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Yes, there is. It took me a while to figure out, mostly because I didn't have any luck with the version that BOINC actually distributes. (I could get it running but there weren't any good instructions on setting up a daemon, which you need to do if you want Boinc to keep running after you disconnect and close your shell session.) Eventually I grabbed the Debian package from http://pkg-boinc.alioth.debian.org/ using apt-get, and it sets up the 'boincd' daemon to run the client and everything automatically. You attach/detach and monitor the status using the boinc_cmd program, which you can run as any user.

I have a few headless boxes sitting around that work as routers and backup servers, and are idle for over 99.9% of the time, and was able to install Boinc via the SSH commandline on all of them, once I discovered that someone had put together the package. There is a fairly decent mailing list for support, too.

If you use something that's not Debian-based, or not x86 architecture, good luck.

As an 'expert' system administrator (albeit unpaid) I have four servers. One is running Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, one is running Microsoft Window Server 2003, one is running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Server), and the other is running Apple OS X Server (10.4).

I can tell you now that when I first started my company, although I was a major advocate of Linux, I soon found that I did not have the time to maintain a then Gentoo or custom LFS distribution, Debian was far too heavy to pick up, and Slackware felt a little dated. So I took a look at Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, liked what I saw, and bought a Dell PowerEdge 400SC with an OEM install.

At first Small Business Server was a breath of fresh air. It was easy to maintain, with a full complement of features, having been bundled with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Window Sharepoint Services. I actually enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - using it.

Until backup stated to fail. Until my tape drive disappeared. Until the sharepoint website database got corrupted. Until exchange monitoring failed. Until the POP connector started to thrash the CPU. Until the Windows Update website failed to check for updates.

These things happened. I'm not saying that they wouldn't happed with another system, but that is not the point, since they happened to me, and that caused me grief, and time, and money to resolve. I ended up trying to build a new system based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, since I already had Microsoft specific data (files and tables), but this proved even more difficult to maintain.

I struggled for eighteen months, and then decided to build an Ubuntu 5.10 server. I use Ubuntu on one of my laptop, and had gently learnt the apt- way, and liked it. I set up a server with similar features to the Small Business Server, using Postfix, MySQL, and Plone, and even went some ways to transferring my sharepoint data. It works. It hasn't failed yet.

I bet the guys who took part in the survey only set up a server, installed some applications, and patched it. I bet they didn't try running a business for 18-months, just to see what it was really like.

I must say that we recently purchased an Apple PowerMac, and were so impressed we are now looking at completely switching, hence the OS X Server. It is a dream to install and configure, but we are going to run it for several months until we are satisfied that it can do the job.

Debconf 5 video archive has a video about Fully Automated Install, FAI really is impressive it does a full installation which taks a bit more time but it's alot more flexible than using Partition Image.

I use a 10GB partition with 5GB of data which Partition Image does in 3min, the exact same thing is done in 10min with FAI. On the other hand with FAI it is very easy to keep the image up to date, which is a very tedious process with Partition Image. Also growing filesystems aren't really that wasy in Linux yet.

I would say go with FAI, it's the cheapest route, in hours.

That's easy to fix.

I'm sure glad no one has thought of this before

Before I knew any better, I used to run Mandrake. This article gave me the first moment in many months that reminded me of the existance of Mandrake. Was that just me or did we all collectively tune out from Mandr*? To rephrase, what has Netcraft confirmed? :)

ehh? Ubuntu? I think they should have used Suse.

ehh? Suse? I think they should have used Debian.

ehh? Debian? I think they should have used Manriva.

ehh? Mandriva? I think they should have used Fedora.

What the f*ck is your point? Go figure.

This according to the Debian language shootout.

Those benchmarks are interesting to analyze but they're meaningless for really evaluating language performance. The larger (and more powerful) C++ standard libraries give it a significant penalty in such tiny program comparisons, but those same libraries often give it a considerable advantage in real programs (consider this as an example of another trivial program where performance is hugely in C++'s favor, due entirely to good libraries and the power of templates).

C++ code is not appreciably different from C code except where specific constructs are used, and the run-time costs there are small and quantifiable while the programmer efficiency gains can be enormous. C++ is, in general, as fast as C.

Unfortunately, this common misconception just isn't true. C++ is not as efficient as C.

This according to the Debian language shootout.

The fact is that D is more efficient and has a far better syntax. C++ is an ugly language that has survived on hype and misconceptions. It's a shame, really.

Unfortunately, this common misconception just isn't true. C++ is not as efficient as C.

This according to the Debian language shootout.

The fact is that D is more efficient and has a far better syntax. C++ is an ugly language that has survived on hype and misconceptions. It's a shame, really.

"caught up"? How many linux distributions try to provide a really cross-platform installer? Have a look here to see what I mean by cross-platform.

http://www.addonshop.com/
http://www.emperorlinux.com/
http://www.ibexpc.com/
http://www.linare.com/
http://www.linspire.com/
http://www.linuxcertified.com/
http://www.microtelpc.com/
http://www.outpost.com/
http://shoprcubed.com/
http://www.sub300.com/
http://www.systemax.com/divisions.htm
http://www.walmart.com/
http://www.xandros.com/

http://tuxmobil.org/reseller.html
http://www.us.debian.org/distrib/pre-installed
http://www.linux.org/vendor/system/index.html

http://tuxmobil.org/ (general information)

No OS

(Sabio made by Quanta, like Dell-latitudes)
http://www.avadirect.com/
http://www.asimobile.com/
http://www.powernotebooks.com/

1) Performance is now basically the same as C/C++/Objective-C apps.

No its not, peruse a few of the benchmarks here http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

Debian already has a "postgresql-8.1" package (in unstable). I just installed and switched over to this. Works good so far. For some reason the page for the package is not there yet, but I guess that is because its very new?

Debian already has a "postgresql-8.1" package (in unstable). I just installed and switched over to this. Works good so far. For some reason the page for the package is not there yet, but I guess that is because its very new?

and the 10 month old bug report

I count 41 in the last month for instance at http://www.us.debian.org/security/. Feel free to check other distros.

Can these cards use XVideo in X11?

Recent NV cards seem to have this problem:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/08/msg002 05.html

Makes using them with realplayer, mplayer, xine etc... pretty difficult.

Does anyone know what the story is with the Debian package of this?

I just spent more than two hours trying to get the "official" version of this running on my headless Debian sarge box, over an SSH session, and I eventually threw in the towel when I couldn't find a script for running it as a daemon that seemed generally accepted to work and be stable. It's too bad, since I have the perfect system for it: my backup server, which sits connected to a cable modem in a friend's basement, on a UPS and 99.9% idle, since all it ever gets used for is the few seconds every day when my other systems rsync to it.

I had high hopes when I found out that there's a packaged version over at https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-boinc/ however that server seems to be dead as an oak door right now.

It's too bad they didn't do a better job documenting this for anything other than a "desktop linux" install with a non-remote user, because I think a lot of the potential users of this software are going to want to do it using a daemon, and install it remotely over SSH -- so it can use the idle cycles on a server or other headless box. Right now it's a real exercise in frustration, sadly, and I think I'll wait until somebody comes up with some good step-by-step instructions on how do it, using precompiled Debian packages.

I'd love to help, but I'm not going to risk possibly screwing up something on my home server for it. There's a reason I swore off installing anything that didn't come from Debian Stable, and maybe I'm just being reminded of why.

Apple is Microsoft with tiny market share.

If I have to choose between Apple (overpriced hardware) and Microsoft (overpriced software), I'd pick Linux any day.

As this link confirms, Debian can be installed from a wide variety of media. Check it out. This probably goes for some other distros as well.

In practice, a huge corporation that gets caught using GPL'd code would have the FSF helping out whomever the author is

So there is little or no prospect of any "GPL infringement" lawsuit in which the plaintiff doesn't have to prove material breach of contract under the most unfavorable construction the defendant can justify.

Of all organisations in the world, be assured that the FSF is the least likely to sue you for anything less than brazen cut-and-pasting of entire programs, despite your personal vendetta against them.

Oh and no need to mention which kernels and OSs would be ideal; we already know about the answer to that.

All you need is: http://www.us.debian.org/ It's a beautiful thing.

There is a fundamental problem with Blastwave and every one of the available efforts to adapt a new package management system to Solaris. Solaris has an existing package management system and all the dependencies in this system are ignored or overwritten by the new system. Alternatively the new package management system will take over and require that it be used exclusively. Let's look at a few examples:

1) rpm.rutgers.edu - this is a terrific resource that has some major advantages over blastwave. It will take your existing Solaris packages and migrate them to the rpm database, however this is a one shot deal and you are expected to manage your software with rpm from that point on. What do I do if I want to install a patch from sun or a new SUNW package?
2) Netbsd pkgsrc : Rocking good software collection and spectacular cross platform goodness, but it has no concept of the host package management system. Also I miss the ability to apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade . The source base changes every quarter. I had high hopes for http://solarpack.sourceforge.net/ but development has been dropped.
3) Sunfreeware. Solaris packages, but no dependency info is used at all.
4) Blastwave, ibiblio, and a few others. These systems use solaris packages, but don't integrate them with the Sun provided dependency database.
5) Sun's own Companion CD has Sun maintained packages (albeit not very many) that do seem to do the trick.
6) Many efforts to port apt to Solaris as detailed here:
http://solarpack.sourceforge.net/links.html#solari s

So the question is, what is the goal of all this? It looks to me like the purpose of a package management system is to minimize systems administrator labor. That means that I might be willing to manually create and maintain one or two packages, but if I am installing many packages I would like to have a dependable repository of secure, bug free packages that I can draw upon. Furthermore I need a method of doing a simple mass upgrade of packages.

The major reason for using Solaris is the get a stable platform. Solaris binaries from 10 years ago will still run unmodified on Solaris 10 from March of this year. Joel Sparsky has written at length on the subject of a stable API as being the underpinning of Microsoft's success. Industry is still willing to pay a premium for Sun hardware and software because they have a need to minimize change in the datacenter. If I want to install Gforge http://people.debian.org/~bayle/ on a stock Debian Sarge machine it will auto install more than 20 packages. On Solaris many of these packages are already provided by sun. Stripping your machine down to the kernel and a few other support packages and replacing the guts of the OS with Debian (or pkgsrc) doesn't seem to me to be the right way to go if you are looking for stability. Sun is the one making the commitment to support for 10 years not Debian. I would like to use as much Sun supported software as possible in setting up my machine.

Sure thre is Debian GNU/NetBSD just go here.

http://www.debian.org/ports/index#nonlinux

Here: http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-cd

Before people comment on why Debian is doing this i suggest reading Debains core statement of what they are all about http://www.debian.org/intro/about

Esspecially this bit:

Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide.

However, work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels, primarily for the Hurd. The Hurd is a collection of servers that run on top of a microkernel (such as Mach) to implement different features. The Hurd is free software produced by the GNU project.

Type in "server" and you get http://httpd.apache.org/
Type in "os" and you get http://www.apple.com/macosx
Type in "operating system" and you get http://www.debian.org/

Oh you could have lots of fun here! :)

Isn't that what Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is?

"Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port that consists of GNU userland using the GNU C library on top of FreeBSD's kernel, coupled with the regular Debian package set."

It even has apt repositories

Even Debian had this ready before the article! Word on the mailing lists it that they also hope to be able to release GNOME 2.14 (or was it 2.16?) in parallel with GNOME later on. Now wouldn't that be cool?

Package signature verification is the major new feature of the Apt 0.6 branch. The Release file (the detached signature of which is in Release.gpg) contains the MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the various Packages and Sources files that comprise a release. The Packages and Sources files contain the checksums of the debs (debian binary package) and dsc (debian source package) files.

Further details in the Securing Debian HOWTO.

Package signature verification is the major new feature of the Apt 0.6 branch. The Release file (the detached signature of which is in Release.gpg) contains the MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the various Packages and Sources files that comprise a release. The Packages and Sources files contain the checksums of the debs (debian binary package) and dsc (debian source package) files.

Further details in the Securing Debian HOWTO.

Package signature verification is the major new feature of the Apt 0.6 branch. The Release file (the detached signature of which is in Release.gpg) contains the MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the various Packages and Sources files that comprise a release. The Packages and Sources files contain the checksums of the debs (debian binary package) and dsc (debian source package) files.

Further details in the Securing Debian HOWTO.

Package signature verification is the major new feature of the Apt 0.6 branch. The Release file (the detached signature of which is in Release.gpg) contains the MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the various Packages and Sources files that comprise a release. The Packages and Sources files contain the checksums of the debs (debian binary package) and dsc (debian source package) files.

Further details in the Securing Debian HOWTO.

Package signature verification is the major new feature of the Apt 0.6 branch. The Release file (the detached signature of which is in Release.gpg) contains the MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the various Packages and Sources files that comprise a release. The Packages and Sources files contain the checksums of the debs (debian binary package) and dsc (debian source package) files.

Further details in the Securing Debian HOWTO.

Also, there's the issue of support with proprietary software on Linux. There's always support for RedHat and SLES.. never Debian.

HP offers support for Debian on their servers.

http://h20219.www2.hp.com/services/cache/76815-0-0 -225-121.html

There are many individuals and companies that support Debian. Some are listed on Debian's consultants page:

http://www.debian.org/consultants/#US

Ahem?

Lame does not contain any of the Fraunhofer Institute code, the lame source code is fully GPL. However, personal and commercial use of compiled versions of LAME (or any other mp3 encoder) requires a patent license in some countries.

Not all countries support software patents, and in those countries, LAME is free for use. Of course, it commonly gets used even in the US & Germany too, and although Fraunhofer isn't likely to sue an individual over it, it's far more likely that they'd go after a large, cashed-up business that incorporated it into one of their high-investment products.

Basically, although software patents are controversial, MS has no need to take the risk. They'd be more likely to just pay Fraunhofer the licence fee (as they have for the mp3 codec included with Windows), but they have a perfectly good standard that they own themselves (which was developed in response to the patent), and it makes much more sense to use this in a closed platform like Xbox.

I've had wine and Crossover office 4.2 run on 64-bit debian. It won't run natively in 64-bit mode, but it runs seemlessly as a 32-bit binary under chroot (or dchroot). You won't even notice that it's running in 32-bit mode.

Check out this HOW-TO from debian AMD64 on setting up a 32-bit chroot environment.

This explains why Microsoft would need to pay royalties. Even LAME is not exempt (at least in Germany & the USA) - the whole reason for its original name ("LAME Ain't an Mp3 Encoder") is to help avoid the patent issues around mp3 encoding.

I think it was QNX that had one feature I did find interesting though.. the ability to move your logged in GUI session from client machine to client machine without shutting apps down or logging out. It was a pretty cool feature similar to what we can do with VNC today but smoother. I'd love to see that work in X. (If that wasn't QNX then I have no idea what it was!)

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/teleport

MySQL only became popular because it's faster than postgresql for less complex database work. Postgresql is a better database. I just wonder why SCO went for a deal with MySQL instead of just taking the BSD-licensed Postgres. (I would use postgres myself if my webhost and CMS supported it)

Also, mySQL has a totally wrong view of the GPL: see this discussion on debian-legal.


-- Get free domain names

install a 32bit chroot...

https://alioth.debian.org/docman/view.php/30192/21 /debian-amd64-howto.html#id271960

it works wonderfull, surely it is a workaround, but it is not as bad as not being able to use 32bit programs at all.

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experimental main

You mean, people like OpenBSD, or perhaps Debian, or Gentoo or ....
When you avoid screwing up your design the first time round, it does help that you need to do less work.

Debian has released advanced software technology that has rendered the need to reboot obsolete, threatening the adoption of Intel's recent vapor into the marketplace.

AMD64 / EMT64 / x86-64 is NOT PROPRIETARY.

It was developed as an open standard to ensure industry-wide acceptance. Intel does not need a license to develop and sell an x86-64-compatible chip, and neither do you.

According to Marc Miller of AMD: x86-64, now named amd64, was developed as an open standard, therefore it's not something we can license.

The open standard is x86-64. AMD's trademarked implementation is called AMD64. Intel's trademarked implementation is called EMT64.