As I logged into KDE, I was presented with an unpleasant warning: "Error initializing sound driver". I knew what is the vi-way of configuring sound in such cases, but I wondered if there is a graphical tool that would do the trick for me. I remember that Lizard always detected my soundcard - a SB PCI128 - without any problem, but I also could use COAS (Caldera Open Administration System) to configure my soundcard. Well, after looking around, I could neither find COAS nor any KDE or Gnome utility that would configure or load the sound driver. Let me say, as a side note, that I started the KDE Control Center, and chose "Help: Find" and typed "sound" and hoped I'll find something. Well, I found exactly 0 occurances in the KDE's Control Panel's help system! Doesn't that suck, expecially for a novice?
I tried YAST2, went to the "Hardware" section, but no sound options. So, I gave up and just ran "modprobe es1370" to enable my soundcard, and edited "/etc/modules.conf" to have the kernel module loaded at startup. I wonder how many beginners would be able to figure this out. Not many, I am afraid.
Now, you'll remember that I have selected the wrong io port setting for my network adapter, and wanted to correct that setting. So, I start YAST2 again, and in the "Network card configuration" I discover that ... my card is not there! There is no card displayed in the list of interfaces. So, I click on "configure" to set up the NE2000 again, but now I can only attach it to the eth1 interface, eth0 is not available anymore! Really stupid. Since I don't have two NE2000 interfaces, neither I want to run two IP networks on the same card, I realize that my only option is to, again, edit /etc/modules.conf. No biggy, but it will be a hell for a new Windows convert. Or BeOS convert, for that matter. Just out of curiosity, I did configure NE2000 through YAST2 again which I had to attach to eth1, and after accepting the changes and restarting YAST2, I noticed that my card is still not in the list. This must be a bug, which I have to accept since I'm actually reviewing a beta.
After briefly navigating through the available desktop applications, I concluded that there is precious little multimedia-related stuff. Almost nothing, in fact: one CD player, Kpaint, KSnapshot and that's about it, really. Not even GIMP or mpg123 or cdrecord or mkisofs were included. I played around in Gnome, too, but very soon I was greeted by a crash: while loading Gnome, I would get "Application battstat-applet-2 has crashed due to a fatal error (segmentation fault)". Looks like Gnome and me have a problematic relationship.
uname -a reveals that the kernel is 2.4.19-4GB. What that 4GB exactly means, I know not, but perhaps it hints at some memory management optimization.
I hope to see soon a more Caldera-like UnitedLinux. Not that this one was bad. In fact, apart from the occasional Gnome (and the one YAST2) bug, it's rather good already, in spite the fact that it's a beta release.
UnitedLinux for your network
I confess I didn't know that UnitedLinux was a server-centric linux, until Eugenia (the EID of this site) told me. But as I was installing it, some things reminded me of that, like for example the powerful storage management options. However, once I started looking around the system, the server and network centric characteristic of this distro became very apparent.
First of all, you will not be able to telnet or ftp to your freshly installed UnitedLinux host. In fact, very little services are even active. One of the first utilities I have found in this distro was "saint", which is a successor of the famous SANTA (sometimes called SATAN) network security scanner. I used saint against the newly installed box, and even with the heaviest scanning I have found no vulnerabilities! And only 2 services were running: ssh and XDM (the X login thingy). This was rather impressive. But wait, for all of you security-conscious folks there, you will find tcpdump, ethereal and a set of utilities based around traffic-collector, which will all work with your interfaces in promiscuous mode and capture the traffic in the most atomic way. This impressive lineup of network scanning tools makes your UL workstation both a bastion of security and a dangerous cracking tool - depending on which hat you wear that day.
Naturally, you will find ftp, http (Apache) and authentication servers, plus samba and NCP (NetWare network storage protocol) servers. UL implements iSCSI support that provides access to a maximum of 16 remote targets and up to 256 LUNs per target. For name resolution you can chose between a full BIND 9 DNS server or lwresd, which is a lightweight name server. Or, you can implement NIS. Which brings me to the authentication options: NIS, LDAP, kerberos, Radius and of course all the PAM modules are there. The Apache webserver is provided with the Jakarta-Tomcat and the Jserv servlet engines, plus the ubiquitous mod_perl and mod_php4. I am not able to list all the options that come with Apache in this distro, but ther really are many.
And I didn't even mention all the disk management utilities that implement LVM and software RAID on the various filesystems that support them.
When I installed UL, I noticed that it took more than 2 GB of diskspace. As I said previously, it came with almost no multimedia applications, and even stuff like mkisofs and cdrecord are missing. I was wondering where did all that 2 GB space go? Well, now I know.
About the Author:
Gianmario Scotti holds a masters in electronic engineering, currently living in Finland and working for Nokia as a UNIX installation developer - developing installation scripts and procedures for Nokia and 3rd party software on Unix. Loves classical music, his wife and fruit. Other interests include history, electronics, computer music, movies and strategy games.
- "Installation"
- "The System, Networking"
