The Rev for Linux "Seal of Approval" doesn't exist. I'd like to suggest
it, but perhaps under the more practical heading of "Currently approved
Linux distros" for use with the Runtime Revolution programming system.
There are hundreds of Linux distros out there, all at different stages
of development, and with slightly different characteristics -
particularly in the details of the file system. In my view, such a
situation is perfectly natural and normal, and it is just a question of
time before commonly-agreed standards and greater uniformity arise. We
all remember what cars looked like a few years ago. You could, for
example, tell an American car a mile off, and nobody could ever mistake
it for an English Minicar, a German Beetle, or one of those French cars
that looked like a baby's inverted pram. Nowadays, because of a natural
process of optimization and other factors, it is very difficult at first
glance to identify whether a car is American, Japanese, European, or
whatever.
From a programming point of view, the current situation is very
intimidating, not only for Runtime Revolution, but also for anyone
hoping to program in Rev for Linux generally rather than for a
particular distro. However, the first great hurdle has been overcome by
Rev: the IDE runs successfully on just about any distro you can find,
whether installed on the HD, or running on a ramdisk using a Live CD.
Heck, it runs beautifully even on Puppy Linux! However, what we need to
evaluate as Rev programmers is whether any particular distro is worth
supporting at all in its current state, and whether the peculiar
characteristics of its file system are worth catering for in terms of
time and energy devoted to our programming efforts.
A great way of evaluating a considerable number of the distros out there
is to adopt the hobby of collecting live CDs. You just pop them in your
drive, boot up your machine, and Bob's your uncle. Of course, if you
have some kind of Linux already installed on your HD then this is a
help, since a lot of Linuxes running in RAM make use of the HD's swap
partition if one is available, but this is normally not essential, and I
have never tried a live CD and had any kind of subsequent trouble with
my Windows as a result of accidental interference with the HD. For
anyone interested in trying out Linux together with Rev, there is a
great list of live CDs at http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
which can be downloaded and burned.
So what criteria should be used for selecting "Rev approved" Linux
distros? I suggest the following stringent list:
1. The distro runs or installs automatically (i.e. can be done by a
layman) and configures all normal hardware, even on old machines,
including Windows network printers, floppy diskette drives, etc.
2. The distro plays all normal files (AVI, MP3, BMP, PDF, DOC, - i.e.
common Linux AND Windows files) automatically "out of the box". By this,
when the file is clicked or double clicked, it is already associated
with an appropriate utility to play or show it, and the program doesn't
break or lack codecs, etc.
3. The Rev IDE (and consequently Rev standalones!) runs OK and looks good.
Applying the above at this very moment, out of the 300 or so distros
available, no more than a few are left. (I don't know the number
exactly, because I haven't tried out anything like all the distros.
Perhaps you can help with this evaluation.) And there are some
surprises. I have always been a great fan of Ubuntu, and apart from its
wonderful social philosophy, I think it shows the greatest potential of
all the Linuxes, but at the moment it fails dismally over criterion #2.
Red Hat Linux, one of the original most famous distros, supported
indirectly by Rev in that they give special attention to "RPM"
packaging, is such a big flop over criteria #1 and #2 that you might not
even get as far as evaluating #3. Their new Fedora Linux - which looks
like a copy of Ubuntu, except that it uses their own RPM packaging - is
not much better, at least not on my old Pentium II with a very simple
hardware configuration. In my limited experience, the only distros which
roughly fulfill criteria #1-3 above are:
a) Puppy Linux (!!)
b) Linspire
c) Kurumin (Brazilian Linux, an improved Knoppix)
The case of MEPIS is rather tragic. It fulfills criteria #1-3 very well,
but unlike the other Linuxes, Rev looks really crappy in it. The Rev
font set (which appears to be independent of the system fonts chosen for
the OS) is all small and spidery.
Of course, other Linux users/experimenters are likely to disagree with
my own subjective selection, and naturally the exact files for testing
under criterion #2 is a thing which needs to be agreed upon. At this
very moment I would have the tendency to suggest the following in
relation to Rev's "seal of approval":
I. Since Ubuntu is one of the most stable and popular distros out there,
and it has a magnificent philosophy, I would "hang fire" on a Rev seal
of approval until such time as criterion #2 is adequately fulfilled,
hopefully in the next release ("Edgy Eft", due in 6 months or so).
II. Try to define a SINGLE alternative distro for a Rev seal of approval.
I therefore ask for your help in telling me what the best Linux distro
is in your experience (approximating criteria #1-3 as defined),
preferably one which can be tried from a live CD, and also what you
think the most crucial file types for out-of-the-box playing are under
criterion #2.
Thereafter, at least theoretically, attention could be better focused on
the peculiarities of the file systems involved and what recommendations
could be made in obtaining fundamental system info through Rev (such as
how to implement the specialFolder Path functions, where to find the
fstab file - if indeed there is one - giving info about the floppy
disk's existence, and so on).
Regards to all,
Bob
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
[email protected]
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
