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If it's named after the species of penguin, it should be soft

Yes.

There's an old, politically incorrect, cartoon with a husband freaking out in a car while his wife is driving the wrong way into oncoming , and saying, "I'm not going the wrong way... THEY are going the wrong way". Lennart Poettering wrote systemd, which is broken on machines with a separate /usr (without initramfs). Like the wife in the cartoon, his reaction is "My software isn't broken... the machines my software won't run on are broken. Repartition and reformat your machine.".

If that had remained strictly a Redhat-ism, nobody else would've complained. However, udev has been hijacked into the systemd tarball https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ Because of the shared code with systemd, udev shares systemd's brokenness on machines with separate /usr, even if you're not running systemd itself. That's the vast majority of linux systems.

As the infomercials say... "But wait, there's more". Lennart Poettering has made no secret of his desire to do away with standalone udev. See
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html Basically, if you want to use udev (required by the vast majority of linux machines) you'll one day need to switch to systemd.

There are scattered efforts to run systems on mdev, bypassing udev altogether.
https://github.com/slashbeast/mdev-like-a-boss#readme
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev/Automount_USB

Opinion?

There's an old, politically incorrect, cartoon with a husband freaking out in a car while his wife is driving the wrong way into oncoming , and saying, "I'm not going the wrong way... THEY are going the wrong way". Lennart Poettering wrote systemd, which is broken on machines with a separate /usr (without initramfs). Like the wife in the cartoon, his reaction is "My software isn't broken... the machines my software won't run on are broken. Repartition and reformat your machine.".

If that had remained strictly a Redhat-ism, nobody else would've complained. However, udev has been hijacked into the systemd tarball https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ Because of the shared code with systemd, udev shares systemd's brokenness on machines with separate /usr, even if you're not running systemd itself. That's the vast majority of linux systems.

As the infomercials say... "But wait, there's more". Lennart Poettering has made no secret of his desire to do away with standalone udev. See
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html Basically, if you want to use udev (required by the vast majority of linux machines) you'll one day need to switch to systemd.

There are scattered efforts to run systems on mdev, bypassing udev altogether.
https://github.com/slashbeast/mdev-like-a-boss#readme
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev/Automount_USB

Opinion?

Crudely:

RedHat (most of 1990s) -> FreeBSD (briefly, ~1997) -> Debian -> Cygwin (get shit done on a Windows box) -> Solaris (at work) -> Gentoo (most of 2000s) -> Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora / etc (distro-hopping urge every few months) -> Gentoo (the most fun Linux to run at home) -> LFS (playing around, but less fun) -> Gentoo -> CentOS (at work) -> FreeBSD (when I "got all religious" about licensing philosophy) -> other BSD's (OS hopping) -> FreeBSD

Now I'm sworn off Linux for good, but I sure do wish FreeBSD was (even) more like Gentoo... I also love some things about OpenBSD (better kernel licensing policy, more readable src, to-the-point installer, etc - and the coolest mascot!), but unfortunately it has too many compatibility and performance shortcoming. DragonFly BSD is a long-term possibility.

--libman

There's a lot of reasons to switch distros. Everyone usually finds one that fits their way of thinking after two or three. People also find that the different distros work better at different tasks - you don't (generally) use Ubuntu for servers, for instance.

As far as what I run on "my" computer, it hasn't changed much: Slackware -> Debian unstable. I knew Slackware inside and out (back in the 3.x days) and now I know Debian very well (you have to, if you run unstable). I've hit a comfort zone, and I'm unlikely to change.

I switched from Slackware to Debian because Slackware was very, very far behind on switching from the libc5 C library to glibc (the second major change in Linux, the first being the switch to ELF executable format). A lot of software was being written that didn't work with the old libc5, and Pat (the maintainer of Slackware) was being stubborn on the point. He had his reasons, but I wanted new software, so I switched.

I tried Corel Linux back when it came out. That lasted about two days. It didn't live up to its promises, and when I found myself replacing the Corel repositories with Debian repositories, I knew it was in vain (BTW, doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade from Corel to Debian is... interesting. It worked, after a lot of fixing, but I finally wiped and reinstalled Debian). It's just as well - there was only the one version of Corel Linux.

I've had to use Red Hat (not Enterprise, but old school Red Hat Linux) on a few occasions for work-related reasons. This was back in the RPM dependency hell days, and it turned me off of any distro that doesn't maintain a decently large package repository. I used Fedora Core 4 and found it to be just as bad. Same goes for Mandrake (before they became Mandriva - I had friends who ran that because it was "user friendly" - I did not find it so. It might be better now, of course.

I've used Gentoo for shits and giggles on a server I run. I was just curious about it. I've since replaced it with OpenBSD because a) I didn't have the time to learn to admin it properly and b) compiling every package in the system on an Intel Atom chip is painful. (I already knew how to admin OpenBSD.) I liked Gentoo and if I ever replaced Debian as my main distro, it would be to go to Gentoo. I just don't have the time to learn a new system anymore.

I've done LFS. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of Linux. It reminded me a lot of my Slackware days, back when you had to compile everything.

Ubuntu works, and I've run it on a few machines, but doesn't fit into my way of doing things. I like to customize my system a lot, and I like to log in as root when I'm doing admin stuff. You can do that with Ubuntu, but it's just easier with Debian.

Of course, there's the BSDs and Solaris as well, and these days I mostly do server stuff on OpenBSD (or FreeBSD if it's a fileserver). The BSDs make excellent servers and don't feel as "hacked together" as Linux does. I wouldn't use one as my main system, but if I had a technical job again I wouldn't mind a FreeBSD desktop.

So the rite of passage isn't to find the most obscure distro, but to find the distro that suits both you and your use case best. Experimentation never hurts, and you can learn a lot from running different distros.

You're not that aware of the technology or it would be obvious to you what he meant by: "You make a big list of valid hashes, GPG sign the list..."

You do it this way:
http://www.djangoproject.com/m/pgp/Django-1.2.7.checksum.txt

The stuff between: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
and:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

are signed by the corresponding signature.

more examples: http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/current-iso/stage3-amd64-20120621.tar.bz2.DIGESTS.asc

> What people tend to forget about GNOME is that a large chunk of the developers are
> employed by Red Hat. GNOME isn't worried about losing users because regular users aren't
> supplying their pay cheques, Red Hat is and that's why they get to call the shots and you don't.

There must be some MS moles at Redhat, secretly working to destroy linux...

* GNOME 2 was usable; destroyed.

* Got your linux PC's hard drive nicely partitioned? Sorry, must repartition because they f'd up udev.

* Like your current init system (other than systemd)? Sorry, you'll soon have have to go with systemd as your init if you use udev. That's because udev code has been rolled up into the systemd tarball. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.hotplug.devel/17392 At first they talked about long-term support for a separate udev. But they're rapidly changing their tune. See http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html
======
(Yes, udev on non-systemd systems is in our eyes a dead end, in case you haven't
noticed it yet. I am looking forward to the day when we can drop
that support entirely.)

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc
=====

Some people are getting pissed off enough that they're seriously looking at running linux without udev. The common replacement is the mdev utility from the busybox build. See...
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev/Automount_USB
https://github.com/slashbeast/mdev-like-a-boss
https://blog.stuart.shelton.me/archives/891

> What people tend to forget about GNOME is that a large chunk of the developers are
> employed by Red Hat. GNOME isn't worried about losing users because regular users aren't
> supplying their pay cheques, Red Hat is and that's why they get to call the shots and you don't.

There must be some MS moles at Redhat, secretly working to destroy linux...

* GNOME 2 was usable; destroyed.

* Got your linux PC's hard drive nicely partitioned? Sorry, must repartition because they f'd up udev.

* Like your current init system (other than systemd)? Sorry, you'll soon have have to go with systemd as your init if you use udev. That's because udev code has been rolled up into the systemd tarball. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.hotplug.devel/17392 At first they talked about long-term support for a separate udev. But they're rapidly changing their tune. See http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html
======
(Yes, udev on non-systemd systems is in our eyes a dead end, in case you haven't
noticed it yet. I am looking forward to the day when we can drop
that support entirely.)

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc
=====

Some people are getting pissed off enough that they're seriously looking at running linux without udev. The common replacement is the mdev utility from the busybox build. See...
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev/Automount_USB
https://github.com/slashbeast/mdev-like-a-boss
https://blog.stuart.shelton.me/archives/891

I say the compile, took three solid days

X is pretty huge and I'll bet it didn't just do the drivers you need but all of X - then there's KDE and a pile of apps there, I'll bet openoffice was in there too, so it comes down to Gentoo not being fine grained enough to cope with that situation with the options you told it to do (or not clearly telling you the consequences of your choices).

I followed
      http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml
and I decided to use 'emerge -pv xorg-drivers'. I was not able to get X to start afterwards. Not a big deal; I ended up using ssh and X forward to do the testing I needed to do. If I was really interested in running Gentoo I probably would have created an xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and manually set the video driver to either vesa or vmware, but after three days of compiling I was impatient to get the testing I needed to do over with. :-P

I've been there, done that with a little slow fanless VIA system that could actually benefit from specific compiler flags so Gentoo actually made some difference, and it was more than one day to get what I wanted even though I didn't go overboard and went for fluxbox instead of gnome or kde. Package management is there in all the other distros to avoid such annoyances and in most cases the stuff is compiled to take full advantage of whatever CPU you have anyway.
It should have said on the tin that Gentoo is all about insanely long compiles, but it's there in the docs if you look hard enough (eg. instructions on cross compilation for older hardware imply that it's going to take a very long time, so it gives you the option to do stuff on another faster machine instead). I played with it for a bit but that little slow box has Fedora on it now and a only a few things I've put on from source are actually optimised for that CPU. When you think about it the only times you really care about what the CPU is doing is in a very small number of appications that run it flat out and not the kernel, not X and not the window manager. Just compile gimp, vlc, firefox or whatever to use the hardware as well as it can run and you'd probably get all of the benefits of Gentoo on odd hardware, and if it's not odd hardware they'll just be a binary package that will do it just as well for you anyway.

The three-day compile was in a VirtualBox VM using both cores of a 2.5 GHz Core2Duo with 1024 MB of RAM dedicated to the VM. There's an irony in running Gentoo in that the reason given to run it is "speed", but to get that speed requires lots of compiling, which is slow.

There must be a way of installing pre-build binaries with Gentoo, as I've heard rumor of it, but I didn't find it myself. Probably a command-line switch to 'emerge'. If I end up running Gentoo again I'll try to figure that out. ;-)

It doesn't sound like you really know how to use gentoo based on what you're saying. I've built KDE and a system from scratch and it doesn't take one day let alone three.

No, it really took three full days for the base system + base KDE4 within a VM. I used the instralll instructions from Gentoo's website.
      http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/kde4-guide.xml

Also, don't set USE flags system wid unless you know you want to, that's what /etc/portage/package.use is for.

See the link above; the instructions has one change the USE flags, and then has one run 'emerge -uDNav world'.

You're correct that the USE flag was --newuse and not --newuser. Your comment otherwise was quite rude. Surely using elitism isn't going to help the Gentoo project.

Older gentoo gamecd's can be found that do just that. Live boot disc to unreal tournament for example.

Nothing quite like setting up samba to understand windows auth. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml

Alternatively, you could pick up one of the official MCSA/MCSE books. These do an alright job of covering it. Maybe it's just because I'm a linux admin, but I learned more from installing samba than I ever did from windows books.

Er running the latest version of a distro is like running a new version of Microsoft Windows before the first Service Pack comes out. I'm not sure what you really expected. And it's certainly not cramming it down your throat, the official site mirror for the US has installs all the way back to 8.04.

If you want an easy life, just install Gentoo...

Phillip.

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/GNOME3_Stable

In other words, its not stable enough on Gentoo

It all depends on what you are working on.
High level user space -- it does not
matter.

Low level down and dirty there is nothing closer to the bone than Gentoo.
      http://www.gentoo.org/

Embedded hardware constraints demands that you know how to
prune and tune the lowest bits. Gentoo is the bleeding edge but
by the time you are ready to ship anything your bits will not be.
Gentoo users demand that all the knobs get exposed.

Desktops for the developers are also important. They need big displays
and a full set of compilers and cross compilers; editors; and other
development tools. You also need full and rich kickstart tool set to load and
reload systems to a known state. Fedora or Ubunto make good desktops.
After your engineers "emerge world" a couple times they will move to an RPM
based system with a smile on their face. You will also find value in a set of build
machines to anchor releases on.

Source code control server is also important: If you do not understand
the list of source code control tool options that is the first anchor to
set in your new project world.

I second that. It was him that included my first kernel driver ( http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-driver-devel/2010/8/5/6885969 ). He is also a Gentoo developer belonging to the kernel team: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/kernel/

So Unix has ASLR, DEP, compiler exception handling bounds checking?

VMS is the only other OS that has DEP support fully. XP has partial support by SP 2.

Checklist wise Windows is the most secure kernel

I tend to doubt that. Have you checked out PaX and Grsecurity? I personally use Gentoo Hardened. It's a source-based distro so everything in userland is also built with SSP which provides the bounds checking (one nice thing about having the source). It also includes support for SELinux (see the Resources section of that first link I provided).

I guess you've never heard of Gentoo...

You might be interested in this: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/
I use git w/diff.external=winmerge and couldn't be happier

What's to stop you from removing the system logger you don't like and installing whatever you want?? See: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=9

Great, can fix the surround sound now.

Where you do save a crapload of time is things like the integrated revision system, so when you edit a system file you can simply check it out and check it back in when you're finished.

If you want version control on system [config] files, it is equally easy to put /etc in a git repository. Same benefits, but without relying on an obsucre file system. Oh, and I can push the same config files and their full mod history to every computer on the network. Can your fancy ZFS do that? I thought not.

Or compiling everything with appropriate use of processor extensions.

Ever heard of Gentoo? It's quite a bit easier to use than your BSD ports system.

Not to mention the much easier process of eliminating unneeded modules from the kernel.

I don't know what you're talking about. Linux always supported module unloading, and will usually do it automatically with no user intervention required.

Cygwin and Msys are basically pointless. Windows already has a native UNIX subsystem with a strong user community and a couple flavors of Linux. There's even a reverse WINE for binaries that can't be compiled for Interix.

Firefox was updated to 7.0 fairly quick after release, same with 6.0 and 5.0. 4.0 has been too long for me to remember how long it took. http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/firefox

Chrome I can't comment on how quickly it stays updated but it is very much in the package manager. http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/google-chrome

Firefox was updated to 7.0 fairly quick after release, same with 6.0 and 5.0. 4.0 has been too long for me to remember how long it took. http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/firefox

Chrome I can't comment on how quickly it stays updated but it is very much in the package manager. http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/google-chrome

Note that this is the entire system, so building Ice Cream Sandwich from source is just like rebuilding an entire Linux distribution from scratch from the ground up, from the kernel down to the user tools and the windowing system, etc. If you've ever used Gentoo, this should sound familiar. I wonder if some of the tools that Gentoo users are familiar with to help speed along compilation, such as distcc, could help with this.

"In 3.x, -O3 has been shown to lead to marginally faster execution times over -O2, but this is no longer the case with gcc 4.x. Compiling all your packages with -O3 will result in larger binaries that require more memory, and will significantly increase the odds of compilation failure or unexpected program behavior (including errors). The downsides outweigh the benefits; remember the principle of diminishing returns. Using -O3 is not recommended for gcc 4.x."

(emphasis Gentoo's, not mine)

2:

"Some users boast about even better performance obtained by using -O4, -O9, and so on, but the reality is that -O levels higher than 3 have no effect. The compiler may accept CFLAGS like -O4, but it actually doesn't do anything with them. It only performs the optimizations for -O3, nothing more.

Need more proof? Examine the gcc source code:

Code Listing 3.1: -O source code

if (optimize >= 3)
{
flag_inline_functions = 1;
flag_unswitch_loops = 1;
flag_gcse_after_reload = 1;
/* Allow even more virtual operators. */
set_param_value ("max-aliased-vops", 1000);
set_param_value ("avg-aliased-vops", 3);
}

As you can see, any value higher than 3 is treated as just -O3."

Read this stuff. It actually is kinda important...

/me rolls his eyes.


M.

At expense of being modded down, I suggest Gentoo Linux.

Gentoo Linux is actually a meta-distribution, which means that you can use Gentoo to create your personalized Gentoo-based distribution. The package manager (portage), which builds packages from source, can compile the package to the same (as the host/running arch) or any other architecture transparently, while tracking dependencies and anything else you would expect from a modern package manager. We can argue that it provides more or less the same features as bitbake (openembedded) or buildroot (debian), but really the big benefit of Gentoo is that the cross-development tool is actually the same as the system's package manager. This means that your new embedded system can benefit from all the available packages in the Gentoo repository, given that they build for the target architecture - of course.
For more information have a look at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/
If you are not familiar with Gentoo but you are already know how to create a GNU/Linux system from scratch, learning how to use Gentoo utilities is straightforward. However, if you are both new to embedded Linux development and Gentoo Linux, it might take some time to get used to it. But once you get your development system setup and your team used to it, trust me, Gentoo makes it really easy because you can automate most of the process. An example is the Gentoo LiveCD (which is still Gentoo) which is automatically built in a regular basis.

I've seen some interesting use cases in the Gentoo embedded mailing list but probably the most important one is Google. Google is using Gentoo to build it's Chrome-OS, for more information look here - http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide
There was a extensive discussion at Chrome-OS on what to use for their development system, and they ended up choosing Gentoo. Look up at their archives for the relevant thread since, if I remember correctly, the discussion provides a lot of pros and cons for some Linux-based embedded development solutions out there.

Just my two cents.

Gentoo - the ultimate education tool.

... + squirrelmail + apache + spamassassin (later switched to dspam)

I used this guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/virt-mail-howto.xml

It was great when it started out. It handles multiple domains. Handled spam well. Ran on a low end PC. Handled email for my family and a couple of friends.

Then it became a fucking pain in the ass to maintain. Mainly the spam filtering started failing, and it was a resource drain. Switched from spamassassin to dspam which improved the situation. But dspam was a fucking chore to train the filter.

Eventually I gave up. It took too much of my precious time to manage all the shit on my own and I moved my domains to Google Apps and can't be happier.

Just because I wanted to look it up:

Gentoo: Latest stable is 3.6.17, unstable is 4.0.1
http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/firefox

Arch: Latest is 5.0
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/firefox/

Debian: Sid has Iceweasle at 3.5.19
http://packages.debian.org/sid/iceweasel

Spotlight (specifically the metadata) is not portable/transferable. Quite frankly using grep/locate/find over a directory structure where files are symlinked into multiple categories is a real pain in the ass. POSIX extended attributes mean that the underlying file system is capable of storing and manipulating the metadata necessary, but the userspace tools suck!!

I've pondered this question before, and voiced some of my thoughts on the issue here. In summary we would need three things:

• Convenient userspace tool for specifying tags on an individual file. Could be done easily enough with a script wrapper around attr
• Convenient userspace tool for querying tags on an individual file, Again, simple with a script wrapper around attr, but ideally we would also want to add a new option to 'ls' to display an additional column to containing files/dirs tags.
• A way to query collections of files matching a binary expression of tags, e.g. patient_name && x-ray; And this is the tricky part. The ideal way to do it imho is to add some form of tag expression syntax to shell globbing patterns, and modify the standard C libraries accordingly. Then the current userspace utilities would automatically fall in line as far as I can tell. Anyone up for this job? It's not the coding that's hard, it's getting the community to agree to it...

Of course that's just Linux, and possibly Mac is covered if HFS+ does POSIX extended attributes. Once again, windows user's are left out in the cold. However, it would be trivial to write an export script that would create a copy of a collection of files in a hierarchical structure using symlinks ;) One could even write a fuse filesystem that makes the underlying collection appear as a symlinked hierarchy, which would be a quick step to at least get GUI file managers etc to grok the idea, although ideally the various file managers would provided direct methods to query tags, filter by tags, and modify tags.

I haven't tried thebrain (mentioned above) before, but I'm keen to give it a shot. I've certainly never seen or heard of anything else that does what I want, and what the OP has asked for. I'm especially curios to see how portable is? Can I for example, take my files from my linux laptop, and back them up to my NTFS external drie, preserving the organisation overlay provided by the brain?

The problem with that suggestion is that the people maintaining the code don't have a clue what QA means.

Gentoo developers don't maintain code, they maintain software packages. That means our main objective is to distribute the software to the users without minimal modifications, so that you get pretty much what upstream developers distribute. The only exceptions are when a patch that fixes a bug, security vulnerability or even a build problem, is available, then we would try to integrate it earlier than upstream. We also ensure the build system works, and we have documented policies on how to do that. Besides the regular stabilization process, there is also a QA team responsible for checking minimal ebuild (the portage recipes on how to compile software) quality. I had some commits reviewed by them so believe me when I say they are quite picky:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0048.html

And before people whine - I used Gentoo as my primary distro for around three years. The emerge system is great - but the data inside is crap.

For someone using Gentoo for around three years, that doesn't seem like a very insightful answer does it? What is the "data inside"? Are tou referring to ebuilds? :)

If you want to build your stuff from source and actually have a working system, look at the Debian-based distros. There's this nifty "apt-build" thing that lets you build software with whatever compile options you want (so you can still do -O3 -funroll-loops on everything if you really hate memory), just like Gentoo does

It is not the same thing. I was told by some people that they needed to be constantly asking the sysadmins to install the development packages of scientific libraries in Suse Linux (same applies to debian), depending on the use case, that can take weeks.

And there are packages for just about everything; partially because Debian's been around forever, and partially because "just about everyone" uses Ubuntu now.

Debian is not very famous for up to date software or is it? Sure you can add alternate repositories but you don't need to do that on Gentoo..

The primary difference is that you can build with source code that will actually work, and probably won't blow your system up when you just do a routine update. Wheras with Gentoo, some random kid who's too 'leet for testing might just promote to stable a new version of Xorg or Apache (both real examples from experience) which works fine on his system but breaks everyone else's in the world. And by "might" I mean "will". :)

Obviously the Gentoo's policy on package stabilization can't catch every single package problem out there. The policy was somewhat made to allow a fair trade-off between stability and availability. We could increase stabilization times but software would be available in a less timely manner...

Major breakages are not only Gentoo developer's fault. Sure sometimes a Gentoo developer messes up and makes its users rebuild the entire installed software, but most of the times are either bad decisions from upstream developers or because a major change (which breaks stuff) is really needed. If you understand how library linking and versioning works, I don't think I have to explain further..

Oh and by the way, latest versions of Portage have a nice feature called "preserve-libs" which prevents breakage if the API of a library changes..

I'm posting that mostly because quite a few Gentoo users think that only Gentoo (and maybe some of the BSDs) can easily rebuild a system from source, so they put up with atrocious quality assurance (which is admittedly extremely difficult given the Gentoo user base, and supposedly has gotten better) because they don't know that there are quite usable alternatives that are also mor

I'm one of the token Windows system admins here... and even I know that this stuff is just bloatware.

• dynfw is just a script to do a few things with iptables, its not new functionality.
• OpenSCAP is just some tools to manage code signing, which is an attempt to enumerate goodness, and doesn't actually fix things by improving security.

I thought they were talking about something new and useful... not just some hype... oh well... looks like they care catching up with uSoft in that department.

http://dev.gentoo.org/~tove/stats/gentoo-x86/cvs-log-sum.txt [gentoo.org]

I'm number 20 on that list, having recently surpassed 10k commits to Gentoo myself (in 7 years). The top of our list is somebody with 70k commits.

That's impressive and we don't even count what's going on in the overlays..

Yup, that's Ubuntu before the suckage added.

  Or Unbuntu with the suck massaged out: http://www.linuxmint.com/

    Too light to contain suck: http://www.archlinux.org/

    Too tiny to hold suck: http://puppylinux.com/

    Got their suck fixed a few releases ago, it's all good now: http://www.fedoraproject.org/

    fixed their suck a while ago too, lookin' good: http://www.freebsd.org/
 
    supports all kinds of desktops that don't suck: http://www.mandriva.com/

    roll your own without the suck: http://www.gentoo.org/

http://dev.gentoo.org/~tove/stats/gentoo-x86/cvs-log-sum.txt

I'm number 20 on that list, having recently surpassed 10k commits to Gentoo myself (in 7 years). The top of our list is somebody with 70k commits.

- robbat2@gentoo

You don't but it might not be that easy. Firefox 4 probably won't be backported to many old versions of Linux distros so you might not be able to get it from your package manager.

That is true, however there is nothing stopping you from compiling it yourself for your particular distro or hardware set.

You can do it more most any distro, or use a distro that compiles EVERYTHING like Gentoo.

wow, this was coordinated
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20110401-canterbury.xml
http://www.opensuse.org/
http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110401
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2011/04/msg00006.html

Didn't you hear that debian, openSuSE, Arch, Grml and Gentoo are merging?

http://www.debian.org/
http://www.opensuse.org/
http://www.archlinux.org/
http://www.gentoo.org/
http://www.grml.org/

Do you think the repressive Chinese government would let the media know that their country's national processor has a flaw?

The Loongson 2E & 2F processors have flaws, but it's not like the Chinese is hiding anything.

One of the flaws is this one, and there is a software workaround for it: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338405

As I have seen thus far, China is working openly with the open source projects to get their changes upstream into the Linux Kernel, glibc & tools, and other applications.

I even have a port of Open Grid Scheduler (Grid Engine fork, a batch scheduler for HPC clusters) for Loongson:

http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/

Well, you could look at the documentation :)

Seriously, this part of the handbook explains how it works pretty well. The "working with rc-update" and "changing the runlevel behavior" sections are probably the most important for most users--or rather, for most of the subset of users that would care about this to begin with.

just look at linux GUI's just a rip of, of Windows.

-1 uninformed, at best
Classic Gnome with customization
Gnome Shell (useful screenshot)
Enlightenment (no screenshots on official site)
GNUstep
Fluxbox
Xfce

To continue on-topic: wasn't it just last week when we noted that the Windows Phone marketplace specifically excludes GPL software?

What's with the double line spacing, /.?

just look at linux GUI's just a rip of, of Windows.

-1 uninformed, at best
Classic Gnome with customization
Gnome Shell (useful screenshot)
Enlightenment (no screenshots on official site)
GNUstep
Fluxbox
Xfce

To continue on-topic: wasn't it just last week when we noted that the Windows Phone marketplace specifically excludes GPL software?

What's with the double line spacing, /.?

• Debian: [1], [2]
• Ubuntu: [1]
• Gentoo: [1]

BSD (it's not dead, after all!)

This shows a huge amount of ignorance. BSD is alive and fine, in several forms:
- FreeBSD
- NetBSD
- OpenBSD
- DragonFly BSD
These are probably the most important. Take a look at Freebsd Derivates. You'll see there are many commercial products derived from Freebsd too.

Also, there are initiatives of porting different Linux distros on top of the BSD kernel:
- Gentoo/*BSD
- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
- Debian GNU/NetBSD (abandoned in 2002 it seems)

BSD was, is and will be alive for a long time.

So you would rather trust yourself over an organisation that has entire teams dedicated to browser based malware who command vast resources?

Yes. The reason is very simple: no one is in a better position to secure my own equipment than I am. If I didn't know how to do that, then you might have a point.

If Google wanted to send skilled technicians and/or security researchers to my physical premises to harden my systems for me, then you might have a point. I could pick their brains and probably learn a thing or two. Google has made no such offer. Meanwhile, a "take it or leave it" blacklist has no such advantage.

All browsers suffer from zero day vulnerabilities and just running NoScript and AdBlock will not stop all of them. I'm betting you don't scan the contents of every URL before you open it and even if you did you only use one scanner which is only as good as the last update. Google has the advantage of being able to see potential vulnerabilities pop up on multiple sites, particularly ones it knows are disreputable or have served malware in the past. Most AV companies seem to see web based malware blocking as secondary to detection and removal after the fact but for Google it is their main function.

For just this reason I don't rely on updates alone. I also use a combination of the least-privilege principle, non-executable pages, address space randomization, SSP, and other techniques to make it quite difficult to successfully exploit even a zero-day vulnerability. If you're interested, I arrange this by using Gentoo Hardened. These measures, plus staying up-to-date, plus commonsense best practices are the foundation of how I run my systems.

If you are unfamiliar with those techniques please research them before falsely pronouncing a third-party blacklist as the superior choice. I don't need Big Daddy Google looking over my shoulder to make sure I stay safe and I'm capable of making an informed decision about this.

I'm not saying Google are perfect but they are pretty damn good and you would be nuts to ignore their free advice.

That's a nice appeal to authority you have there. I agree that Google's blacklist is better than nothing. I said in an earlier post that it's a good thing overall. However there are vastly more effective ways to secure a host. By comparison, this blacklist is a convenience at best. Anyone could investigate and implement those ways, but the vast majority of users don't want to. They are the target audience. They are the ones who stand to benefit from this blacklist. If I ever said that nobody should ever use this blacklist for any reason then the way you've been responding to me would make a lot more sense.

I don't believe you appreciate the nearly religious nature of your objection. I have determined that any benefit I would derive from Google's blacklist is negligible for me. I am not stopping anyone else from using it if they believe it is of value to them. I am not advocating that Google be made to stop maintaining this blacklist. I am not saying this blacklist has no value, only that it has no value to me so I use alternatives that better meet my needs.

For some reason you seem determined to convince me that that it's not appropriate for me to make this determination for myself. You think I'm "nuts" or must be in error because some guy on Slashdot can't easily talk me out of what my own research and experience has taught me. We will have to part ways at this point, as I don't believe I can help you with that.

At the root of this, I don't know if self-determination and personal responsibility offend you, if you're far too impressed by large organizations, or if you're just one of those who must win a convert because you feel affronted by someone who adheres to a different philosophy.

Not to be posted toward anyone in particular, but being as this /. is about a change to Ubuntu, I'm sure there will be a plethora of posts regarding how inept they are at dealing with the changes or questioning why the change or etc. The real question is why bother ever complaining about something that was free. If you don't like it, you can always get your money back (credit +$0). If you really don't like the way a distribution is going or have a problem of stability or security of one thing verses another, then by all means do it yourself. If you want something the way you want it, then do so: LFS, Gentoo, or ArchLinux

Link please.

I think you're full of it, and are just trying to perpetuate some old myth about socially incompetent *nix-users.

You'll always be able to find rude people on the internet, but Linux related forums is in my experience some of most polite and helpful corners of the internet. Like people willing to spend hours helping you track down some obscure bug or misconfiguration.

Random recent example: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-851901-highlight-.html
And: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=872137

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/

WRT unix granularity, you are probably a bit behind the times.

But yes, in many scenarios this is overkill, in fact, I remember the frustration of the cygwin folks in the past as they discovered that the more granular windows system was incapable of doing all variations the basic user / group / world read/write/no access set.

There was some discussion of it on the mailing lists at the time.

Anyway. To frame this a bit more productively. Under linux systems nowdays, configuration overrides on a per-user basis are in places like ~/.local and ~/.gconf

Is there something like that for windows, so you don't need special privs to override generic system values w/ user-specific ones?