A contributed live CD created from the current UserLinux desktop package set is available for download.
UserLinux Desktop Live CD 0.2 Available
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Don’t try to boot it on a system with less than 128kB RAM, and the more RAM the better.
No worries I won’t.
Well damn, there goes my plan to run it on an old Tandy 286. But hey, I guess that answers the question of how to get it onto 1,298 5-1/4 inch floppies.
what version of gnome ? if its 2.8 maybe i will download it. what about xorg ? if its 6.8.1 then i musssst download
Probably no x.org. It’s based on Debian, so I’d guess GNOME 2.6 and XFree86 4.3 with lots of patches.
WHERE is the link to download the Live CD? I could only find a link for the installation CD, and as Peter Venkman said to Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters “It’s already a little crowded in there”.
http://hams.com/Mirror/userlinux-live-0.2.iso
008436e19ce4747af9598edee288c3e7 *userlinux-live-0.2.iso
Anyone have any screenshots, performance data, and hardware support on the system?
It seems Ubuntu is competing in the same market as Userlinux, with the exception that Ubuntu is backed by actual paid developers. For a naive observer, it would seem desirable for the two projects to join forces.
Ubuntu is actually doing things fairly differently. They have basically forked Debian and will have to maintain all their own packages. UserLinux aims to only provide a policy layer over top of vanilla debian, and keep the official debian packages.
Maintain all their own packages? Er, no, that’s more or less the exact opposite of what the Ubuntu developers intend. I suggest checking out http://www.netsplit.com/blog/work/canonical/ubuntu_and_debian.html – it’s a blog entry by one of the Ubuntu devs, giving a nice overview of the relationship Ubuntu hopes to have with Debian.
Seems like some good things are happening in the debian camp. Has anyone thought of writing an article contrasting the various strengths and weakneses of the approaches these various distos use?
The Ubuntu FAQ says not to mix Ubuntu and Debian packages.
This looks interesting. Debian does almost everything right, except release management. Debian stable releases are too far apart, and not predictable. In my experience, releasing on a regular schedule works much better than feature driven releases. Ubuntu’s six month cycle is the right interval. A shorter interval is undesirable for production, but six months is not too long to wait for major upgrades to important packages such as GNOME or X.
Release early and often is good for developers, but not for users who just want things to work. Frequent incremental updates are great for improving a single program, but cause chaos when dealing with the interactions between hundreds of separate packages with complex dependencies. A distribution should freeze versions at scheduled intervals and provide only critical updates between intervals. Production systems shouldn’t be disrupted by frequent changes, each of which needs testing before deployment. Development, on the other hand, requires frequent change.
Debian testing and unstable work well for development. They even work surprisingly well for production systems, but that many changes threaten stability. But Debian stable is too old. Ubuntu looks like a good solution.
It’s quick, easy and pain free. Very clean and non-geek friendly, iow, the names on the icons might mean something to ppl that are zealots
Not a lot of packages are installed, it’s only about a ~467MB d/l. Knoppix is alot more comprehensive, but it’s also not as end user friendly.
It’s got a lot of promise. I just wish distros like Mandrake, Suse and Redhat would look at the likes of Xandros and OpenLinux. This is what end user friendlyness (read ex-windows users) is all about.
“A Userlinux desktop live CD is available. This allows you to test and demo the system on any i386 PC without touching a hard disk. This system is somewhat lower performance than the hard disk version, simply because of the seek and access speed of a CD vs. a hard disk, and the fact that the filesystem is a RAM disk. Don’t try to boot it on a system with less than 128MB RAM, and the more RAM the better.”
Yeah. They sure know what they’re talking about…
Just tried the LiveCD and I wasn’t all that impressed with it, especially not compared to SuSE. If the install version is the same, then I’m not sure why I should use it instead of any other distro. It doesn’t add anything of value as far as I can see.
I’d keep in mind that this is only version 0.2 though. From an end user standpoint and only comparing it to Knoppix it was much more friendly than Knoppix. No geek text flashing across the screen on boot or shutdown and it was clean and simple. Everything was labeled very well and easy to understand.
I’ll be waiting to see what version 1.0 looks like.
I couldn’t compare to a Suse Live CD as I haven’t tried one for sometime now.
It’s ok I got my leading edge with 256k.