“Conectiva Inc., a Brazilian company that distributes, develops
and supports Linux in Portuguese, Spanish and English, has released
the 6.0 version of the Conectiva Linux platform, this time
simultaneously for corporate and domestic users. In Latin America,
Conectiva Linux will be available in two versions: “Home &
Office” and “Server”. The operating system has 6 Cds with more than
a thousand software packages and several demo versions of
commercial programs.”
“The biggest and most remarkable advantage of Conectiva
Linux 6.0 is the Advanced Package Tool, also known as APT.
Previously APT was only available for .deb packages but was
recently enhanced to support .rpm packages too. Conectiva 6.0
is the first rpm-based distribution with fully integrated apt-get
support. This new tool makes it easier to keep the platform
up-to-date and secure, since it can automate the update and
installation of all .rpm packages. APT, when used as an (automatic)
upgrading tool, can detect the availability of new versions of .rpm
packages, and take care of download and installation. In
corporations, APT has a very crucial importance in terms of
security, because with it, the system administrators can facilitate
automatic corrections and upgrades in a very fast and easy way,
getting around the manual work of updating every machine in the
network with, for example, the security update. Conectiva employee
Alfredo Kojima, who is also the author of Window Maker, has
enhanced APT to support RPM packages.”
“Other features of Conectiva 6.0 are KDE2, the latest version of
the K Desktop Environment, which features: Konquerer, the KDE file
manager and web browser; Koffice, the KDE office suite with
spreadsheet, presentation manager, flowchart program and more. KDE2
also comes with a selection of multimedia programs, including aRts,
a sound manipulation program which can, amongst other functions,
play MP3 and WAV files.”