LDR | Not just yet another Arch Linux Fork ?

Release of  new linux distributions based upon existing major and well known distributions is a common day happening in the linux world today . Ubuntu is known for having countless forks . Recently Arch Linux has gathered lot of spotlight and some distributions based upon Arch Linux have come forwards . LDR  is one  of those Arch Linux based distributions which was added to the "Distributions on the Waiting List" of  DistroWatch.com on 2011-04-11.

As described by its developer Tom Medhurst
 
" LDR stands for Linux Done Right. It is an Arch Linux derrived GNU/Linux distro which has many software components pre-configured so you can just install and get on with it! "

Here is the LDR`s official website with the initial details about this distribution . 

LDR has its own repository with custom made packages not available in Arch`s repositories. I had a chance to test two of the released isos of LDR i.e ldr-1.0 and ldr-1.06 both as live cd and in vmware . Although I had no good luck with the live cd due to issue with Nvidia driver but on vmware LDR was quite impressive.

As LDR is in the early stages of development I am not expecting lot from it . I will closely follow this distribution with hope that it will improve with time and will stand on its own feet rather than disappearing into obscurity like many other forks .

Best of luck to LDR . 

Mandriva Cooker is alive and shining !

We all know that Mandriva project,the Paris based Linux company, recently faced lot of troubles due to financial turmoil with rumours of the expected demise . But the things are not as bad as they were predicted and the project is actively working towards the expected new releases as announced on Mandriva mailing lists recently.

Mandriva has lived for years on my home computer but mostly with the stable release. With recent unfortunate events the upgrades I was getting on my Mandriva were quite slow so I decided to switch to "cooker". The decision was a bit risky because cooker is not meant for production machines but I took the risk and I am not regretting it.

I am running cooker on daily basis and as expected I am getting loads of updates daily with occasional glitches which are normal with cooker but which get fixed easily . All the packages are latest e.g Firefox 4.0b7 and I am enjoying every bit of using Mandriva with cooker.

I am expecting that next stable release will be good enough to make us forget the bad days we faced with Mandriva in past many months.

How to set Smart Package Manager on PCLinuxOS

Smart Package Manger Version 1.2 is available for download from repositories through synaptic on PCLinuxOS 2010 . Smart is not officially used as a package manager on PCLinuxOS. This may be the reason that smart does not work by default once you install it and needs manual tweaking before it works for you and also the version is not upgraded to current 1.3 . 

Synaptic works flawlessly on PCLinuxOS so you do not need smart as an alternate. But as a personal preference to use an alternate package manager I looked into smart and followed  these simple steps to set smart for my PCLinuxOS .

1 : Setting of Mirrors

 Click " Edit" on  smart GUI , locate " Mirrors" and click that to open a new window where you can set your primary and alternate mirrors according to your choice . 

2 : Setting Channels 

Once again click " Edit " on smart GUI , locate " Channels " which will open a new window for setting channels. Everything is set by default, you need to change few things. 

a ) Set the priority  from 0 to 10 both on " rpm-sys " and on the selected mirror " apt-rpm " . This can be achieved by clicking properties button of the above two.

b ) Keep both the above checked and un-check any others.

Now you are all set. Either click the green curved arrow button " update channels" on smart GUI to  synchronize your system with remote repositories or run this command in shell as root

" smart update " 

Smart GUI on version 1.2 apparently freeze but keeps on working in background . Smart needs to be upgraded for which I have put a request on PCLinuxOS forum. Smart GUI is as simple as Synaptic and with little exploration one can find his/her way around it to manage packages on PCLinuxOS . Simple smart commands can be found here .

Once again a clear warning :  PCLinuxOS team does not use smart as an official package manager . 

I like smart because of my personal reasons . If you want to have smart working on your PCLinuxOS the above steps will help you to fix it. But I am not sure there will be any support from PCLinuxOS team in case you run into any problem with smart.

There is an interesting article about smart on PCLinuxOS written by  pinoc 

which is worth reading.