CentOS 4 is built using the same source code as the industry-leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and version 4.3 is commensurate with RHEL 4 update 3. Released in March of this year, CentOS 4.3 contains all previously issued bug fixes and updates. It’s not really a new release so much as it is the old release with all patches applied. This matches Red Hat’s own release cycle, which is designed to make upgrading and updating easier in businesses that require their systems to remain as uniform and predictable as possible. With the fading away of TaoLinux and White Box Linux, CentOS alone fills the huge gap between Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

CentOS overview

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is reliable, easy to use, and has extensive support options. One thing it is not, though, is inexpensive. The usual alternative for people who can’t or won’t use RHEL is its publicly available development edition, Fedora Core. Unfortunately, Fedora is too often littered with showstopping bugs, and doesn’t make as reliable a platform as RHEL does. That’s where CentOS comes in — it’s built from the source RPMs from RHEL Advanced Server, minus Red Hat’s trademarks and proprietary graphics. The end result is an operating system that operates and performs identically to RHEL, with a few extra tools to make it easier to update, and no official Red Hat logos or images.

CentOS is an acronym for Community ENTerprise Operating System, meaning it is a free-of-charge and free-as-in-rights operating system that is stable and reliable enough to be used in a large business. The release cycle is slow and predictable, which is favorable to large businesses that seek a stable, uniform operating environment with rapid security update delivery. Home desktop users may not find as much enjoyment in CentOS because its desktop software tends to be a few versions older than the latest and greatest packages included in home desktop-oriented GNU/Linux distributions.

CentOS has a relatively simple installation routine, just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Unlike RHEL, which has different editions for a variety of business uses, CentOS only maintains one core from which you can customize your operating environment to act as a desktop, workstation, or server. RHEL has the same options, but is packaged and supported differently for different uses.

The GNOME desktop environment as customized for CentOS is easy to use, navigate, and customize. It includes up2date, a program that notifies you of software updates, though the preferred method of software maintenance in CentOS is through YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified). YUM requires command line interaction, but the only command most sysadmins need to know is yum update — a simple command, to say the least.

CentOS comes with a large enough selection of desktop and server software that the computing needs of nearly any business or professional operation can be met. Anything certified for RHEL should work with CentOS. If you don’t find what you want, you can use the Dag Wieers RPM repository to add many more packages to your system.

System services can be enabled, disabled, or restarted through a nice graphical tool; a similarly easy-to-use tool exists for connecting to other servers on the network. Ease of service configuration ends there, though — each service must be custom-configured by hand from a text editor. The config files are generally well-commented and do not significantly deviate from the universal default values or file names.

What’s new in 4.3

The 4.3 release contains the same updates and enhancements found in RHEL 4 Update 3, plus a new YUM-based update system that automatically selects the closest available CentOS update mirror.

CentOS: RHEL rebranded

Putting it to the test

I had some trouble with the x86 version of CentOS 4.3 on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 test system. Specifically, the USB keyboard and mouse went totally crazy — repeating keys and clicks, and in general being unusable. Oddly, the problem did not occur in the 64-bit edition of the same release.

The up2date program is still there, but it won’t be as fast because of the new server selection scheme employed by YUM. On my test system, the yum update method worked quickly and without error. up2date, however, crashed several times on the AMD64 version, and took a long time to complete on the x86 edition.

The software is somewhat aged, but that’s to be expected from a maintenance release, which is what 4.3 is.

A few people have written to me post-publication and asked that I mention YUMEX, a graphical frontend for YUM. It can of course be installed via YUM: yum install yumex. It’s a nice utility, and definitely a great addition to CentOS. However, I still feel that it should supercede up2date, or that the user should have the option of using YUM instead of up2date for updates by default, not as an add-on or afterthought.

Conclusions and developer recommendations

CentOS is the perfect alternative for people who can’t afford or otherwise are opposed to paying for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It’s as perfect a clone of RHEL Advanced Server 4 Update 3 as can legally be distributed. Overall I found it just as easy to install, use, and maintain as RHEL4.

The only recommendation I have is for the CentOS team to make YUM graphical in a minimalist way, much like up2date currently is. The beauty of up2date is that it is so easy to use and understand, whereas running YUM from the command line to update the system by hand is sloppy and unreliable. I’d like to see an up2date-like utility that monitors the update servers for changes and either automatically applies them, or puts up a big red exclamation mark like up2date does.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Purpose	Operating system
Manufacturer	The CentOS Project
Architectures	x86, AMD64/EM64T, IA64, PPC, Alpha, SPARC, S390, and S390x
License	GNU General Public License
Market	Servers, workstations, and desktops of all kinds; people who like Red Hat Enterprise Linux but can’t afford it
Price (retail)	Free of charge
Previous version	CentOS 4.2
Product Web site	Click here

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

SUSE Linux overview

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.

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.

There are two versions of this operating system (aside from the corporate
products): commercial and OSS. The commercial edition is generally referred to
as SUSE Linux; the open source edition is generally written SUSE Linux
OSS. Both are essentially the same operating system. However, if you buy the
commercial edition of SUSE Linux 10.1, you’ll get CD and DVD media, an
extensive paper manual on the operating system and its software, and
90 days of installation support from Novell. The open source version is href="http://www.opensuse.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">free to
download, but it does not come with paper manuals or installation
support.

If you find that you’re in over your head with SUSE installation and
configuration and don’t want to wait for Novell to ship you the commercial
edition, I’ve authored a PDF guide called SUSE Linux 10.1 Kick Start, published and offered for sale through Sam’s Publishing. If you only need some post-install configuration help, check out my guide on Hacking SUSE Linux 10.1.

What’s new in 10.1

SUSE Linux 10.1: still good, but a little buggy

One of the most visible ways that Novell has lost its edge lately is the glaring lack of a changelog or any significant marketing materials for SUSE Linux 10.1. In other words, there is no comprehensive list of improvements and changes since 10.0 — there isn’t even a press kit or reviewer’s guide available, which is highly unusual for a commercial operating system. So in lieu of an official list, here are the changes I have discovered in 10.1:

• AppArmor has been upgraded to the full version; previously only the Lite edition was included.
• Xen has been upgraded to version 3.
• KDE, GNOME, and X.org have been updated to their newest stable versions as of the release date.
• YaST Online Update (YOU) and SUSEwatcher have been replaced by the ZENworks updater.
• The Atheros wireless networking drivers (madwifi) have been removed; Atheros-based wireless cards are not supported in SUSE 10.1 initially, but you can download a madwifi package after the installation is complete.
• The proprietary Nvidia drivers are no longer included or available from YaST.
• Various installation-related improvements.
• Separation of free and non-free software; the commercial and OSS editions are now materially the same. All non-free software has been moved to a separate ISO, which can be downloaded for free. Previously these packages were only available in ISO form through the commercial edition.
• NetworkManager replaces NetApplet for easier wireless networking.
• The XGL graphical interface enhancement and the Compiz window manager are now supported and included with the distribution, but are not installed by default.

Putting it to the test

There are a lot of nice things to say about SUSE Linux 10.1, but most of them I said back when 10.0 was released. It’s easy to install and configure, comes with a ton of software, etc. etc. — it’s probably the best desktop GNU/Linux distribution, and easily the best free-of-charge distro for those new to GNU/Linux (Ubuntu fanboys: please send hatemail to spamtrap@thejemreport.com).

The first major change that I noticed in SUSE Linux 10.1 was the distribution method. The commercial edition no longer has any proprietary software integration, and the OSS edition has its own proprietary add-on disk for things like the Java Runtime Environment, the Flash browser plugin, and all of the other proprietary extras that desktop users generally want. The Nvidia video driver is gone, though, which is a disappointment. Its absence means that you have to download the standard driver from the Nvidia and install it yourself… and reinstall it every time your Linux kernel is updated.

Speaking of drivers, Atheros wireless network chip support was officially dropped from SUSE Linux, then hastily re-added to the installation repositories some time after the release. You’ll have to put the driver RPM onto a CD or USB drive before installation, or find some other way to connect to the Internet to get the driver afterward.

The installation procedure is largely the same as it has been over the past several years, though there are little enhancements here and there that make it easier for new users to deal with, especially where drive partitioning is concerned. The default partition scheme actually makes sense — only a root, swap, and home partition are created, with the majority of the drive’s space going to /home — and if you have Windows on the drive already, the NTFS or FAT partition is automatically resized for you. There’s no need to mess with boot loader configuration anymore, either — GRUB is used by default, and automatically adds existing operating systems to the boot menu. Lastly, the Internet connection test usually works; in previous releases, this function was broken.

Once you get to the KDE desktop, you’ll notice one major difference in SUSE Linux 10.1: a buggy, highly unstable ZENworks has replaced the traditional, mature YaST Online Update. I’ve been using SUSE Linux 10.1 constantly for more than a week, and certain package updates (dhcp, totem) consistently crash the update tool. Hopefully Novell will find a way to fix this soon, lest SUSE’s security be in jeopardy from a lack of ability to apply patches.

YaST is largely the same as it was in 10.0, even down to the Online Update settings remaining in place despite the fact that they are no longer used by default. SaX now sucks, though — you can’t change the video driver, and if it does not recognize your monitor properly, you can have a lot of trouble updating the video drivers or installing/configuring XGL and Compiz because SaX wants to revert to all of its own default settings every time it has to autodetect something.

NetworkManager is nice, but so was NetApplet — there isn’t much of a difference between the two in terms of the end-user experience. Under the hood, NetworkManager uses an entirely different network device control framework separate from ifconfig and iwconfig. The two different networking subsystems don’t play well with each other, so you have to either use the new system or go back to the old method. Most people shouldn’t have any trouble with NetworkManager, but if you have any custom network configuration scripts or if you have to compile your network drivers manually, you’ll run into problems.

I tried out XGL/Compiz, and only hosed the system twice. When you mess with the X.org and SaX configurations on a low level (as you must do with XGL) and KDE (with Compiz, which is meant for GNOME), you’re begging for trouble. The video problems that you can experience as a result of a failed configuration attempt include the inability to switch to a virtual terminal to fix things — you have to rely on a serial terminal or SSH login, or boot from the installation CD. I recommend staying away from XGL until there is a proper YaST module for configuring it.

Lastly, Novell has trashed the default GNOME theme so that it works from a single KDE-like menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Making it “normal” requires about ten minutes of configuration work.

Conclusions and developer recommendations

While SUSE Linux 10.1 has lost some ground on its wonderful predecessor, I can see where it is headed in the future — and I like what I’m envisioning. A mildly buggy release like 10.1 was necessary in the big picture, unless of course Novell had opted to wait until issues with Atheros drivers, the ZENworks updater, and XGL were resolved. That would have resulted in a “skipped” release, I think. Despite the trouble I had with 10.1, none of the problems were showstoppers, nor would they keep me from continuing to use and recommend SUSE Linux.

I hold SUSE to a higher standard than most other distributions because it has always been synonymous with high quality and ease of use. Even with the few troublesome spots that version 10.1 has, it is at very worst on par with distros like Fedora Core, Mandriva, and Ubuntu. At best, it’s still the same great SUSE Linux.

Boy do I ever have some suggestions for the SUSE developers:

• Don’t push it out the door. SUSE Linux 10.1 feels rushed, like the release engineers put the deadline ahead of product quality. It shows.
• Atheros drivers — WTF? I have never seen an operating system — especially a GNU/Linux distribution — actually lose hardware support from one release to another. It would have been better to wait until madwifi-ng and the SUSE kernel could play nicely with each other. The fact that Atheros drivers were added later does not make up for their absence on the installation media where people who rely on Atheros-based network cards need network support most.
• Stop castrating Xine. Why is SUSE the only desktop GNU/Linux distribution that cuts the DVD support out of Xine? There is a workaround for this problem, but SUSE users should not have to go through the hassle.
• SaX SuX. It’s either time to ditch SaX2, or make it more configurable (like it used to be). The world would be a better place if SaX2/iSaX did not overwrite the xorg.conf file every time the system starts. Sometimes you need to add custom hacks to this file. At the very least I would like to see a program that allows you to edit the device schemas that SaX uses when configuring newly detected hardware. If my monitor is not properly detected, I should be able to permanently teach SaX the correct settings.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Purpose	Desktop operating system
Manufacturer	Novell
Architectures	x86, AMD64/EM64T, PPC (PPC is not supported in the commercial edition)
License	GNU General Public License, although all of the packages on the non-free extras CD is proprietary
Market	Desktop users
Price (retail)	US $60 for the commercial edition, but you can download an evaluation DVD, live DVD, or the OSS edition for free
Previous version	SUSE Linux 10
Product Web site	Click here

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

SUSE Linux 10.1 only

If you’re not using SUSE Linux 10.1, don’t follow this article. There are separate guides for SUSE Linux 10, 10.2, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, and other operating systems. You can find them in the directory of how-to guides on Software in Review.

Why you need this guide

SUSE Linux 10.1 OSS — as the name implies — is comprised entirely of free, open source software. What you will be doing in this tutorial (with the exception of configuring XGL and Compiz) is installing proprietary add-ons that add functionality. All of the browser plugins are proprietary and will require you to agree to restrictive software licenses. The DVD playback capabilities are in violation of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (and similar laws in other countries), which many believe to be unconstitutional and a violation of consumer fair use rights (Click here for more information on DMCA reform). In other words, installing the DVD decoding software could be illegal where you live; therefore I’m not telling you to do it, but I’ll tell you how it’s done — for educational and informational purposes only, of course.

Furthermore, if you morally or ethically disagree with proprietary software and refuse to use it, this guide will be meaningless to you.

If you need a more thorough guide that covers installation and system-wide configuration, I’ve written one for Sam’s Publishing (a Prentice Hall imprint) entitled SUSE Linux 10.1 Kick Start (ISBN: 0768668263). It will be available as an electronic download for $7.99, starting on August 24.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you have already installed SUSE Linux OSS 10.1, and are now seeking to add support for Java, Macromedia Flash, Adobe Acrobat, Windows Media, RealPlayer, ATI or Nvidia graphics cards, XGL/Compiz interface enhancements, and commercial DVD movies. Feel free to ignore the portions of the guide that do not apply to your situation, but don’t skip over the parts that show you how to add sources to YaST, or the required packages section.

Furthermore, this guide assumes you are using the default desktop environment, KDE. If you’re using GNOME or a window manager, you’re on your own as far as getting to the YaST utility and any other KDE-specific instructions listed below. In general, however, the majority of the information in this guide is environment-agnostic.

Lastly, Hacking SUSE Linux 10.1 applies only to the x86 and AMD64/EM64T processor architectures. It does not cover the PowerPC architecture. If someone who has a PPC machine is willing to contribute a section specific to PPC, please email me at jem at thejemreport.com.

Adding sources to YaST

The first order of business is to prepare SUSE to install software from alternate sources. In addition to making this guide easier to follow in the long-run, it also eliminates the need for your physical installation media (CDs or DVD).

Go into the YaST utility by clicking on the round green main menu icon in the lower left corner of your screen. Select System, then click on YaST (Control Center). You’ll be prompted for your root password. Go ahead and type it in and press the Enter key.

You’re now in YaST, and the Software category is already selected by default. Click on the Installation Source icon. This will bring up a window that will allow you to add software repositories so that you can download add-on software. You’ll notice that your CD or DVD installation media is already listed. Go ahead and disable it by clicking the Enable Or Disable button — you’re going to add an Internet address that will replace your discs, meaning that all future packages will come from the Internet instead of your SUSE discs. If you need to, you can just as easily enable the CD/DVD source later.

Click the Add button, then click on HTTP in the popup menu. Add the following Internet address to the Server Name field and then click on OK:

packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.1 (or select a mirror from this list if this address doesn’t work for you)

You may get two errors for this source — ignore them both for right now. Repeat this process and add the following servers to your installation sources:

• mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source/
• mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/non-oss-inst-source/

The servers may take a few minutes to properly register with your system — be patient. If you need Atheros wireless drivers and currently have a wired Internet connection, add this source as well:

madwifi.org/suse/

Without adding the preceding sources, it will not be possible to follow the rest of these steps. Also make sure you set them to refresh — click the Refresh On or Off button to toggle the status of the new sources you just added. You can now close the Installation Source window by clicking Finish in the lower right.

Required packages

Most of the steps below demand that the following packages be installed:

• gcc
• make
• kernel-source
• kernel-syms
• kdeadmin3
• compat-expat1
• expat

Check the YaST Software Manager to see if they are installed. If they are not, install them and continue with these directions when you are finished.

Atheros wireless network drivers

The original release of SUSE Linux OSS 10.1 did not contain drivers for Atheros-based wireless network cards. There are now packages available, however. Go to the Software Manager in YaST, then search for this term: madwifi

In the right pane, most people will need to select these two packages:

• madwifi
• madwifi-kmp-default

If you have a multi-CPU, Hyper-Threaded, or dual-core system, select the madwifi-kmp-smp package instead of madwifi-kmp-default. If you’re using Xen and need to have Atheros support in your virtual machines, select the Xen-related madwifi drivers. After you have installed these packages, you can load the ath_pci module by hand, or just restart the computer to activate your wireless network.

ATI video drivers

SUSE Linux 10.1 ships with the newly revamped open source radeon driver. That may be fine for 2D rendering, but it doesn’t do direct rendering for 3D graphics. To get hardware 3D acceleration (and for XGL support), you still need the proprietary ATI fglrx driver.

Go to the ATI Web site, click on Drivers & Software, then Linux Display Drivers and Software, then on the driver appropriate to your video card. 32-bit SUSE installations need the x86 drivers, and 64-bit SUSE needs the x86_64 versions. After you have clicked the link for your card, yet another link comes up. Click it, scroll down to the downloads table, then right-click the ATI Driver Installer download link and save it to your home directory. You do not need to download any of the other packages.

After the file transfer completes, close all open programs, then press ctrl-alt-F1 to switch to the first virtual terminal. You’ll see a text-mode login prompt; log in as root. When you’re at the command prompt, type in this command:

init 3

You’ll see a bunch of text scroll by, and then a message saying that runlevel 3 has been reached. Press Enter to get the command prompt back, then type the following command in to switch to the directory you downloaded the ATI driver to:

cd /home/username/

Substitute your user name for “username” in the above example. Now you need to change the ATI installer permissions so that it can be run from the command line.

For long file names, you don’t have to type the whole name into a terminal window. Instead, just type the first few letters and then press the Tab key, and the file name will be automatically completed for you. This is useful in situations like the one you’re in now, where there is a long and complex file name to type in. So type the following command into your terminal, and use the Tab key to complete the ATI driver file name, then press Enter to execute the command:

chmod +x ./ati-driver

That will make the program executable; this must be done before you can run it. Now it’s time to run the installer. Again, use tab completion instead of typing the name in. You have to add the ./ before the filename to tell the terminal program that the file you are referring to is in the current directory. If you don’t specify that, the terminal will look in other places for the file. It sounds crazy, yes, but that’s the way GNU/Linux is (and Unix before it). For the below example, the entire file name is typed in. Please note that this may not be the same file name that you downloaded — it is only an example. You should use tab completion when you type this command in so that you don’t accidentally mis-type the long file name. The part of the example that will not change is the switch statement after the file name (the part with the dashes). Here’s the example command for the ATI driver installer for a 32-bit system:

./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-x86.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE101-IA32

And for a 64-bit system:

./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-x86_64.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE101-AMD64

After a few dozen lines of text, a driver package will be created. Go ahead and run it with the following command (the first example is for 32-bit systems):

rpm -ivh fglrx_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.24.8-1.i386.rpm

And for 64-bit systems:

rpm -ivh fglrx64_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.24.8-1.x86_64.rpm

Update your system environment variables with this command:

ldconfig

Next, you need to tell SUSE that you want to use this driver instead of the standard one:

aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Lastly, you have to tell YaST which driver to load (that’s a zero in the example, not a letter):

sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx

Now reboot your computer by typing the following command:

reboot

The next time your system starts, you’ll have hardware 3D video acceleration. Please note that every time you update your kernel, you must re-install the ATI video driver.

Nvidia video drivers

SUSE Linux 10.1 no longer includes the proprietary Nvidia graphics driver, but Nvidia does provide a SUSE installation source for YaST. Add this to your Installation Sources screen in YaST as instructed above:

download.nvidia.com/novell/sle10sp1

Once it’s been added, close YaST and right-click the ZENworks notification icon in the lower right corner of your screen. Click Refresh in the popup menu, then wait for ZENworks to check for updates — it could be several minutes. ZENworks should find the Nvidia kernel pacakge and notify you that updates are available. Left-click on the ZENworks icon when it turns into an orange circle, make sure all of the available packages are selected, then go ahead and apply the updates. When ZENworks is done, restart your computer. When next you log into SUSE Linux, you should have hardware 3D acceleration enabled. To check, run this program from a terminal program (the computer screen icon in the lower left, between the house icon and the life preserver):

glxinfo

Dozens of lines of text should result from this command. Look near the top for the Direct Rendering line. If it says Yes, you’re all set. If it says no, make sure ZENworks isn’t still listing the Nvidia packages as updates. If it is, try this process again or visit our forum and ask for help.

Java support

To add support for the Java language both for standalone applications and as a browser plugin for Web applets, go into YaST, then select Package Management. In the Search box, type in sun and click Search. A bunch of packages will show up in the right-hand pane. Click the checkbox next to the following packages:

• java-1_5_0-sun
• java-1_5_0-sun-alsa
• java-1_5_0-sun-devel
• java-1_5_0-sun-plugin

Note to 64-bit users: The Java 1.5.0 packages in the AMD64/EM64T edition of SUSE Linux 10.1 are 64-bit, whereas the Java 1.4.2 packages are 32-bit. Since the Firefox package is 32-bit, you will have to install version 1.4.2 if you want to be able to use Java applets. Firefox will use 1.4.2 if you have both versions installed, so you can install both Java 1.4.2 and 1.5.0, though outside of Firefox I’m not sure what effect that will have on Java-aware programs.

There is no harm in selecting all of the java-1_5_0-sun packages (you’ll notice that there are a few more that weren’t selected), but they are not necessary for running Java programs. If you’re a Java programmer you may want at least some of the other packages. When you’re done selecting them, click on Accept. When it’s done installing, click on Finish in the popup window to go back to YaST. Your computer will now be able to run Java programs and applets.

Flash, Acrobat, Windows Media, MP3, and RealMedia support

Go back into the YaST software manager. In the Search box, type in w32codec-all and click on Search. A single package should appear in the right-hand pane. Click the checkbox next to it if it is not already installed. Some people may see a lock icon there instead; this means that the package is already installed.

Erase your previous search term in the Search box, type in acroread and click on Search. Click the checkbox next to the acroread package in the right-hand pane.

Now search for flash and click Search. Select that package for installation by clicking its checkbox and agreeing to its license.

Search for realplayer and click Search. Click its checkbox. You only need the RealPlayer package itself — the other search results are not necessary.

Search for mplayer and click Search. Click the checkbox next to mplayerplug-in. You can also install the other package — MPlayer — if you want to, but you’ve already got a number of video players on your computer.

When you’ve done all of this, click on Accept. Other packages will be dependent on some of these, so you may have to click Continue in the Automatic Changes screen that comes up. After that, all of the packages you just selected will be installed and your Firefox Web browser will have all of the plugins it needs. You’ll also have the ability to play MP3 music files. A popup window will appear when it’s done — just click on Finish and you’ll be brought back to YaST.

DVD playback on 32-bit machines

You must add the sources listed above and then perform a software update via the ZENworks update tool (from the K menu, go to System, then Configuration, then Update Software). This will replace your Xine libraries with DVD-capable versions from Packman. If you had any errors in installing the Packman repository, ZENworks may not properly recognize it as a source. If this is the case, go to YaST, then Software Manager, then search for xine. Right-click all of the packages that have a blue-colored font, and mark them for update, then click Accept. There will probably be a few other required packages that YaST will want to add — go ahead and accept them, too. This is essentially the same service that ZENworks is supposed to do automatically for you.

After you’ve installed all software updates, go to the K menu (the green chameleon icon in the lower left corner), then select Internet, then Web Browser, then click on Web Browser (Konqueror). When Konqueror opens, copy and paste in this address if you are using 32-bit SUSE Linux:

http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.9/rpm/libdvdcss2-1.2.9-1.i386.rpm

Or just click here if you want a link. Konqueror will ask you what you want to do with the file. Click the Open With button, and in the ensuing popup window, click on System, then Configuration, then KPackage (if you do not have KPackage installed, bookmark the DeCSS RPM, then go back to the YaST software manager and install the kdeadmin3 package, then restart this process). The KPackage program will read the DVD decoding package from the Web. Click on the Install button at the bottom of the KPackage window, then click on Install in the next window too. You will be asked for your root password; type it in and press Enter. Shortly thereafter, the DVD decoding library will be installed. Click on the Done button, then close KPackage and Konqueror.

You now have the ability to play commercial DVD movies on your computer — put one in and try it, if it’s legal where you are. A popup message should appear when you put in a DVD movie. If it asks you if you want to play the movie with Kaffeine, click on Yes and you’ll go straight to the video player. In some instances the disc may be recognized as a data disc, and SUSE will ask you if you want to open the DVD with K3b. In that case, click on Ignore, then go to the K menu, select Multimedia, then Video Player, then click on Media Player (Kaffeine). When Kaffeine starts, click on the Open DVD icon.

DVD playback on 64-bit machines

You must add the sources listed above and then perform a software update via the ZENworks update tool (from the K menu, go to System, then Configuration, then Update Software). This will replace your Xine libraries with DVD-capable versions from Packman. If you had any errors in installing the Packman repository, ZENworks may not properly recognize it as a source. If this is the case, go to YaST, then Software Manager, then search for xine. Right-click all of the packages that have a blue-colored font, and mark them for update, then click Accept. There will probably be a few other required packages that YaST will want to add — go ahead and accept them, too. This is essentially the same service that ZENworks is supposed to do automatically for you.

After you’ve installed all software updates, go to your K menu, then select Internet, then Web Browser, then click on Firefox. When it opens, copy and paste in this address if you are using 64-bit SUSE Linux (there is currently no 64-bit binary RPM):

http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.9/libdvdcss-1.2.9.tar.gz

Select the Save As option, then click on the Home icon in the left pane and save it there. The file isn’t very big, so it should download almost immediately. You can close the Web browser now, and open a terminal by clicking the monitor icon in the lower left corner of your screen (it’s between the house icon and the life preserver). Now use this command to switch to root permissions:

su

It’ll ask for your root password — go ahead and type it in, then press Enter. Now you need to decompress the file you just downloaded. Type this in:

gzip -d libdvdcss-1.2.9.tar.gz

Then unpack it from its archive by using this command:

tar xvf libdvdcss-1.2.9.tar

The file will un-tar to its own directory, so you can now safely delete the tar archive:

rm libdvdcss-1.2.9.tar

Now you need to compile the DVD decoding library. Change to the directory first:

cd libdvdcss-1.2.9

And then run the configure program with this command (don’t leave out the dot and slash):

./configure

When it’s done configuring, run the make command to build the files:

make

Finally, it’s time to install the library:

make install

You now have DVD playback support. It won’t work until your library path is updated. There are a variety of ways to do that, but the easiest is just to restart your computer.

Now let’s test it out. Put a movie disc into your DVD drive and wait for SUSE to recognize it. A popup window will ask you what you’d like to open the disc with; select Kaffeine and click OK. Since this is the first time you’ve started Kaffeine, an installation check will come up — just click Next. After that, you’ll be asked if you would like to set Kaffeine as your default player for a variety of formats, and if you’d like to create a desktop icon. Do whatever you want to with these options — they are immaterial to DVD playback. When Kaffeine finally opens, your DVD should go to the root menu or, if there is no menu, start playing the first chapter.

Some DVDs and DVD players are finicky, and might not automatically start playing a movie disc. If you put a DVD into your drive and it doesn’t bring up the Kaffeine player, open your K menu, select Multimedia, then Video Player, then click on Kaffeine (Media Player). When Kaffeine starts, click on the Play DVD icon.

Using XGL/Compiz

The reason why I’m putting this section last in the article is because it needs to be done after your video drivers are installed. It’s also the section that is least likely to work for you (and most likely to destroy your nice, new SUSE Linux 10.1 installation) because the video card support is so slim and the code is so immature. If you have an Nvidia card of the GeForce 4 TI-4200 era or newer or an ATI card of the Radeon X300 era or newer, and if the drivers installed without a hitch, XGL will probably work on your system. There are three very negative possibilities by following the directions below: anything that uses the SDL library for 3D rendering will look transparent and will generally be unusable. Secondly, your 3D frame rate can drop significantly (on one test system, I saw glxgears go from 16000 to 12000 after enabling XGL), and lastly, you can totally hose your X.org environment. If the worst should happen, you can usually log in through SSH on another computer and change your xorg.conf and displaymanager configuration files back to the way they were (or use SaX); sometimes this will un-hose a system. Proceed at your own risk. All things considered, XGL is a bunch of useless, distracting GUI tricks that will sap your 3D rendering performance, and I can almost guarantee that you will get sick of this XGL crap after you have impressed all of your friends with it and come to the sober realization that wobbly windows, faded window controls, and the raindrop effect serve no meaningful purpose to desktop computing. So if you don’t have a compliant video card, console yourself with the fact that XGL isn’t all that wonderful anyway.

Before you begin, make sure you have a compatible video card. You’ll need one of the following: an ATI Mobility 9700 SE or better; an ATI X300 or better; or an Nvidia GeForce 4 TI-4200 or better. The best-case scenario is an Nvidia GeForce 6000 or 7000 series card; ATI cards prior to the X300 (but after the 8500) may or may not work depending on many factors. If you don’t meet these requirements, do not mess with XGL right now — wait for it to improve compatibility with a wider array of graphics chips.

Last warning: I had a lot of trouble with ATI graphics cards and XGL in SUSE 10.1. Specifically, SaX kept forgetting my monitor settings which meant that X failed to start, which would force me to re-configure with SaX, which in turn would erase the ATI-specific xorg.conf hacks, which would cause more problems. So after a lot of work I could get XGL and Compiz to start for a single X session, but I never did find a good way to make SaX stop screwing up my configuration files. Testing went very well with an Nvidia card, but I lost a lot of 3D performance with XGL.

Start by installing XGL and Compiz. Here are the specific SUSE packages that must be added:

• xgl
• compiz
• libsvg
• libsvg-cairo

If XGL was installed before you added your Nvidia or ATI video driver, you must remove and reinstall XGL. If any of the other packages were already installed, leave them alone. When you’re done installing everything, open a Konsole or GNOME Terminal, use the su command to switch to root, then edit the /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager file. On line 126 you should see an entry like this:

DISPLAYMANAGER_XSERVER="Xorg"

Comment that line out by putting a # in front of it, then duplicate it, using Xgl instead of Xorg:

#DISPLAYMANAGER_XSERVER="Xorg"
DISPLAYMANAGER_XSERVER="Xgl"

Then save and exit the editor. While still in the root terminal, run this command:

SuSEconfig --module xdm

Attention ATI users: You must add these lines to the video card Device line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option "KernelModuleParm" "agplock=0"
Option "EnablePrivateBackZ" "yes"

Close all open programs and press ctrl-alt-backspace to restart the X server. The next time you log in, XGL will be enabled. To try it out, run these two stacked commands from a terminal window:

compiz --replace gconf decoration wobbly fade minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place switcher water && gnome-window-decorator &

Compiz will replace your current window manager and use a GNOME-like window decoration. This is necessary to get the full effect of XGL/Compiz. Now play around and experience some of the XGL tricks for yourself.

If you’re sold on XGL and want Compiz to start by default in KDE, create a file called compiz.desktop in the ~/.kde/Autostart/ directory and add these lines to it:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=compiz --replace decoration wobbly fade minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place switcher water & gnome-window-decorator &
GenericName[en_US]=
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-autostart-after=kdesktop

You can configure XGL/Compiz options through the GNOME Control Center, in the Desktop Effects Settings section. To start this program from KDE, open up a Konsole window and type this:

gnome-control-center

For more information about XGL/Compiz config options, see /usr/share/doc/packages/xgl/README.suse.

Welcome to your dream desktop OS

And that’s all you need to do to make SUSE Linux into a super-powered desktop operating environment. Aside from running Windows and OS X binaries, SUSE Linux 10.1 can do everything that proprietary operating systems can and more. If you have trouble with the directions in this guide, or if you run into problems that aren’t covered here, click the link below to visit The Jem Report’s discussion forum — we’ll do our best to help you. Please note that you are not entitled to support through this forum; it is offered purely as a gesture of goodwill.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

FreeBSD overview

This section is for people who are new to FreeBSD. If you’re already familiar with it, you may want to skip down to the next section.

Originally developed from the Unix-based Berkeley Software Distribution, FreeBSD is among the oldest extant Unix derivatives. It is currently maintained and improved by a large team of programmers, and supported monetarily by individual and corporate donors.

From FreeBSD you can generally expect a modern, Unix-like operating system, heavily armed with network services and tools. It is relatively easy to install, configure, and administer FreeBSD on servers or desktop machines. FreeBSD is scalable up to at least 12 CPUs (this is as many parallel CPUs as it has been officially tested with), which includes SMP support for Hyper-Threading and multiple cores.

Aside from the programs included in the base system, FreeBSD offers extra software via pre-compiled binary packages; and a Ports system, which functions much like a less automatic version of Gentoo’s Portage software management framework. From Ports you can automatically download, compile, and install more than 13,000 programs. There are few applications in the free software canon that are not available in the FreeBSD Ports tree. There is also an available Linux binary compatibility layer which is efficient enough to say that there is no noticeable performance difference between Linux binaries and FreeBSD binaries running on the same system.

A common misconception about FreeBSD is that Apple OS X is based on it. While some of the FreeBSD userland programs are used in Darwin (which is the operating system that forms the basis for OS X), the OS X kernel is based on Mach, not FreeBSD, so OS X is not “based on” or “developed from” FreeBSD in the traditional sense (such as the way OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD in 1995).

The majority of the FreeBSD base system is licensed under the free software BSD license, although some included programs are governed by the GNU GPL and similar free software licenses.

What’s new in 6.1

Perhaps the FreeBSD team took a page from the OpenBSD playbook, and chose to make a lot of small modifications for 6.1-RELEASE. That’s in stark contrast to many of the preceding releases, which introduced revolutionary code changes that, while great on paper, ended up causing more trouble than they were worth.

A complete list of changes since 6.0 can be found in the release notes for AMD64 and i386, but the highlights are:

• Improved keyboard support
• Improved sound drivers
• A number of base system components have been made multi-processor safe
• IPv6 support in ipfw
• Various network driver bug fixes and enhancements
• Improved package tools, including Portsnap
• A firmware subsystem that allows loading binary blobs into the kernel

Putting it to the test

FreeBSD 6.0 was a positive note in what had been a negative trend with the buggy and unstable FreeBSD-5 series. I used to rely on FreeBSD as my desktop operating system a few years ago, but had to switch to GNU/Linux when my system became too unstable to use.

FreeBSD 6.1 is best described as a refinement of 6.0, but it’s nowhere near perfect yet. The good news is, the AMD64 version of FreeBSD 6.1 is better than ever, though the credit for this success is half due to many third-party software packages in the Ports tree that are now fully 64-bit clean.

Despite all of the improvements in the network drivers, I had a little trouble with the Nvidia nve driver — I got intermittent device timeouts in the AMD64 edition of FreeBSD. It’s possible the problem also occurs in the i386 version, but I didn’t see it happen there, and the error was rare to begin with.

I also ran into keyboard problems during installation. The installer either locked up or killed the keyboard connection the first two times I ran it; the third time through I had garbled keyboard output; and I never did get the mouse working. The devices in question were part of the Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 6000, which is a fairly new peripheral package. Still, there were no problems with these devices in OpenBSD 3.9 or Gentoo Linux. Part (or all) of the mouse problem was that moused would not recognize the uhid0 device node as the USB mouse.

The good news is, the major stability problems seem to be gone for good — 6.0 was not a fluke. The package problems that I had with the 6.0 installation CDs (asking you to switch discs dozens of times) also seems to have also been fixed in 6.1.

This is the first time I’ve used Portsnap for updating my Ports tree. Usually I do it the old fashioned way, via cvsup. Although it would really take a few weeks of daily updates to properly test a framework like this, I found it to work as advertised during my test period. Portsnap requires a lot of initialization — you have to download a snapshot, then rebuild the Ports tree before you can do anything with it. Portsnap kind of reminded me of Gentoo’s Portage system, although a bit more primitive. Anyone who is already familiar with cvsup, portupgrade, and the Ports tree won’t find anything new and wonderful about Portsnap, but newcomers will probably find this to be a much simpler way to update their installed programs.

Conclusions and developer recommendations

Overall I found FreeBSD 6.1 to be another step in the right direction, and I think it’s encouraging that there weren’t any revolutionary base system changes in this release. Sometimes big changes are unavoidable, but historically the FreeBSD team has bungled such leaps as the switch to the ULE scheduler, the introduction of SMP, and the liberation of the base system from the big giant lock. Sometimes you have to stop and make sure that what you presently have is working properly, and it looks like now is that time for FreeBSD. I applaud their efforts with 6.1 and look forward to testing 6.2. In fact, I may even try to switch my workstation back to FreeBSD in light of its newfound stability and networking enhancements.

Here’s what I’d like to see in FreeBSD in the future:

• More refactoring. It looks like the FreeBSD team is on the right track, but it’s worth reiterating the fact that the best progress happens in small steps. In every single FreeBSD release I have used back to 5.0, I’ve found at least one indication (and often many) in the form of error messages and crashes that something isn’t working right. That shouldn’t happen.
• Installation of default config files. After installation, FreeBSD is left with no real make.conf or rc.conf, although there are example files in /usr/share/examples. Every time I install FreeBSD, I find myself copying over these files (and cvsup supfiles) to /etc and customizing them myself. I don’t see why the examples can’t be installed into /etc by default.
• AMD64 Java binaries. FreeBSD now has a license to distribute JDK and JRE binaries from Sun, but only on the i386 architecture. A 64-bit version would be nice.
• Better organization of the Ports tree. Although I think that the Ports tree in general could do with a standard naming convention for categories and programs, a bigger complaint of mine is that every non-English language has to have its own directory. I’d like it if everything in /usr/ports could comfortably display on one screen after an ls command. If all of the foreign language ports were moved to a single directory (or a metadirectory to house the current dirs), that would free up a lot of screen space, which makes finding categories and programs much easier. I also think that the science directory could include the biology and astro categories; and I strongly question the need for an “x11-clocks” software category.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Purpose	Operating system
Manufacturer	The FreeBSD project
Architectures	x86, AMD64/EM64T, SPARC64, PC98, Alpha, PPC, IA64
License	BSD, although some parts of the base system are under the GPL or other free software licenses
Market	Web, email, and other network services servers; also useful as a desktop OS
Price (retail)	Free to download, or $35 for a CD set
Previous version	FreeBSD 6.0
Product website	Click here

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

WordPerfect Office overview

This section is for readers who are new to WordPerfect Office. If you’re already familiar with this software suite, you’ll probably want to skip down to the next section to see what’s new in this release.

Corel WordPerfect Office is built around some of the industry’s oldest and most feature-packed software. The WordPerfect word processing program predates Microsoft Word, and was the premiere DOS word processor before graphical interfaces (ala Windows) were the standard. Quattro Pro has also long been recognized as a hard-hitting spreadsheet program. Newer additions to the suite include the PowerPoint-like Presentations program, the Presentations Graphics drawing program, and the Mail personal information manager.

All of the WP Office suite programs are compatible with their Microsoft counterparts, and use Microsoft file formats interchangeably.

WordPerfect Office is often used in law offices and courtrooms, many of which are standardized on the WordPerfect file format. The reasons for this are WP’s excellent legal document tools and its ability to integrate with other external legal software — features that competing office products do not have.

The differences between WP Office editions

There are now four distinct editions of WordPerfect Office: Home Edition, Standard Edition, Student and Teacher Edition, and Professional Edition. The differences in functionality among these versions can vary from minor to major.

The first major difference among the four is price: Home Edition is U.S. $100; Standard Edition is $300; Student and Teacher Edition is $100 (with proper academic credentials); and Professional Edition is $400. Upgrade editions of the Standard and Professional Editions are, as usual, somewhat less expensive. Though Corel advertises WordPerfect Office as being substantially cheaper than Microsoft Office, as you can see, that point of view greatly depends on which versions of WP Office and MS Office are being compared.

The other major difference among the versions of WP Office X3 is the included software. Standard Edition includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Presentations, Presentations Graphics, Mail, Pocket Oxford Dictionary, Legal tools, and the OfficeReady template organizer.

Professional Edition includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Presentations, Presentations Graphics, Pocket Oxford Dictionary, Legal tools, OfficeReady, the Paradox relational database program, a software development kit for WP Office, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, and various articles of documentation that are specific to software development for the WP Office X3 platform. Note that Professional Edition — for whatever strange reason — does not include WordPerfect Mail.

Student and Teacher Edition is licensed only for non-commercial use, and includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Presentations, Presentations Graphics, Paradox, Pocket Oxford Dictionary, and OfficeReady.

Home Edition is the most watered-down of the bunch, including WordPerfect Home Edition, Quattro Pro Home Edition, and OfficeReady. Also bundled with Home Edition are Corel Photo Album 6 Standard, Pinnacle Studio SE, Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD LE 8, and Norton Internet Security 2006. You might notice that all of this software has reduced functionality — you’re getting the bare bones versions of these programs.

WordPerfect Home Edition (the program, not the suite) is missing the following compared to the Standard Edition:

• Open and edit PDF files
• Save without metadata
• WordPerfect file format conversion utility
• Document collaboration and review tools
• Legal tools
• XML creation functionality
• Visual Basic tools
• Pocket Oxford Dictionary
• Signatures
• No WP 5.1 or Legal compatibility modes

And Quattro Pro Home Edition is missing:

• Lotus 123 compatibility mode
• Insert external data
• Visual Basic tools
• Publish to XML
• CrossTab reports

The rest of this review will concentrate on WordPerfect Office X3 Standard Edition.

What’s new in X3

Office suites don’t change much from release to release anymore, but WP Office X3 does offer something that previous editions did not have: a good personal information manager (PIM) and email client. A few releases ago, Corel Central was WordPerfect’s somewhat substandard email client. It was dropped as of WordPerfect Office 12, when Corel conceded the email/PIM battle to Microsoft. Instead of offering its own email client, WP Office 12 concentrated on better integration with Microsoft Outlook. Those enhancements have not been eliminated in favor of the new WordPerfect Mail program, but WordPerfect Office X3 users are likely to get more from Mail than from Outlook because of Outlook’s dependence on Microsoft Word for enhanced email functionality.

The new WordPerfect Mail

Quattro Pro and Presentations now have the ability to export to PDF, and all of the WP Office X3 programs have a somewhat better looking user interface.

Other than that, there are no significant new features in WP Office X3 — only slight, often invisible enhancements and updates to version 12.

WordPerfect Mail

WP Mail is a Microsoft Outlook workalike; it has almost all of the same functionality as Outlook, except it’s designed to be integrated with WordPerfect Office instead of Microsoft Office. As you can see from the screen shot, the interface is familiar and intuitive. The only thing that really bothers me about Mail is its inability to do inline spell checking. I want to know that typos and misspellings happen when I make them, and I don’t want to deal with a popup window at the end of the email showing me the unrecognized words out of context.

Yahoo’s new word processor?

Overall, WordPerfect Mail is a decent email/PIM application, but I don’t think it will change your mind if you’re happy with Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, or Novell Evolution.

WordPerfect X3

WP Office X3’s flagship component was already as good as it could get without becoming multi-platform. When it’s as good as it can get, what do you add? A Yahoo search box, apparently. I was surprised and disappointed to see that Corel had incorporated a Yahoo Web search box into the previously clean WordPerfect interface. Congratulations, WordPerfect users, you’re now paying big bucks for a word processor that has an advertisement for Yahoo in it, and Corel will be making extra money off of your in-program Yahoo searches. WordPerfect has officially jumped the shark — assuming it hadn’t before now. I guess when you’re at the top, the only direction left to go is down.

One good point about WordPerfect X3 is its ability to open and edit PDF files. Don’t expect any miracles, though — this function is only good for extracting text and pictures from a PDF. You wouldn’t want to publish or edit an imported PDF because of the large number of formatting errors that occur during the translation.

Quattro Pro X3

The only other feature enhancement of note is the ability to save a document without its metadata. Hidden metadata in Microsoft Word documents has been the subject of a few embarrassing corporate scandals over the past few years. It’s nice that WordPerfect has the ability to remove such data, but it kind of makes you question why this kind of information is there in the first place.

Quattro Pro X3

Some minor changes were made to the CrossTab Reports function and the charting tools. You can now maintain connections with ODBC databases through CrossTab, and there is better rendering functionality for charting.

Presentations X3

Presentations and Presentations Graphics haven’t changed much, either. Basically, Presentations now has anti-aliasing for fonts and graphics, and a template browser called Master Gallery. Presentations Graphics is now a separate application with more vector drawing and shape tools.

Extras and add-ons

Presentations X3

The Oxford Concise Dictionary is available as an add-on to WordPerfect for U.S. $20. This is nothing new — it’s been around since at least version 10. This is not a product; it’s an “unlock key,” which allows you to access the full functionality of the software that you’ve already purchased. The Oxford Concise Dictionary adds in-program dictionary lookup functionality to WordPerfect, so if you need to look up a word, just right-click it and then click on Dictionary in the popup dialogue to see its definition. You can also search the dictionary if you like. No other word processor has this kind of in-program functionality, and to professional writers or students, it’s worth the money.

During installation, Corel pushes you to install the Yahoo toolbar for Internet Explorer — more of the same in-bed-with-Yahoo crap that nobody who buys a commercial office suite wants to see. This isn’t so much an “extra” as it is a mild form of spyware, monitoring what Web sites you go to so that Yahoo can “better serve you” by selling marketing data.

Conclusions

If you’re currently using (and happy with) WordPerfect Office 10, 11, or 12, there is no good reason to upgrade to X3. All of the features necessary for most “office” work were present in these versions, and there aren’t any significant advantages to upgrading. I think the real point of WP Office X3 is to appeal to people buying new office suites, or those upgrading from ancient versions of MS Office. And — believe it or not — there are still a significant number of people who are using prehistoric versions of WordPerfect for DOS as well.

Presentations Graphics X3

I get the distinct feeling that there were two reasons for Corel to come out with this new release: first of all, to release before Microsoft Office’s next version. Secondly, to remind people that Corel still sells an office suite and that it is modern and up-to-date. The kind of “enhancements” found in WordPerfect Office X3 are the kind of standard updates and bug fixes that you used to get for free in service packs. I guess now we have to shell out for every release rather than rely on Corel to support older yet fully capable versions of the same software.

What is the future of WordPerfect Office? Are we going to be buried under a growing pile of new versions that offer trivial updates? I think the outlook is bleak for WordPerfect Office, particularly when considering the growing GNU/Linux and Apple markets, and the competition posed by cheaper alternatives such as OpenOffice.org.

That’s not to take away from the competency of WordPerfect Office X3. It’s a more-than-capable office suite and it includes what I believe to be the world’s most powerful word processor. Having said that, I think the Yahoo “partnership” in WP Office X3 portends the beginning of the end for this once-great desktop software suite.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Purpose	Office suite
Manufacturer	Corel
Platforms	32-bit Windows 98SE, 2000, XP, and 2003
License	Proprietary, restrictive in all the usual ways
Market	Law offices, current WordPerfect users
Price (retail)	U.S. $270 for the Standard Edition (click here to buy it from Amazon.com)
Previous version	WordPerfect Office 12
Product Web site	Click here

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

OpenBSD overview

This section is for people new to OpenBSD. If you’re already
familiar with it, you may want to skip down to the next section on the
improvements in 3.9.

The BSDs in general have a common reputation for high code quality and poor
hardware support. In OpenBSD’s case, the code is definitely high quality.
Nothing in the default installation is half-implemented, or committed on an
experimental basis. If full functionality is not yet possible for hardware
drivers, basic functionality is achieved and thoroughly tested; this forms the
basis for further driver development. Everything you get in the release is
production-ready, secure by default (meaning the administrator does not have to
lock down the system — it is already locked down, and services must be
individually enabled), and comes with possibly the finest integrated
documentation in the Unix-clone world. While you might find a poorly
programmed driver or other base system component in other BSDs and GNU/Linux
distributions, in OpenBSD if something is supported, it works. Like all
operating systems, however — yes, even Windows — not everything is
supported.

Hardware support is a sensitive area for the OpenBSD developers. Since they
won’t allow any proprietary code in the base system, and since manufacturers
are reluctant to dedicate resources to writing official OpenBSD drivers, the
development team is notorious for creating their own drivers through
reverse-engineering. As a result, OpenBSD’s RAID and wireless network card
support is exceptional — better than Linux’s in some ways. It also has
surprisingly good ACPI support, particularly on laptop computers. In fact,
because of the good, documented wireless and ACPI support, OpenBSD makes a fine
laptop operating system. The only significant obstacle for desktop users is the
lack of hardware 3D acceleration for video cards.

OpenBSD is among the most secure x86/AMD64 operating systems in the world.
Cryptography is integrated into nearly every part of the operating system;
libraries are loaded in a random fashion; and program and daemon privileges can
easily be isolated from the rest of the system via chroot, and privilege
separation and revocation.

A complete OpenBSD installation from the commercial CD set can be completed
in about five minutes. Extra programs can be added through an APT-like package
tool that has access to thousands of precompiled packages, or custom compiled
through the Ports system. OpenBSD even has binary emulation layers for FreeBSD,
Linux, Unix SVR4, SCO/ISC, and BSD/OS programs, so if there is no native
OpenBSD port of your favorite *NIX application, you can probably still use it.

Each OpenBSD release has a graphical theme and a song that goes with it. The
theme reflects a major concern that the OpenBSD programmers are addressing or
bringing to light.

For more information on OpenBSD, you can visit href="http://www.openbsd.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">the
project Web site, or this article on
using OpenBSD.

New in 3.9

OpenBSD advances slowly; each release represents a large collection of small
changes. If you want a complete list of changes since 3.8, href="http://www.openbsd.com/plus39.html" target="_blank"
rel="nofollow">visit the 3.9 changelog. Below are the
highlights:

• Better Apple PPC support
• Improved x86/AMD64 hardware support, especially network adapters and drive controllers (standard fare for OpenBSD releases)
• Upgrade support in the package tools
• Revamped wireless networking framework
• Support for hardware sensors

OpenBSD 3.9’s theme revolves around “the blob,” referring to proprietary
hardware drivers that rely on a large binary file to achieve full
functionality. these “binary blobs” are often poorly programmed and are
incomplete, support few devices or configurations, and have bugs that the
operating system’s programmers can’t fix because they don’t have access to the
source code. Blobs cannot be fixed by anyone other than the device
manufacturer, and if they have security holes, the operating system developers
can’t patch it. Binary blobs also present a licensing threat because the
proprietary agreements that govern them put heavy restrictions on
redistribution. Some operating system projects or companies will work out
distribution agreements, but rarely are such deals made for free, and they
generally restrict the user’s freedom to redistribute the software on their
own. Understandably, projects like OpenBSD and GNU find situations like that to
be inconvenient at best, and dangerous at worst.

Putting it to the test

Usually I try to “break” an operating system by putting it on a wide variety
of computers. Since I have never been able to cause any errors (aside from
trying to use RAID cards that are not supported), I skipped that phase and
decided to spend the entire time using OpenBSD instead.

I found the improved package tools to be a huge benefit. Rather than
compile everything from source or download the packages and dependencies that I
wanted to install, I set the configuration to download packages automatically
when I try to install anything from Ports. So I go to /usr/ports/editors/vim
and when I run make install clean, a package is downloaded instead
of compiling it from source; if a package isn’t available, Ports goes ahead
with the compilation. I also tried out the new update option, but being so
close to the release, no updated packages were found. Just to see what would
happen, I substituted a 3.8 package directory for a 3.9 installation. The
result was that many of the packages showed upgrades which were really
downgrades to 3.8 packages. I suspect that is a bug — package upgrade tools
should only recognize higher versions as upgrades, and there should be some
effort to verify that the source directory contains viable and up-to-date
packages.

Conclusions and developer recommendations

The improved package tools make OpenBSD much easier to install, upgrade, and
maintain. For those who need to install several programs on top of the base
system, the new package tool functions are priceless.

Here are some features I’d like to see added to future editions of OpenBSD:

• Default color console support. The DEC VT220
  terminal, along with all other monochrome consoles, is long dead –
  even Digital itself replaced the VT200 series with color text and
  graphics terminals. Why is OpenBSD still using it if it’s so old and
  limited? For the x86 and AMD64 OpenBSD ports, I’d like to see some
  enhanced console features. Color (which can be achieved presently by
  either hacking the terminal config files, or by installing GNU Screen
  and setting “screen” to the default terminal) and framebuffer support
  for higher resolutions are two modern conveniences that I’d love to see
  in the default OpenBSD installation.
• Easier Java installation. I realize that licensing
  restrictions prevent the Java Development Kit from being distributed
  with OpenBSD. Those same licensing issues prevent an easy JDK
  installation, but I’m sure it could be a little simpler than
  downloading so many files from multiple sites and waiting hours for the
  source code to compile, then adding the path settings by hand. Can’t
  some kind of agreement be worked out with Sun to provide an OpenBSD
  binary, even if it is not included with the base system?
• WPA support. I know that WPA is a
  lousy way to encrypt wireless data and that it creates a false sense of
  security, but there are a lot of wireless access points that require
  clients to use WPA. Since OpenBSD’s wireless networking framework does
  not yet support it, you can’t connect an OpenBSD machine to a router
  that requires it.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Purpose	Operating system
Manufacturer	The OpenBSD Project
Architectures	x86, AMD64/EM64T, SPARC, SPARC64, Alpha, HP300, HPPA, Mac68k, MacPPC, mvme68k, mvme88k, luna88k, VAX, MIPS, Zaurus
License	BSD
Market	Servers of all kinds, for home, office, or enterprise; security-minded desktop users and sysadmins
Price (retail)	U.S. $45
Previous version	OpenBSD 3.8
Product Web site	Click here

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Secure by default

First of all, you should familiarize yourself with the concept of secure by default. A simple way of explaining it is, everything is turned off until you turn it on. That means that the Web server is not going to start until you manually add httpd to the startup script. OpenSSH services will also be unavailable unless specifically enabled.

Because it is secure by default, you may have to do more initial configuration with OpenBSD than with most other Unix and Unix-like operating systems, but you’ll spend a lot less time securing it — maybe no time at all, if you follow the instructions in the manual pages.

Quick OpenBSD facts

• Default shell: Korn shell (ksh) for root; Bourne shell (sh) for users; the C shell (csh) is also included by default.
• Default editor: vi
• File system: BSD Fast File System (FFS) with soft updates (no journalling necessary)
• Kernel: 4.4BSD-based, monolithic, SMP-capable, does not support external kernel modules by default
• Binary support: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, SCO/ISC, SVR4, Linux, BSD/OS
• Supported architectures: Alpha, AMD64/EM64T, cats, hp300, hppa, i386, luna88k, mac68k, macppc, mvme68k, mvme88k, sgi, sparc, sparc64, vax, zaurus
• Hardware support (i386)

Making it easier to mount CD drives

First you need a mount point for your CD or DVD drive. I recommend /mnt/cdrom (create it with mkdir /mnt/cdrom), but you can do whatever you want — just remember what it is so you can mount the CD drive on it later, and modify the below instructions accordingly.

OpenBSD’s default /etc/fstab file does not have a line for CD/DVD drives. Most people’s optical drive will use the /dev/cd0a device node, though there are a few others. Type ls /dev/cd* to see all of the possibilities. You may want to test mount them with a CD in the drive if you are unsure which node is the right one.

Once you have a directory to mount to and you know which device node corresponds with your optical drive, it’s time to add a line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/cd0a  /mnt/cdrom  cd9660  ro,noauto,nosuid,nodev  0 0

Setting up Ports and packages

OpenBSD doesn’t include much software in the default system, so you’ll probably have to add most of the programs that you need. There are two ways to add software to OpenBSD: through the Ports tree, and through precompiled binary packages. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but here are some basic observations about both systems that will help you decide which approach to take:

• Ports compiles each program from source code, which allows you to modify the Makefile to accommodate specific needs; packages are already compiled with the default options.
• Packages are installed moments after they are downloaded; Ports can take a long time to compile.
• Packages are easier to upgrade when it comes time to switch to the next OpenBSD release; Ports are trickier to upgrade, and will take much longer to reinstall.
• There are about 200 more programs in Ports than there are in the package repository. Many of these extra programs are proprietary (the Java Development Kit, for instance).
• It’s easier to find programs in Ports than it is the package database, especially when you’re offline. You can, however, use the Ports tree to find a program you want to install, then use pkg_add to install the package.

My recommendation is to install the Ports tree (see below for instructions), but use packages whenever possible. The two may be used in conjunction with each other (see below), but if you do not install the Ports tree you will have to know the exact package names, as OpenBSD package tools do not use any kind of name resolution. That means you can’t just type pkg_add gnome and have GNOME installed. You have to know the exact package name, which has its version number and patch level appended to it. Since you probably don’t know exactly what version and revision of GNOME is available for the current release of OpenBSD, you’ll have to use your OpenBSD CD to browse the package list. Alternatively you can connect to the OpenBSD FTP server and search through the same list online.

Mount your OpenBSD CD and then switch to its directory so that you can browse it. Assuming you mounted it on /mnt/cdrom, the i386 package directory is in /mnt/cdrom/3.9/packages/i386/ (assuming you’re installing packages in OpenBSD 3.9 — if not, change the version number in the path). Use the ls command to look through the directory and find programs that you want to install.

Next you’ll need to tell your package installer where to look for package files. By default it takes a command line argument, so you have to specify an address and file name for every package you want to install plus all of its dependencies. Obviously that is not a very efficient way to do things, so let’s add a default path for the pkg_add command to look in.

Initially you may want to use the OpenBSD CD because it’s quick, available, and doesn’t require an Internet connection. It doesn’t have all of the OpenBSD packages on it, though — just the ones there was space for. If you want access to more packages, you’ll need to use the FTP site (detailed below). To add the CD as the default package location, use vi to open /root/.profile and then add these two lines at the bottom:

export PKG_PATH=/mnt/cdrom/3.9/packages/i386/
export FETCH_PACKAGES=yes

The “3.9″ and “i386″ will change depending on the release of OpenBSD you’re using and the architecture of your computer. If you’re installing OpenBSD 3.8 or 4.0 on an AMD64 or VAX machine, change the directories accordingly. Before you install any packages, make sure the correct CD is in and mounted.

If you want to install packages at a later time and don’t want to lug around your OpenBSD CDs, or if you didn’t find the programs you want on the CD, you can use an FTP package mirror instead. First find a mirror in this list that is closest to your location. Then add it to /root/.profile as shown above:

export PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp2.usa.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.9/packages/i386/

The mirror site above is only an example — use one from the list I linked to above.

Log out for the changes to take effect. The next time you log in, pkg_add will automatically retrieve any packages you tell it to, plus their dependencies. If you try to install a program from Ports, OpenBSD will check to see if there is a package available first; if so, it downloads that instead (to remove this feature, comment out the FETCH_PACKAGES line in your profile). Here’s an example:

pkg_add -v gnome-desktop-2.10.1.tgz

The -v flag makes the output more verbose; it is not required. In the above example, GNOME and all of its dependencies will then be downloaded and installed on OpenBSD 3.8.

After you’ve added a package source, whenever you try to install a program from Ports, OpenBSD will automatically try to retrieve the package first. So even though there is no name resolution for packages, Ports can act in that regard.

Adding the Ports tree and OpenBSD source code

OpenBSD does not install the Ports tree or the operating system source code by default. To install them yourself, just copy them over from CD #3 or download the source files from the OpenBSD FTP site. You can find them in the /pub/OpenBSD/3.8/ directory (substitute 3.8 for your release version). The files are called src.tar.gz and ports.tar.gz.

Unzip and untar the src.tar.gz file to the /usr/src/ directory, and the ports.tar.gz file to the /usr directory (it will unpack to a new /usr/ports/ directory). That’s basically all there is to it.

Java support

Installing a Java Development Kit on OpenBSD is more difficult than on most other OSes. On the other hand, most other OSes don’t really care about licensing to the degree that OpenBSD does. Since proprietary packages cannot be included with OpenBSD, you’ll have to use the Ports tree to install the JDK. There is currently no option to install a standalone Java Runtime Environment without the development kit.

To install a JDK (and by association, a Java Runtime Environment as well), first you’re going to have to manually retrieve the JDK binaries, source code, and BSD patch sets from a few Web sites, then you’re going to have to compile them from source. It takes a long time, so I suggest fetching the files all at once, then letting OpenBSD work on compiling them overnight. This process also requires a lot of free space in /tmp and /usr, so make sure you’ve got some room to work with. The amount of free space necessary depends on which JRE or JDK version you are installing. At minimum, a few hundred megabytes; at maximum, maybe more than 1GB. The reason why you need so much disk space and compile time is, Java must bootstrap from a previous version. That means that JDK 1.5 bootstraps from 1.4, which bootstraps from 1.3. So you’re downloading files for and compiling three JDKs. That is, unfortunately, the price you pay for using Java on OpenBSD.

The file names, versions, and addresses will change with every release. A sure-fire way to find out what files require manual fetching is to go to /usr/ports/devel/jdk/1.5 (assuming you want Java 5.0 — versions 1.3 and 1.4 are also available) and type in make. Any initial dependencies will be fetched and compiled, and when it reaches a point where your intervention is required, the exact names and Web addresses of the files you need to retrieve will be printed on the screen. Go to the addresses, download the files, and save them to /usr/ports/distfiles/, then continue the build. If you miss a file or two, the build process will tell you which files you’re missing.

As an example, here are the file names and addresses for JDK 1.5 on OpenBSD 3.9:

• j2sdk-1_3_1_16-linux-i586.bin from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download.html
• j2sdk-1_4_2-linux-i586.bin from http://java.sun.com/products/archive/j2se/1.4.2/
• j2sdk-1_4_2-src-scsl.zip, j2sdk-1_4_2-bin-scsl.zip, j2sdk-1_5_0-bin-scsl.zip, and j2sdk-1_5_0-src-scsl.zip from http://wwws.sun.com/software/communitysource/j2se/java2/download.html
• bsd-jdk14-patches-7.tar.gz and bsd-jdk15-patches-2.tar.bz2 from http://www.eyesbeyond.com/freebsddom/java/jdk14.html

Lastly, you will have to add the Java executable path to your shell configuration file. Assuming you are using the default Bourne (sh) or Korn shells (ksh), the file to edit is ~/.profile. If you’re using the C shell (csh), the file is ~/.cshrc. Bash is ~/.bashrc, and the Z shell (zsh) is ~/.zshrc. Somewhere in one of these files you will find a PATH environment variable. Add /usr/local/jdk-1.5.0/bin to it (or whatever Java version you installed). Some programs may require a JAVA_HOME setting as well:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk-1.5.0/

Log out for the changes to take effect. Remember to go to the /usr/ports/devel/jdk/1.3 and 1.4 directories and run make deinstall clean to remove the older JDKs and build files that you bootstrapped from.

Enabling FreeBSD and Linux binary support

OpenBSD comes with a variety of binary compatibilities compiled into the kernel. They are, however, disabled by default. To enable them, edit /etc/sysctl.conf and skip down to the end of the file where the binary emulation section is. Uncomment any lines that you need support for. Most people will want Linux binary support:

kern.emul.linux=1

FreeBSD binary support is in the same section. Again, just uncomment it to enable it. Feel free to look through the rest of the file to see if there are any other options you might be interested in (I usually enable wsmouse, which is the console mouse driver).

To achieve optimum Linux binary compatibility, you will also need to install the redhat_base package, then create a /proc directory and a line in /etc/fstab to mount it at boot:

/proc  /proc  procfs  rw,linux  0 0

Recompiling the kernel

I’ll start this section by saying that you probably won’t ever need to do this. Even if you often find yourself messing with Linux or FreeBSD kernel options, you’re likely to never need to mess with OpenBSD’s — pretty much everything is compiled in by default. Some say that the fewer kernel options you have (in other words, taking out what you don’t need), the better the kernel performs (or at very least, the smaller it is), but I haven’t done any performance testing to verify that.

The kernel configuration files are in /sys/arch/i386/conf (substitute i386 for your architecture if it is different). The standard kernel config is in the GENERIC file. If you want to compile a custom kernel, I recommend creating a separate file based on GENERIC rather than screw around with the original. Traditionally a custom config file is called MYKERNEL — so just copy GENERIC to MYKERNEL and edit from there. The SMP kernel options are in GENERIC.MP. If you’re on an SMP machine, don’t bother editing the file — it only contains a few SMP-specific options that override GENERIC — just skip to the next step.

Once you’ve got your configuration the way you want it, run the config program on it:

/usr/sbin/config MYKERNEL

If errors are detected, fix them and re-run config. If no errors are detected, switch to the directory that config created:

cd ../compile/MYKERNEL

Then compile the kernel:

make clean && make depend && make && make install

SMP support for multi-core, multi-CPU, and Hyper-Threaded machines

If you’re on a multi-core or multi-CPU system and want to use the SMP kernel, you do not need to recompile anything to get SMP support. While OpenBSD uses the single-CPU kernel by default, you have the option of installing the bsd.mp kernel during the installation process. If you choose that option, bsd.mp will be in your / directory.

Before you switch to bsd.mp, test it out by typing it in at the boot prompt when the system starts (before OpenBSD starts its init process). If all goes well, just switch to your root directory and move bsd.mp to bsd:

mv bsd.mp bsd

Further information

OpenBSD has the most thorough, easy to follow documentation of any operating system I’ve ever used. Just use the man command to look up nearly anything that is included with the base system or installed packages. If you’re new to OpenBSD, type man afterboot to get some tips and instructions for setting up and configuring various services and devices.

If you’re still stuck after reading the documentation, a great source for online BSD help is the OpenBSD section of the BSD Forums Web site.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It’s been a while since I last reviewed Gentoo Linux because there haven’t been too many significant changes in the past few releases. I’ve been using it as my primary desktop operating system for a year and a half, though, and I’ve been running my main Web/email/database server on it since October of 2004. There’s a reason why I’ve stayed with it that long, both as a desktop and server OS — and there’s also a reason why I’m writing a review of the 2006.0 release after a long hiatus from Gentoo reviews. Read more at Software in Review, or Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Gentoo Linux overview

This section is for people new to Gentoo Linux. If you’re already familiar with this OS, skip down to the next section to read about Gentoo’s new features.

Gentoo Linux is a unique GNU/Linux distribution that compiles all of its software from source code rather than using precompiled binary packages. Gentoo is arranged much like FreeBSD, except it has command line tools that automate all of the special functions that must be done by hand in FreeBSD. Where FreeBSD has the Ports system, Gentoo has the automated Portage system; where FreeBSD has /etc/rc.conf to regulate boot processes, Gentoo has the rc-update tool to add or remove scripts from the startup process.

Although the entire system can be compiled from source (and updates are applied by recompiling the whole program), there are a few binary packages available for some of the larger applications, like OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. You can also install the operating system from a binary package, then recompile it as each piece of the operating environment needs updating.

The number of programs in Gentoo’s Portage tree grows constantly. It’s a rare occasion when you can’t find a significant open source program in Portage. In fact, you can probably find several different versions of it, and you can compile in special functionality or hooks for other programs if you like. Numerous performance enhancement capabilities are also available, in case you want to try to squeeze some extra speed out of your software. In short, Gentoo Linux is the perfect operating system for the desktop tinkerer.

What many people don’t know about Gentoo is, it is also an outstanding server OS. From a standard stage 3 (binary) installation, you can have Postfix (plus Amavis, Clam and Vipul’s Razor), Apache (with PHP, SSL, and Perl), OpenLDAP, and OpenSSH installed, configured, tweaked, and in production in a little over an hour. If you don’t have much experience with these services, the Gentoo project provides in-depth and generally up-to-date documentation that will get your server up and running securely and efficiently in short order. Other distros can accomplish this kind of setup faster; speed of installation is not what Gentoo is noted for, however. Rather, it’s ease of automation and customizability. A Gentoo sysadmin can easily take advantage of programs like emerge, webapp-config, etc-update, and rc-update to do the majority of daily and weekly system maintenance with a few simple scripts and/or cron jobs.

Gentoo is also about choice. Don’t want to use Postfix? Fine, use Exim or Qmail. Don’t want to use Apache 2? Apache 1 is available. Not a fan of syslog-ng and vixie-cron? Choose from a list of other loggers and cron utilities. Want to keep Java off of your machine? You can make a simple change to a config file that will ensure that a JRE or JDK will never be installed.

What’s new in 2006.0

The only major change to Gentoo in this release is the addition of a liveCD with a graphical installer. The liveCD boots to a plain GNOME environment with some basic desktop programs and a link to both the graphical and the ncurses-based installers. Both are identical in functionality, but the ncurses installer can be run outside of X.org.

One of the coolest things about the installer is its ability to save installation configuration settings to a text file. You can then use this file to quickly reinstall Gentoo, if necessary. I would imagine that you could easily create a script to automate the installation process by using a prefabricated config file.

The installer is not meant to make the installation process less complex; in fact it does not leave out any of the options that are available from the old “install by hand” process. All it does is make the whole installation routine faster; instead of reading instructions and typing in the next command, you just click checkboxes, type in names and locations, and proceed with the install. It cuts down the pre-compile configuration time by at least half. As a bonus, while you’re waiting for the system to install, you can take further advantage of the liveCD environment by browsing the Web.

The Gentoo installer is well-documented, so if you get stuck at any point, the Help button actually does provide some decent assistance.

Gentoo Linux 2006.0 has also reportedly improved its PowerPC and SPARC support, but I didn’t have the chance to test any architectures other than x86 for this review.

Putting it to the test

The good news is, the liveCD works really well — it boots and runs even on ultra-modern computers with peripheral hardware that is only supported through generic drivers. This could be a great advantage for Gentoo users who need a liveCD to fix boot problems with an existing Gentoo installation. You could do this with previous Gentoo CDs, but you were limited to the command line. Alas, the liveCD doesn’t save you much time as a rescue CD if you’re already a command line wizard.

I’m a veteran of multiple Gentoo installs on a variety of systems, so I was looking forward to using the new installer to see if it could make the process a little simpler. I tried to install Gentoo 2006.0 at least a half dozen times on my test system (Asus A8NE, Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 1GB RAM, Seagate SATA-V 150GB drive, ATI Radeon X700 PCIe video card — this system works perfectly with other, older distros), and the Gentoo installer failed in various ways each time. I didn’t give up until the installer completed with a non-fatal exit status, but it still produced some errors and did not install the system as intended. I re-checked the ISO’s MD5 sum, wrote it to a new CD, and still had all the same problems with the new Gentoo installer.

Using a stage 3 environment generated from the liveCD itself, and installing no extra packages or programs, I was able to get Gentoo onto the test computer. The Gentoo installer made it a much easier, quicker task to get to this point. However, a significant amount of time was spent after the fact, installing programs and changing settings that seemed to cause the installer to error out and fail.

Since the AMD64 edition of the liveCD was marked as “experimental,” I figured it wasn’t worth the hassle to try it out, considering my experiences with the more heavily tested x86 edition.

If you are going to use the Gentoo installer from the liveCD, make sure you save your installation settings before the actual installation process begins. If the installer fails, you will not be able to restart it with your settings unless you have saved them to a file.

Conclusions and developer recommendations

The new Gentoo installer is a step in the right direction, but it’s not production-ready just yet. Gentoo Linux in general, though, is more than capable of performing the duties of a desktop or server operating system. For the technically inclined, I highly recommend it.

Here’s what I’d like to see changed or improved in the next Gentoo release:

• Better testing on the installer. The new Gentoo installer doesn’t work very well; it could use a lot more testing.
• An option to go back in case the installer fails. It really sucks when you spend 20 minutes tweaking the settings to install the perfect Gentoo system, only to see them all erased when the installer errors out. Why not give the option to posthumously save the install settings upon failure, or at least to go back and remove some options so that you can try again?
• Automounting of existing disk partitions. The liveCD should mount any detected hard drive partitions. This makes it much easier to use as a “fixit” CD in those rare instances when you’ve made your Gentoo system unbootable. It’s also nice if you’re installing to a hard drive that has unknown content; it would be helpful to see what is on the disk before it is partitioned and formatted.
• Java 5.0 support. I’ve been waiting patiently for several months to get Sun-JDK 1.5 support in Gentoo. Yes, I have read the notes on why Gentoo doesn’t have it yet. But many other distros have Java 5.0 support. It seems to me that this should have been fixed in Gentoo by now.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Purpose	Operating system
Manufacturer	The Gentoo Linux Project
Architectures	x86, AMD64/EM64T, PPC, PPC64, SPARC, SPARC64, Alpha, IA64, HPPA
License	GNU General Public License
Market	Experienced GNU/Linux users, FreeBSD users wanting to switch to GNU/Linux
Price (retail)	Free to download, or you can buy it on CD from the Gentoo Store
Previous version	Gentoo Linux 2005.1
Product Web site	Click here

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

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