Mageia 1 Review: How to make a distribution

First of all let's see the general basic steps of a Linux distribution creation.

• Find a strange name for your distro and create a childish logo.
• You know that creating a new distro is hard, so you must find an already existing base. (Beware! You will have find a good reason of your distros existence and that is not a easy as it sounds. See later.)
• Create a website!
• Make sure that every page of the website contains the words: free and community (at least 10 times)
• Community, community, community: explain in large how wonderful your distros community is.
• The features page of the website: copy and paste the old "how wonderful is that linux has everything from office programs to games" text from a different distro page. If you think that's now enough then add something again about the community or freedom.
• Show exciting statistics about the huge number of packages available in your repositories and hide the fact that in 2011 installing something which is not in the repo is still a pain and you have no idea how (don't want) to change this.
  
• If you think the default desktop of your distro sucks or have no idea what the default DE of your distro should be then do create a lot of spins and add a download option for every DE spin. Make sure you explain somewhere the importance of choice. To help confused users add a complicated wiki article about different installation medias and wonder why Linux is under 1% on the desktop.
  
• Make sure every visitor of your site understands that your distribution includes LibreOffice and NOT OpenOffice but don't explain why this is important (because is not).
• Invite people to do things. Say that everybody can participate and hide the fact that you have no idea what is the direction or plan. Here you can explain again why the community is so important. When explaining the lack of strategy or direction you can point that no commercial management can dictate the path your distro will take.
  
• Create a backports repository for your current "stable" version. Create a nonfree repository too. And create a testing repository. And create a contrib repository. Say again something about the greatness of choice, but add that you have no idea what will happen if somebody mixes these repositories too much.
  

And we are here: http://www.mageia.org. They are following this little guide with lots of enthusiasm. Mageia 1 is a new (old) distribution and is based (basically they have copied everything) from Mandriva Linux. Mandriva is bad now because they are controlled by an evil corporation. And this corporation is not a community, which is bad.

They did a good job at explaining why this distro is needed: Mageia is about people. So it is a club or something. They even states that Mageia have People not Users...

Ah, and they are looking for advocates too!

A list of truly evil systems

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

I think this is around 99% of the whole freetard community. Nice.

BTW, they call them all GNU/Linux. I understand they are pissed, because everybody forgets GNU, but still. Red Hat Enterprise GNU/Linux?

LibreOffice 3.4.0 final is out. Don't use it!

http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/06/03/the-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-3-4-0/

These guys are so honest. They warn you to not use their crap if you actually want to do some real work. Because version x.x.1 will be the real final-final. What's wrong with the alpha-beta-rc versions? Ah, you want to be in front of openoffice! They have only v3.4.0 beta of the same crap. You are the winner! I propose version 9.0.0 for the next version. You will be in front of openffice AND Windows 8. That will be awesome.

Your mouse is not broken! This is Gnome 3!

Good news! Your mouse is not broken! You just don't need to right click! And you don't need icons, taskbar, bullshits. They just distract attention! You don't even need a shut down menu. Let's hope they will not remove left click in Gnome 4.

Hello KDE! Please fix this bug or do something else.

Sometimes I am forced to use Linux... This happened today: the system is Kubuntu 11.04, Vmware. I REALLY tried to like KDE but this bug I will present, simply renders the whole KDE to an unusable piece of shit: KDE CANNOT REMEMBER THE FU*ING SCREEN RESOLUTION!
Every damn time I restart the virtual machine (and I have to restart a lot of time) the SCREEN RESOLUTION RESETS TO 800X600. And all the fu*ing plasmoids are in a different place. And this is not something new, this a fu*ing old bug.

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Look: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1637869

Of course not even a single ubuntu fanboy tried to answer. At least something totally unrelated, as usual.

There is a weird, add xrandr there and there, workaround, but you know: go to hell!

I don't know, the KDE devs are not using monitors? Or 800x600 is ok, anyway nobody needs better than this?

Zorin OS Review - I wanna be Windows 7 - Part 3

...still trying to understand

Zorin OS Review - I wanna be Windows 7 - Part 2

We are back to Zorin OS and after the installation I have mixed fellings. Nothing wrong has happened but I had a constant "just don't click on the wrong place" feeling (wrong click - wrong time). I am trying to see Zorin from the point of view of a inexperienced user. And until now Zorin OS failed. The Grub boot screen with the kernel version is fine for Gentoo or for people from other parallel universes but here just does not fits with the "ultimate desktop experience" promise.

First boot! Wow!



Let's summarize my first impression: 90% of this desktop looks good. The remaining 10% is the problem, that big fat Computer icon on the top-left. Why did you made it so big? Without that the desktop it simple and elegant. Our friend, the red button is still here, this time on the right-bottom, but from the design point of view is not a problem. This is Gnome 2 with a Windows 7 style theme. There is nothing wrong with that but the big computer icon leads you to another disappointment. As a Windows user you may think that using the computer icon you can access your computer content, your desktop settings, your device settings and other administration tools. Especially with such a big computer icon! There is no such thing here. By clicking on the Computer you will get this:



Who is the target audience of Zorin OS? Windows users? "lost+found"? What is the reason of putting the root in the users face? What is the purpose of this icon? It is like putting a big System32 icon on the Windows 7 desktop. Maybe with a right click we will have more luck. In Windows 7 we have the "Properties" and "Manage Computer" menus from where almost everything is accessible.



Victory! We have Properties but we also have "Restore Icon's Original Size" which is very confusing again, because gives you an impression that the size is not the original, but in the same time this your first boot, so somewhere somebody must have made the modification, which sounds strange. I did not tried the Compress and "Send To" menus and I cannot image the consequences of clicking on one of these. Back to the original plan, let's access our computer's properties. Click Properties:



Holy crap! The wonderful world of Linux! I think this is where the new user starts looking for his Windows 7 CD. Why did you put this useless, ugly, big Computer icon here? Anyway you have the Home icon under which is almost the same but at least opens the user's folders, where is possible to save or copy something. Contents: 3 items, totalling 0 bytes. At least make it normal size. Yes, I know the answer: Linux is not Windows. But in this case Linux wants to be Windows, and some logic is needed anyway.

If Windows 7 then Start Menu. Zorin OS gives it's best in this area:



Yes, basically they wanted to copy the Windows 7 user interface, and the idea itself is not so bad but the execution is. The Zorin start menu does not have all the features of Windows 7, it feels different but the biggest problem is the bug which represents the quality of Zorin OS and in some ways the current state of the Linux desktop. The bug: after clicking a few times on the Zorin start menu, it starts to show the icon list twice or more. On the screenshot you can clearly see this. This bug appears every time I boot, this was a long test, now the system is up-to-date but the bug is still present. Honestly: this is unacceptable!

Meanwhile I wanted to change the screen resolution, so I have searched for "screen" and "resolution" in the start menu:



Nothing! You must use the word "monitor" and nothing else brings you good results. Again: Zorin OS failed.

At this point I have updated the system. Another gift from Zorin: a cryptic error message. That means that while the Zorin OS team is remastering the upstream Ubuntu, in the same time they are creating new bugs because I have never seen this error on Ubuntu. Bad, because maybe this is the single case where the Linux desktop is better than Windows, the easy way you update the whole system. Zorin cannot handle this correctly.



Oh, and did somebody noticed the "Welcome to Ubuntu" text? Very nice and integrated.

...to be continued