Fedora Core 6 is now available as a live CD. This is great news to the old fedora fans out there. Fedora is a project that is sponsored by RedHat and is contributed by many developers around the world. These people create high quality open source software which can be used by anyone.
It was a great distro back in those old days. But after Ubuntu came along, it lost its place. I haven’t tried FC for the past 2 years and this live CD would be a nice way to try it.
The live CD is available for i386 architecture only and you can download it from the official website or from torrents. It is about 683mb.
Here is a timeline showing all the GNU/Linux distributions.
Ubuntu Lite is a stripped down version of the popular Ubuntu GNU/Linux system. This is can bring the life to those old hardware lying around. You can check it out here, and download a torrent for an install CD here.
The default Window Manager is IceWM. It has Abiword and GNUMeric for the basic office needs. I think I would like to see it running on the old system that I have just to see it working.
Fluxbuntu is a Ubuntu-based derivative that uses FluxBox as the desktop environment (window manager). It is lightweight, swift and efficient compared to Gnome or KDE. These features makes Fluxbuntu suitable for vast range of computers, from low-end to high-end.
It installs on a Pentium 2 233MHz with 384MB of Ram within 12 minutes after starting the install process.
Minimum Requirements:
CPU: Pentium 2 233MHz (It might work on lower i have only tested it on this cpu)
RAM: 128 MB
HardDrive Space: 2GB (1.2GB Installed)
Here is an awesome video which shows the performance and stability of Ubuntu Edgy Eft (Knot 2). The person actually tried to crash the new Ubuntu by opening all the applications in the menu. But there is absolutely no slowdown or crashes. Watch the video to see it yourself.
IT@School GNU/Linux is a single CD customised GNU/Linux distribution containing the typical software tools required by an high school student or teacher. Apart from a host of typical desktop applications it also contains various educational applications like TuxPaint, Ghemical, Kalzium, DrGeo, Gcompris etc.
The CD was developed by IT@School Project in association with Free Software Foundation of India (www.gnu.org.in).
It has various tools like Editors, Educational Tools, Internet Browsing tools, Python for teaching programming, etc. It would be nice OS for a student. However I wonder, how many school children get to work with a computer in the remote villages in India?
Download IT@School GNU/Linux try it out.
OpenBSD can be called the most secure operating system used by man now. The development process of the OS focuses on building a secure, open and free UNIX platform. Most of the tools used for cryptography and security like OpenSSH were developed by these guys. Here is an article which takes a closer look at OpenBSD.
Ubuntu has a package called Popularity Contest (popcon), where you can vote on your popular, most-used application every week. It is fully automated and once configured, it takes care of the rest. This information will help the developers to make decisions over which packages should be promoted and which should be in standard installs.
To set it using the command:
$sudo dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest
You can send the information through HTTP or via EMail. I have set it up through HTTP. The results is updated in popcon.ubuntu.com.
This week I had installed Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 and tried really hard at making my SmartLink Internal Modem to work in it. It hadn’t worked in any other distro other than Debian Sarge. I started with a 64 bit version of Ubuntu, but it didn’t help. I followed the instructions in Launchpad and configured the modem. So here are the steps that I followed to make my SmartLink modem work in Ubuntu 6.06.
- First we need to have a few packages which need to be installed before installing the driver. You need to have build-essential, linux-headers-ARCH (where ARCH is your kernel version and can be found with uname -r in the terminal), fakeroot, module-assistant and debhelper. All these can be installed (with the dependancies) using apt-get.
- Then you need to install ungrab-winmodem from the linmodem website. Just extract it and make; make install to install it.
- Download slmodem-2.9.11-20051101.tar.gz from http://phep2.technion.ac.il/linmodems/packages/smartlink/
- Download sl-modem-daemon_2.9.10+2.9.9d+e-pre2-5build1_i386.deb, but don’t install it yet.
- Extract the tar.gz file and type make and then sudo make install in the folder where you extracted it.
- Type sudo modprobe slamr
- Then install the sl-modem-daemon using
dpkg -i sl-modem-daemon_2.9.10+2.9.9d+e-pre2-5build1_i386.deb command.
- Type
sudo /etc/init.d/sl-modem-daemon restart to restart the daemon.
- This ends the installation part of the modem. Now you can setup your internet connection.
- I used wvdial and unusually, the modem redialled every time the ISP showed the Login prompt. So, I put in the Stupid Mode = 1 in the
/etc/wvdial.conf file.
UnixLite is a lightweight unix/linux compatible operating system written in C++. Just like Linux, it is just a kernel - written from scratch and most of the part is written in C++. However the library used by UnixLite comes from uClibc and applications running comes from the GNU project. UnixLite kernel implements some frequently used system calls of linux, furthermore, it is binary compatible with linux, and some GNU software have been ported to unixlite.
Due to the small size(the kernel is made up of about 20000 lines of code) and the object oriented programming using the c++, the kernel becomes more modular and easy to understand.
Technical Features:
- Support paging and flat memory model, nearly same as linux
- Implements about 80 posix compliant system call
- Binary compatible with linux
- Able to run bash/gcc, and some other common UNIX tools
- Very rudimentary TCP/IP support, able to run a simple http server
- Very small, about 20000 lines of code
- Written in c++, highly modular and extensible
- Minix’s 32-bit file system
