Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Downloading and Uploading Linux Distributions and Packages

Linux newbie and Linux savvy of this country should be aware of our limitations in the IT world.
Now that I have downloaded over 150 CD versions (Live CD to be precise) of Linux CDs, I am now doing some brief survey of their installation capabilities.
I have now down to top 5 (Five) of my liking (100 is for Live) for installations.
When I select the top five I have many considerations.

1. Light weight and fit into a CD

2. Should have a nice file system that even detect my spare Dos partitions(no windows in them for the past 3 or 4 years not even Wine in them)

3. Good partition tool

4. Good PDF and Word program

5. Image program and a Video program to watch clips before installing

6. Good set of Drivers for old and new computers including laptops.

7. No need for internet connection at the time of installation

8. Set of boxed CDs, if it is a commercial version

9. One year cycle (if possible) stability. Six month was ideal for me to see whether developers are listening to my vocal and almost interactive commentaries in the web

10. Preferably a repository to download Skype, Open Office, Flash and few other nice Goodies.

11. Last but not least " root" and "user" capability instead of sudo.

12. Good Grub file and compatibility with other Linux distributions.

Most of the Top 20 to 30 distributions have at least 8 out of 12 of my specifications and nothing in between them to choose except personal interest and likings.

So rating according to a number scale is redundant. All are pretty good their own ways, robust, stable and free of viruses.

The biggest problem is needing internet to install. Not only this slows down the whole process and sometimes freezes at the last moment without a boot or grub file at the end and sometime changing the BIOS due to freezing. This is unacceptable in the third world where download facility is painfully slow.
The other serious problem is incompatibility of Ubuntu versions to detect other Linux versions and giving priority to Windows instead. This is appalling.

I had this problem yesterday and today. I have at least two working distribution 9one for day to day working and one for an emergency- my emergency one is PCLinux first and Puppy second).

One of my old computer has a SATA hard disk and IDE hard disk. When they configure the hard disks a and b comenclature (not for Master and Slave) was at random and there were no two distributions that did the same thing the exact the same way. I had to give up after 24 hours.
I tried changing the boot file and the fstab and i could never configure the distributions exactly the same.
This was piece of cake in the early days when the distributions were handful.
Each one had an understanding of the other. It is not so now with so many distributions out there.

We need to formalize this like normalizing in tables, otherwise there going to chaos in time to come.

I have been talking about Sri-Lankan Standards ( we do not have any-Selfish and First come First basis, everybody beat everybody at the winning tape and their are only one winner and all the others are losers) elsewhere.
It is time we redesign our wheels and engines.