It’s not often that you see a desktop operating system aimed at power users. Usually an experienced user is expected to build the operating system from the command line ala FreeBSD, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, or Linux From Scratch; or to spend hours customizing one of the totally GUI-controlled distros like SUSE or Xandros. Either of those options can take hours of research, config file hacking, and software downloading and installing. Mandriva Linux PowerPack Edition is quite a departure from both of those scenarios — it allows the experienced user to easily make the OS into exactly what he wants without all the extra “new user” stuff.

Key features

For those new to Mandriva Linux PowerPack Edition (this is not the same as the other Mandriva editions, such as Discovery/LX, Move, and PowerPack+), this section is a brief explanation of what you can expect from PowerPack. Those already familiar with Mandriva or Mandrake PowerPack Edition may want to skip down to the next section.

Mandriva Linux (formerly known as Mandrake Linux) is a desktop operating system aimed primarily at experienced computer users and software developers. The default desktop is KDE, and a careful selection of default desktop software components have been selected: Firefox 1.06 (with the Java, Flash, and Adobe PDF plugins), Evolution 2.4, The GIMP 2.3, OpenOffice.org 2.0, AmaroK, and dozens of other programs. Above and beyond the defaults, you can choose from almost 4000 more programs in the Mandriva package database.

While it is pretty and has some nice configuration tools, Mandriva does not hold the user by the hand and point out every little thing. You’re going to have to know your way around KDE and GNU/Linux in general in order to really be satisfied with Mandriva. You have to know what a firewall is and what services you want to let through it; you have to know what the terminal is and how to navigate and run programs in it; you’re going to have to know what to do if the right driver for your video card isn’t detected. In return, you get an operating system that doesn’t meddle with things that you prefer to adjust by hand. If you’re looking for powerful software that has just the right amount of graphical configurability without ignoring anything important, Mandriva PowerPack Edition is perfect for you.

In addition to desktop software, Mandriva PowerPack edition also includes the following server software: MySQL 5; Apache 2; Postfix and Exim; various DHCP servers; named; OpenLDAP; Samba; and hundreds of other Internet- Web- and intranet-based services, programs, and add-ons.

Click here for a screen shot of Mandriva Linux 2006 PowerPack Edition.

New in version 2006

There is little new to the 2006 edition of Mandriva PowerPack Edition. Most of the revolutionary changes were made not to PowerPack, but to Discovery/LX, which inherited much from Mandriva’s acquisition of Lycoris. PowerPack was supposed to benefit from Mandriva’s merger with Conectiva, but the only Conectiva remnant of significance that I could find was the Smart package manager. Smart is not installed by default — it has to be added manually through Rpmdrake. Ironically, Smart doesn’t really seem to offer anything above and beyond the tool that you need to install it, and in fact I found Rpmdrake to be a little easier to navigate than Smart.

The first thing that annoyed me about Smart was that it didn’t install any menu entries in the K menu; I had to start it from the command line. There is also a Smart system tray notification tool that informs you of software updates, but it too had to be started from the command line. Then when I installed and updated a few programs through it, Smart messed things up to the point that it couldn’t even start anymore because some GTK libraries had been improperly updated. If you’re smart, you’ll stay away from Smart for now.

The 2006 release of Mandriva PowerPack Edition also offers different default software configurations optimized for slower, older computers. I don’t have any slow, old computers, so the standard installation was offered to me on all of my test systems. This feature supposedly offers less memory- CPU- and disk-intensive desktop software choices (IceWM instead of KDE, for instance) in place of the more advanced, resource-hungry defaults.

Xen virtualization support is included if you want to use it. I didn’t test the Xen implementation in this release of Mandriva.

The 32-bit x86 and 64-bit AMD64/EM64T editions are now both included in the retail package. Previously you had to choose one or the other. CD sets are no longer provided in the retail edition; if you need CDs, you’ll have to get the cheaper download edition and make them yourself.

Bugs and problems

On a system based on an Asus A8N-E motherboard and an Athlon 64 X2 processor, I couldn’t install Mandriva because of a problem with the Nvidia SATA driver. And on a ThinkPad T40, the onboard ATI video card couldn’t be configured with hardware acceleration.

The Smart package manager constantly failed to update or install new programs, citing a “public key not available” message for several packages. When it finally did go through, it screwed up the whole system and everything had to be reinstalled from scratch.

Ndiswrapper is included and integrated into DrakConf, but it didn’t work on the Centrino IPW2100 chip in my ThinkPad T40. A Mandriva company representative told me that Mandriva is Centrino certified, and there are native drivers provided, but they did not work on the T40. The output of dmesg and lspci showed no IPW2100 devices, so I suspect there is a kernel-level problem, as the chip is recognized in all other distributions I’ve tried.

Many menu options were missing upon first (and second, and third) boot. Specifically I found that Mandrake Update and DrakConf (the configuration tool that controls all aspects of system administration) were there on the computer and could be started from the command line, but not present in the menus. This was magically resolved when I registered with Mandrake Online and downloaded an RPM that updated the Mandrake Online utility. I don’t know which one of these things triggered the fix — or maybe it was both? No matter what fixed the problem, the default absence of DrakConf and Mandriva Update is unacceptable.

Pricing and services

The PowerPack Edition costs U.S. $85 for the retail box edition, which includes two 300-page paper manuals, a DVD for both the x86 and AMD64 editions of Mandriva, 60 days of support, and 30 days of the Mandriva Online service.

Beyond your one month of Mandriva Online, you will have to pay an extra $22 per year. All Mandriva Online does is make updating the software easier by providing update notification and automatic update services. Nothing is stopping you from using the standard Mandriva Update program to download and install software updates, so essentially the Mandrake Online service is a matter of convenience.

A 30-day subscription to the Mandriva Club is also included. This offers access to community message forums and other Mandriva support resources. Again, this costs extra beyond your 30 days, and the pricing is tiered according to how much support you think you will need.

Summary

In terms of look and feel and operating system structure, Mandriva 2006 PowerPack Edition has changed very little in the past few years. The software is updated with newer features and tools, new packages are added, and the entire Mandriva experience improves with every release. But you’re essentially getting the same distro that you could get with Mandrake 9.0. In other words, Mandriva fans will be more than pleased with Mandriva 2006 PowerPack Edition. If you haven’t tried Mandriva in a while, the 2006 PowerPack Edition might be a good way to get back into it — especially if you want a powerful GNU/Linux distribution but want to avoid doing a lot of manual system administration on your home desktop computer. Beyond the initial installation and setup, you’ve got a great operating environment without the hundreds of unnecessary programs and extras like SUSE and Fedora tend to install, and excellent support through the Mandriva community.

Despite that, I still believe that everything should work properly. The ATI video card in my laptop wasn’t correctly configured, and the Nvidia SATA driver problem also prevented me from installing Mandriva 2006 on one of my test systems. It seems that bugs are also a Mandriva tradition that is carried on from release to release — every time I install a new version of Mandriva Linux, I find a lot of bugs. There is always something that doesn’t work quite right, as though a couple more weeks of testing could have produced a flawless distribution. And, as always, all of the problems (except for the driver issues) were fixed by applying updates.

Developer recommendations

Here are some improvements that I’d like to see in the next edition of Mandriva Linux:

• Better testing. I hope to see no problems with hardware configuration, significant software bugs, or driver issues in the next release. I think Mandriva needs to be more careful in its release engineering.
• A new theme. I’m all blued out; I’m tired of the default light blue themes of Windows, SUSE, Mandriva, Xandros, and Fedora Core. Is this Linux’s blue period or something? If Mandriva has to be blue, can it at least go back to the theme used in Mandrake 10.1, which was sort of an indigo color? The abstract penguin drawings and the shades of light blue in Mandriva 2006 are annoying. I know it sounds silly, but I honestly think the uninspired default theme for Mandriva 2006 detracts from its overall worth. When you stare at that theme all day, it has to be good, and just for once I’d like to see a GNU/Linux distribution where I don’t have to mess with the theme to make it more interesting and pretty.
• DVD playback. Linspire can offer the ability to play commercial movie DVDs. Why can’t Mandriva?
• Better wireless support. If Ndiswrapper is present, it should work properly. Xandros Desktop has a spectacular implementation of Ndiswrapper; so should Mandriva.
• The Mplayer plugin. Sure would be nice to watch video clips online. The Mplayer browser plugin would accomplish this nicely.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.

They’re all so neatly packed, some of them installed only a couple of times for testing and evaluation. It’s not just free software in the pile — some of it is proprietary. There’s a copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 that is licensed for press evaluation only; a copy of Adobe Creative Suite under similar licensing terms sits beside it.

For reviews, it’s always a good idea to keep a recent version of a GNU/Linux distribution so that you can compare it to a new version. There’s no need to keep more than one, though, and certainly I don’t need so many retail boxes lying around, let alone the 400-page distro manuals and media kits. I’ve already thrown out the duplicates and the distros that never worked at all (I threw out two boxed sets of Lycoris Desktop/LX), but there is really no need to keep any of this software anymore.

As you can see in the photo (which does not include everything in my collection), I have several old DOS games from the now defunct Sierra On-Line game company. Some of them are real classics, like Betrayal at Krondor and Quest For Glory. Some are on 5.25″ floppy, some on 3.5″, and one or two are actually on CD. These may be worth money to a collector somewhere, so I’ll put a few of them up on eBay and see what they sell for. Some things, like the Macromedia and Adobe suites, cannot legally be sold or given away, so I have to “destroy” them, according to the license agreements. I have some ideas on how I might go about destroying them, but that’s for another article.

And then there are the books. I don’t have as many books as I do software boxes, but the book pile is growing at a much faster pace because I’m now writing book reviews, and these days, software companies more commonly send download editions of software instead of retail boxes. Looking on my book shelf, I have DOS 6 for the Guru Wanna-be (a very handy book in its day); TurboPascal, the Ultimate Pascal Development Environment version 3.0 circa 1986 (there’s a 5.25″ floppy with the TurboPascal IDE on it around somewhere, too); C++ Primer, 2nd Edition by Stanley Lippman (from way back in high school, where this was the textbook for a C++ elective course); and several books on Solaris system programming that I got for free at the Solaris 10 launch event last year. I don’t know why I wanted the Solaris books — I will never need to develop native Solaris applications. I don’t even use Solaris on any of my regular machines.

TurboPascal is obviously dead and buried, but what about the C++ book? Is that still valid for modern C++ programming? And do I even need it if I’m now reading Learning Java, 3rd Edition to get back into programming?

Those are the books that survived the first book purge. I already dumped a pile of DEC Rainbow manuals, documentation for an old Dell laptop machine, and two copies of the Windows 3.0 manuals. Aside from the Java book, I haven’t even mentioned all of the current, still-in-print computer books that I have on my shelf. They’re in the old book queue too — they just don’t know it yet.

And don’t get me started on old computer parts. I’ve thrown out several 1200 and 2400 baud ISA modems and serial port controller cards; an entire 386DX/40 computer that had no PCI slots; proprietary Sony and Teac CD-ROM drives (they were more than $300 new, and here I am throwing them away); and I’ll soon be throwing out an NEC 386SX/20 that doesn’t power up anymore. I used that during high school and I’d like to see what’s on the hard drive.

Some computer parts can’t be legally thrown into the garbage because they contain heavy metals and other hazardous materials. I looked into “recycling” some of my throwaways, but there were substantial fees involved. What’s the incentive to obey the law and help the environment when it costs more to dispose of old monitors and motherboards the legal way? Are the garbage police going to throw me in jail for putting old monitors out by the side of the road?

So what do you do with your old computer stuff?

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.

Don’t get me wrong — some suites contain very useful software. It’s not that everything in each suite sucks, it’s that the suite as a whole fails to be everything that it promises. Programs like word processors, spreadsheets, and drawing programs were never designed to be integrated with one another. There is a general feeling that, instead of using interconnected programs, you’re using different facades of an enormous monster of an application that does everything poorly and nothing perfectly. An office suite is a gigantic, fully-loaded Swiss Army knife, when all you really need is a pocket knife and a screw driver. Each new release adds more features to the package, making the whole thing a little more confusing to navigate and difficult to use. I don’t know about you, but I have a tool box filled with tools that are each designed for a single purpose — and they do that single thing very well. If I had to replace them with an all-in-one tool I’d be pretty frustrated, to say the least. Why can’t software developers take the same approach with software?

Word processors for non-writers

Being that word processors exist to aid in writing, you’d figure that they’d be geared toward writers, or at least people who write letters occasionally. Looking at my current favored word processor, StarOffice Writer version 8, I see a button bar and menu structure geared toward every imaginable purpose: making fliers; inserting graphics and tables for presentation hand-outs; macro recording for executing complex formatting functions; and oh, yeah — writing letters and books and stuff. I also see totally superfluous buttons that I can’t imagine ever using: there’s a spell check button, but it only checks one word at a time in a document and shows a mere one sentence for context. Considering how many words the built-in dictionary does not know, it’s far easier to select the button next to it, which checks spelling as you type and underlines misspelled or unrecognized words with a squiggly red line. One glance at a document and you know if you have any errors in spelling. Why would I ever use the spell check button when I have that feature turned on all the time? Copy, paste, and cut? Why would I need buttons for those things? They’re in the Edit menu already, and have universal shortcut keys that almost every program in the universe adheres to.

How about a word processor that is made for writing — wouldn’t that be something? As a professional writer, I can’t remember the last time I needed to insert a table into a document, or draw vector graphics in a manuscript, or change the background color, or a lot of other things that Writer 8 does.

Secondly, I look at StarOffice Writer — and OpenOffice.org Writer, and TextMaker, and… well, pretty much anything else except WordPerfect 12 — and see Microsoft Word’s interface layout. I don’t want to see Microsoft Word. If I wanted to use Word, I’d install it through CrossOver Office. Show me a good word processor with a sensibly designed interface that is as much unlike MS Word as possible and I’ll show you a customer.

I’m getting desperate for a word processor made for writing — letters, articles, books, essays, and that sort of thing. I don’t want to design banners, fliers, brochures, or hand-outs. If I need to do those things, I’ll use a desktop publishing program like Scribus. I don’t need to draw in my document; I have The GIMP and Inkscape for drawing. Please, somebody do for OpenOffice.org what Firefox did for Mozilla, and cut down Writer into something that resembles its name. If people really need to do all of that extra stuff, maybe it should be in its own separate desktop publishing program instead of jammed into a word processor.

Spreadsheet abuse

Spreadsheets were originally designed to organize and analyze small amounts of data. Later they got the ability to produce charts and graphs to further assist with that purpose. But over the years, I don’t think I’ve seen one person actually use a spreadsheet for organizing or analyzing data. Well okay, I did use it once — I recorded benchmark numbers from several motherboards using a standard video card, CPU, RAM, and software configuration to attempt to gauge the effect that motherboard technology had on 3D rendering performance. Using Excel (later Calc, when I switched to GNU/Linux) allowed me to easily enter, track, and chart that data. In fact I can’t think of another kind of program that could do that better than a spreadsheet.

That’s an isolated case. Spreadsheet abuse is rampant, and it’s a respecter of no one. The mighty and the weak, the rich and the poor alike use spreadsheet programs for unspeakable purposes. To program universal remote control units; as a home address book; or in production as an employee time card tracker; an unordered price list for a wholesale vendor; or to keep production financial data for a successful small business. The guy who used Excel for his mission-critical financial data was truly amazing; he was coming close to Excel’s 65536 row limit and asked me if I knew of a spreadsheet that could support more rows. In a low, even tone, I told him that a spreadsheet is not a database, and that he should seek professional help immediately (with migrating his data to a production database and a sensible frontend, that is).

Presentation software: the harbinger of a useless business meeting

Show me a PowerPoint presentation and I’ll show you a useless company meeting. Electronic slide shows attempt to distract a bored audience where the meat of a presentation would ordinarily entertain them. No meat? Give them more sounds, animations, and transition effects. In the old days, speakers used to keep their notes to themselves; now, for some reason, they want to show them to the audience with fancy graphics. It’s as though they secretly know that their presentation sucks, so the presenter tries to subconsciously make up for it with a spiffy slide show. It just goes to prove the stage adage that a big smile and jazz hands can make up for bad dancing.

The uselessness of a meeting is directly proportional to the complexity of the PowerPoint presentation. If you want to quote me on that in the future, mark it down as Jem’s Law.

Integrate this

In the dark days before I switched to GNU/Linux, I actually bought a legal standalone copy of Microsoft Outlook. I already had WordPerfect 10 and didn’t need or want Microsoft Word on my machine — I hate Word.

So I installed Outlook XP and found out that there were three major problems with it: I could not receive attachments in email, my outgoing messages were limited to plain text, and no spell checker was available. It turns out that Microsoft, ever security-minded, decided to disable the ability to accept file attachments in email messages. Fortunately a Google search turned up a little tool to re-enable that functionality. The spell checker and plain text email problem was due to the fact that I did not have Word installed on my machine. Word supposedly provided the functionality necessary for Outlook to function as I had originally expected it to — or perhaps the mere presence of Word on the same machine would unlock and enable more features in Outlook. Regardless of the cause, Outlook XP was not really designed to be used standalone, even though it was sold that way.

Sometimes programs don’t have enough functionality, instead relying on “integration” to cover for missing features. I once had Macromedia Studio MX, and used it to create really annoying Web sites. I’ve recovered from those terrible habits and now only use hand-coded XHTML/CSS or a free software content management system for all of my sites. But when you don’t understand enough about Web design and development to make anything worthwhile by hand, you have to rely on WYSIWYG tools to get the job done. I spent most of my time trying to make things look “just right” without any regard to the code behind the scenes, which ultimately made things worse. The second biggest time waster I experienced was trying to figure out which program I needed for each specific task. Flash could do vector drawings, but it couldn’t do dotted lines. For those, you had to go to Freehand. But then I’d get started in Freehand and need to save to a raster format, but I couldn’t do that because Freehand doesn’t work with raster graphics. So then, I guess, you have to hop over to Fireworks, which in turn doesn’t do vector graphics. It was an endless maze of software, and I could not understand why there had to be three programs to do the work of one. I just needed all of the drawing and graphics tools in one program.

Software integration is a pain in the butt. Not only does it cost more initially, but it also costs more to upgrade. If I actually need two programs to make one of them work, or three programs to accomplish a task that one should be able to do by itself, that looks to me like a clever way to charge more to get what I really want out of a single program. No one wants that… except, of course, proprietary software companies.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.

On October 6, Novell officially released SUSE Linux 10, the latest edition of its heavily armed desktop operating system. It offers a choice of great-looking desktop environments, a gigantic selection of desktop software that can do practically anything you could want, and the much-acclaimed YaST setup and configuration program. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and it’s definitely in the running for the best desktop operating system currently in production.

Key features

For those of you who have never used SUSE Linux, the following is a brief explanation of this GNU/Linux distribution and what you can expect from it.

SUSE Linux has long been among the best desktop GNU/Linux distributions in terms of features, ease of use, included software, hardware support, user support, documentation, and quality of design. It has a user-friendly installation procedure and it will work on virtually any desktop computer except perhaps some that use motherboard technologies released in the past two months or so.

SUSE uses the Windows-like KDE desktop environment as its default, but is perfectly integrated with the GNOME environment as well. The menus are easy to navigate, and the installed software is easy to find. There’s nothing difficult about SUSE Linux.

If you buy the commercial edition of SUSE Linux 10, you’ll get CD and DVD media, an extensive paper manual on the operating system and its software, and 60 days of installation support from Novell. The open source version is free to download, but it does not come with paper manuals, installation support, or many of the proprietary extras that the commercial edition has (the Java Runtime Environment, the Macromedia Flash browser plugin, the Acrobat reader, RealPlayer, and other programs). You can certainly add those extras later, though.

SUSE Linux 10 comes with a built-in firewall and spam filter, and although it’s hardly necessary on GNU/Linux, SUSE also includes an antivirus program. Because of these features and the fact that it requires a limited-access user account to be created for daily use, SUSE is, by default, more secure than many other desktop operating systems. Overall, SUSE Linux is an excellent choice for those new to GNU/Linux.

Click here for a screen shot of SUSE Linux 10 using GNOME.

Click here for a screen shot of SUSE Linux 10 using KDE.

New in version 10

The following packages are new to SUSE Linux version 10:

• AppArmor Lite
• Twinkle and KPhone for Voice over IP (VoIP) communications
• BitTorrent support built in, with KTorrent as a client
• Novell iFolder 3
• YaST modules for AppArmor and PostgreSQL
• Mozilla Sunbird calendar application
• Krita, the new image-processing tool of KOffice
• The Banshee and AmaroK music players
• The Beagle search tool

There are few revolutionary things in the above list. AmaroK and Banshee are yet more music players when there are already several to choose from. A normal SUSE installation can leave you with four or more digital music players; how many do you need?

Although Beagle was technically included with SUSE Linux 9.3, it was not installed by default because it was still under heavy development. It allows you to search a variety of data sources for a search string, much like the traditional file search function does. Beagle finds information in your address book, email, chat logs, visited Web pages, and documents.

Novell’s AppArmor is a security system that detects unauthorized access to files and services. It’s mainly a sysadmin’s tool, and I don’t think desktop users will find much value in it as it requires a great deal of configuration. The version of AppArmor included with SUSE Linux 10 is the Lite edition, meaning it has reduced functionality.

Novell’s iFolder is a file system synchronization tool. You save files locally, and they are automatically updated on the iFolder server (you have to set this up yourself) and pushed onto selected other machines. So if you have both a desktop and laptop machine that must have identical /home directories, you can use iFolder to automatically update each computer with the latest files. Again, this is a little beyond the normal desktop user and I think it will go largely ignored outside of business environments. It’s a great replacement for rsync scripts and various other hacky methods of updating user files on multiple computers.

Also new to version 10 is the availability of SUSE Linux OSS, a version of the distro that only includes open source software. It’s free to download from the openSUSE Web site. Previously, SUSE Linux was only available as a live DVD and as a commercially distributed product. In addition to those, you can now download SUSE Linux 10 as an “evaluation” DVD that contains all of the same software as the actual product, or the “open source only” edition that has none of the proprietary extras that the commercial product offers.

Using SUSE 10

Aside from a few minor shortcomings, I found SUSE Linux 10 to be the same great SUSE experience that it’s always been.

The installation routine was, as always, easy to follow and superb on hardware detection. I was a little disappointed to see that Centrino wireless network chips are still not really supported. Theoretically they are supposed to work with the right firmware, or other extra software, but for all of the downloading and trying, I have never gotten it to work. I was hoping that would be addressed in SUSE Linux 10, but it looks like Centrino users will have to wait for 10.1 or beyond for better out-of-the-box wireless LAN support.

Another thing I was hoping to see improved in SUSE Linux 10 was ACPI support, especially for laptop computers. The battery monitor applet in GNOME still doesn’t work on my Acer TravelMater notebook computer in version 10. It works on a ThinkPad T40, but it worked on that system in SUSE 9.3 as well.

On the upside, SUSE Linux 10 seems to be faster than 9.3 was. Rendering of menus is speedier, and the system in general seems more responsive and memory-efficient.

GNOME integration is better in SUSE Linux 10. Whereas the SUSEWatcher applet would often fail to show up in the GNOME notification area in SUSE 9.3 (it would appear as a separate running window instead), it now installs there every time.

I tried to upgrade from the previous edition of SUSE, but found myself facing dozens of dependency errors. I chose to ignore them, and in the end it seemed like there was little or no direct effect from doing that. The only program that failed to upgrade properly was Eclipse, but it was easily reinstalled. I later erased everything and did a fresh install because I didn’t trust the upgrade. I was afraid that there were hidden problems that I would encounter when I was least able to address them, and it wasn’t a big deal to restore my user data from tested backups.

Summary

As always, SUSE Linux is a pleasure to use, and remains my preferred operating system for notebook computers because of its great wireless networking tools, wide array of up-to-date desktop software, and the YaST configuration tool. With a few adjustments to add DVD playback and other goodies, the OSS edition can be just as functional as the commercial version. Speaking of which, the commercial edition is well worth the $60 MSRP, so if you’re serious about GNU/Linux, buy it directly from Novell.

Current SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional users will see little or no benefit in upgrading to version 10. There are no significant additions that make the price of upgrading worthwhile, and the software in 9.3 works extremely well as-is.

Developer recommendations

Here are some improvements that I’d like to see in the next edition of SUSE Linux:

• DVD movie playback. Yes, I know the DeCSS software is illegal in the US and other countries. But Linspire found a way to do it legally, and so can SUSE. And if we can’t have a DVD decoder, could we at least have Xine playback libraries that aren’t crippled (or should I say “developmentally disabled?”) to prevent DeCSS from working?
• A more sensible default partitioning scheme. GNU/Linux should not be installed entirely on one big partition. At very least, the /home directory needs to be on its own partition to make it easier to back up files and upgrade the operating system. On most large hard drives — which you’ll find in any computer made in the past 3 years — the root partition does not need to be larger than 10GB, as the entire distribution plus space for temporary files can comfortably fit there. Then dedicate the rest of the drive to /home and life is easier when you want to upgrade or switch distributions, because you can completely erase the root partition and still keep all of your data and settings.
• Better upgrade functionality. As a corollary to the previous suggestion, upgrading from previous versions of SUSE should be easier. While the installation utility supports upgrading, a huge mess of dependency problems ensues. This can in part be solved by a separate upgrade option that can erase the root partition and install the new edition of SUSE on it while keeping /home intact.
• Render YaST windows in the field of view. This is something that’s annoyed me for a long time, and it negatively affects usability. When you start YaST or any of its child programs, a new window is brought up in the lower right, but about 10 percent of it is rendered out of the frame of the screen. This forces you to move the window to a position where you can see it all, and you have to do it every time you bring up another YaST window.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.

The National Center for Open Source Policy and Research is a non-profit organization established to promote the use of open source software solutions within government IT enterprise environments for the benefit of government agencies, the general public and public sector entities. NCOSPR will accomplish this by serving as a facilitator and administrator of development and implementation services among government, academic, open source community and information technology (IT) industry developer, distribution and user communities.

“The structured adoption of open source software systems represents an enormous opportunity for government and public sector IT environments,” said NCOSPR founder and Open Source Software Institute executive director John Weathersby. “The National Center was established to help bridge the gap between the government IT needs and the open source IT industry and development community in a manner that is consistent and conducive to established government IT and acquisition policies.

“Open source software represents an amazing modern paradigm shift in the way information technology is developed, implemented, acquired and managed,” Weathersby continued. “We want to see these benefits leveraged within public sector enterprise environments for each of us as recipients of public services and as taxpayers.”

The National Center consists of three (3) core component entities: a National Open Source Resource Center; an academic Open Source Center of Excellence; and an Open Source Public Policy Institute.

As a National Open Source Resource Center, NCOSPR’s mandate is to serve the public by helping to identify the “common technical needs” within government agencies and bring to bear the resources, applications and expertise of the IT industry and independent open source development communities to meet these needs. The adoption of open source promotes interoperability, standardization, extension of product life cycle, best business practices, and provides leverage in acquisition practices that are currently unimagined in the world of proprietary licenses, vendor lock-in and single-use development practices.

As an academic Center of Excellence, NCOSPR challenges the bounds of research and development in order to advance the existing body of knowledge and technical skill within the IT, academic and government communities. NCOSPR’s mandate is to reach out to every corner of the academic community to draft and train the next generation of IT professionals and researchers in order to promote advanced education and economic development.

And as an Open Source Public Policy Institute, NCOSPR’s mandate is to recruit experienced and innovative thinkers to help craft development, implementation and acquisition policies that will facilitate the continual adoption and growth of open source within the public sector IT communities.

The National Center will be administered by the Open Source Software Institute and hosted by the University of Southern Mississippi. NCOSPR?€™s administrative offices are located at the University?€™s main campus in Hattiesburg, MS and technical offices located at the University’s satellite campus at the John C. Stennis Space Center on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Additional satellite and affiliate branches will be established on-site at participating government, academic and industry partner locations.

The National Center will be funded by public grants, public and private donations and through development and support projects performed for participating government entities.

About NCOSPR

The National Center for Open Source Policy and Research (www.ncospr.org) is a non-profit organization established to promote the use of open source software solutions within government IT enterprise environments for the benefit of government agencies, the general public and public sector entities. NCOSPR will accomplish this by serving as a facilitator and administrator of development and implementation services among government, academic, open source community and information technology (IT) industry developer, distribution and user communities.

Copyright 2005 Open Source Software Institute

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