Any reliable Linux?

[minthaka]

Please don't take this as a revolt, but I'm really looking for a distribution which would:
1. Have a stable K3b version
2. The latest version of Inkscape, OpenOffice, Gimp etc.

I'm currently using Xubuntu 9.04, and I don't know why but non of the DVD burners are working correctly, although I have a working DVD writer.
I've thrown away Mandriva 2009.1 because of utter instability.

The other topic is: is there a possibility to give up such a sectarian way of naming convention present in the different distributions? I mean, is it possible to have an unified naming standard for the removable devices, like /dev/dvd for dvd-rom, /dev/cdrom for cdroms etc. I found very different kind of namings and that makes the writing of programs almost impossible. I've seen /dev/sr1 for dvd, and also /dev/hdb for the same. Does it has any sense?

Could they just slow down the development process to have some stable stuff?

[Roxoff]

Please don't take this as a revolt, but I'm really looking for a distribution which would:
1. Have a stable K3b version
2. The latest version of Inkscape, OpenOffice, Gimp etc.

You probably want to use one of the server versions, one where stability not newness is the guiding principle when selecting packages, e.g. CentOS, Debian server, Ubuntu server, SLED or similar. Isn't having the latest versions of Inkscape etc. counter productive here? I'd have thought you'd have gone for the most stable rather than the most up to date.

Could they just slow down the development process to have some stable stuff?

Why? Microsoft never do that, and they're a big software company.

[reed9]

What do you mean by stable k3b? The KDE3 version is quite stable. As far as I know, the port to KDE4 is not complete, so there is no stable version.

The only distro that maintains the latest stable releases of OpenOffice, et al., in their official repositories, is Arch and probably Sidux, because they are rolling release. Otherwise, you can install the latest of all these programs, but you'll either need to compile from source or find a ppa that has what you want. Well, GIMP, which is updated infrequently, appears to be current in Jaunty. Not sure about inkscape. Openoffice is not current in Jaunty. But with any distro (unless it's rolling release), software released too close to or after the distro release will by necessity not be included.

Could they just slow down the development process to have some stable stuff?

Yes, but then you wouldn't have access to the latest version of openoffice, inkscape, and GIMP. You can't really have both the latest and greatest in software and utter stability. If stability is your thing, try Debian Stable, or Scientific Linux, or Slackware.

[daark.child]

The other topic is: is there a possibility to give up such a sectarian way of naming convention present in the different distributions? I mean, is it possible to have an unified naming standard for the removable devices, like /dev/dvd for dvd-rom, /dev/cdrom for cdroms etc. I found very different kind of namings and that makes the writing of programs almost impossible. I've seen /dev/sr1 for dvd, and also /dev/hdb for the same. Does it has any sense?

The standard you talk about already exists. On most distros, /dev/dvd, /dev/cdrw, /dev/dvdrw, /dev/cdrom etc, already point to your optical devices. They are symbolic links to the actual devices which would be /dev/hdX, /dev/srX etc depending on your hardware.

[minthaka]

For some reason both k3b and GnomeBaker are producing weird errors. Usually the process goes until the end, but then during the session's closing the process just stops with an error message. The version used by Jaunty is still KDE3 i guess, yet probably some libraries from KDE4 are causing bugs. The Linux today is neither KDE3 nor KDE4 and that's a critical state of the things.

[minthaka]

The standard you talk about already exists. On most distros, /dev/dvd, /dev/cdrw, /dev/dvdrw, /dev/cdrom etc, already point to your optical devices. They are symbolic links to the actual devices which would be /dev/hdX, /dev/srX etc depending on your hardware.

But why not only /dev/hdX or /dev/srX? What makes the difference, and what's the sense of it, if any? Wouldn't was it easier to have just one?

[reed9]

What's the error message?

From what little I know about device naming, it has to do with the type of connection the cd/dvd-rom has. The IDE/ATAPI connection will be labeled /dev/hd(x), and a scsi connection will be labeled /dev/scd(x) or /dev/sr(x). So /dev/scd0 would be the first scsi cdrom device. I have no idea why the different names between /dev/scd0 and /dev/sr0. I imagine there's some old convention behind it and something to do with how udev populates the /dev/ directory.

But there's nothing to stop you from changing the names if you like, using the mknod command.

[daark.child]

But why not only /dev/hdX or /dev/srX? What makes the difference, and what's the sense of it, if any? Wouldn't was it easier to have just one?

reed9 has explained it very well. ATAPTI/IDE cd/dvd devices traditionally use /dev/hdX, SCSI cd/dvd devices /dev/scdX and SATA cd/dvd devices use /dev/srX. I think there is a move to unify some of the code that handles various storage devices, so in newer kernels you get device names like /dev/sdaX, /dev/scd0 etc for ATAPI/IDE and SATA hard drives and cd/dvd devices.

[D-cat]

I'd reiterate that this is more of a Window Manager platform thing than a distribution thing. I run SuSE 11.1 under KDE 3.5 and have zero stability issues; everything burns normally. The default KDE now is 4.1 (though exists 4.3 now), but it's still in development and causes headaches for people in all distributions. If you stick with 3.5 in whatever distribution you choose, I think you'll find things running the way they should, K3B included.

As others had mentioned, the standard naming convention does exist as well, though this does appear to be a distro thing. Most of the common/popular distros make the symlinks in /dev so you can access your optical device as /dev/cdrom or /dev/dvd or whatever it is identified as.

There's also a push in latest kernels that all hard drives are /dev/sd** with no regard to their interface in order to simplify scripts and make things easier to handle over all. Because of the flexibility (for lack of a better word) of modern BIOS drive ordering (thanks to SATA and USB boot options), there's also a push to mounting devices by their disk ID or UUID instead of their device letter, that way you don't foul up your mount points when you add a new drive to the system or use a different boot order.

The world of simplifying the use of Linux is making progress.