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Distribution Review: Polish Linux by John Looney

PLD is a Polish Linux Distribution, put together by some people very big into getting the most out of RPM. If you have a look at RPMfind.net, there are RPMs for every package you could think of...for PLD. Mandrake and RedHat trail a distance back.

Also, they are very active on the RPM mailing lists, helping people out, and suggesting new and interesting ways to make RPM work properly. Yesterday, as I was musing over the "poldek" console-based RPM getter tool, I noticed massive filesystem corruption on my / partition. Bad buzz. I rebooted, and the filesystem wasn't even mountable.

Thankfully, /usr/local (which contains my wolf files) and /home are other partitions, so I didn't have a problem going for a reinstall. And PLD was chosen.

There are ISOs available, but the lads are going for a 1.0 release in the next few weeks, so bug-fixes are getting crammed in from everywhere, and as the ISOs are three weeks old or so, I decided to go for the "download a floppy, and install from an FTP site" option instead. Being a pre-1.0 distro, I was expecting bugs. Curiously - I only found one. I did find plenty of "features" that annoyed me.

First off, it's got a menu system slightly reminiscent of slackware/RedHat 2.0 - you can do whatever bits you want. I decided to install onto an unused partition and stick it all into that partition.

However, as soon as I clicked on the "manually partition disk" button, it quit out of the nice text wizard, and started downloading packages. My brain registered this as "Oh God no! My Wolfenstein!!!" and hit ctrl-C as often and as quickly as possible.

Despite my wrath and fury, it just returned to the menu system. I sorta expected a reboot, or a corrupted filesystem, or something nasty. Examining the messages on-screen, showed that it was just downloading IDE modules and parted (yes, the installer will let the brave resize existing ext2 partitions). So, I clicked on "manually partition" again, set everything up, and went onto "package management". I chose the "gnome workstation" install, and added a few packages. For some reason, it included ircd in those packages...strange, but I did click "network servers" or some such.

While installing, it shows the packages being downloaded & installed. That's all. No progress, no idea how many there are left etc. No idea how much space it'll take up, or how much it'll download. So, I just watched the screen, thinking of better days, like when I could play Wolfenstein on my machine. Yesterday, I think it was.

Anyway. I noticed (with approval) that instead of one package, apache was actually thirty packages. Impressive. An RPM for each module. And it's like that for most applications.

After the install, it detected that I had USB devices, and set uchi as the default driver. The installer didn't say "ooh, you have a mouse, and keyboard" etc. But, on boot, PLD seemed to detect them. X wasn't mentioned at install time. At all. No X configurator or anything. It just installed all the Xfree drivers for all of them. Bah. There was also no mention of NIS during the install, or any offer to setup network drives. There was no mention of a keymap or a console font that I'd like - it gave me US, with a lat2 font (so euros and pound symbols couldn't be viewed, never mind typed). Finally it installed a bootloader (ye olde lilo), and rebooted.

I was presented with the most colourful text boot process that I'd ever seen. Nice. And very slow. Remember the pretty [PASSED] and [FAILED] stuff that RedHat cogged from HP-UX ? Well, they've got that, only you get presented with [BUSY] (in purple) then [DONE] (in green) or [FAIL] (in red).

I'm convinced there are little delays between BUSY and DONE. It takes too long....though they say "it's faster". It isn't. Didn't time a boot though.

So, after the first boot....

The Apache it configured had a mod_auth_samba installed, though on startup, apache moaned that mod_auth_samba was missing a "dbm_fetch()" function. Could be that it was linked off an incorrect version of glibc or some such.

I was really annoyed that they didn't install a web browser - graphical or text - by default, on a "gnome workstation" install. I suppose, if you are installing over the net, you want the minimal. But, I would dispute the fact that an IRC daemon would be "minimal". Despite claiming FHS 2.x compliance, they don't have the "service" command, which I thought was part of it. Must check that up.

It took a while to get X going - it kept hard-hanging the machine. I think it was because I was using nVidia's custom driver, and each time that X started, and quit (I have a USB mouse, and no idea how to get it to modprobe mousedev and input when it's accessed), it hard-hung the box.

Once X was working, and I had everything back to normal, it was time to install the packages I'd forgotten I use every few moments, like snmpd, Galeon etc.

The most serious problem I had was Zmailer. It's installed instead of sendmail, and not configured. So, you can start up mutt or whatever, and start mailing people. And all that'll happen is that the mails are thrown away, and you get error messages. I've no idea what they mean, and couldn't configure zmailer. I spent longer trying to figure it out than wiping it, installing sendmail, and putting "DS mail.antefacto.com" into /etc/mail/sendmail.cf (yeah, I'm supposed to use m4 files, but I couldn't be arsed).

"poldek" is the package management tool. It kicks severe ass. Usually package management tools annoy me. Red-Carpet, for all it niceness, doesn't have a nice way of saying "PHP is my custom one. Never ask me to upgrade it". And every other one has something similar. I've not found anything wrong with poldek yet. For instance, to install Gimp, and it's "aa" plugin:

poldek> ls *gimp*
gimp-1.2.3-5
gimp-aa-1.2.3-5
gimp-data-extras-1.2.0-4
gimp-devel-1.2.3-5
gimp-manual-1.0.0-6
gimp-mpeg-1.2.2a-1
gimp-pats-tiger-1.0-5
gimp-print-4.2.0-4
gimp-print-cups-4.2.0-4
gimp-print-devel-4.2.0-4
gimp-print-lib-4.2.0-4
gimp-print-samples-4.2.0-4
gimp-print-static-4.2.0-4
gimp-static-1.2.3-5
xpcd-gimp-2.08-4
poldek> install gimp-aa-1.2.3-5 
Processing dependencies...
gimp-aa-1.2.3-5 marks gimp-1.2.3-5 (cap gimp = 1.2.3)
  gimp-1.2.3-5 marks perl-gtk-0.7008-10 (cap perl(Gtk))
    perl-gtk-0.7008-10 marks perl-XML-Parser-2.30-4 (cap perl(XML::Parser))
    perl-gtk-0.7008-10 marks perl-XML-Writer-0.4-6 (cap perl(XML::Writer))
  gimp-1.2.3-5 marks perl-PDL-2.2.1-8 (cap perl(PDL))
    perl-PDL-2.2.1-8 marks fftw-2.1.3-8 (cap fftw)
gimp-aa-1.2.3-5 marks aalib-1.4rc5-4 (cap aalib)
There are 8 packages to install (7 marked by dependencies):
I gimp-aa-1.2.3-5
D aalib-1.4rc5-4, fftw-2.1.3-8, gimp-1.2.3-5, perl-PDL-2.2.1-8, perl-XML-Parser-2.30-4, perl-XML-Writer-0.4-6, 
D perl-gtk-0.7008-10
Retrieving ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ra/PLD/i686/PLD/RPMS/gimp-aa-1.2.3-5.i686.rpm...
.................................................. 100.0% [19.6K]
Retrieving ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ra/PLD/i686/PLD/RPMS/gimp-1.2.3-5.i686.rpm...
.................................................. 100.0% [7.1M]
Retrieving ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ra/PLD/i686/PLD/RPMS/perl-gtk-0.7008-10.i686.rpm...
.................................................. 100.0% [384.2K]
Retrieving ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ra/PLD/i686/PLD/RPMS/perl-XML-Writer-0.4-6.noarch.rpm...
.................................................. 100.0% [20.3K]               
Retrieving ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ra/PLD/i686/PLD/RPMS/perl-PDL-2.2.1-8.i686.rpm...
.................................................. 100.0% [933.5K]
Retrieving ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ra/PLD/i686/PLD/RPMS/fftw-2.1.3-8.i686.rpm...
.................................................. 100.0% [137.6K]
Retrieving ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ra/PLD/i686/PLD/RPMS/perl-XML-Parser-2.30-4.i686.rpm...
.................................................. 100.0% [232.4K]
Retrieving ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ra/PLD/i686/PLD/RPMS/aalib-1.4rc5-4.i686.rpm...
.................................................. 100.0% [47.7K]
Executing rpm --upgrade -vh --root / --noorder...
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:aalib                  ########################################### [ 12%]
   2:perl-XML-Parser        ########################################### [ 25%]
   3:fftw                   ########################################### [ 37%]
   4:perl-PDL               ########################################### [ 50%]
   5:perl-XML-Writer        ########################################### [ 62%]
   6:perl-gtk               ########################################### [ 75%]
   7:gimp                   ########################################### [ 87%]
   8:gimp-aa                ########################################### [100%]

Now, pop over to www.pld.org.pl, and see what they can do for you. It's not for beginners, but I like it. Anyway. Back to work.

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