Conectiva Linux 7.0 Review

Patrick Mullen writes: "The Duke of URL has posted their review of Conectiva Linux 7.0. Conectiva Linux was the first distribution to support APT-RPM, which cures most of the ails of typical RPMs. Their latest release even bundles a graphical front-end to APT, and brings the worlds of Debian and Red Hat together."

Re:Site only in Spanish and Portugese?

[adebater]

try
http://en.conectiva.com/download/

Re:User reviews?

[rinsoblue]

I use Conectiva 7.0 and I like it a lot. I also use Mandrake and all 3 BSDs. Conectiva has just the right amount of graphical-install and do-it-yourself that many people seem to yearn for. Both version 6 and 7 have found all the hardware except sound cards on my computers. After I finish the graphical install I use Red Hat's sound configurating program which is installed and waiting.

I think this is a very good product that has been overlooked too long. I recommend it to any beginner who finds other distributions too overwhelming. ISO's are available at linuxiso.org and it installs with a choice of the 3 major languages of the Americas.

Rinso

Connectiva employs many kernel mantainers

[Pac]

Like other major distributions, the brazilian Connectiva employs many people closely related to Linux development.

Marcelo Tosatti was recently announced [advogato.org] as the new head mantainer over the 2.4 stable kernel tree. Rik Van Riel is known for his work in the memory management subsystem and Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo works with IPX.

The point here is not to praise Connectiva (or Red Hat or anyone), but to notice that it is perfectly possible to run a profitable company and care for the development community at the
same time.

apt is not the whole story

[mvdwege]

While the reviewer is right that apt is a wonderful tool, he is guilty of two very common mistakes:

1. apt is not the package manager per se. It is a front end to the package manager. Therefore the whole idea of using it with another package manager as its default (dpkg) is not so unlikely as it sounds. In fact, as far as I can make out from my Debian documentation, apt is specifically designed to be agnostic in regards to what package manager does the actual work.
2. The previous was only a minor quibble. His major mistake is however his assertion that you can download any .rpm and have apt sort out the dependencies. Guess what? It doesn't work that way. In order for apt to work, it needs a central repository that provides it with a correct dependency list. Without that, you're back to the good old dependency hell. This is what makes Connectiva and Debian great, because that is exactly what they provide, and it is only because they do that that apt is such a great tool

Mart (a happy Debian user)

RPM is not that bad...

[O2n]

From the article:
A limitation of RPM is the lack of ability to fetch and install dependencies that are needed when installing a given package. It can be frustrating to try and install some software only to be held back by unmet dependencies. This usually leads to time-loss as one has to track down these dependencies, install them, and then install the package you wanted to install in the first place.

I've been using redhat - at least on some test machines not involved directly in the network - since 4.1. While rpm is far from perfect, it's also not that bad as the article implies: you can search for the missing dependencies here [redhat.com] -- note that you have to check "Provided Packages", then download those packages from your favourite mirror.

Package Fragmentation

[asr_br]

They didn't mention the fact that CL 7.0 comes with a lot of packages fragmentation.

By "package fragmentation" I mean splitting XFree, Gnome, KDE, glibc and all other big software in a lot of small packages, keeping the compatibility with other distros and with the old CLs.

Example:
Number of packages
Software CL 6.0 --> CL 7.0
glibc 03 --> 65
XFree86 34 --> 79
kde 60 --> 276
gnome 32 --> 66
koffice 01 --> 19
linuxconf 56 --> 70
-devel 127 --> 373
rpm 03 --> 05


This is very useful when installing the distro in a machine with little disk space and specially when doing a remote upgrade (you don't have to download big packages with functionalities that you don't use).

A complete article: "Fragmentation of Packages on Conectiva Linux 7.0" can be found here [conectiva.com.br], but it's in Brazilian Portuguese (I'm sorry).

- Ademar
"Unfortunately, no-one can be told what Linux is.. you must see it for yourself."

Kernel 2.4 maintainer

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep an eye on these guys. Marcelo Tosatti, the new kernel 2.4 maintainer, works at Conectiva, and that's another reason to believe they're doing a serious job there.

Re:YAGOD (Yet Another Geek-Only Distro)

[Banjonardo]

Does the world need another distribution that caters only to geeks?

Perhaps the U.S. doesn't. But this is A Brazilian product, and technical support is gonna be in Portuguese. (Or Spanish, if you stretch it.)

The Brasilian people, yes, DO need a nice geek-catering distro, if only because it has techsupport in Portuguese.

Re:I could care less now...

[neroz]

I tried Gentoo recently, and portage has a lot of potential, but its no where near APT. It can't handle dependancy conflicts, it can't even say to a depended package that 'i need gnome support' - you have to use an env variable. This may work for source based systems, but when they move to binary, they will either have to bloat each package, or provide many small packages, like debian does.

Portage v2 is in the works ATM, hopefully that will solve these problems, but, if you are a debian user, you will most likely be disapointed with Gentoo.