Like I said last Friday, UHU-Linux 2.0 was released as the first version (the fourth in its history, after 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2) to support the English language as an extra to Hungarian.

Knowing that Frugalware is an interesting distro, I was deadly curious to see how can keep up this "another Hungarian distro" with the other English language distros, now that it got bilingual.

It's worth noting that Hungary is a small country, and UHU-Linux was exclusively developed by Magyars (as it only featured this language till now), while Frugalware has an international team of developers.

Also of note, UHU-Linux 2.0 Test 2 was released in July, so they had quite some time for testing and bug-fixing. Some people liked even Test 2 — let's see now what we got in the final release.

The FTP and the torrent were unavailable when I tried to download the CD version, so I got it through rsync. The CD version only has GNOME and it features 882 packages, while the DVD edition has KDE and a lot more — but even with the CD, you can get everything from the online repositories: Synaptic listed 2177 packages.

Let's proceed to the installation now.

UHU-Linux 2.0 has an extremely nice graphical installer, much nicer than pretty much everything I've seen so far (but I usually install with text/ncurses installs). Much more ergonomic than Anaconda, and blazingly fast!


After the first greeting, you will have the default boot screen in Hungarian. Press F9 and change the language to English.



For the time being, the license is in Hungarian-only. I can only suppose it's a standard disclaimer of not assuming any responsibility if UHU-Linux will break your system or kill your cat, and so on. The rest is just Linux, which is under GPL.



The partitioning screen lets you choose between using the whole disk or using an existing older partition (my case). When you choose the second, you can actually customize your disk using the "Partition manipulator" button, which will fire cfdisk — the only non-GUI part of the whole setup, but most people will not need it.

I will make an intermezzo here to note that UHU-Linux 2.0 tries to educate users (or to accomodate Linux veterans) by suggesting you to have your system split over multiple partitions. The list of suggested mounting points is well thought:


NOTE: ReiserFS and XFS are supported in the installer.

Now that you have set up your partitions, you'll go to the selection of packages. Once again, this is for the CD, not the DVD edition, so the selection is smaller.

Please note the cute Search feature, something that's not trivial!



A small annoyance here: the three selections ("Base text mode system", "Recommended packages" and "Full installation") have some bug under the hood: changing several times in a row your option may lead in the wrong selection to be done. The full install from the CD says "2.4 GB", and this is also the recommended one, while the basic one printed "630 MB" in my case. After having searched for some packages though, I managed to click on OK and get an assessment of "269 MB" of packages to install, as you can see in the following screen!

This is not the actual install that I performed. I opted for a full install, and it took exactly 6 minutes! (No hidden times, like the post-boot configuration in Ubuntu. No need for that.)


After the installation of GRUB, a few more screens are shown to you, but I will skip them here. The last steps of the installation are:

• Setting Administrator's (root) password.
• Adding Users.
• Configuring the Graphical Interface. Here you can manually select the videocard driver from a list (should it be wrongly detected), and you can set your default resolution, refresh rate and color depth (and you can test them!) — something many installers won't let you do!

It's now time to boot into the installed system.

Based on Linux kernel 2.6.17.6-10, UHU-Linux 2.0 will boot using an 80x25 text screen before going into X.

The provided kernel failed to accept vga=791 or vga=793 as a kernel boot parameter, so I had to stick with 80x25.

It will normally autologin as the regular user you have added during the install.



UHU's GNOME desktop is quite nice and well-configured, I'd say:


Note the GNOME NetworkManager at the bottom, near the CPU and Network meters.

I wouldn't care it's only GNOME 2.14.2 and not 2.16. The improvements in GNOME 2.16 are not that dramatic, and the only version of GNOME you should probably avoid is 2.12.

You will noticed that all the other partitions (Linux, Windows, whatever) will be mounted and shown on the desktop. This is handled by handled by HAL and FUSE, and they're mounted as R/O under /media (not under /mnt)*.

Should you want to have them R/W, add a corresponding stanza in your /etc/fstab, e.g.:(You should have the mounting directory created.)

I wanted now to go online using an ADSL connection (PPPoE).

The network has a special treatment in UHU-Linux 2.0. First of all, let's note that, from a GUI point of view, UHU-Linux has several that can impact on the network configuration:

• /usr/bin/network-config, which configures the interface(s) card(s):
  
  


• /usr/bin/adsl-config, which only sets the user, the password, and the interface card for a configured ADSL connection:
  


• /usr/bin/uhu-dialer, which is the fully-fledged GUI PPP configurator that can be used for ADSL connections too:
  
  

To configure an ADSL connection, you can use the "classical" scripts from rp-pppoe: pppoe-setup to configure the connection, pppoe-start to start it, etc.

You may need to restart the network (as root):
Before using the GUI tool uhu-dialer, it's advisable to make a backup copy of the original /etc/ppp/pppoe.conf file, which bears (part of) the "long comments" from Roaring Penguin's package. The GUI tool will overwrite it with a "short version" which will only tell the actual settings (and will set FIREWALL=NONE).

The network configuration in UHU-Linux 2.0 is not perfect though. There is no firewall by default, and the file /etc/iptables.conf is not taken into account (Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros also lack a firewall by default). Should you have an ADSL connection, you're not asked if you want it to have FIREWALL=NONE, FIREWALL=STANDALONE or FIREWALL=MASQUERADE. Even more, your ADSL connection will not be started automatically upon the boot (and you're not asked about that).

To have the ADSL connection started with your Linux box, edit carefully the file /etc/runlevel.d/adsl.service and make it have:
Keep as is the line:
A "specialty" of UHU-Linux is its own init system, which is still sysvinit-based, yet with simplified filesystem hierarchy and modified rc scripts.

uhu-init handles the following directories:

• /etc/rc.boot
• /etc/runlevel.d/default
• /etc/runlevel.d/custom
• /etc/rc.halt

Unfortunately for me, the documentation in /usr/share/doc/Packages/uhu-init is in Hungarian only.

This is to be said as an explanation of why I preferred to configure the ADSL service by hand instead of using the recommended /sbin/srvmgr.

What do we have in UHU-Linux 2.0 in the first place?

The CD comes with a GNOME 2.14.2 desktop, OpenOffice 2.0.2, and a good selection of usual programs, usually (if not always) in their stable version (e.g. GIMP 2.2.12). Should you want something more than the default packages (or should you want to update your DVD installation), go to Applications -> Settings and fire Synaptic.

As of my first attempt to connect to the online repositories via FTP or HTTP, the servers were unable to handle my request:


This is why I strongly suggest you to enable the rsync repository instead:


You will then be able to access over 2,000 packages, including updates — like Firefox 1.5.0.7 over the provided Firefox 1.5.0.7, and also Thunderbird 1.5.0.7. A slightly updated kernel is available too, and an updated uhu-dialer shows that feedback is not ignored, and updates really happen.

A small and random selection of packages on either the DVD edition, or online (the versions are from the online repository):

• Productivity: nVU 1.0, gnucash 2.0.0, gnumeric 1.6.3, gpdf 2.10 (you have Acrobat Reader 7 by default, also Evince), abiword, Scribus 1.3.3, Blender 2.41 (this is not "productivity" though), Dia 0.9.5.
• Internet: Skype 1.3.0, Opera 9.01, bittorrent-gui 4.4.0, azureus 2.4.0.2, Ekiga 2.0.2.
• Multimedia: vlc 0.8.5 (MPlayer comes by default), gxine 0.4.9, xmms 1.2.10, rhythmbox 0.93, mplayer-w32codecs 0.20060501-1.5, Banshee 0.10.10, Audacious 1.1.1, Audacity 1.30b.
• Window Managers: kde 3.5.3 (everything, including Koffice, k3b 0.12.16, etc.), WindowMaker 0.92, Blackbox 0.70.1, FVWM 2.4.19, Enlightenment 0.16.8, XFCE 4.3.90.
• Emulators: WINE 0.9.18, QEMU (DOSbox comes by default, should anyone still be using it), bochs 2.2.6, VMware player, VMware Workstation 5.5.1 (license is required to make it work!).
• Servers: apache 2.2.3, mysql 5.0.22, PHP 5.1.5, postgresql 8.1.4, proftpd 1.3.0.
• Development: Bluefish 1.0.5, anjuta 1.2.4, monodevelop 0.9, ruby 1.8.4.
• Admin: nagios 2.4.
• Misc: Beagle 0.2.7, F-Spot 0.1.11, digikam 0.8.2, gdesklets 0.35.3, gkrellm 2.2.9, deskbar-applet 2.14.2, clamav, Emacs 21.4a, fortune-en.
• Of note: MONO 1.1.13, gnome2-keyring-manager (not by default), fuse-sshfs, VNCviewer.
• Extra games: atomix 2.14.0 (one of my favorites — but no, they don't have Six, even if it's Hungarian!).

The bright side of UH-Linux is that they don't follow the maniacal definition of "freedom" as by the FSF, the DFSG or whatever else.

Therefore, UHU-Linux 2.0 comes with the following preinstalled:

• Java 5 (1.5)
• Flash 7
• Acrobat Reader

Moreover, as they're not in the U.S, and they seem not to fear for now for potential legal consequences, you will notice that some restricted or patented stuff comes by default. From the first test, I could notice that:

• BMPx plays MP3 files;
• gxine plays MPEGAUDIO (libmad);
• MPlayer plays AVI files;
• Totem plays AVI files.

I was a little puzzled that gxine is an old version (0.4.9), but I'm using an even older version (0.4.1) in CentOS, and I have no problem with that. Why am I using gxine? Because it's one of the very few multimedia players able to dynamically change the displayed info (artist and title) while listening to online streams (like online radio stations)!

There is a microscopical unexplained glitch in gxine's GUI, not affecting its performance in nay way:


Another creation of the UHU team (after the network-related GUI tools) is the UHU Control Center (Application -> Settings or /usr/sbin/uhu-control-center):

 
Here you can find and launch configuring tools not present in GNOME's or KDE's control centers, including the already presented network-config or Synaptic.

Nice work.

Yet another UHU-Linux choice: jDictionary, a Java-powered dictionary framework that already comes with sets of bilingual databases:

• English <-> Hungarian
• German <-> Hungarian
• French <-> Hungarian

This would have been perfect... if (and only if) jDictionary were using Unicode (UTF-8). Using a Central European ISO character set, some French accents are broken (I also encountered this issue when I was working at a French-Romanian dictionary), especially «à»:



I forgot to remark the way UHU-Linux 2.0 puts the applications into categories — in a way much more practical than most of the other distros. Just take a look at the Multimedia menu, and then go to the Tools menu, which also includes the productivity applications:


The Network menu is also very practical and neat:


To end with a last UHU-specific choice of an application installed by default: the CD-burning (and audio-ripping) less-known cdw (now discontinued):



It's not such a bad one, yet it fails to be practical enough if you want to make a CD with a lot of directories and files.

Caveats and advices — or some other experiences with UHU-Linux 2.0.

It's only a half-weekend stand with "her" ("distro" is "her" to me :-)), yet I have some more notes to put down about my first experience with UHU.

The ESD is not started by default (which may be good at times, to make sure it won't interfere with ALSA and/or OSS apps), however if you want to enable it, you will find there's no default sounds in GNOME:


Well, gnome-audio is not in the repositories!

Synaptic does not add the installation CD to the repository!

Starting with GNOME 2.12, the "Open Terminal" option has been removed from the desktop right-click menu. Some distros have added a replacement, usually as an extra package, nautilus-open-terminal. This is not the case with UHU-Linux 2.0.

UHU-Linux 2.0 also lacks a gnomesu / gksudo (gksu).

You can disable the automatic login of the default user through Desktop -> Administration -> Login Window (gdmsetup).

Should you want it, you can disable the desktop shortcuts to the mounted volumes by firing Applications -> Settings -> GNOME Configuration Editor (gconf-editor), navigating to the key /apps/nautilus/desktop, and unchecking "volumes-visible".

I noticed a file /etc/sysconfig/numlock, where you could put on instead of off. However, this has no effect in X. To have the NumLock active in GNOME, go to Desktop -> Preferences -> Sessions, the Setup Programs tab, and add /usr/bin/numlockx.

The most important flaw design in UHU-Linux 2.0 is the fact it never asks you about your Time Zone, and it doesn't ask you about the keyboard layout either!

Installing it using the English language configured the system as follows:

• Time Zone: CEST (Central European Daylight Saving Time).
• Generic 105-key (International) keyboard.
• U.S. English.

Some people will have problems with these settings, and they should use tzconfig (as root) to set their TZ.

A last hint: yes, the .uhu packages are actually .deb files.

The bottom line: For a distro that has just went global with the 2.0 release, UHU-Linux is remarkably innovative, clearly targeted to the desktop user, extremely easy to install, and it can come on a single CD, should you dislike the idea of a DVD. The online repositories are pretty rich in packages, and you should value the effort of the UHU team, knowing that they couldn't benefit from a multinational development team (like with Frugalware). The UHU init system, the UHU Control Center and the network GUI tools, as well as the ease of use for the home user (codecs, plugins) add value to it, and makes me put here the crucial question: why so late for an English version, knowing that all Linux packages have at least an English description?



P.S.: The first comment clarifies a lot of the questions.

*Clarification about the non-NTFS automounted partitions:

I was not taking about the NTFS partitions automounted under /media, they're obviously R/O.

What I meant, is that I got on the desktop something I also have with my Debian testing/unstable, meaning: two labels, "/" and "/1", corresponding to some other Linux partitions, one being ext3, and the other reiserfs.

They are belonging to root, and can be written only by root, so they're R/O for the rest of the users.

I don't know what's the correct approach for preventing them (and only them) to show up on the desktop:

• kernel-hal-automount?
• dbus-daemon?
• gnome-volume-manager?
• custom policy under /etc/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/?
• changes in either /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/50-uhuautomount.fdi or /etc/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/10-ide-drives.fdi, possibly in the blunt way shown in /usr/share/doc/hal-0.5.7/conf/storage-skip-all.fdi?
• some other script in /usr/share/hal/scripts/?

I'm not HAL-savvy, but I would prefer to have on the desktop as automatically mounted only the removable devices. Should I have other Linux mounts, I'd rather have shortcuts to the ones mounted as mentioned in /etc/fstab, not as detected by HAL.

UPDATE (2007-10-09): UHU-Linux derivatives, never popularized (outside HU, that is).

UPDATE (2007-12-19): A look at UHU-Linux 2.1 RC2.

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