation and management (I still have at least one
pet bug with it but that's somewhat "advanced" use case which
is working but non-intuitive).

Thanks again!

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