Mint Simplicity Versus Calculate Complications
It's been a slow week for distribution news it seems, but Jack Wallen posted a Linux Mint review on Linux.com. Chinese Allwinner Technology, chip manufacturer, has joined the Linx Foundation in what some are saying is an effort to polish its reputation. Red Hat Security team member Kurt Seifried said embargoes do more harm than good and former openSUSE team leader Agustin Benito Bethencourt thinks the user distro should go to continuous delivery.
My adventures in Calculate continue to be challenging. I made some progress today making my new install livable, but it's not going as well as I anticipated. It seems the greatest challenge is learning how to do things the Gentoo/Calculate way (again). I've forgotten so much, a lot of other stuff has changed, and Calculate has its own quirks. I spent most of my allotted time today trying to get NVIDIA drivers working through configuration without luck and I suppose I'll have to take more drastic measures tomorrow. There was a bug in the drivers causing this very issue, but was supposedly fixed a version or two before mine. I'm going to try a newer version of the drivers first, but early reading is indicating I may have to rebuild the kernel. So, tonight I'm still posting from Linux Mint 17/17.1.
Speaking of Mint 17.1, Jack Wallen said to new Mint users, "Linux Mint 17.1 is that it is an ideal platform for any user." He said that while other distributions run to the latest "shiny, touch-friendly" gizmos, Mint has remained true to its roots. "With just the slightest of tweaks, Mint has gone boldly into that good night while keeping a foot deeply planted in the familiar." From there Wallen demonstrated why Mint is a good choice for desktop users and concluded, "If you’re looking for a new operating system, one that you can depend on and get up to speed with quickly, you’d be remiss not to give Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” a glance before any other distribution."
Red Hat's Kurt Seifried recently blogged that security embargoes aren't working out real well for the Open Source world. He wrote that all the effort to keep vulnerabilities secret is taking time from actually addressing the security issue. Privacy is hard to arrange in Open Source explained Seifried and many times leads to incomplete or incorrect fixes from upstream. He said the best thing to do is to "only embargo the issues that really matter and even then we use embargoes sparingly."
Other interesting posts from around the Web:
* openSUSE transformation step 2. The user oriented distro.
* Allwinner joins the Linux Foundation, Press Release
* Build Your Own Linux Productivity Machine With KDE Service Menus