OpenLab: The other African distribution

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

October 27, 2005

Living in Ubuntu's shadow

Ubuntu is the Linux media darling of the moment. Mark Shuttleworth, dot-com millionaire, space tourist, philanthropist and Open Source evangelist seems to have hit the right keys in terms of promoting Ubuntu. At Distrowatch.com, Ubuntu has been the most popular distribution for 12 months, an eternity in this business. It gets 1000 hits more daily than any other. On the other hand, OpenLab, South Africa's other representative in the Linux distribution list, ranks in at 64 in this past month's polling. Is the difference in rank just a result of Ubuntu's professional PR? Not entirely. Ubuntu is professional in all ways. With a big budget provided by Shuttleworth, it is an attempt to bring Debian, the most carefully crafted Linux distribution, to the masses. And it has been extremely successful. And what about bringing the second most carefully crafted and venerable Linux distribution, Slackware, to the masses? You have a whole-hearted attempt to do this with OpenLab, sans the astronaut's deep pockets.

Installing OpenLab

OpenLab 4 works as a live CD distribution. That is, you're able to run it from just the CD drive if you want. My aim, however, was to install it as I would any other distribution and check out its suitability as a desktop system. So let's walk through the installation of this Slackware-based distribution from the dark continent.

Some articles I had read about OpenLab mentioned that it would run fairly well on older hardware, so I trotted out my trusty old AMD K6 II and gave it a try. When you plunk the CD in the drive and boot, start up is really fast, so it would seem it doesn't disagree with my aging hardware. Also, I have often had problems with other distributions with this machine. It has something to do with the video card and frame buffer problems, but with OpenLab, I didn't have any problems. What I did miss, at this point, was the possibility to get support for my Spanish keyboard layout. Typing 'lang=es' at the boot prompt usually does the trick, but this did nothing here. Actually, this is no big deal, since OpenLab boots into KDE and you can change this very easily by just clicking on the US flag in the taskbar.

Before I installed, I logged in as the demo user and took a brief look around. OpenLab 4 features the latest KDE desktop, version 3.4. Despite KDE's reputation for being resource-hungry, it didn't seem to challenge the old machine too much. Not that it flew, but I didn't have one of those situations where you open up an application and have to go out for a coffee while it loads.

Let's go back to the business at hand, which is installation. To install OpenLab, you need to log in as the 'root' user. No password is required. The installation process takes place in a scaled-down KDE desktop, which I found rather interesting.

First, you'll need to select a language from among Africaans, Dutch, English, French and Brazilian Portuguese.

Then you'll be presented with a menu where you can choose to install to the hard drive or rescue an existing installation.

Next, you'll see the instructions for partitioning:

This fires up a great looking partitioning tool called GParted. GParted is a Gnome based application, so all is not KDE based.

Those who have read my other distribution reviews know that I'm partial to a minimum of two partitions. One for the root partition and the other for /home. This is what I've done here. After you've partitioned the hard drive the way you like, you need to establish which partitions the root (/) and /home file systems will reside on, if you've partitioned as I have. After choosing the root (/) partition, /home was automagically chosen for me by the installer, which was a nice touch.

I know partitioning makes people a bit nervous, particularly if you're running another operating system on the machine, but it was pretty easy to get to this point. Next, we need to select our time zone. First, there is a general list from which I selected 'Europe'. Then, in the second screen, I selected 'Madrid', the closest capital to where I am. At this point, it will start copying packages from the CD. After it's finished installing the packages, it will install the bootloader in the master boot record of the hard drive. There is, surprisingly, no other choice, as there are in other distributions. I never install it anywhere else, but those with good reasons for installing it elsewhere might not like this detail. Next, you'll need to choose a root password and create your personal user account. Between these administrative tasks, you'll see this whirly-gig spinning around:

Working with OpenLab

If you log in as a normal user, you'll boot into the visually pleasing KDE 3.4. Before we actually start using OpenLab for normal work, there are still a few setup tasks that we need to complete.

If you go to the system menu, you'll find a link to the OpenLab Administration tool or OLAD for short.

With OLAD, you'll be able to perform a number of administration tasks, like setting up your network.

To do this, click on the 'network' tab and the the 'edit network' button and enter the machine's IP address and the netmask. After pushing 'global settings', you can add information about your gateway, hostname and my ISP's nameservers. As you can see below, after doing that, I was then connected to the outside world.

A good foundation with room for improvement

Since OpenLab is based on Slackware, it comes with a tool known as gslapt, for installing and updating software. It is a front-end to slapt, Slackware's version of Debian's apt tool. When I started installing some packages that I wanted on the system, I began to see some of OpenLab's rough edges.

Emacs is a must with me on whatever system I work on. Much to my chagrin, gslapt wouldn't let me install emacs. In fact, in the list, there was more than one version of emacs. Since these lists were created by the slapt sources that came with the distribution, I figured that installing new packages would just work right out of the box. Unfortunately, it didn't. The same thing happened to me with XMMS, the music player application. When I tried to install it, one of the versions of XMMS in the list wouldn't install, but the other one did. However, when I tried to run the application, it wouldn't work. It complained about the wrong version of glibc. This means that slapt wasn't capable of determining its dependencies correctly. When I looked for the Opera browser in the list, it was there, but the version was outdated. After installing from source, I noticed that the fonts were ugly, so it wasn't playing nicely with the xfont system for some reason. This hasn't happened with Opera on any machine I've tried for a couple of versions now.

I had some other problems, like the 'man' pages not working. Whenever I typed 'man command' I got an error message. I could read the man pages in Konqueror, however, by typing man://command. Something was obviously misconfigured in the system that outputs the text-mode man pages.

Despite the problems with package installation, OpenLab is a stable and user-friendly system. I was running it most of the weekend, using it constantly and I didn't have any glitches. And it is also surprisingly fast, even on my challenged hardware. To use a comparison, I had heard about MEPISLight, a Debian-based distribution designed for older hardware. This version of MEPIS is, I'm sure, more widely used than OpenLab and definitely enjoys more name recognition. And like OpenLab, it purports to use a less resource intensive version of KDE. I gave MEPISLight a try and I must tell you that OpenLab is considerably faster and seems more stable than MEPIS. If I had to choose between the two, I'd stay with OpenLab. If they could make the package management a bit easier, I think it would be the ideal distribution for an educational environment, particularly.

As I pointed out in the beginning, OpenLab has the potential to do for Slackware what Ubuntu did for Debian. I encourage A.J. Venter and his team of developers to keep working. I see a lot of potential in this other distribution from Africa. OpenLab is a diamond in the rough from the land known for its abundance of these brilliant and valuable stones. It won't take too much work to see it shine.

You can find more information about OpenLab at the distribution's website

Michael J. Jordan is the webmaster of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**Linux.org