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Debian World Domination Plan
An anonymous reader writes "Guillem Jover announced his plans to take over the non-Debian world and released a tool which converts in
runtime any distribution to Debian. It does not convert in the sense
of mapping all previous installed packages to the Debian counterparts,
but installs a base system or tarball and cleans traces from the
previous distribution."
Then as a migration tool it's pretty limited.
/home and /data and /specified intact).
It would be fantasic to be able to hit a button, have something read the RPM database and automagically reinstall a APT based system (leaving
It's not fantasic to replace the kernel and leave you with a right royal mess of apps that can't be maintained, or worse still nuke everything so it doesn't work right.
This is a first step, which is cool, but it looks like it needs extending a bit to gain some practical application. Rather like the depenguinator (script to remove linux and install BSD) its a cool toy with little real application as of yet.
Beep beep.
You make it sound like Debian is a single entity with a single mind. Last I checked there was no official statement about KDE, just a bunch of people who were tired of upstream not using sane packaging policies.
FWIW, I think most of that's over now - I think KDE's even in a releasable state. New people took over when the old maintainer gave up in disgust.
It seems that people are moving to another Linux distribution if you can read between lines in the following statement:r /corporate/2446
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/press/pr?n=/p
Anyway, it's certainly not a surprise: my feeling is that Mandrake is the Linux distribution the most close to Debian in its spirit. It's more friendly and offers more new features though.
I think the KDE problems have already been dropped years ago. What they need to drop to get to the desktop is:
1) there installer, it simply requires far too much manual tweaking to get from a first install to a useable system, other distro are far better here. If Knoppix takes a minute to boot and be useable and Debian multiple hours up to days, something is seriously wrong.
2) there 'stable' concept, it just doesn't make sense to have all stuff crunched into one gigantic package and call it 'stable'. Stability isn't a gloabl issue, but very often a per package one, ie a new KDE or Gimp can often be way more stable than the stuff that you find in a Debian stable, but it will never get included in there, since stable dosn't get any updates at all beside security fixes. This often leads to having packages in stable that are far less stable than what you can get from unstable. 'stable' should mean having a stable system, not being stuck with the same programm versions for multiple years.
In the latest poll amonst KDE developers Debian was the favoured distro. 25% total.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
... will upgrade Windows XP to Debian 4.0.
I'm not sure why this is funny...
Unfortunately, I see a lot of perfectly good PCs get tossed because the owner has hosed Windows with some sort of adware/spyware/Kazaa. Most of these PCs have WinME or 98 on them. As long as they have 128 megs of RAM (256 better) and a ~500Mhz processor, they are good machines. Unfortuately, WinME an 98 are unacceptable operating systems and XP is prohibitive in cost when you can buy a new PC for $350. Why bother?
If someone made a distro to displace ME and 98, then there would be a huge market out there. And I'm not talking about some bootable thing. We need a distro that will back up the current hard drive, install Linux and then bring down some of the known backup (like Favorites, My Docs, etc).
I'm thinking of starting a PC recycling business because most trashed PCs these days are still acceptable performers. I'll take all these PCs, install Linux and then donate them to churches and schools. Brilliant!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The attitude of "turn services off and you don't need a firewall" is wrong.
The problem with the server breakins amplifies this.
Either debian is strictly for techs, or its not.
If not, debian needs a simple firewall for all installation scenarios. Not including a firewall is malpractice. More than one firewall option is no excuse.
Adding a firewall application after an install is no good either. And it is too late.
A simple firewall front end needs to be included in every possible setup situation, from unstable to testing to stable, from plain vanilla, to knoppix, to damnsmalllinux.
Not providing firewall protection from the start shows that the debian project suffers from tunnel vision. They fail to see a problem, and fail to fix it because of this.
I can think of one factor which might work in favor of keeping spyware off linux. It's just that, in my experience at least, closed source programs seem to never work well in Linux for very long. They tend to be restrictive about letting distros package them, and that's just the distros that even allow closed source programs in. And eventually library changes seem to render closed source programs difficult to even run on up-to-date systems, because the writers don't seem to grasp how quickly many users upgrade their systems when there's no cost and little risk involved. And if it is open source, it's just a matter of forking the project.
Though even aside from that, given that coders make up a significant or even a majority of Linux users, I don't think any bothersome program which nonetheless provided a useful service would last long without having a clone of it put together by someone out there. So, while I agree that there's no technical reason that spyware couldn't exist in Linux, I think the social factors will keep it out untill Linux reachs a state where it has a similar market share to Windows - which frankly I don't have much hope of ever happening.
Everything will be taken away from you.
What is really needed is root only chmod +x. Every other code should be sandboxed.
What Debian really needs is a program which can back up a Debian system by noting which packages are installed and then just saving /home, /usr/local, /etc, /var, /opt and so on. It would make backups a lot more sane and sensible.
"The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them to even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indi
1. Retire old, slow performing computers
2. Spend time (re)installing Linux on them
3. Donate them to charity
4. Take tax deduction on your 1040
5. Profit!!! ?
If I ever retire my old computer (that's a big if) that is exactly what I plan to do with it. Saves me a disposal problem, let's me add more to my tax refund, and it's socially responsible.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Yeah, they seem to be interested only in the fetus while it's still in the womb. When you're born, you are out of luck, Jack.
If you get right down to it, the anti-choice are less about "saving the children" and more about controlling the lives and choices of women. A barefoot-and-pregnant woman having babies every 9 months is also likely to be tied down to home and hearth, with none of the "uppity" ambitions that give these (mostly) men fits. She's also likely to die young, too.
A century ago, women like Margaret Sanger took up the cause of birth control because of the plight of the wife-as-baby-factory. Yes, she also had weird ideas about eugenics, but aside from those (which were common in her era) her arguments about the necessity of birth control are still valid.
In societies where safe and effective birth control is available and women are able to plan their families, women and children lead better lives. All religions except the Catholic Church and a small subset of Orthodox Judaism accept birth control now.
The thing that the anti-choice need to support is artificial womb research. If they want to end abortions, they should support research into making them obsolete. Instead of "killing" a fetus, you simply transfer it out of the womb and into the artificial womb until it comes to term. Then when the child is born, you find willing families to adopt.
Oh, silly me. Lots of kids are waiting for adoptive homes...where are the anti-choicers when the time comes to adopt? They're not there? What happened to "adoption, not abortion?" It went the same place as caring for the "poor unborn children" when they get born.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
... GENTOO IS BETTER!
At least I hope it is.. I've never used it before and I did an emerge system before I left for work today. With any luck I'll be using it by the end of the day (or night).
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Now we can convert our bleeding-edge Gentoo distribution, into a Debian distribution with packages over two years old! Yay!
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!