Distros To Try: Slackware 9.0-rc1 And Yoper 1.0

FrosGate writes "Slackware 9.0-rc1 is now available for public consumption over at www.slackware.com. From the site: 'Some of the main components included are the 2.4.20 Linux kernel, KDE 3.1, GNOME 2.2, and XFree86 4.3.0, as well as gcc-3.2.2 and the latest development libraries. Enjoy!' Enjoy is right!" And Scorchen writes "YOPER has released Version 1.0 of their increasingly popular distro. This is the their first stable release." Here's the announcment. The website claims "With Yoper it is possible to import packages from all the other major distros including rpm's, deb's, and tgz packages."

Comments

Re:Yoper looks a bit dull?

[hdparm]

GNU/YOPER

Happy now?

Oh sorry, it's Stillman, not Stallman.

Re:I'm gonna try Slackware 9

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't even touched Slack since the 5.x days

So i guess that means that you have never touched slackware then genius?

And you can...

[Anonymous Coward]

...reaffirm your masculinity with a goofy red hat?

whatever floats your boat dude ;)

How Open Source Software Harms the Environment

[Anonymous Coward]

As you may know, Open Source has always lagged far behind in many 'consumer' type of features. Among the most prominent are 'power saving' modes featured on many of the newer PCs. The subsystems, of hardware, BIOS, and operating systems, reduce the amount of power consumed by the computer when it is not in use, and thus save energy and the environment. However, it is clear that by eschewing these features as being for 'lame desktop windoze lusers', the open source community firmly establishes itself as standard American energy sucking social reprobates, unconcerned about the fate of the rest of the planet, and not caring one whit if the entire nation collapses just like California did last year. In this article I show just how much energy would be wasted if people did, in fact, switch to linux or BSD.

The way to calculate power consumption of a computer is relatively simple and will cost about 50 bucks. First you need to get a multimeter that can measure AC current up to a few amperes. The next step is to get a 3 prong power cord. After that get some connector thingies and a wire stripper/crimper. Then take the hot wire of the power cable and split it and make it so you can plug the multimeter into it, in series w the circuit to measure. In this case, a computer.

Next, power is measured in watts. A good familiar yardstick is lightbulbs, with 60 watt being pretty normal to see in ceilings in people's houses. Volts * amps = watts, and since the voltage will be roughly 110-120 volts, (measure w a voltage meter if u wanna be exact), you can multiply the number on the ammeter by 120 to find out how many watts the computer system is using up.

Now, surprisingly, in 'off' mode, power supplies and monitors and so forth draw current. 83 milliamps in my case. .083 * 120 = 9 watts. Thats pulling all the time. Day and night. 24/7. Now, lets say I have this thing plugged in all year. Thats 8760 hours. The power company measure this stuff in 'kilowatt-hours', so how many of those am I using? 9 watts * 8760 hours = 78,840 watt-hours, or 78 kilowatt hours. At 14 cents a kilowatt hour in my district, I have payed 11 dollars to the power company this year for my computer system to do absolutely nothing at all. Not even be turned on.

Now let's say I turn it on! My system draws roughly 0.66 Amps with windows running. When I start an open gl game its 0.68A. If i decide to unplug the fan that saves me 0.02A. basically, though, its roughly 0.66 Amps.

If I left my computer on full blast all the time, hard disk going, monitor on, etc, this is what it costs me to be up 24/7. 0.66Amp * 120v = 79.2 Watts. 8760 hours in a year at 79.2 watts makes roughly 693,000 watt-hours, or 693 kilowatt hours. Again at 14 cents per, thats about 97 USDollars worth of electricity a year for the computer to be on.

But the nice folks at Microsoft, being tree hugging hippies and all, have implemented easy to use, reliable, and safe 'power saving' mode. This mode will make your hard disk stop spinning, and on suitable monitors will turn them off as well. Now, how much power does this actually save? Well, you can measure it. Just wait a few minutes for the comptuer to go into power saving mode.

In my case, when the monitor goes into sleepy mode, (the orange sleepy light instead of the green power light on the monitor case) consumption plummets from 0.66 Amps to 0.27 Amps. All because of an operating system software feature interacting properly with the a simple monitor hardware feature that has been around at least 5 years. Now when the hard disk shuts off, it goes down even more to about 0.23 Amps. Now, with the hard disk not spinning and heating in my machine, I could theoretically shut the case fan off and save another 0.02 amps... but my box doesn't do that. Anyways, there is even a 'more power saving mode', its called 'suspend' mode I believe, and that drops me down to a low low 0.20Amps. I guess it shuts down some circuits on the motherboard as well as the HD and monitor. I don't know.

Anyways, lets say the box was in 'power saving' mode all year, monitor at sleepy-orange, and hard disk spun-down. 24/7. 120V * 0.23 Amps = 27.6 Watts, * 8760 hours = roughly 241.7 kilowatt hours, down from 693 kilowatt hours. Thus I spend 33.8 dollars, down from 97 US dollars, a savings of roughly 63 dollars, or about 2/3 off. Thanks Windows.

Let me be more realistic and say I use the computer 5 hours a day. 1,825 hours a year I am on the computer using it, so it cannot be in 'sleepy mode'. Thus, 6935 hours I am in sleepy, using 27.6 watts, and 1825 hours I am in 'doing things' mode, sucking up 80 watts. I still end up with 6935*27.6+1825*80 , 337 kilowatt hours, which is about 47 dollars. Compared with the 693 kilowatt hours / 97 dollars above, that's still 1/2 as much as leaving it in 'awake' mode all the time.

Let us say, though, that instead of running a modern, secure, stable operating system like Windows, I was instead running a legacy app from the 60s: Unix. It is no wonder that FreeBSD and Linux both have unusable 'power saving features'. First off, you have to recompile your kernel to even use them, depending on which of the 100+ 'distributions' of Unix you get. Second of all, you can never be sure exactly what you are supposed to fiddle with to get it turned on. For there is the 'kernel' power saving subsystem, and there is the 'GUI' power saving subsystem, often hidden deep in the bowels of a window manager like KDE. Frequently these 'power savers' do something pathetic like 'screen blanking', which doesnt save much of anything. It just turns the monitor black.

In such a case,the monitor keeps sucking power. So does the hard disk. I know that you will say 'but hdparm lets you turn it off'. Sure, if you can figure out how to use it. After you do that, you may find that even when it shuts off the hard disk, the hard disk will randomly spin back up for fun. Why, I ask you? Because linux is full of programs that feel they need to write to disk periodically, and none of them have given a second thought as to cooperating with things like hdparm and so forth. Or maybe they have, but linux and unix are so hopelessly confused with 5 different layers of configuration subsystems, that nobody knows how to do it. The end result is that for all but a very few expert users, who probably recompile their kernel, Linux and other open source products end up making the computer suck TWO TO THREE TIMES MORE POWER than Windows.

Thus, to run Unix is about the same as leaving a 50 watt lightbulb in your closet on all the time for no reason other than to suck power that you didn't need to use. They say there is a 'Windows Tax' on computers, but there is a 'linux tax' on our national economy and our environment.

Thankfully, mercifully, Linux has not yet been forced upon the vast majority of people, despite the efforts of tens of thousands of linux zealots holding 'install fests' and other bacchanalian orgies of 'enthusiast'ism.

Well, I know what you are thinking. I promised this would be about the environment, and so far all I've talked about is money grubbing penny pinching of a few measly ten dollar bills (Featuring the genocidal racist maniac, Andrew Jackson, I might point out, but that is another story for another time).

So let's perhaps figure out how much of that mucky black stuff it takes for Linux to sit on its lazy ass not reducing power consumption. Ah yes here we go
One kilowatt hour = 3.6*10^6 Joules,
42 gallons (1 barrel) of oil = 6.1*10^9 Joules.
So lets convert oil to kilowatt hours ok so it'll be the same units as I used to calculate how much the computers use, above. 6.1e9j/barrels-oil / 3.6e6 j/kwh --> 1694 kwh per barrel of oil. Divide by 64 gallons/barrel and you get 26 kilowatt-hours per gallon of oil. Now, you probably have an idea of how much a gallon of milk or 2 liter bottle of soda pop is, so I will leave you to imagine filling it with black slimy crude oil pumped out of the ground and realize it will run a ~3 watt item for ~8600 hours (like, say, a hard disk spindle motor, for 1 years time)

Well, how much mucky muck will be wasted in toto? As before, 693 kwh for a computer w/o powersaving, on all year round. 337 kwh for a computer in sleep+5hours a day of use. Thus, the first computer is using up 693kwh... divide by 26kwh/gallon, you get roughly 26 gallons of oil a year to run the first computer. The second computer is using 13 gallons of oil. Thus, the second computer is SAVING 26-13, or 13 gallons of oil from being pumped out of the ground.

What's that you say? You don't run your computer on oil! You don't have some diesel generator out back burning gasoline (and no, kids, you dont "gain energy" by refining oil into gasoline. you just pack it differently. For that matter, oil produced is a fuzzy term, for a great deal of energy must be expended to haul it, produce it, refine it, etc, sot he numbers are not pure in the first place. Hopefully we get a good rough idea though.) Now your power plant doesn't probably burn oil either! Probably true. So what about coal? Maybe your local power plant burns black rocks so you can play quake?

Fortunately those smart folks who study things like energy have written down the kwh for coal too. 1 pound of coal (size of your fists) has 1.6*10^7 joules of energy. You can see this in action at a medieval fair, many of whom have 'blacksmiths' nowdays burning coal in a little oven to bend metal with. Fun and stinky. Coal, btw, is ripped out of the ground where poor people live, because they don't have any lawyer friends to get the neighborhood standards committee to get the coal company. Normally when someone strip mines a mountain, kills a few thousand trees, leaves them dead on their lawn, and causes landslides and black smoke to pour over everyone, the homeowner's association and the neighbors get mad and send nasty letters and perhaps point out that mud slaked yards to don't comply with the 'neatly trimmed grass' provision of the subdivision homeowner agreement.Anyways at least the coal companies don't hire assassins to go and kill miners trying to get higher wages anymore. At least not in the US.

But I should not link linux to murder, that would be a bit of a wacky stretch. This article is about a serious topic! A pound of coal has 1.6*10^7 joules of energy, and 1 kwh is the same as 3.61*10^6 joule, so a pound of coal has 1.6*10^7j/pound divided by 3.6*10^6kwh/j or roughly 4.4 kilowatt-hours of energy. Pretty crap compared to oil I must admit. But 4.4 kwh is still nothing to sneeze at, as I myself if burned in an oven probably wouldn't produce all that much more, and I weigh 200 times more than a pound of coal.

But how much of that could Linux waste? Let's say As before before, 693 kwh for a computer w/o powersaving (linux), on all year round vs 337 kwh for a computer with powersaving (Windows), 5 hours a day of non-powersaving use. Thus, 693kwh divided by 4.4kwh/pound-coal means about 158 pounds of coal go to run the first computer, while 693kwh divided by 4.4kwh/pound-coal means roughly 77 pounds are needed for the second computer. That's 81 pounds of coal a year some person in a coal mine is hauling up so that Linux can sit there wasting energy.

Now I know what you are saying, 'I don't burn coal to run my computer! My power comes from the power company, and who knows what they do. Maybe hydro or nuclear or maybe they have gerbils running in cages.'

That's OK though, there is a way to get a rough idea of what exactly they might be using. Yes here we are, a chart of how energy is produced in the US. Roughly, Coal: 22%, Nat. Gas: 20%, Oil: 14%, Nuke: 7%, Hydro: 3%, 'biofuel': 3%, other 3%... so linux is probably wasting coal, oil, or natural gas. Maybe plutonium. Probably not solar, wind, geothermal, tides, ocean thermal whatever, biomass, bamboo/wood/sugarcane burning/whatever.

So there you have it. Linux wastes energy .How much energy, though? I mean what's a few pounds of coal between friends. OK a few dozen pounds. Some of us get that much for christmas in our stockings free from Santa Claus. But what if there was more than one person running Linux? What if Wal-Mart gets it's wishes and Lindows becomes used by, say, I don't know, everyone who has a computer in the United States of America?

So how many computers are there in the US anyways? In the US, here says roughly 60 million on the internet[broken link] , Here says 133 million flat out. I like to be conservative and use round numbers so lets say 50 million people switch to Unix, the 'non-powersaving OS', for a year. Then what?

First let me calculate the power consumption of 50 million computers that have usable working powersaving (Windows) and compare it with those that don't (Open Source, like Linux or BSD). Again, in one year: 693 kwh for a computer w/o powersaving, on all year round. 337 kwh for one with powersaving. Multiply each of those by 50 million. That is 3.47*10^10 kwh for the first computers, and 1.69*10^10 kwh for the second. A difference of 1.87*10^10 kwh, or 18.7 -billion- kilowatt hours.

Now, how much is this 18.7 Billion kilowatt hours, all of which would be wasted turning hard disk platters that were not being read/written, and shooting light out of monitors that went unwatched? How much is that in terms of oil, coal, or natural gas? 1 kwh is 3.61*10^6 joules, so in joules the waste is 6.75*10^16 joules. Now there's 1.6e7 joules in a pound of coal, 1.1e6j in a cubic foot of natural gas, 6.1e9 in a barrel of oil, and 3.7e13 joules in a pound of uranium.

Thus, the waste of switching 50 million computers to Linux would be 6.75e16j divided by 1.6e7j per pound-coal, or 4.2 billion pounds of coal. Gas? That'd be 61 billion cubic feet of natural gas (roughly a 3/4 square mile blob of gas). Or 11 million barrels of oil. Or, 1,824 pounds of Uranium

Speaking of Uranium, it's stripped from Uranium ore (rocks), two pounds U per ton of rock, and 1 percent of that the right kind of U for splittin'. So, we would be diggin thru roughly 182 thousand tons (1824pounds*100percentages) of radioactive dirt so that Linux computers can sit there spinning the hard drive motors and spewing electrons out of the monitor for no reason.

Now, those are big numbers. But how much do they mean relative to say, eating a ham sandwich? Well, I don't know about ham sandwiches but at least there are some numbers about total production/consumption out there. Example: In the USA, Nuclear produces 674 billion kwh/year . Thus, if 50 million open source operating systems were wasting 18.7 billion kilowatt hours a year, that is 1/36th of the nuclear power generated for a year, or roughly 10 days worth of nuclear power plant operation. 10 days of people slogging through spent nuclear fuel rod canisters, watching dials, calculating steam pressure, etc, all because of no powersaving mode in computer operating systems.

Or perhaps open source would rather waste coal energy. Say there is 1.12 billion short tons coal/year produced in the US, and a short ton is 2000 pounds, so wasting 4.2 billion pounds of coal, that is 2.1 million short tons, or one 500th of US coal production. Half a days worth at least. Mining, shipping, transport, burning, smoking, polluting, etc. All for the little devil and penguin to burn up doing nothing.

Or oil. There are roughly 6.25 million barrels produced every day in the USA, so basically 50 million open source computers, if they took the place of Windows computers for a year, would be wasting 2 days worth of the entire oil production of the United States. All the drilling rig hands, all the oil field workers slinging drill casing around in their 5 ton trucks and whatnot.

Clearly, our nation cannot afford to be doing this . Nor can our environment. When we do things like strip minerals from the earth and burn them, or pull sludge from where it's been buried 150 million years and put it through lots of tubes, and combust it, we aren't doing it for fun. We are doing it because we feel it is an easier way to live than being hunter gatherers. Or something. Actually most of us are probably not quite sure. After all in modern society you can live your whole life and never see a single thing that you have eaten grow, nor have any idea whatsoever where your heat, food, water, clothes, etc, actually come from. The assembly line mentality. But anyways.

The reasons behind this are many, but chiefly it is that open sourcers in general DO NOT CARE. They have listen a thousand reasons why they program and what motivates them and what they care about. Energy consumption is very very low on the list. For them, computers are a magic resource that comes from a store that they can fiddle with for fun. Or 'to solve a problem for themselves', which usually involves some obscure administrative task that 99.99% of the world would not care about or want to take the time to understand. Thus we have open source software, written by people who don't care about the environment, for people who don't care about the environment. It's power saving features, if they exist, are buried in obscure, hard to use, crappily implemented subsystems that require a great deal of technical knowledge to even switch on, let alone set up. Thus they go unused.

This is not the fault of the users, nor is it the fault of the people who 'do nothing but whine'. It is the fault of people who don't care about any of this being the ones who control open source projects. It is pointless to release independent patches to projects without coordinating with people already working on areas of the project. Otherwise your patch will quickly become outdated, or simply not work, or be poorly integrated, and thus hard to use, which is part of the whole problem in the first place. Perhaps one could build a 'critical mass' of dissidents and create a fork, but that does not change the fact that millions of people will not use that fork, and will continue with their own familiar Linux/BSD distros, whose leaders will not change their retrograde attitude about such matters.

The answer, of course, is to give energy-tax credits to people who install Windows, rather than unix. There is basically no other way to prevent this energy tragedy from happening. Won't someone think of the children?

Re:I'm gonna try Slackware 9

[Rebel Patriot]

I haven't even touched Slack since the 5.x days. I think that it's time to get back to my roots.

Troll! had you ever ran Slackware you'd know there were no 5.x releases!

Go back under your bridge.

Re:Slackware is always quick to pick up the latest

[illogical_simby]

What's wrong with you guys, I'm still wiping my eyes. Keep the funny posts coming!

Re:I don't undestand why linux is on so many CDs

[moertle]

I remember the day that I was saddened that the /slakware directory didn't fit on a single 100MB Zip disk.

Yes.

[Ayanami Rei]

(didn't I just say that?)

So what, it still isn't funny. Nothing about slackware is funny until you run fortune -o

Re:OSNews

[colin_n]

The duds as described in the thread on OSnews are these, and I will do a copy and paste:

"Yoper doesn't include a working dependency-resolving package manager. Apt is included, but doesn't seem to work; rpm is installed, but the db has no clue what packages you have installed, so you have to use --nodeps, and after the new program crashes because of dependencies, you have to look at the output from the console to see what you are missing, then to rpmfind.net, and on, and on." - posted by anonymous.

Sorry I wasnt descriptive before

Colin

I'm going to make a new distribution

[baywulf]

It will be a tiny version of Debian called 'DE' and to please RMS I'll call it GNU/DE.

Slackware 9?

[Spacelord]

Oh damn .... and I just finished upgrading my workstation from 8.0 to 8.1

Re:The Fuck$lashdotNow Report #1 -- Nested Mode

[p00p]

you unfortunate turd. You have just wasted one of my two logged-in posts. Twat. Do you accept ASCII pr0n?

Got p00p?