Another Mandriva fork!

[NickStone]

In last months edition of Linux Format magazine they gave away a copy of the latest version of ROSA Linux which is a fork of Mandriva. On the face of it, it looks exactly like Mandriva 2011 but with a few "improvements". I have not yet installed it and fully tested it. I have only run it from the DVD that came with the magazine.

From first impressions of what I have seen so far, it looks like a good distribution and I like what they (or Mandriva) did with the KDE desktop.

You'll find the website at http://www.rosalab.com/

also I had found a good review of it here http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2012/05...ng-a-firs.html

By the way, I am not employed by ROSA or have anything to do with this distribution.

[GreyGeek]

They chose an excellent distro to fork! I noticed that the developers are principally Russian. As a group the Russians are VERY good coders. I also see that they are offering 5 year support plans. That seems to be one Ubuntu trend that many distros are copying.

[dequire]

There's also a lot of innovations in that distro - Rosa Simple Launcher, Stack Folder, and Rosa Media Player to name a few.

[GreyGeek]

And, it looks like other distros are cherry-picking various apps in that distro. I installed the ROSA media player from this source:
http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/package...a-media-player

[oshunluvr]

I was a Mandrake/Mandriva user in the past. DiskDrake (the partition management tool) was the best I had ever seen at the time. It had a feature where you could move an in-use directory to another partition (reboot required of course) and it would automatically and correctly update fstab. Made moving /home easy as pie.

[GreyGeek]

I began using SuSE with 5.3 in September of 1998 and stayed with it for FIVE years, until Novell bought it in Nov of 2003. Novell had no clue what the GPL meant and on the SuSE Usenet posted a msg saying that it was no longer legal for SuSE users to make "archival" copies of SuSE without written permission from Novell. The msg included the email address and phone number of the lady that one was supposed to call. I pointed out to them that with that requirement they violated the GPL on which SuSE was based (expect for YAST, which was proprietary) and according to the GPL they could no longer disseminate SuSE. What a firestorm it created.

I could smell where things were going and decided to look for another distro. I found Mandrake, which changed to Mandriva. I stayed with it a couple years, until a reported bug in 10, IIRC, burned out optical drives. I tried Knoppix, LibraNet, back to Mandriva, then Kannotex and a couple others. I went back to Mandria and was waiting for a video bug to be fixed in the fall of 2008 when I heard about Kubuntu. I tried it in Feb of 2009, on a lark, and my video 3D worked perfectly. I've stayed with it every since. In one more year I will match my SuSE time. After that I will have been with Kubuntu longer than any other distro. Such is its progress and power I can't see moving to another one.

[dequire]

Honestly if I were to replace Kubuntu anytime in the near future (it won't happen) I'd install Rosa Linux. I like a lot of what those guys are doing. But then again, the benefits we'll be seeing in Kubuntu via all the full-time dev's now working on Kubuntu (via the generosity of Blue Systems) is exciting to be a part of, even if it's just from a user's POV. Yes, I'm actually excited about the whole wonderful mess of Canonical, Blue Systems, KDE.eV, and Digia. Exciting times, indeed!

Edit: so much so that I added my own quote to my signature!

[vinnywright]

Humm that rosa-medea-player looks good .......in fact it's becoming one of my favorites right now (installed from GG's link) it respects my media keys (F5-F8,back,play-pause,stop,ford) only XBMC dose that as well of all my players.

think I'll put ROSA on the testing partition for a wile

VINNY