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If I Had My Own Distro...
Gentu writes "Adam Scheinberg writes an interesting editorial explaining what he would do if he was a developer and he had a Linux distribution. His suggestions are pretty radical, and in places resembles of what Apple had done to MacOSX with the help of BSD as the underlying technology. But if this is what it takes to get Linux into the next level, it might worth the consideration."
The goal of the MHS project is to define a Modern Hierarchy Standard for UNIX-like operating systems which will further enable them to evolve, innovate, grow, and compete with Windows and other modern OSes.
/bin => /System/Commands /sbin => /System/Commands /boot => /System/Boot /dev => /System/Devices /etc => /System/Config /lib => /System/Libraries /proc => /System/Process /mnt => /Mount /opt => /Apps /tmp => /Temp /home => /Users /usr/bin => /System/Executables /usr => mostly placed under /System /var => mostly placed under /System
/Apps directory rather than cramming everything into /usr.
Specifically, MHS technology will provide the following benefits:
100% Application Directory Oriented
Internationalization of Directory Names
More Intuitive Directory Names
Fewer Root Directories
Support for Case-Insensitive File Systems
Full Coexistence with Legacy FHS
Increased System Flexibility
A new hierarchy will be a big enough change to make distributions switch to application directories.
Set of environmental variables pointing the location of major system directories.
Applications would no longer need to hard code directory names.
System level directories grouped together under a common directory. (/System)
Currently, the directories are expected to be moved to the following locations:
All paths will be lower-case on a case-sensitive file system. As shown otherwise.
Application developers and distribution makers will need to use the
The autoconf family of tools will be patched to support the new hierarchy which will make most applications translate easily.
Although it can still be done, MHS will not support the same level of shareability (i.e. mounted over a network) as the legacy FHS standard.
FHS can be emulated via symlinks and MHS can be emulated on existing FHS systems. A kernel/file system hack of some kind may be done to have the legacy directories disappear in directory scans, to help improve user friendliness.
In addition to the standard, the project is developing a set of scripts that will setup the new hierarchy on existing FHS compatible systems.
The standard will not be finalized until a Linux distribution ships based upon it.
heres why:
1: the stuff he says on the first page is basically a bunch of static linkx that can be done easily.
2: You cannot have a Gentoo style community unless you are a distro that caters to people who are willing to go to great lengths to learn more about their OS and computer hardware.
3: the one desktop environment is stupid. Thats one of the reasons I switched from windows, that their desktop environment is idiotic, especially in the same paragraph as talking about how linux offers choice.
4: installers are not necessary. try making a gui frontend to Gentoo's emerge/portage if you want a good install system. Not only does it download and update, but it also works. really well.
5: this asshat cannot spell bruce perens' last name. I am supposed to trust him with my OS? *cackles*
not to echo Linus or anything, he sounds like his objective os to combat microsoft on the desktop. I think personally that it is far better to exceed or be superior to Microsoft for technical reasons more than market share reasons. Besides...last time I checked the average non-poweruser on windows is just as lost as they would be in KDE, for example, if not more. And were said powerusers not almost all gamers, they'd likely find KDE superior if they gave it a chance (to compare similar DE's).
my $.02
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Because most people have x86 hardware and Mac OS X doesn't work on x86 hardware (in case you didn't know). I'll bet that most people aren't willing to shell out $2000+ for an Apple system with the performance of a ~$1000 x86 system when they already have an x86 system. I myself have an Athlon XP computer, and if I had unlimited money I'd buy a PowerBook and dualboot OS X and some form of Linux. But, like most of the people in this world, I don't have unlimited money, so I'll stick with my x86 hardware for now.
Ok, so this guy has an article about how confusing it is that there's a zllion GNU/Linux distros, and he wants to add one more -- his own? His own distro which does everything backwards from other distros, so that users can't use any of the help-documents that apply to all GNU/Linux distros?
/boot -- the portion you boot from. /dev -- where devices (like your CDROM) are. /mnt -- where devices are mounted and accessible from. /root and /usr -- where most of the applicaitons are. Then there's /home -- where the user's stuff is. How exactly doesn't this make sense? My suggested improvements would be renaming /dev to /devices, /usr to /user, and /mnt to /mounted-devices.
His complaints abou the file-system hierarchy are noted. However, I believe he is wrong. There is
I think this guy's comments are certainly not taylored towards making a good GNU/Linux distributiion overall -- but only one that is good for people with 1+GHz systems. Only allowing people to choose what are clearly the most bloated applications? I don't think so. Obviously, this guy doesn't give a flying fuck about anyone who wants to use Linux for older computers.
Rather than eliminating choices, the distributions should give users the information to make better choices. Mark one e-mail client as the preferred "light" client, and several others as preferred "well-featured" clients for various environments. Also, for categories (in Gentoo) like net-mail, provide a spreadsheet of features and which e-mail clients have those features, as well as binary-sizes, RAM-sizes, and benchmarks of run-time performance, load-time; also, user ratings.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Have a look at Fluxbox, Enlightenment and projects like Slicker which is a more radical card based version of the KDE kicker. It's pretty unique in my eyes.
http://slicker.sourceforge.net/
Cloning Windows? the screenshots I've seen of latest Windows betas seem to suggest they've lifted a few ideas from the Unix desktop as well.
That should've read:
I completely agree. X is horrible. PicoGUI seems to be doing well, and hopefully it'll address these problems when it's more mature. I can't say for sure, though, because i'm really not very Linux-smart, and i couldn't get it to compile. (Oops :D )
Forgive my idiocy. I've spent too long posting to forums that use stuff like [url=http://www.blah.com]. Sigh.
Apple indeed quit working on Linux, but it did at one time distribute a linux system called mklinux. It was based on RedHat and had a mach kernel rather than the normal Linux kernel. Whether that makes it not Linux anymore is certainly an interesting academic question. Of course, Darwin ended up taking away a lot of the development that used to happen on mkLinux. Apparently work has gone slowly, as in the 5 years or more I have been looking at this project off and on there still has not been a "release" though it appears the site is being updated and release candidates being released.
Here.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I cannot believe how stupid you are.
You have no understanding of how symbolic links work.
If you really think this is such a problem, use hard links!
You're making claims out of your ass that "kernel filesystem" needs to be rewritten simply because you don't understand the difference between hard links and soft links.
Congradulations, your stupidity has caused me to no longer read comments on slashdot.
I can't believe how bad it's gotten...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
I feel like a broken record lately..sorry. But your describing Mandrake and their urpmi/rpmdrake set. I agree, dependencies are a huge pain but a properly setup Mandrake box will handle those with rpmdrake (a gui frontend) which includes a really good index (by group, name, source, etc).
Think of Mandrake as Sid with less crashing and almost everything else you just asked for. Just don't forget to configure urpmi with Easy Urpmi with all available sources first off (Nvidia drivers, Macromedia plugins, all sorts of good stuff!) so you can get those apps! (and remove the Mandrake Mplayer and replace with the PLF..wink, wink)
Quack, quack.
Seriously, Knoppix seems to have everything but a ``push me to repartition the hard drive and install automagically'' button.
Wait, yes it does...
You can use knoppix as an gui installer.
Find out how HERE
I'm using a system setup this way right now.
In < 15 minutes I had a fully working debian system - and I mean *fully* working. All my hardware worked etc.
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." "I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
When I first got Red Hat 8 it had Mozilla 1.2.1. I tried downloading the .rpm for 1.3... install it. DEPENDENCY: mozilla v1.2.1 needed for mozilla-nspr 1.2.1
So I get nspr and try installing it... mozilla v1.3 required. DOH
I try selecting both in the GUI, it runs 2 separate processes. both fail. DOH
btw the rpm engine is really slow at working with dependencies. perhaps it needs a cache (new option --use-cache ?)
At this point, I get frustrated, download the tarball, run gunzip, tar -xf, cd over, read the readme's. ./configure;make install ... and then all I have to do is make a symlink in /sbin point to the directory containing mozilla. Takes a couple hours but all but 10 minutes spent afk while it compiles; not that bad...
The only way to test the speed of X is to test it by itself. Take it down to minimal and then try it on various hardware and compare it to windows.
:P
X by itself is fast and efficient on my computers. I don't know why yours aren't. Try setting up X with twm or another lightweight window manager. See how fast it runs? Even on my old and crusty AMD K6-2 450MHz, X pops up very quickly in twm or another lightweight window manager. It is only when I run KDE/Gnome/(insert bloated desktop here). Hell, with a lightweight window manager, X11 runs peachy on a 486!
What this shows is that all of the modern "fancy" toolkits and window managers are the bottleneck, not X! IANAP, but I would say that the optimization needs to happen in the upper layers. Also, using the networking functionality doesn't slow my X sessions down at all when using fvwm/twm/blackbox/etc. Acutally, I haven't really noticed a slowdown for KDE or Gnome... at least not enough to catch my attention when I wasn't looking for it.
Oh yeah, I like my networkability (is that a word?) with X11.
*** The problem with making Linux not just a clone of Windows is that it's always (from the X perspective) been a clone of Windows. Motif was designed to offer the functionality of the HP VUE system and the visual elegance of Windows 3.1. I kid you not. Motif still remains as the single biggest influence on Linux desktops today. QT 1.x offered just two styles - Windows and Motif, Motif being a clone of Windows. GTK was always a blatant Motif clone.
Actually you are wrong. Motif was developed in 1989 and windows 3.0 actually didn't come out until 1990. So there!
History of Motif
History of Computers
In fact, just the opposite is true, MS Windows blatantly took all it's ideas from this OSF initiative.
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
hello, as you are obviously new to UNIX/Linux, please check out the nice(1) manpage. Gentoo developers make significant effort to test compiler flags, and filter flags known to cause problems, if you can make something function incorrectly or crash with a compiler flag, thats a bug and should be reported. It will be fixed by filtering out that flag.
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
Well actually Gentoo is the development environment of choice for lots of high profile projects, Fluxbox WM for example. A large percentage of Gentoo users are developers, i dont know what youve based this claim on, but its clearly not reality.
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
Umm, Gentoo has an installer? I dont think so. Please install gentoo before criticising it.
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
I'm sure thats what your distribution provider wants you to think, but the fact is it _DOES_ make a difference, and it rocks. I also believe KDE is usually the most popular DE.
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
Gentoo has been ported to MIPS, PPC, Alpha, SPARC, etc. Im writing this message on a SPARC64 Workstation running Gentoo.
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
See above. Untested software is not available in stable branches, If you really want latest development releases, they are made available using ~arch keywords, but most people stick to the EXTENSIVELY tested packages.