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Not so good, see:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/G...

You can achieve the same level of security with Hardened Gentoo Linux (PaX, Grsecurity2, which is Gentoo with different flags) https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/H... .
The only small difference is that strcpy is still allowed (applications should move to strlcpy/strpcpy instead).

Then again, I don't use hardened Gentoo, because last time I tried (couple of years back), it was hard to maintain on a simple desktop.

Other distributions that use PaX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's not clear that it's actually required.

It's worse than that - not only is it not clear that it's actually required, I (and other) want to know why they aren't just writing a simple userland library that uses TIPC, which is already in the kernel. Even if there was some legitimate reason to need a kdbus-like feature that that wasn't already supported by TIPC, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to extend that existing, already debugged code and extend TIPC with the that feature?

It's not clear that it's actually required.

It's worse than that - not only is it not clear that it's actually required, I (and other) want to know why they aren't just writing a simple userland library that uses TIPC, which is already in the kernel. Even if there was some legitimate reason to need a kdbus-like feature that that wasn't already supported by TIPC, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to extend that existing, already debugged code and extend TIPC with the that feature?

1999 called and wants its meme back. Seriously, have you actually used any modern Linux distros? Hey, good news, it has gotten so easy to install and use, you don't even need to install it! Download any of a dozen LiveCD / DVD / BRD / Thumbdrive versions, burn it to the appropriate media, and reboot. Bam! You have a fully functional modern OS at your fingertips. Give it a try, and if you don't like it, it comes with a 100% money back guarantee.

Seriously, even Gentoo (notorious for having one of the more complex installs) has a graphical installer as of somewhere near 5 years ago. I don't understand where the original poster is coming from...

Yeah, I'm not totally sure myself, but it seems to me it's not even available on Gentoo, where we use the MAD Gstreamer decoder plugin for MP3 decoding...

From http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Installing_the_Fluendo_MP3_plugin the plugin should be located at: /usr/lib/gstreamer-1.0/libgstflump3dec.so (and I don't have it, even with gst-plugins-bad and media-libs/gst-plugins-ugly installed).

From https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=281083 they say the plugin was included in gst-plugins-bad, but this dates back to 2009, so things may have changed...

Hmmmm... http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-plugins-bad/tree/gst/mpegdemux actually says the plugin originated from Fluendo, but is this really the version talked about in the very (intentionally?) limited report, or a simple fork for which the issue may have been fixed long ago, while not fixed in the official Fluendo version which apparently few really use?

Or does Mozilla ships the plugin themselves? It does not seem to be included in the files installed by Firefox on Gentoo, unless it's been statically linked inside some other file... Even if Mozilla ships it, it's very possible Gentoo does not install it, to use the libraries available on the system...

The Mozilla bug report is still private even though the fix is supposed to be already shipped in Firefox 37...

The relation between Fluendo and Gstreamer is quite blurry too... They employed the main Gstreamer devs for some time, then they left and founded another company, but gstreamer.com is still owned by Fluendo, but they link to the Freedesktop servers to get Gstreamer...

I recently got it working on Gentoo with the usual fiddling around. A portage overlay makes this pretty painless and there is a decent guide. http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/St... It's just a matter of building appropriate compatibility libs somewhat akin to supporting 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system. I was impressed enough that I did a little re-partitioning to allocate a couple hundred gig sandbox for Steam to live in. Some of those games are big!

What's cool is that, for me, linux steam came with the batteries included. I have a fair smattering of games for it that I've already accumulated just as a side-affect of their being cross platform titles.

As a result of its questionable status with regard to copyright restrictions and other potential legal issues, the TrueCrypt License is not considered "free" by several major Linux distributions and is therefore not included in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, or Gentoo.

While this is true of the others, it is not true of Gentoo. Gentoo's policy seems to be that while the base system should not depend on non-FOSS components, having them present in the main tree is fine. (This might be partly because it's pretty easy to filter which licenses you want on your system using ACCEPT_LICENSE.)

As a result of its questionable status with regard to copyright restrictions and other potential legal issues, the TrueCrypt License is not considered "free" by several major Linux distributions and is therefore not included in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, or Gentoo.

While this is true of the others, it is not true of Gentoo. Gentoo's policy seems to be that while the base system should not depend on non-FOSS components, having them present in the main tree is fine. (This might be partly because it's pretty easy to filter which licenses you want on your system using ACCEPT_LICENSE.)

Just as I was warming up to your rant...

Gentoo? Oh, please, bitch. Gentoo is for ricers. Period. I have better things to do with my time than to compile every single shitty utility on my system. That's what a distro is for. Oh, and Gentoo can be systemd'ed as well. Read it and weep.

I think you just made nimbius's point for him. Sure, you can systemd gentoo, but you don't have to. From the gentoo wiki page that you linked, at the very top: "It is supported in Gentoo as an alternate init system."

This is how Linux was. If you didn't like the way something worked, you used something else instead. Unlike the large distros that are moving more towards "here is all your crap", love it or leave it.

Just as I was warming up to your rant...

Gentoo? Oh, please, bitch. Gentoo is for ricers. Period. I have better things to do with my time than to compile every single shitty utility on my system. That's what a distro is for. Oh, and Gentoo can be systemd'ed as well. Read it and weep.

I think you just made nimbius's point for him. Sure, you can systemd gentoo, but you don't have to. From the gentoo wiki page that you linked, at the very top: "It is supported in Gentoo as an alternate init system."

This is how Linux was. If you didn't like the way something worked, you used something else instead. Unlike the large distros that are moving more towards "here is all your crap", love it or leave it.

Just as I was warming up to your rant...

Gentoo? Oh, please, bitch. Gentoo is for ricers. Period. I have better things to do with my time than to compile every single shitty utility on my system. That's what a distro is for. Oh, and Gentoo can be systemd'ed as well. Read it and weep.

Arch? Uses systemd. Don't believe me? Click here or click here. Arch is the Gentoo of the 2000s.

You have no idea what you are talking about. I would be tempted to add a STFU or two, but I am just too lazy.

Just as I was warming up to your rant...

Gentoo? Oh, please, bitch. Gentoo is for ricers. Period. I have better things to do with my time than to compile every single shitty utility on my system. That's what a distro is for. Oh, and Gentoo can be systemd'ed as well. Read it and weep.

Arch? Uses systemd. Don't believe me? Click here or click here. Arch is the Gentoo of the 2000s.

You have no idea what you are talking about. I would be tempted to add a STFU or two, but I am just too lazy.

Yeah, thankfully systemd is still regarded as an "alternative init system" by Gentoo. I rather like OpenRC, hopefully they'll stay the course.

OpenRC seems to fit the bell, but fails at the first I believe.

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Co...

Its just an end run around the GPL to create a commercial linux.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewt...

why does this post keep getting deleted.

This seems the place for you if you are worried about your reading of the future https://www.gentoo.org/

If you're that nostalgic you can still do it the old fashioned way.

This has nothing to do with a RPi. It is a common file system problem.
RPi has 2 file systems.
      1. Fat32 for the bootloader, proprietary firmware and kernel
      2. Linux rootfs that can use many different kinds of file systems.

ext2 wasn't very good at handling unclean shutdowns.
ext3/4 are a little better.
fat32 is terrible.

Fortunately the fat32 partition doesn't need to be written very often, so you're good. Reads aren't dangerous.

What you really want to do is make sure your Linux kernel has an initramfs installed in the kernel image, so it can fsck and fix any file system errors if the partition wasn't cleanly unmounted.

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Cu...

There you go. Not a hardware issue.

Ahh, the usual misrepresentation of why we oppose systemd that always shows up. Calling us haters while trying to reframe the discussion away from the real issues isn't convincing - it just adds evidence that systemd gains position by propagand and politics instead of design and implementation quality. No, you are not going to scare us away form linux. Some may retreat to FreeBSD, which is fine (it's a good OS). The rest of us are going to stay with linux, even if it large parts of linux leave and become part of the systemd monoculture. We've been here before, after all, over a decade ago.

The varied technical issues with systemd are bad enough, but they have already been discussed, and are a central reason why the sysadmins ae forking Debian. Many systemd advocates try and steer discussions back to these technical issues - while denying that systemd doesn't actually work for everybody - to avoides talking about the fundamental design problems and philosophical changes that systemd forces on Linux. While it is currently popular to "move fast and break things", those of us with more experience understand the value in not breaking everything. None of this means that those that are better served by systemd shoudl stop using it! We're only angry about the attemts to force a monoculture by breaking compatability for political reasons, when there as no technical need. You know, like Microsoft does with their "not invented here" attitude.

Still, those are philosophical issues about the software itself. That is not the primary problem some of us have with systemd, which is not about technical problems, but is instead an attack on our prefered method of licencing. The systemd takeover is an attempt to separate Linux and many userspace tools from the GPL, so that software can be used under the LGPL terms instead.

What is the big difference between GPL and LGPL? Linkage. Linking to a GPL library requires you to follow certain requirements if you link against it, while the LGPL specifically allows taht usage. (k)dbus provides the workaround, by replacing what would be a normal function call into a library with a "IPC". It's slower, but so what, computers are way faster than needed. In the end, while you can still choose to release your code as GPL, if you have to use an IPC mechanism to do anything useful the license requirements that will actually apply ends up being being more like the LGPL. For a better explanation, see this post by stevel in the Gentoo forums.

Well, if I wanted to release under the LGPL, I would. What I'm not going to do is undermine my choice of license just because a bunch of embedded developers (and others) want to use what were traditionally GPL projects without having to be bound by the copyleft requirements. If this was proprietary software, you would call that kind of behavior "stealing" or "piracy".

So don't bother with claims about "faster desktops" or "easier programming". When your solution also bundles a forced monoculture ("unifying the difference betwen distributions") and contains a loophole around the licence some of us chose it is simply not an option for those of us that place "freedom" as the most important feature. /how much does JTRIG (or their equivalent) pay for these propaganda attempts, anyway? //It's a waste of money regardless, given how transparent these comments are ///some of this post is reused from a post I made on HN

We've been explaining this for years, only to face the slurs and word-game attacks by the systemd advocates.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends

First, re: monolithic. What IS a factual effor is that, when discuss software, the term "monolithic" has anything at alkl to do with the number of files a project happens tro compile into. To claim that something has a "monolithic design" is to claim that the features are far too thightly coupled, and cannot be replaces individually should the need arise. That need can range form personal opinion, to some horribl security flaw being discovered. Really, this is an extension of the idea of trying to write "modular code" instead of an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti. Systemd is the worse case I've ever seen a project heading down the "spaghetti" route, and maintainabiliity in the future is goign to be painful once the needs of the real world start making demands against the "simple" desing systemd started as. In this sense, it is a repeat of the "hal" fiasco. Only worse., given how much more money and time that has been invested so far.

That's just a general technical critique. The real problem with systemd is not technical, but the fact that it is actively trying to remove the unix nature of linux and replace it with a more windows-ish style. Yes, that is opinion.. Some of us are of the opinion that we came to unix to get a better OS than the hard-to-use, obscure-by-design windows style of OS. So we will never be using systemd, as the very nature of what systemd enforces goes against the very reason we currently chose to use linux in the first place. The only reaon you see anger here is because Lennart choose the wrong way to implement these goals. He could have forked off a ux and made his own sandbox where he is free to do whatever he wants. Instead, he is ripping apart a place others call their home.

There is an evern deeper problem in play here, too. The maintainability is enough of a reason for the sysadmins to fear systemd, and my personal opinion and personal requirements are enough for me to avoido systemd, but those are both local concerns. The bigger problem, which rarely talked about due to the systemd advocates yelling about everything else and idstracting a lot of people with technical minutea is a problem of ideology and Free Software.. As we used to say here on /. many years ago, sometimes the "free as in speech" of Free Softwware is more important than the "free as in beer" ($$$/cost) of Open Soruce. See the the usual sources like the FSF foir why; what matters is some of us choose to release projects under the GPL, for ideological reasons, and not the "Lesser" variant, the "LGPL". This makes it harder to use tsome software in proprietary code., which was the intent behind the choice of the GPL over the LGPL.

Well, that pisses off a lot of people, would would liek to sue Free Softwarein their products (distribution), but not be bound to the GPl's requirements. Which brings us to how systemd is an end-run around the GPL in a new variant on "tivoization". (k)Dbus is simply an excuse to say you're not "linking" to GPL code, by making all API calls into RPC. As someone who has worked on building a community of Free Software, this will be a devistating setback. (stevel explains it in more detail at that link)

Of course, the fact that systemdj's compartmentalization (with cgroups) to create a purposfully opaque box you're not supposed to care about is exactly how you would pull some scheme to force DRM into linux, and I'mm sur ethe NSA just loves having such a huge pile of new, overly complicated, pile of C code placed into such a key position. These are good reasons for avoidin systemd, but like the technical arguments , are not partciularly important.

//Just watch: I"ll be accused of being "supid" or "para

Yeah, "meh, as long as it boots". And _sometimes_ it doesn't. See this bug - obtained by mere installation of multipath-tools and regenerating the initramfs. Lennart plainly refused to add any debugging features that would have made the case obvious.

- Don't be afraid of package.keywords, especially for very specific use flags.

Another long-time gentoo user here - the above file is used for mixing stable and unstable/testing packages. I'm sure the parent meant package.use.

Another thing to note is portage has a built-in way to deal with patches that happen outside of ebuilds, you simply create a directory specific to the package that needs patching and drop the patches in it, and portage will automatically use the patches. This is extremely handy for a system maintainer as you don't need to edit ebuilds.

Sysvinit+OpenRC is the default on Gentoo.
Alternatively you can use systemd.

> Ripping out udev? Have fun with you init scripts no longer knowing anything
> about device state change. Sure, might be useful if you could guarantee that
> devices don't drop in and out of a system, but that's not been true for at least five
> years now. I constantly plug and unplug my phone into my laptop (often just
> to charge the battery, but sometimes for file transfer or for music) so you're
> not capturing the desktop market either. Servers need it for hot swap. Exactly
> what benefits are gained in which market? If you can list them, then we will know.

Udev can be replaced by mdev which comes as part of busybox. See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... and also https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... Yes, folks, automounting+autounmounting USB keys, without X running, let alone GNOME or KDE. Yes, mdev *CAN* handle device state change. It sets /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug to point to /sbin/mdev

> Ripping out udev? Have fun with you init scripts no longer knowing anything
> about device state change. Sure, might be useful if you could guarantee that
> devices don't drop in and out of a system, but that's not been true for at least five
> years now. I constantly plug and unplug my phone into my laptop (often just
> to charge the battery, but sometimes for file transfer or for music) so you're
> not capturing the desktop market either. Servers need it for hot swap. Exactly
> what benefits are gained in which market? If you can list them, then we will know.

Udev can be replaced by mdev which comes as part of busybox. See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... and also https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... Yes, folks, automounting+autounmounting USB keys, without X running, let alone GNOME or KDE. Yes, mdev *CAN* handle device state change. It sets /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug to point to /sbin/mdev

Gentoo is a distribution of Linux (or GNU/Linux or whatever you want to call it) probably best known for its method of software updates where source is compiled on-the-fly to binary as part of the "portage" update system.

ChromeOS is Google's linux (kernel)-based operating system which essentially has a Chrome browser act as the entire user-facing operating system. Apps are written in HTML5/Javascript, etc.

NaCl (Native Client) is a new feature of Chrome that lets you run native (or in PNaCl, ie Portable Native Client, it's a platform-agnostic format that is quickly converted to native binary before running) code from within the browser, all in a sandboxed environment. You can actually get a shell within the browser and compile and run binary apps inside the browser as well. See the Google IO video about this.

The app code is all running on top of the Chrome platform, specifically inside of Native Client. In this way the ARC (Android Runtime for Chrome) apps run in the same environment as other apps you can download from the Chrome Web Store, even though they are written on top of standard Android APIs.

The runtime probably includes some modified version of the entire android framework, etc. meant to be wrapped up by a Chrome browser window and interact with Chrome's input/output, etc.

I don't see how this WON'T be ported quickly to Linux by someone, though it'll likely need Chrome/Chromium. Nothing has stopped Android source from being ported to regular ol' linux except that no one has done it yet. But this work by Google will probably make it easier to include in Chrome.

Incidentally, on Ubuntu, NaCl isn't compiled in, so you may want to get a version in which it is. You can turn it on by following the instructions here.

I am a linux sysadmin, and many of the packages required for desktop use not only don't apply to me, but are pretty well useless. I would love to see a distribution where any dependency on X11 was not only stripped out - but *compiled* out. I would love to see a distribution where systemd was not getting its mitts into everything.

But it's not only that, it's tuning. I discovered that Ubuntu's default scheduler settings on a Dell R620 with 384G of RAM and a nice beefy RAID 10 array are actually the *worst* settings for this kind of system. Everything else I tried - other schedulers, tuning CFQ, etc., they all led to better write throughput. Which leads me to wonder how many processor and other cycles are wasted because sysadmins just install with the default settings and hope for the best?

There needs to be a distro where the adults are in charge. I'd even build it if I had time, and I most certainly would be willing to put some time into working on one.

So you want Gentoo without compiling?

There is theoretically a way to use Gentoo's portage on freebsd, but I've never read up on it too deeply. Might start.

Looks like Gentoo will also support systemd.

Gentoo already supports systemd - that webpage is a year old and wasn't a great comparison at the time it was created (and systemd was already available on Gentoo back then). SystemD on Gentoo is old news already - about the only thing left is to strip sysvinit out of the default install and have use user pick whatever implementation they prefer (much as they already pick kernels, cron, syslog, etc implementations). The whole point of Gentoo is to try to leave the choice up to the user and at this point you'd be hard-pressed to find software on Gentoo that doesn't work about as well on both OpenRC and SystemD.

I was thinking the same thing. Gentoo has decent support for dependencies, better than Upstart in my opinion, and was working years earlier.

Looks like Gentoo will also support systemd.

That depends. The kernel hasn't been moved into Arch's [core] repository yet, but it is in the [testing] one (it was there first, but just barely, according to the times it was just two hours ahead of Gentoo[1] [2]). Not that it matters which was first anyway, they're both rolling release and will have it much earlier than a distro using a standard release model.

[1] ArchLinux testing/linux package push date at 2014-08-04 06:24:21 (GMT) Source
[2] Gentoo sys-kernel/linux-headers changelog change date at Mon Aug 4 09:39:49 2014 UTC Source

"I see nobody working on an alternative init system. "

There are better init systems in use and supported. Slack init has been it's own thing for a very long time, a bit of a cross between BSD and SysV that follows the slackware philosophy. Simple, robust, and easy to work with.

Gentoo still uses their own fork of init with OpenRC. OpenRC, in a nutshell, provides the features of Systemd or Upstart without breaking compatibility.

Systemd (and upstart, since you mentioned it) is not something primarily created to solve a technical problem. They exist primarily for political reasons. They are Red Hat and Canonical's attempts to rip out the guts of *nix and replace it with vendor-specific infrastructure that they can control and direct.

OpenRC isn't taken seriously because the gentoo folks propose it and now that both Debian and Red Hat, the two major players on the market, have both decided to play along with the systemd game (one of them was more or less forced into it, but no matter), systemd is omnipresent and impossible to stop.

"Because gentoo" makes no sense. Regardless, 'omnipresent and impossible to stop' is bullshit. What is unfortunately true is that Red Hat, Ubuntu, and now Debian will be outside the pale of *nix systems. One large *nix* ecosystem has been effectively forked into three systems. Red hat will own one, Canonical will own one, and the remaining *nix systems, including Linux, Gentoo, and *BSD will remain our own ecosystem that no one can own. It's sad that Debian is officially going the other way but hey, best of luck to them in their new role as Red Hat sattellites.

Gentoo already have systemd support, and you can use it if you like - http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Sy...

I'm not the OP, but thought I'd correct a few misconceptions you seem to have.

It is the distro with the best packaging system.

While this is mostly a subjective matter, Debian's apt/dpkg is pretty archaic. .debs are nothing but glorified tarballs which get unpacked when installing, (therefore have to be created with fakeroot(1)) to name a random point at which it is inferior to a semi-decent system like Portage you can't use it to install packages from source (unless you use 10 debianisms to build a package beforehands). Searching for something with apt-cache is a joke.

You say that like tarballs are a bad idea. It worked well for Slackware. ;-)

Anyway, more to the point, debs are much more than glorified tarballs. That one deb package file contains control information, which specify version information, dependencies, basic package information, installed size, and much more. It also contains scripts to preinstall, postinstall, preremove, and postremove the package. It really is a one-stop shop when it comes to installing programs under Linux. Other than dependant packages, of course.

You can use apt to install packages from source, but the source code must come from the Debian repository. It needs to contain all the info above, and more. A source install is relatively simple to do. Basic process is "apt-get source package; cd package; debuild -us -uc; dpkg -i ../package.deb". So, that's three "debianisms" to download, build, and then install the package. Not as convenient as Portage, but apt/dpkg was not designed to be a source distribution. It probably could work as one, though. Should be simple enough to create a script which does everything automatically for you. If you want a source distro, then Gentoo is definitely the way to go.

Unsure what you find so funny about apt-cache. I use it regularly to search for packages. It works well for me.

It is the distro with the best variety of packages.

Name one relevant package which isn't available on any relevantt distro.

Unsure what you mean by "relevant package" or "relevant distro". I just did a search for a package called "clipit", on packages.gentoo.org. It's a program I like to use to copy between X clipboards, and store a clipboard history. Gentoo doesn't seem to have it. Debian does.

It is the distro with the best package maintainers.

No. Last time i had the pleasure, the maintainer in question didn't reply for 4 months, finally apologizing for not replying and (redundantly) suggesting i follow up with a patch (which i did 3 months ago, at that time). Guess I'll have to wait another couple months until it finally get applied.

One anecdote does not a conclusion make. I've had some very good experiences when dealing with Debian maintainers. In any case, this is subjective. I'm sure other distributions have some great and enthusiastic maintainers, but Debian ranks highly in my experience.

It is the distro with the best reliability.

Stupid and wrong piece of uneducated gibberish. What exactly is Debian's role in Linux' or GNU's reliability? How is Debian more reliable than, say, Gentoo? Fanboyism at its finest.

Not quite. Debian Stable achieves its high reliability by subjecting packages to a good testing period. It suffers jokes from the Linux community for being out of date, but that's what you have to do to achieve that level of reliability. Package maintainers even backport security patches to older package versions, to make sure that they don't install newer package versions on a Stable system.

Debian Testi

Ubuntu isn't especially bloated. It runs at least as good as WindowsXP out of the box, as far as performance is concerned.

To my layman's eyes, Linux has been suffering from a bit of "X distro is/once was good and is slowly dying from lack of funds or internal politics".

Then your layman's eyes are suffering from selection bias (a common problem). There are several distros that have been running solid for a very long time. Such distros are Ubuntu's own granddaddy, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, and more recently SUSE.

Like systemd or not, equating systemd and upstart as equivalent is either ignorant or dishonest.

I guess saying such a thing will get me labelled an extremist in Ubuntu circles. It's no surprise to me that the gentoo guys do the best job comparing the available choices.

Gentoo Linux would suit your needs, as it compiles from source at the install stage ...

There is Debian, with its GNU/BSD version:

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

And Gentoo has their variant:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/fbsd/

Those are the only two I know about :)

Red Hat is doing something no other distro vendor has done

... Gentoo? And Daniel Robbins' Funtoo project?

These two distros are very similar, with a few key differences but in both you can choose how stable or not stable you would like. If you want stable, you can have stable. If you need bleeding edge, you can have bleeding edge.

Granted its not "automatic updates" but I don't like the idea of my server doing updates like that without me initiating them.

The point is that RDO isn't a new distro, or a specific RH flavour of OpenStack, but just plain vanilla OpenStack builds, nicely packed in RPM's and with a "yum" repository. So RH based distros like Fedora 18, CentOS, Scientific Linux can install and maintain it, just by enabling the RDO yum repo.

There is a quickstart guide and lots of documentation here:
http://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart

All in all, this makes it really easy to test and play around with OpenStack.

Red Hat is doing something no other distro vendor has done

... Gentoo? And Daniel Robbins' Funtoo project?

These two distros are very similar, with a few key differences but in both you can choose how stable or not stable you would like. If you want stable, you can have stable. If you need bleeding edge, you can have bleeding edge.

Granted its not "automatic updates" but I don't like the idea of my server doing updates like that without me initiating them.

> What you need is a ulibc distribution that is designed for virtualization
> utilizing a KVM kernel and a uclibc user land based on debian.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but Alpine Linux http://alpinelinux.org/ is a strong candidate. It's uclibc-based, and runs on busybox's utilities, which is yet another simplification. It'll even run using busybox's mdev instead of udev. That's assuming you don't run some braindead "desktop environment" which depends directly on udev, or evdev, which in turn depends on udev. That rules out GNOME and XFCE

Gentoo http://www.gentoo.org/ can be coerced to a minimal, text-only glibc build, via judicious use of the USE flags. This includes replacing udev with mdev. Again, avoid the flashy "desktop environments". If you want to really go barebones, it has an "embedded", uclibc-based option. For experts only.

I run qmail for sending/receiving mail (on Gentoo; netqmail package), using maildir, of course. On top of that, I run the Courier IMAP server on my internal network (with TLS encryption). Until a few months ago I used Mutt as a client (console-based), but I've moved to using Roundcube (web-based email), which I initially installed for my wife, and have been happy with it. I also have some automatic filtering to folders via Maildrop (another Courier utility; it looks at a ~/.mailfilter file to route mail).

Roundcube/the IMAP server's search is OK most of the time - I keep my inbox small and move older mail to sub-folders - when I want to do advanced searches or search large mailboxes I log in and grep through folders of interest; this works well with the maildir format with one file per message. Maildir was also quite resilient when I had a HD crash and needed to recover some lost mail (block scan for blocks that look like mail headers found most missing items, and I do better backups now - mail is under ~/.maildir and gets backed up automatically).

I would move older messages to maildir (there are plenty of mbox converters, and almost anything non-proprietary should be convertible to mbox or maildir via existing programs or a short perl script) - even if at some point maildir dies off entirely, which seems unlikely, converting it to another format will always be trivial due to its simplicity and it has the advantages mentioned above of being able to search easily with grep etc.

I cannot use this GPLv3 add-on to a GPLv3 editor.

A few years ago I whined that there are no good text editors / IDE's out there with a genuine free software license - only ye olde nvi, mg (tiny emacs clone), and a few Windows/Mac-only and SlowScriptKiddyLanguage-based options... The situation remains unchanged today.

My attempt to convince the vim lead developer to relicense (so that *BSD OS'es could include it in base) has led nowhere... I guess he thinks Evil Microsoft wants to "steal" vim code for Visual Studio 2015 ::rolleyes::...

A zillion editors out there, and all of them bundled with unethical anti-market legal threats...

Very depressing...

--libman

I did it using the "gamerlay" overlay. There are guides on doing it without using overlays for example http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Steam one bug that bit me was fixed like this http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/846939071390931093/

Not when you take the license into account...

--libman

This Gentoo one looks like a good one - a forum post, but a good one nonetheless.

You are right about Stallman's extreme Leftist views

I try to avoid the irrational left-vs-right "wing" terminology. It originated as a schism within the socialist movement, with those seated on the "right" of some historical deliberative body being "nationalist socialists", and those on the "left" being "internationalist socialists". I reject them both.

One possible exception may be when I'm highlighting the distinction between copyLEFT and copyFREE with upper casing, just as a reading aid (unless I forget). The former is an application of copyright that stands for a particular political special-interest group, while the latter stands for freedom.

and being familiar w/ your link,

By this do you mean the the thread on the Free State Project forum?

I'm not sure why you say that he attacks bad people.

I think you've misunderstood me. I was saying that Stallman is often attacked by other people for all the wrong reasons - and not for the right reasons to be severely critical of him.

Personal attacks against Stallman are often focused on his lifestyle choices, and I think those attacks are often irrational. Hippies are a-OK, as long as they don't initiate aggression (i.e. socialist politics) against others. Even voluntary communists are OK (even though their philosophy is so dysfunctional it is almost never practiced voluntarily). I can respect lispy emacs users, even though I reject GNU Emacs and its license. I can agree with some of Stallman's software design ideas, while disagreeing with others.

What is irreconcilable between me and Stallman is that he believes in using government-veiled violence to get his way, and I refuse to recognize that violence as legitimate.

In the Mid East, w/o saying so in so many words, he backs Jihad terror groups against Israel.

I am rather critical of Israel myself (although I do recognize its accomplishments as warranted). Israel could have been established without violating the Property Rights of the Palestinians... But that's a whole nother debate...

And his views on pedophilia and necrophilia - how on earth can anyone consider that mainstream?

Actually those are some of the issues where Stallman is mostly right (except he'd probably fail to fully recognize Parents' Rights in regard to the former). Pedophilia is clearly an illness, and its indulgence is clearly unethical, but it doesn't constitute rape in every single case. The hysteria over "kiddy porn" is probably the #1 threat to Internet freedom that exists today!

The choice of whether to program in C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, C#, Java or whatever should be a decision of individual programmers, since the FSF is not a company. [...]

A group doesn't need to be "a company" (presumably you mean like with salaried employees) in order to have working standards. There's great usefulness to organizations that set policies for the projects that they accept under their umbrella, as long as people are free to fork off on their own if they so choose. We can have the best of both worlds - rational order as well as freedom. There's nothing wrong with having large "cathedrals", as long as there's a "bazaar" of competition between them.

I myself firmly believe that having every component written in a different language is horrendously ugly! I'm a big fan of all UNIX systems programming taking place in C, and brand new future-oriented "post-POSIX" OS projects starti

try http://www.gentoo.org/

I was about to whine about this release being "Steam for Ubuntu" and not "Steam for Linux", but Google told me about this helpful wiki :

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Steam

The client I did install from the overlay works quite well, and Team Fortress too, despite very slow disk access (don't know if anybody experienced this on other distros...). Too bad I only can play one game from my 40+ library.