UserLinux Proposal (And Analysis) Now Available

Lucky writes "Bruce Peren's idea for UserLinux was much discussed on Slashdot some weeks ago; however, there was no formal proposal. Linuxworld is running an analysis of the proposal and links to the first draft."

Comments

UserLinux vs Fedora

[Steve 'Rim' Jobs]

Which one is more likely to grow the most mindshare in the future? I'd be interested to hear some opinions.

Personally I think UserLinux or something like it will prevail in the end. Red Hat exercizes too much control over Fedora IMHO.

Re:UserLinux vs Fedora

[theantix]

It doesn't matter if you are ignorant or just trolling, but you have a point about how out of date Woody is for modern desktop installations. There really needs to be official support for application backports. Hopefully when Sarge goes stable that will be basically what the commercial debian-based distros (Xandros, Lindows et al) will be actually doing.

Re:How about just "Debian"

[Bruce Perens]

Our goal is to get everything we do into Debian. Sometimes, Debian might not want it, or the package maintainer may be slow to accept it. So, I think we will end up having our own repository for fixes. But if we are unable to get Debian to take stuff, it is more expensive for us to maintain - we have incentive to work with Debian.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Distributions too conservative

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

There are tons of games on freshmeat.

only 75% of which are free (as in speech), and 95% of those 75% being crap. Which leaves you only with a handful of really promising open-source games, and 2 or 3 really good original ones (that excludes Doom, Heretic, Duke3D, Quake and other previously-commercial-but-look-how-nice-we-are-we- released -the-source-code-to-you-guys kind of games).

Not much to make CDs out of really.

Re:Is this another distribution? What's the point?

[Bruce Perens]

Please read the paper. That will explain something of what I am trying to do. The main thrust is not a radical improvement in user-friendliness. The "User" in the name is due to the user-supported nature of the economic paradigm I am proposing.

Bruce

Re:How about just "Debian"

[Bruce Perens]

It's not only desktop. It must be desktop and server.

I think it should support the media formats that we can legally support in Open Source. The service companies may want to have their own, properly licensed, add-ons for formats that we can't support. I think we have the opportunity to push Ogg as a standard in the Userlinux venue.

Bruce

Re:How about just "Debian"

[virtual_mps]

To be fair, people @suse and @redhat provided great assistence during the investigation of the debian incident. I would like to see the incident held up as a model of cooperation between the various parts (commercial and noncommercial) of the linux community.

Re:How about just "Debian"

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Knoppix has a nice installer, and it is based on Debian. I don't know if Userlinux will steal this installer, or if they will use the official Debian installer.

2) Debian testing uses perl 5.8.0-18. You should check your facts before posting.

3) Unstable also gets security updates. (I agree that testing is problematic).

4) I don't think that it is fair to claim that Debian has a horrible record of security.

Bruce on Thelinuxshow.com

[bstadil]

Bruce Perens was guest at TheLinuxshow last night and what he wants to do was discussed in some deatal at the second half of the show.

Click Here if you want to hear it.

Re:How about just "Debian"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why start with Debian at all, though?"

for example because everybody else seems to start with debian recently

"Why not start from a better distribution such as SuSe, Mandrake, or Redhat Enterprise Linux?"

ask klaus knopper, knoppix was started from a redhat and than switched to debian, because it was easier...

"Second, Debian is extremely out of date. Even if you use unstable, packages such as Perl 5.8 are not available. And Perl 5.8 has been out for a long time."

grow up...
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/d ebian-d evel-200311/msg01648.html

"Debian is just not the way to go."

au contrair, currently debian is the perfect way to go.

Re:Webmin

[Bruce Perens]

By the way, we will have the free downloadable version of the webmin book online soon. Or you can buy it - it's in the Borders and Barnes and Noble stores, etc. See my book series.

Thanks

Bruce

GPL'ed Qt on Windows

[Balinares]

Here.

I hear you can get a native, Trolltech-provided Qt 3.2 Windows free edition on the CD-ROM that comes with the upcoming re-edition of the Qt book, too, if you can't want for the above project to reach completion.

Otherwise, a decent alternative is wxWindows (not as clean and elegant as Qt, and thus requires a bit more code for a given task, but still very decent, don't worry).

Thank you.

Re:How about just "Debian"

[Daengbo]

Apt-cdrom, my man. Just type apt-cdrom add and you have your local (an d out of date) repository. My distro (rpm based LinuxTLE) supports it.

Re:Need more specific complaint

[Anonymous Coward]

After "dpkg -i downloaded_package" run "apt-get install -f" to force it to download the dependancies (or remove the downloaded package if the dependancies can't be satisfied).