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Three Major Linux Distributions Certified LSB Compliant
KevinDumpsCore writes "RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE are now certified LSB compliant!" Here's the announcement on the Free Standards Group's site. The Linux Standards Base (check out these related Slashdot posts) has been working for years to perhaps tame the what-lives-where cross-distro craziness. (Of course, distro makers are under no obligation to comply with the LSB's choices.)
a nice open standard like LSB, imagine the improvement in install docs, cross distro rpms...this is a good thing.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
LSB requires compliant distributions to provide, not use, rpm, and Debian does.
Window managers should really be little more than themes; otherwise, we're just reinventing the wheel every time another person has to redevelop an algorithm that's already present in five other places.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
It's too bad that the LSB people havn't yet taken on packaging issues. They've effectively chickened out by just recommending RPM. The best features of RPM, DEB and the BSD ports system should be reflected in a new packaging format for people to work towards using. Not only should this format be recommended by the LSB, but the LSB should define policies for the use of the format - package name and version formats, dependencies and package alias names, source package handling, non-official packages, etc. This really is necessary to get distribution of commercial software on Linux; testing for and supporting distribution differences is just too expensive for most companies. This is not to say that everyone supporting RPM won't help, but rather that policies are needed to really make it work, and that we may as well get a more optimal package management system happening :)
(http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/cert_prodlist.t pl?CALLER=display_product.tpl)
-Mandrake Linux ProSuite 8.2 + first update CD
-Red Hat Linux 7.3 with glibc 2.2.5-39+kernel 2.4.18-10 or later
-SuSE Linux 8.0 Professional + aaa_base and Kernel Update
--- Brad (http://www.LinuxReview.net)
could make X anywhere from 12% to 37% faster on the average platform
So, did you just pull those numbers out of your asterisk, or can you actually point to some analysis to back that up?
Even assuming that were true, on most machines (ie, anything better than a 386 with 4 MB memory), the difference won't be noticeable because even a 200% improvement in event response is lost in the noise of human reaction/perception times.
-- Alastair
I don't see seven layers of API. That's just FUD you are spouting from either the Windows or Berlin camp.
A typical GNOME app makes calls into the GNOME libraries, which are linked at the hip to GTK. GTK directly talks the lowest wirelevel X protocol which gets stuff on the framebuffer.
A KDE app talks to the KDE libraries which are built on Qt. Qt talks Xlib (QT experts feel free to call me an idiot and correct me) which, like GTK, talks directly to the X server.
And if you want to argue that X imposes too much overhead, that is why we have things like the shared memory extension and Xrender.
But NO, window managers must remain ordinary applications, otherwise X turns into something brain damaged like Windows or a Mac.
Democrat delenda est
The are some problems, for some reason LSB specifies a standard package, ie RPM
/usr/share/doc/lsb/README.Debian.gz
I do not know why, I see no reason for it, but obvious this is a problem for Debian, which has its own (imo superior) package (debs).
This article from Debian planet, is about a sudo package you can install, which depends on all the LSB stuff (thus gets them installed, with some caveats)
As to RPM, Debian wont move from debs, but I believe they make a wrapper so that dpkg can understand them, see
I will not install lsb, cause it wants lpr (BSD print deamon) and I already use CUPS (a SysV print deamon), as well as other stuff.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I have been using apt for rpm (apt4rpm.sf.net) for ages, works insanly well !! resolve de dependency hell !
Debian 3.0 did pretty well compared to SuSE.
Link shamelessly stolen from this post.
Certification has little to do with being bloated. It has to do with compatibility. Compatibility sometimes aids to bloatedness because you have to support both new and old. Look how big XP is vs NT 2000, a good deal of bloat is to get the Win95 kernel stuff working. Even with all that bloat, there is stuff that doesn't work. Microsoft isn't certified, and it can break things as it pleases, sometimes intentionally.
/etc/rc{1,2,3,4,5,6}.d but called /MyReallyCoolStartupDir/runlevel/{un,deux, trois...}. I doubt if most software would work though. If you want to make your mark on your install, go ahead. There's plenty of stuff you can do. There's just some stuff you should leave where others can find it.
Linux certification has less to do with forward and reverse compatibility than across distros. Testing's a bitch. Last professional project I did on Linux, we had to support 3 different startup models: Slack 3 and inittab, SVR4, and RedHat SVR4 where they moved the rc?.d directories. (granted this was a long time ago and all may have changed since). Because it's a pain to test for 3 different distros, most folks only do 1, and they might as well do the biggest, and that's RedHat. Slack was dropped, and Mandrake was a one time deal. The group that contracted us said screw these other distros, we'll just support RedHat.
The reason for certification is to get more software. If I can target one installation file, one file system layout, then I'm more likely to make software for that. The easier it is for me to support you, the more likely I am to do so.
Yes the user is free to do whatever they want. You could make it where your startup directory isn't
LSB requires the lpr command, not the lpr software. CUPS, LPRng, Berkeley lpr, and GNU lpr all satisfy the LSB requirement IIRC.
I print, therefore I am.
Grr, I'm so tired of people not getting this. The LSB usage of RPM is simply not a problem for Debian. We have no problems handling .rpm packages. See the rpm and alien packages (particularly alien) to see how we do it. The RPM thing is a non-issue regarding Debian's LSB compliance.
To see how seriously Debian takes LSB compliance, go have a look at the archives of the various LSB related Debian mailing lists
noah
LSB is an attempt to standardize many aspects of a Linux distribution, such as binary (executable) file format, dynamic libraries, packages, and system initialization. They also standardize file system format, and the LSB 1.2 is FHS 2.2 compliant.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Handling of incompatible versions of the same software is done ad hoc, without any strictly established and well designed rules. Either the old or the new version gets a number appended to the package name (glib10, kde2, gcc3).