Interview with a Linux Titan

Paldo's own Jurg Billeter

Interview Date - Nov 4 2007

Synapsis

My interview with Jurg Billeter, or juergbi on IRC, took place on a cold November morning, the day before the release of Paldo 1.12. If you have not heard of Paldo, you are missing out on one of the most intuitive "just work" distros out there. It's stable, fast, comes in x86 and x86_64 flavours, uses it's own package manager called upkg and can be used as a live CD or installed onto your HD. For a list of features visit Paldo Information page or from the horses mouth at the Paldo website.

Small appology to Jurg, as this site has had to use the english letter 'U' in your name, sorry.

Intro

Paldo is one of the best "yet to be known" distros that linux has to offer. Period.

If you were courageous enough to make your way through the bootstrapping process to install a previous version, you know what I'm talking about. After you completed the simple 12 steps, written expertly, you come out of the rabbit hole and into a wonderland of Swiss porportions.

Any noob worth his salt would shutter at the thought of installing a distro without a graphical installer, let alone a text installer. But what if a distro didn't have an installer at all? Such was the case with Paldo... until now!

Prediction - Paldo is this year's Sabayon

You've heard it here first people. This distro will be on the tip of everyone's toungue, in about 3 months. Watch the Distrowatch rankings (Or the linux titans rankings, coming soon). This distro will make it to the top ten in a year's time.

What's new in 1.12?

From the Paldo website:

On with the Interview

superbnerb: hi juergbi, thanks for taking the time to do this interview, for everyone out there, tell us a bit about yourself. Who is juergbi?

juergbi: My name is Jurg Billeter and I study Computer Science at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

juergbi: I'm 24 year old.

superbnerb: You also run one of the coolest distros known to exist. Paldo.

superbnerb: How did Paldo start?

juergbi: As I've decided to switch from Windows to GNU/Linux 5 years ago, I wanted to know the new system as well as possible.

juergbi: That's why I've built everything from scratch according to the instructions of Linux from Scratch

superbnerb: So Paldo is not derived from another distro?

juergbi: To the previous question: At the same time I wanted to have the resulting system just work after installation, that's why I've written some simple scripts to automate the build and installation.

juergbi: No, paldo is not derived from another distro.

superbnerb: So, at the time you started, you are 19, new to Linux, and wanted to start easy with LFS? I take it you've been 'into' computers for awhile then?

juergbi: Yes, I've started with some simple programming when I was 8.

superbnerb: wow. So what made you choose the name Paldo?

juergbi: That's just a name that Raffaele and me invented when we made the distribution publicly available. We usually don't treat it as acronym.

superbnerb: So paldo is fictional, good stuff.

superbnerb: So, you previously mentioned that you 'wanted things to just work'. Have you met that goal with Paldo, in your opinion?

superbnerb: does Paldo just work?

juergbi: Not in all areas but in many areas it really just works now, mainly thanks to improvements of various upstream projects.

superbnerb: such as...?

juergbi: I.e. in many cases I can start from the paldo Live CD and everything just works, graphics, sound, network, and input devices.

superbnerb: i agree, it's what first drew me to your distro.

juergbi: Areas where there is still room for improvement is for example printer installation.

superbnerb: is this an area where most distros have struggles?

juergbi: Some other distros have started efforts to fix that issue but it's only slowly getting upstream.

juergbi: One large problem is that many printers are not supported at all, easy installation doesn't help for that.

superbnerb: List 3 things that seperates Paldo from the herd.

juergbi: paldo doesn't try to please everyone. While that may sound like a disadvantage, it makes it possible to have a distribution where the components work together really well.

juergbi: Packages in paldo are only modified if they are broken, else we usually try to fix the upstream package instead of adding paldo-specific modifications.

juergbi: We try to keep everything as simple as possible, so it's easier to understand and more robust.

superbnerb: and what package manager do you use?

juergbi: We use Upkg, that's our own package manager.

superbnerb: interesting, why did you create your own?

juergbi: Creating and maintaining a package is very easy with Upkg, that was important as we have to maintain a lot of packages with few people.

superbnerb: can you explain what makes upkg so easy?

juergbi: We only use a subset of the features of other package managers, for example we don't have versioned dependencies. This is possible because Upkg always also updates the dependencies when updating a package. That makes the package specifications small and thus easier to maintain.

superbnerb: ahh, i've always wondered. So does this increase the speed from a user's perspective?

juergbi: No, this doesn't really affect the speed from the user perspective.

juergbi: Upkg never asks the user questions when upgrading the system. We don't think it's appropriate to do so.

superbnerb: So users never have to answer yes, or yes to upgrade all Dependencies?

juergbi: That's right.

superbnerb: good stuff. have you ever 'tested' the speed difference between upkg and say rpm?

superbnerb: from a user perspective

juergbi: No, that wasn't high priority. We'll try to improve the performance of Upkg in the following versions.

superbnerb: well i've noticed a huge difference between other distros and Paldo's UPKG. to me, it seems faster.

juergbi: Good to hear.

superbnerb: so can upkg upgrade to another release?

superbnerb: so i have 1.11 and if 1.12 comes out, can i upgrade to 1.12 without reinstalling?

juergbi: Yes, that works very well, you can upgrade the system over years without reinstalling.

superbnerb: good to know.

superbnerb: speaking of which, 1.12 is scheduled to come out soon, how is that going?

juergbi: Our build server is still busy building the packages but it should finish soon.

superbnerb: so hype up 1.12 for me, what makes this version the best yet?!

juergbi: It features a brand new graphical installer which will make it very simple to install paldo in a few minutes.

juergbi: s/simple/easy/

juergbi: There are also updates and polish all over paldo. Updated X server where special keys and mouse buttons should just work.

juergbi: GNOME 2.20 with many improvements.

juergbi: OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 on x86 and now also on x86_64

juergbi: The Live CD should also work with modern ATI graphic cards now (still feature-limited).

superbnerb: i have bootstrapped paldo twice. And both times worked like a charm. Do you feel the lack of an installer had been an inhibitor to Paldo's adoption in the Linux Community?

superbnerb: For some reason, sites like distrowatch don't even have you on the top 100

juergbi: I'm pretty sure that it scared off some people that you had to install via command-line previously.

juergbi: Before paldo 1.11 it was also more complicated to switch from the default Swiss locale and keyboard layout.

superbnerb: That i know...lol, however, not impossible.

superbnerb: i now know where the / key is on a swiss keyboard.

juergbi: hehe

superbnerb: so, new installer, new GNOME, and you still have 1 app for each major task?

superbnerb: i.e. you don't have 100 media players, just one good one

juergbi: In the paldo repository there are often multiple apps for each single task but these are mostly just additional contributed packages for special needs. The default paldo installation only has one application per task as far as it makes sense.

superbnerb: which makes for a nice default install, nothing to clog up the works, as they say.

juergbi: The extra packages are not really supported and often not that well integrated, they are not our main focus.

juergbi: Yes, that's the intention.

juergbi: The paldo Live CD consists of exactly the same packages as the default paldo Desktop installation.

superbnerb: are there other 'flavours' of paldo?

juergbi: There is paldo-server, paldo-media-center, paldo-comm-server (VoIP server), and paldo-router

juergbi: You can always also combine these meta-packages.

superbnerb: and do you have stats as to how often all paldo flavours are downloaded? what has integration into the linux community been like so far?

juergbi: We don't have statistics for the meta packages, we'd only have the web server statistics which we're not analyzing.

superbnerb: is there a Paldo roadmap?

juergbi: No, there is currently no roadmap as we don't know how much time we have to invest beforehand.

superbnerb: fair enough. What is the future of Paldo? let's say in a year, and then in 3 years?

juergbi: We'll just maintain and improve the packages as we see the need for it, I don't expect major changes in the near future.

superbnerb: What is the future of juergbi ? what's in his roadmap?

juergbi: I'm finishing my studies next year and my work life will start.

superbnerb: On behalf of Linux Titans, thank you for the interview.

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