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Uhm... Wordpress is here. And the security team has to watch vulnerability disclosure lists, precisely so you don't have to. That's the advantage of using packaged software. The time gap is small enough that there is little benefit in doing that work yourself -- and the security team has way better skills than your average sysadmin.

A "vendor" that does not respond to published vulnerabilities is one no one would take seriously. If you use a distribution which does that, drop it immediately!

And porting Linux/*BSD/Chrome to those architectures, if not done yet, will be relatively easy.

With high probability, it's already done. For most applications, a simple recompile should do.

See for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_supported_architectures and https://buildd.debian.org/stats/

You might have to write a bit of arch-specific code to get Linux running, and fix a few portability bugs in some applications, but it should be easily doable to get something going.

What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?

Not much different, as the people who built Linux distributions would instead have ported GNU to the kernel of FreeBSD.

Wow, I'm surprised that anyone still uses the Xandros shipped with the EEE. Seriously? You do? No flame, a honest question. I have an EEE 701 4G (now used by my wife who has been hospitalized for the last three months, and has a few more to do)... I used the default Xandros distro for very long, especially it was quite well configured for the small screen. Eventually the lack of Asus updating their repositories (still Firefox 2.x, no?) made me abandon the platform.

I switched to DebianEEPC, installed LXDE and the few apps needed and was happy. When my wife went to the hospital, I gave it to her as is and she has no problem using it at all. So it is userfrienldy enough as she really is computer illiterate.

You really keep using the shipped Xandros? More power to you, but I'd like to know why :-)

But yes, I remember them mounting as /media/D:... I guess it was to keep familiarity with a system that can't handle a simple tree and needs a tree for each drive...

(Nice sig... Like it.)

Depends greatly what you trying to do. I'm amazed at how much just works with the SheevaPlug. It proves the open source model to me, if you have the source it can be ported, and much has. Check out: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/arm/

Flash and ARM shows up the problem with closed-source, things only gets ported if those with the source think it's worth it. With Flash there is a ARM port though, least looks like it's in the repository. But I'm not using my SheevaPlug for X stuff. Hopefully Flash can be replaced with Gnash or Swfdec while HTML5 comes in, really shouldn't be the case something that's taken as a big a role as Flash is controlled by Adobe (better than MS though).

As I said, I'm really looking forwards to my ARM netbook, OpenPandora looks like a possible, but really I really want it to be able to HD video comfortably. Same with the BeagleBoard, so close to being my perfect media pc!

You're so wrong it's not even funny. I advise you to read Stallman's essay Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”. Here's a quote from the essay that gets to the essence of what we're talking about here:

The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.

As I understand it to Stallman the primary goal of Free Software is not "better software" in terms of say stability, usability etc., it's "better" in the sense that it's the most ethical.

P.S.

I'd like to point out that I personally don't think Stallman is entirely correct in his description of the Open Source movement, as the goal of Open Source has always been the same as Free Software (among other things see Bruce Peren's "It's Time to Talk About Free Software Again"). However, regretfully the term Open Source has in a lot of cases, as evidenced from this entire discussion, become diluted.

The point of open source and free software is that it's supposed to be better than proprietary.

The point of free software is freedom.

The fact that free software is generally of higher quality is a bonus, one that the "open source" movement focused on. The guy who created the "Open Source Definition" has said it's important to focus on freedom, but unfortunately many still think that talking about people's freedom to use, share, and modify software is just too radical.

Any real php-driven website uses opcode pre-compiling that speeds the execution of a program to such a degree that the stats given on the site you link to are simply way off. Version 5.3 has sped things up even more than their listed 5.2.9, and on a quick check of one of the PHP program examples, there is a blatant misuse of passing by reference, making it look like PHP4 code. Finally, almost none of the examples are based on real-world web development program needs.

One program on that link that might make sense is the regex, where for 4x the code in C++, you get a program 1/3 as fast (again, compared to unoptimized and old version PHP code).
C++ code example
PHP code example

This is a perfect example of PHP making C++ look like a fools language -- for web development.

Any real php-driven website uses opcode pre-compiling that speeds the execution of a program to such a degree that the stats given on the site you link to are simply way off. Version 5.3 has sped things up even more than their listed 5.2.9, and on a quick check of one of the PHP program examples, there is a blatant misuse of passing by reference, making it look like PHP4 code. Finally, almost none of the examples are based on real-world web development program needs.

One program on that link that might make sense is the regex, where for 4x the code in C++, you get a program 1/3 as fast (again, compared to unoptimized and old version PHP code).
C++ code example
PHP code example

This is a perfect example of PHP making C++ look like a fools language -- for web development.

On top of that, if anyone RTFA, they would see this was just an advertisement for his C++ web framework. Checkout that 'Hello World' app!

If anyone could RTFA. It appears to be slashdotted. I suspected the author had an agenda, but ad hominem is not a valid way to debate the merits of an idea. I'd still like to know where he got his numbers; the language shootout lists the factor of pure CPU bound PHP vs C++ as somewhere between 2x and 96x depending on the algorithm; this is ignoring things like caching, pre-compiling, etc. Also of interest is the fact that it takes anywhere between 1/7 and 1/2 as many lines of code in PHP vs C++ for the same algorithm; which again, does not even take into account the time to debug, eg memory errors.

First: where did these numbers come from? I find it hard to believe them, as I have seen actual benchmarks of PHP, not just WAG of "10 times as slow as C++".

My bad; I can't seem to see TFA right now, but judging from other comments, the author actually did use the language shootout benchmarks. My other points still stand, however, as well as points made by others: how much of Facebook's web serving is CPU (in PHP) bound? Did the author take into account the possibility that with caching, PHP wouldn't be nearly so slow?

In my (admittedly limited) experience as a (mostly) maintenance programmer, the absolute number one priority in writing software should be to write maintainable code, for two reasons: 1) it will have to be maintained, and 2) technology (not just hardware) will improve such that "efficient code" that is unreadable will ultimately become just unreadable; simple, straightforward, maintainable code will be optimized by the interpreter or compiler to be as efficient if not more efficient than the "efficient code".

No. Most time is usually spent generating pages: the Wikipedia server role page shows it clearly.

He is using stats that say PHP is 10 slower for running through loops, math that type of crap

Yeah, statistics, they are all lies if they don't support my current opinions ;). See for yourself. PHP is between 3 to 116 times slower than C++.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=gpp&lang2=php&box=1

As they only say that 'the bulk' is running PHP, let's assume this to be 25,000 of the 30,000. If C++ would have been used instead of PHP, then 22,500 servers could be powered down (assuming a conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code), or a reduction of 49,000 tons of CO2 per year.

Before I even start, let me just say I am a C/C++ coder, I've never really touched PHP, and if I were going for a more abstract language, PHP probably wouldn't be it (mind you, I've not written off PHP altogether; I rarely do that with programming languages, except for FORTRAN, COBOL and C#). I've got no favoritism towards languages; I use what best fits the task and try to make my software as readable and maintainable as possible.

First: where did these numbers come from? I find it hard to believe them, as I have seen actual benchmarks of PHP, not just WAG of "10 times as slow as C++".

Second: if the author is so worried about PHP being inefficient, why doesn't he help improve the efficiency of the interpreter? Remember, there are no efficient languages, only efficient implementations.

Third: has he even factored in the fact that higher level languages require less total development time? What about all those commuting hours saved by the programmers because they weren't having to run their PHP scripts through valgrind's memcheck?

Fourth: why C++? How about FORTRAN or assembler? FORTRAN compilers are extremely good at optimizing code, and I'm sure you could squeeze out a few more cycles by coding it in assembly.

Why ask someone who isn't even a gamer where the gaming market is? I just know that looking to Debian as a market for proprietary software would seem to be like looking for water in the desert. There might be some market, but it's going to be small and widely scattered.

In relation to your previous comments on the "failure" of the repositories to accommodate commercial software, how is it a failure? The absence of a way to sell commercial software is a feature. The APT system was designed to be that way. It wasn't designed to be a way for proprietary developers to market their software. Read the Debian Social Contract and the DFSG.

http://www.debian.org/social_contract

You want to put a FPS in the Debian repositories? Write a FPS that is compatible with the DFSG and don't expect to get paid for it because that capability just isn't there.

You might take a look at what Ubuntu is doing in this area as it seems they are/may be going to do something similar to what Linspire did with their CNR system. Linspire failed though as the vast majority of the Linux user base didn't like what they were doing.

That's the Universal Operating System

You're guaranteed to win, or money back.

http://www.gcompris.net/
http://debian.org/

http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

That's the doc-linux-text package in debian which install the HOWTOs in /usr/share/doc/doc-linux-text/HOWTO/.

By the way, debian also links to a desktop user/administrator guide on its web page http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/. And the debian documentation page has a lot of information http://www.debian.org/doc/

I don't know on other distributions, but it seems that the documentation in mandriva (linked from http://www2.mandriva.com/support/ ) is pretty good as well. Especially the advanced guide http://doc.mandriva.com/en/2009/Mastering-Manual/Mastering-Manual.html/.

I believe people never thought aout going to the main page of the distribution and click on the suport/documentation link.

Well, not all:
http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729
Debian is on a 2 year cycle
http://news.opensuse.org/2009/03/05/112-roadmap-and-fixed-release-cycle-for-opensuse/
Suse 8 months

I think Ubuntu and Fedora go for the 6 month, but I doubt 'most' go for 6 mos. I think the average is to attempt an annual release.

Well, compare it to V8, and it is about by an order of magnitude by the Debian benchmarks. But I think their version of V8 is a little old, so it should be a little better than that by now.

Actually javascript is an order of a magnitude slower than C, but it is friggin fast nowdays.

You're confusing a variety of unrelated things here. Javascript works fine in every browser that implements standards accordingly (that is, every browser with the exception of IE 6, 7 and 8). The language is not only consistent across browser, it's actually implementing some really interesting features such as list comprehension, generators, and block scoping.

And I don't know where you get the idea that debugging Javascript is any more difficult than any other scripting language. You can't claim to be a professional JS dev and not have heard of some tools.

Oh, and as a scripting language, it is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages available, in the same league as SmallTalk and Lua. The fact that Palm developers obviously used the wrong tool for the wrong job does not in any way detract from the qualities of the language.

Methinks there's a lot of people that talk crap about Javascript but have never bothered to get the proper documentation and tools. Newsflash for everyone: anyone who does professional Python and Ruby development uses debuggers and text editors specifically for that job. Just because JS runs on the browser doesn't mean it doesn't need the same level of attention.

The above post was also posted to http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5573605#td_post_5572662 with a little more detail. This post predates the other by a few minutes (assuming properly synced clocks), so I'd guess it was the same person who posted both of them.

There are currently three hits for "i8kspeedfan" on Google, all of them having the exact same text; slashdot, a slashdot syndicator, and the above notebookreview page. Maybe it refers to i8kfan, which is probably similar enough to Linux/*nix's i8kutils, which apparently has no project/home page. All I can find is Debian's i8kutils package (though its maintainer claims he is no longer maintaining it). The source is hosted with a direct tgz link from that page.

The above post was also posted to http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5573605#td_post_5572662 with a little more detail. This post predates the other by a few minutes (assuming properly synced clocks), so I'd guess it was the same person who posted both of them.

There are currently three hits for "i8kspeedfan" on Google, all of them having the exact same text; slashdot, a slashdot syndicator, and the above notebookreview page. Maybe it refers to i8kfan, which is probably similar enough to Linux/*nix's i8kutils, which apparently has no project/home page. All I can find is Debian's i8kutils package (though its maintainer claims he is no longer maintaining it). The source is hosted with a direct tgz link from that page.

You are used to Debian ? Then try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

The Debian distro on top of a FreeBSD kernel.

As a bit of a sidebar, you pay more than a "mild penalty" for using Ruby as opposed to C/C++

Comparison

You dont need to program in C++ to get increased performance (plus childish bugs like buffer overflows and memory corruption). Complex apps and other types of programs can be faster than what you think.

can someone please tell me why a simple graphics editor takes 190Mb disk space?

I suppose that the Windows package includes the entire gtk+ toolkit and various support libraries, too. The Debian package of Inkscape is just 20 MB because Debian has the libs in separate packages (which are often already installed for other purposes, such as GNOME, anyway). Here's the dependency list: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/inkscape.

Also, Nested Data Parallelism won't be available in programming languages sooner that in Haskell. And I look for NDP as an unique way to make heterogenous parallel environments work (those like IBM Cell BE, for example).

One word: Aineko

How about Oneko?

Well, the obvious search http://www.google.com/search?q=debian+openssl+%220.9.8l%22 comes up with

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=555829

Which ends:

Subject: Bug#555829: fixed in openssl 0.9.8k-6
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:48:39 +0000

Source: openssl
Source-Version: 0.9.8k-6

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
openssl, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive:

[...]

Closes: 555829
Changes:
  openssl (0.9.8k-6) unstable; urgency=low
  .
      * Disable SSL/TLS renegotiation (CVE-2009-3555) (Closes: #555829)

No fix yet for Lenny as far as I can see, but if you're really worried you could install the sid version.

Looks like Debian has backported the security fix. The version with disabled renegotiation is 0.9.8k-6 .

http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/o/openssl/openssl_0.9.8k-6/changelog

It's in "unstable" at the moment, but you should be able to download and install it without harm.

Debian is server-centric. (Though also hihgly-usable as workstation too.) Long release/support cycles there is the feature, because stability is the priority.

On other side, I have used for about two+ years Debian Sid as desktop at home. I had only three major breakages in all the time which required me too boot system in single user mode to repair it. And that is unstable branch which is literally "just compiled software". That easily compares to rate of reinstalls I had to do on my Windows workstation, which despite being touted as stable by MS, still breaks very easily and breaks quite often.

• By phone: 1-888-NOPIRACY
• Online: Business Software Alliance reporting form
• For management: What to do when you receive a BSA audit letter.
• Download OpenOffice
• Download Linux (Debian)

*MIPS Debian
http://www.debian.org/ports/mipsel/

* An older thread on video sharing hacking with TIVO boxes
http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25139

* Knoppix MythTV
http://www.mysettopbox.tv/

Ad 4): http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-sourcehandling.en.html

And Ruby, PHP and Perl. Check it out for yourselves: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=v8&lang2=python&box=1

As a dev, autoupdates are evil. It's great if the updates don't change the behavior of whatever is being updated, but it sucks ass when those updates break or as MS is so fond of, remove functionality.

Autoupdates are dangerous things. You get unexpected changes with no apparent reason

It doesn't have to be that way...

Come, friend... come and try stable. We'll treat you right.

(which was in a released version of Mandriva before apt was in a stable release of Debian)?

Wait, whaaaa??

The first Debian release was in August of 1993, but yes not with dpkg.
Dpkg/dselect/apt was in the 3rd or 4th debian release which was in 1995.

The first version of Mandrake was released sometime in 1998, an entire 3 years later.
The first version of Mandriva was released even after that!

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html
http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/company/backgrounder

about new gentoo releases?

According to the release engineering page, there was.

Someone should post a story everytime they emerge --sync && emerge world

No, otherwise people running Mandriva cooker should post every time they 'urpmi --auto-update', or people running Debian testing should every time they run 'apt-get upgrade', or users on Fedora rawhide every time they run 'yum update' (ok, for Fedora, maybe not *every* time ...).

Just because you compiled it, doesn't mean you got it sooner than anyone else. (Note, the Mandriva build system is currently not accepting build submissions for "cooker" as cooker is still in freeze, the build system will be back to the usual 50+ packages per day by the end of the week).

It's kicking the ass of plain Lua, which was about 100x slower than Python

Really? Show us where!

beating plain Lua just means that you don't get an F in first-semester computer science.

Must be a real interesting school you attended. LuaJIT has been completely rewritten for 2.0 and the first beta was released on 31st Oct... here's a clue...

wine

Only Win16 binaries require the ability to mmap low addresses, Win32 binaries do not. It is recommended that you test your application with the increase mmap_min_addr setting. If the application starts up without issue, then you should not need to remove the mmap_min_addr restriction.

(http://wiki.debian.org/mmap_min_addr)

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr shows 4096 on my system, and MS Word 2003 works just swell under WINE.

This solution works, please see the links below. However I would reccomend seing what your settings are on your system
$ sysctl -n vm.mmap_min_addr to find what your setting is.
On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS servers (including Xen kernels) and on 9.10 desktops it is 65536. Not a big deal.
http://wiki.debian.org/mmap_min_addr
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2008-July/025805.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/26831/info

But why doesn't Canonical go to [the] same lenghts?

There. FTFY.

Now, if you want a Linux distro that's been fully vetted, go here.

BTW, nice trolling.

Last I checked, a few months ago, there didn't seem to be any simple options for running skype on a 64-bit GNU/Linux machine.

http://wiki.debian.org/skype

"Video did not work for me, but otherwise it was all fine."

I too have old hardware:
486sx16 with 12MB and 275MB drive, 2 ISA 10baseT - use for testing of IPCop.org linux firewall. Works great.

K6-3D 400 with 256mb and 10G drive - Had to get Ubuntu 7.04 because new versions would not find IDE drvies correctly and had problems with ACPI (or lack of). Then upgrade upgrade upgrade not to 9.04. Took awhile. It is what I am writing on now.

My next projects are Dual PPro 200 with 256MB and 2 2G drives. It was running Linux before with NT3.51 in a VMWare session, but that been a few years. 2 SMALL form P6-500 with 256MB and 10GB.

I also run Core 2 QUAD with 8GB and 256G and 1TB with VMWare 5 sessions. So I do not just have old hardware.

I am finding Linux has loss some of its roots for being able to bring more work out of older equipment. But it does not stop us from trying, does it. Good luck with your project.

I used an old redhat diskette a few months ago to netload from their servers, was fun and slow but did work. Other information for doing these types of installs.
http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst
http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html -helpful.

Also remember the Async ports on these old machines and be connected to another machine and used for network loading too. ;-) Just takes longer be works very well.

Thank you

Here's distributions that boot from floppy: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=links#floppy http://bootdisk.com/linux.htm Then, you can install whatever you want via PPPoE.\: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apds05.html.en http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html Here's some recommendations from a 486'er: http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/linux486.html

I can attest to the Debian install. I did this in 2006 with an old 486 laptop with 24MB. Though the above link brought me to the wrong place when I followed it.

Try

http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-i386/20070308/images/floppy/

Its got a lot of floppy images that will take you back to the old days. I had some sort of trouble with the laptop install. The kernel ran fine, but I think the installer had trouble for some reason. I might have ended up apt-get --ing a lot of things. But in the end the system ran. It runs a nameserver and has been up for over a year. Nice thing about laptops is that they have built in UPSs.

Indeed, the oldstable (etch) version of debian, which is still supported wrt security has floppy images.

For example, these can be found here: http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-i386/current/images/floppy/

It should be easy to stay under 700 Mb, even with x. Just don't install gnome/kde , but do xfce or lxde instead.
you can even get to lenny (current stable version) by changing /etc/apt/sources and apt-get dist-upgrade.