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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."
First, installation is being adressed. The currently-released installer is a rewrite of one I made in 1996 or so. It was great for 1996. I wrote Busybox for that installer, by the way. The new installer being tested for the next release has positive reviews. There is also a port of Red Hat's installer.
But the most important thing about installers is that they are run once. People base entire distribution reviews on the installer, which is just stupid.
Debian has Perl 5.6 in unstable at the moment. I don't know if 5.8 is very different, and what the Perl maintainer has to say about it. Why not ask him?
Unstable gets security updates to the main branch, rather than to security.debian.org . Security.debian.org exists because of the need to bypass the release management for stable to get fixes in immediately.
Regarding the security record of various distributions, I don't think the commercial ones will tell us if they are hit, unless it becomes obvious from outside. Who knows how often they have been compromised? Gentoo just announced a compromise, perhaps based on the same brk() bug.
The really impressive thing about the Debian breach was that it happened at 5 PM, they had detected and confirmed a breach and had the sites shut down by 10 PM, they announced the breach at 10 AM, and they did the forensics and found an unsuspected exploit within about a week. I dare you to show me a commercial Linux distribution that has been that timely.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Although we're all getting comfortable with it, I'd like to see the name UserLinux go bye-bye. In fact, "Linux" is getting to be scary word to a lot of execs, especially as Red Hat and Sun announce their pricing, which is getting up there.
I like names like MorphOS, which are much more friendly. Frankly, I'd love to see a catchy name withOUT the word Linux in the title and have th tagline be "Built On Linux" or "Based on Linux."
Does anyone else agree with that?
Toy Story character names are trademarked by Pixar and Disney. Disney is especially known for its legal department. We can't really make commercial use of those trademarks.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
But the most important thing about installers is that they are run once. People base entire distribution reviews on the installer, which is just stupid.
I think what you are going for is that using the system is more important than installing the system. But honestly, OS installers are very important, especially when evaluating for the home user. Most home users have never installed an OS, they got one with their computer. Besides, ease of use with Linux is usually less a function of the distribution itself and more a function of the environment (eg GNOME, KDE, etc.) which are essentially the same for all distros.
Package management is a problem which, IMHO, still needs solving. There are several package management schemes but only debian and the source based distros appear to have mostly killed the dependency monster (it still rears its ugly head in various ways). Both are fairly simple to use, but still not ready for Grandma.
I think that a user linux system should strive to be easier to use and administer than the current crop of commercial operating systems. I think that installation of the system itself and the software are going to be lynchpins in this process. Most users spend more time doing these things than performing any other administration task. Existing technologies will probably provide a good framework for this, but the key to usability is interface interface interface. I think all OSs have a long way to go in this area, quite frankly, not just Linux.
Why not do everything inside of Debian? Because Debian is a non-profit, and needs the synergistic relationship with for-profit engineering and service providers to achieve the goals I am proposing.
Thus, I had to design a structure with Debian at the core, but which is a superset of Debian.
Were I starting with a for-profit, I'd have had to design an independent non-profit at the middle and a number of competing for-profits. Fedora fails the independence test, if you were wondering.
And before you accuse me of wanting to revitalize Debian, you should attempt to make a case that it has lost vitality.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
apt-get install --file
Sometimes you want to install a .deb that doesn't exist in any repository, but depends on packages in Debian. apt-get won't help you, so you use dpkg --install. But dpkg doesn't satisfy dependencies so you have to do it yourself.
It seems to me that apt-get is missing a simple and useful feature. Am I missing something?
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.