Posted by
michael
on from the includes-two-of-every-application dept.
An anonymous reader notes that OFB has a short blurb about a new Linux distribution, Ark Linux, based on Red Hat and chasing the ever-elusive goal of being "easy to use for the masses".
Yes, the announcements on slashdot, osnews, ofb.biz and pclinuxonline came as a total surprise to us.
We aren't 100% ready for the user base we're trying to address yet (there are a couple of installer bugs left, and we're lacking a good internet access config tool -- that's why it's called an alpha), so we tried to remain low profile [and didn't put much effort into the website] -- but now that we've been taken to the public, there's not much of a point in continuing along those lines.
There's also not much of a point in putting up screenshots if you know the look will change before you intend to tell the public.
Who knows, maybe we'll find some new contributors (maybe even for website design and graphics?;) )
Aw, darn, a few months too late.
by
Mitchell+Mebane
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Someone else has already tried this, folks. And done a great job so far. It's called Yoper.
--
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Re:good luck
by
kevin+lyda
·
· Score: 3, Informative
my rule of thumb about linux/unix dirs./lib - libs for binaries for single user mode (ones in/bin)./usr/lib - libs for binaries for multi-user mode (ones in/usr/bin)./var/lib - data files for various applications.
Re:counterproductive
by
sean23007
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You would rather see one good linux package than ten substandard ones. Well, first of all, they can't all be substandard. Whatever is their quality is the de facto standard. But I digress. What I am trying to say here is that it would not be in the interest of the Linux community to combine all of the distributions into one "good" one. Each distribution has its own advantages and disadvantages, many of which are mutually exclusive. Combining Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, etc would not yield one system with the advantages of all and disadvantages of none. It simply wouldn't work.
One of the biggest draws of Linux and the Open Source movement in general is that there is so much choice. Not only the freedom to choose a specific distribution, but to create a new one if you feel there is an unfilled niche. Combining distros cannot work, so these people felt that they could fill a niche by creating their own distribution.
--
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Re:Four years and half too late.
by
Bero
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Ark Linux did not exist four and a half years ago. In fact, we didn't want to go public yet - we don't like preannouncing vaporware (though the current alpha version is actually usable, if you can overlook the rough edges) -- so there wasn't much need to update the website etc. until someone decided to notify the media of our existance.
The 4 1/2 years reference from the original poster refers to the creation of the Mandrake distribution, which started with similar goals, but developed into a different direction.
Mandrake is a good distribution, and suitable for desktop use if you know what you're doing a bit - but Mandrake is an all-purpose operating system, and therefore too complicated for many newbies (this may be hard for us geeks to understand, but people do get confused at the notion of 50 editors, 4 desktop environments and 20 MP3 players).
Ark Linux will focus on being a home user OS, and just that. IMO, if you want to please too many totally different needs at the same time (and "server", "techie workstation" and "newbie home user" are 3 _very_ different needs), you have to make too many tradeoffs.
once it's as easy as windows it's going to crash like windows too.
No, because we're trying not to repeat the design flaws of Windows.
Some of the things that make Windows unstable, and what we're doing:
In Windows 95, 98 and ME (the most unstable ones of the bunch), every user can overwrite/delete system files. Installing application X overwrites the DLL application Y installed, causing application Y to be unstable. soname versioning is a vital part of all Unix-like OSes, and we're definitely keeping that, avoiding the windows DLL mess. As for overwriting/deleting system files, it's a security vs. usability tradeoff, and I think we've found a good compromise: The system runs as a normal non-root user with special privileges (via pam) to run package installation tools and some system config tools as root without being prompted for a password.
All drivers etc. run in kernel space, frequently causing a badly written driver to crash the entire system. Ark Linux uses the same drivers as any other Linux out there - so we won't lose the stability. The biggest part of the graphics drivers etc. is in userland, so it can't crash the OS
Windows is not open source, therefore its code does not get any peer review. Ark Linux is, and will always be, Free Software. In fact, it's a not-for-profit community project.
Take off the tinfoil and a quick read of the site..
- 4 clicks to install = good - giving simplification a shot = good - developed own installer (i guess) = good
- no info about what to do with an iso = bad - explained in terms of red hat = bad - unanswered questions on page = bad - needs:
screenshots
info on hardware requirements
info on supported locales (or is it just English)
info for developers on "why develop for distro x"
needs a "why use our distro" page for users
- might be interesting if you could do work just by popping CD in (without partitioning or doing a big install).. or is that what it does? dunno.
That's some seriously awsome support.
by
redhairedneo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm already installing, just look at that support
Seriously though, don't click the link, it's goatse.
What the hell is with that??
Well..
as already pointed out by bero, we are still in a developement stage, and that's why we didn't any public announcement so far.
Our highest focus atm is the codebase, the distro itself.
That's why the website is still a bit "poor".
I hope we will be able to work on it soon... just remember that Ark Linux is an "open" project, therefore everybody is free to contribute anything.
I really hope to get more people involved as time goes on.
Let's see
Ark Linux web site is a farce with pr0n on it
by
isdnip
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm surprised fewer Slashdotters even looked at Ark Linux' web site before engaging in the usual jabber about easy-to-use Linux distros. The site itself has no info about the distro. But if you go to the FAQ, lo and behold you get a bunch of references to "goatsex", an ASCII art dirty picture, a few hundred lines repeating the word "faggot", and a dirty story. Not much about Linux though.
I suspect the whole thing is a put-on by somebody with a serious lack of taste. Certainly if it were a real distro, and this stuff were hacked onto the site, then its server security wouldn't be adequate.
Re:Ark Linux web site is a farce with pr0n on it
by
Bero
·
· Score: 5, Informative
What you've seen is the result of someone from the IP 68.13.232.26 (ip-68-13-232-26.ok.ok.cox.net), located in Atlanta, using Phoneix 0.5 on Windows 2000, abusing the fact that we've tried using an open support system.
The idea behind the system was simple - anyone can ask questions, and anyone can reply. Pretty much like a Wiki. So in a way, we got hacked - but since there was no protection for this area of the website, I wouldn't call it a security problem in the distribution. And we learned from it - the support system is now censoring bad posts. I find it sad that these things are necessary, when ideologically, we'd much rather fight censorship.
We made one mistake - namely that we trusted people wouldn't abuse it. This guy used malicious HTML tags to redirect the support system to his crap site.
Dear "hacker", you can be proud - you just circumvented nonexistant security blocks! I'll vote for you at the l33t h4x0r of the month contest.
Re:how to make linux desktop good for masses
by
Bero
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Ark Linux will not be a Windows clone, though we don't hesitate to clone parts of the Windows UI where it makes sense.
"Microsoft does XXX" is neither "XXX is good" nor "XXX is bad".
Ark Linux aims at providing everything the average home user needs - the desktop, office suite, media player, net access tools, a couple of games, etc.
For developers, there's the Ark Development Suite, a collection of development tools and programming languages (about 200 MB) - comparable to Visual Studio (with obvious differences - e.g. we support additional languages like Python, Objective-C, Perl,..., but don't support C# (yet - Mono isn't ready for prime time)).
Of course, Ark Development Suite is 100% free too - the only reason it isn't included in the base OS is that 95% of the targeted users won't need it.
Re:same bero from RH?
by
Bero
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes.
I originally started working on Ark Linux as a proposal for a Red Hat home user edition - but obviously they didn't care.
1. stop basing them on red hat. If red hat is so great, use red hat.
Red Hat has a great base system, but is not the best distribution over all. Red Hat Linux is, in my opinion, a lot like a rusty old car with a great engine (think glibc, gcc,...) in it. So what would you do in that situation? Right, you'd salvage the engine and put it into a better car. That's what we're doing.
2. Gime me some actual reason why this is better than red hat, mandrake, suse, conectiva or the red-hat flavour of the week.
It's not better, it's for a different type of users. If you intend to set up a server, don't use Ark Linux.
Ark Linux is an operating system for home users - something the distributions you've listed have failed to achieve (it's VERY hard, if not impossible, to write an OS that's a good server, a good home OS, and a good corporate workstation - there are totally different needs for those 3 areas. Our philosophy is to pick one, and do that one well, instead of doing all 3, and doing them just ok.
Re:Four years and half too late.
by
Bero
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And that's exactly what we're trying to do. We've tried to put in only the best of its kind for everything (where best is, of course, subjective - you may or may not agree with our choices), occasionally opting for 2 if there's really a need (e.g. OpenOffice is probably the best office suite overall, especially since people will need to open M$ files sent by colleagues -- but it's totally unusable on a slow machine, where KOffice runs circles around it).
As for performance, we're trying to give it - e.g. we've patched glibc to use a much faster malloc (we didn't really like the --enable-fast-malloc option in KDE - why give a fast malloc only to the UI and leave the rest of the system slow? That needed fixing...), and we're using prelinking from the start.
Re:Red Hat 8.0 *IS* ``easy for the masses''
by
Bero
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No...
Show it to any newbie, and you'll see.
What the **** is a partition?
Why do I need 50 editors? Is that emacs thing good? Should I use vi?
User administration? What the ****? This is _my_ computer, I don't want a *****ing login! I don't need that in Windows, therefore it's easier to use!
Why can't I edit the menus?
And that's just 4 of the comments you _will_ get.
Also, if you look at the technology behind it, you'll notice it's suboptimal.
Red Hat 8 is an interesting idea, but I think they got it pretty wrong, and made the OS worse by stripping it of some of the best tools and leaving in vastly inferior ones.
User interface wise, Ark Linux does a lot more than putting another theme on top of Red Hat 8 - we've replaced all their UI stuff.
Try it out for yourself and you'll see the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
See BeroLinux on SF which was then integrated to Linux Mandrake PR
wolruf@gmail.com
No screenshots??!?
;) )
Yes, the announcements on slashdot, osnews, ofb.biz and pclinuxonline came as a total surprise to us.
We aren't 100% ready for the user base we're trying to address yet (there are a couple of installer bugs left, and we're lacking a good internet access config tool -- that's why it's called an alpha), so we tried to remain low profile [and didn't put much effort into the website] -- but now that we've been taken to the public, there's not much of a point in continuing along those lines.
There's also not much of a point in putting up screenshots if you know the look will change before you intend to tell the public.
Who knows, maybe we'll find some new contributors (maybe even for website design and graphics?
Someone else has already tried this, folks. And done a great job so far. It's called Yoper.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
my rule of thumb about linux/unix dirs. /lib - libs for binaries for single user mode (ones in /bin). /usr/lib - libs for binaries for multi-user mode (ones in /usr/bin). /var/lib - data files for various applications.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
You would rather see one good linux package than ten substandard ones. Well, first of all, they can't all be substandard. Whatever is their quality is the de facto standard. But I digress. What I am trying to say here is that it would not be in the interest of the Linux community to combine all of the distributions into one "good" one. Each distribution has its own advantages and disadvantages, many of which are mutually exclusive. Combining Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, etc would not yield one system with the advantages of all and disadvantages of none. It simply wouldn't work.
One of the biggest draws of Linux and the Open Source movement in general is that there is so much choice. Not only the freedom to choose a specific distribution, but to create a new one if you feel there is an unfilled niche. Combining distros cannot work, so these people felt that they could fill a niche by creating their own distribution.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Ark Linux did not exist four and a half years ago.
In fact, we didn't want to go public yet - we don't like preannouncing vaporware (though the current alpha version is actually usable, if you can overlook the rough edges) -- so there wasn't much need to update the website etc. until someone decided to notify the media of our existance.
The 4 1/2 years reference from the original poster refers to the creation of the Mandrake distribution, which started with similar goals, but developed into a different direction.
Mandrake is a good distribution, and suitable for desktop use if you know what you're doing a bit - but Mandrake is an all-purpose operating system, and therefore too complicated for many newbies (this may be hard for us geeks to understand, but people do get confused at the notion of 50 editors, 4 desktop environments and 20 MP3 players).
Ark Linux will focus on being a home user OS, and just that.
IMO, if you want to please too many totally different needs at the same time (and "server", "techie workstation" and "newbie home user" are 3 _very_ different needs), you have to make too many tradeoffs.
No, because we're trying not to repeat the design flaws of Windows.
Some of the things that make Windows unstable, and what we're doing:
soname versioning is a vital part of all Unix-like OSes, and we're definitely keeping that, avoiding the windows DLL mess. As for overwriting/deleting system files, it's a security vs. usability tradeoff, and I think we've found a good compromise: The system runs as a normal non-root user with special privileges (via pam) to run package installation tools and some system config tools as root without being prompted for a password.
Take off the tinfoil and a quick read of the site..
- 4 clicks to install = good
- giving simplification a shot = good
- developed own installer (i guess) = good
- no info about what to do with an iso = bad
- explained in terms of red hat = bad
- unanswered questions on page = bad
- needs:
screenshots
info on hardware requirements
info on supported locales (or is it just English)
info for developers on "why develop for distro x"
needs a "why use our distro" page for users
- might be interesting if you could do work just by popping CD in (without partitioning or doing a big install).. or is that what it does? dunno.
I'm already installing, just look at that support Seriously though, don't click the link, it's goatse. What the hell is with that??
Well.. as already pointed out by bero, we are still in a developement stage, and that's why we didn't any public announcement so far.
Our highest focus atm is the codebase, the distro itself. That's why the website is still a bit "poor".
I hope we will be able to work on it soon... just remember that Ark Linux is an "open" project, therefore everybody is free to contribute anything.
I really hope to get more people involved as time goes on. Let's see
I'm surprised fewer Slashdotters even looked at Ark Linux' web site before engaging in the usual jabber about easy-to-use Linux distros. The site itself has no info about the distro. But if you go to the FAQ, lo and behold you get a bunch of references to "goatsex", an ASCII art dirty picture, a few hundred lines repeating the word "faggot", and a dirty story. Not much about Linux though.
I suspect the whole thing is a put-on by somebody with a serious lack of taste. Certainly if it were a real distro, and this stuff were hacked onto the site, then its server security wouldn't be adequate.
Ark Linux will not be a Windows clone, though we don't hesitate to clone parts of the Windows UI where it makes sense.
..., but don't support C# (yet - Mono isn't ready for prime time)).
"Microsoft does XXX" is neither "XXX is good" nor "XXX is bad".
Ark Linux aims at providing everything the average home user needs - the desktop, office suite, media player, net access tools, a couple of games, etc.
For developers, there's the Ark Development Suite, a collection of development tools and programming languages (about 200 MB) - comparable to Visual Studio (with obvious differences - e.g. we support additional languages like Python, Objective-C, Perl,
Of course, Ark Development Suite is 100% free too - the only reason it isn't included in the base OS is that 95% of the targeted users won't need it.
Yes.
I originally started working on Ark Linux as a proposal for a Red Hat home user edition - but obviously they didn't care.
1. stop basing them on red hat. If red hat is so great, use red hat.
...) in it. So what would you do in that situation? Right, you'd salvage the engine and put it into a better car. That's what we're doing.
Red Hat has a great base system, but is not the best distribution over all.
Red Hat Linux is, in my opinion, a lot like a rusty old car with a great engine (think glibc, gcc,
2. Gime me some actual reason why this is better than red hat, mandrake, suse, conectiva or the red-hat flavour of the week.
It's not better, it's for a different type of users.
If you intend to set up a server, don't use Ark Linux.
Ark Linux is an operating system for home users - something the distributions you've listed have failed to achieve (it's VERY hard, if not impossible, to write an OS that's a good server, a good home OS, and a good corporate workstation - there are totally different needs for those 3 areas. Our philosophy is to pick one, and do that one well, instead of doing all 3, and doing them just ok.
And that's exactly what we're trying to do.
We've tried to put in only the best of its kind for everything (where best is, of course, subjective - you may or may not agree with our choices), occasionally opting for 2 if there's really a need (e.g. OpenOffice is probably the best office suite overall, especially since people will need to open M$ files sent by colleagues -- but it's totally unusable on a slow machine, where KOffice runs circles around it).
As for performance, we're trying to give it - e.g. we've patched glibc to use a much faster malloc (we didn't really like the --enable-fast-malloc option in KDE - why give a fast malloc only to the UI and leave the rest of the system slow? That needed fixing...), and we're using prelinking from the start.
Show it to any newbie, and you'll see.
And that's just 4 of the comments you _will_ get.
Also, if you look at the technology behind it, you'll notice it's suboptimal.
Red Hat 8 is an interesting idea, but I think they got it pretty wrong, and made the OS worse by stripping it of some of the best tools and leaving in vastly inferior ones.
User interface wise, Ark Linux does a lot more than putting another theme on top of Red Hat 8 - we've replaced all their UI stuff.
Try it out for yourself and you'll see the difference.