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Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey
tim1980 writes "Derek Croxton has written a rather long editorial on how he sees the Linux and Open Source communities, and his personal experiences with Linux, the editorial is titled Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey and is over 3,500 words. Excerpt: 'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a command that he copied verbatim from a document discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it means or how to alter it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.'"
'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type;
It's as if he's looked into my very soul... or tapped into my webcam.
Michalangelo Progr
that's why god created apt-get.
It's been years since I had to worry about dependancies.
2 reasons:
Apt-get from debian has been ported to Fedora/Redhat. I use Fedora. (laptop)
I use Debian. (desktop)
That's it.
What to patch?
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Wham bam thank you mam!
Want mplayer, but Fedora doesn't have the ability to play DVD's or Mp3's?
Head on down to Dag's RPM repositories, follow his directions and go:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install mplayer libdvdcss xmms
done and DONER!!!!
Apt-get IS the killer application for linux.
Update everything, patch everything. Not just core system like in Windows!
No MORE DEPENDANCY HELL.
It's realy quite nice. Install debian, upgrade to unstable. I've been running it for 2 years, no sweat and completely up to date.
someone without a clue writes a crappy essay
someone else w/o a clue links it on slashdot
lemmings knock the site offline
$how do i read a file from my floppy? "mount?" who woulda thought.
The problem is knowing where to look sometimes. I am still learning useful commands.
Here, all you freeloaders ;-). I'll take it down later today.
:-).
I just spoke with him on the phone, too; cool guy. I don't think he was expecting anyone to actually call him
|/usr/games/fortune
Hello,
Recently I've been introduced to an operating system known as Linux.
Lured by its low cost, I replaced Windows 98 on my computer with Linux. Unfortunately the more I use it the more I fear that this "Linux" may be an insidious way for the Dark One to gain a stronger foothold here on Earth. I know this may be a shocking claim, but I have evidence to back it up!
To begin with, Linux is based off of an older, obsolete OS called "BSD Unix". The child-indoctrinatingly-cute cartoon mascot of this OS is a devil holding a pitchfork. This OS -- and its Linux offspring -- extensively use what are unsettingly called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a computer running Linux then you probably have these "demons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! Furthermore in order to start or stop these "demons" a user must execute a command called "finger". By "fingering" a "demon" one excercises an unholy power, much the same way that the Lord of Flies controls his black minions.
Linux contains another Satanic holdover from the "BSD Unix" OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: "chmod 666". What other horrors lurk in this thing?
Consider some of these other Linux commands: "sleep", "mount", "unzip", "strip" and "touch". All highly suggestive in a sexual nature. I know that our Lord cannot approve of these, and I urge them to be renamed to something appropriate to the Christian community. Interestingly "CONTROL-G" (the sixth key from the left of the keyboard) does an abort. To write files a "VI" editor is included. All these are to ensnare the unsuspecting christian who could get tempted by typing "VIVIVI" all day long.
Fourth, Linux uses a flavor of DOS known as Bash. Bash is an acronym for "Bourne Again Shell". On the surface this would appear to be supportive of the Lord. However, remember that even Satan can quote the bible for his own purposes! While I believe Linux may be born-again, its obvious by the misspelling of "born" that its not born-again in an Christian church. Will the lies ever cease?
Additionally, one of the main long-haired hippies involved with the GNU Free Software Foundation supports communism, contraception and abortion. He has consistently supported 60's counter-cultural "values", and his web site even advocates government support of contraception. He also wears fake halos, and has quips about his made-up church that relates to his free software. I find such blasphemy to be extremely unsettling.
One must also remember that the creator of Linux, a college student named Linux Torvaldis, comes from Finland. I'm sure all the followers of Christ are aware of the heritical nature of the Finnish: from necrophilia to human sacrifice, Finnish culture is awash in sin. I find little reason to believe anything good and holy could arise from this evil land.
Finally, let us remember that there is an alternative to using the Satan-powered Linux. I think history has shown us that Microsoft is quite holy. I'm told that its founder, William Gates is a strong supporter of our Lord and I encourage my fellow Christians to buy only his products to help keep the Devil at bay.
I wish I had more time to expound upon my findings. Unfortunately a family of Jews has moved in across the street and I must go speak to them of Jesus Christ before they are condemned to eternal hellfire.
Please investigate this as you see fit and I'm sure you'll reach the same conclusions that I have.
Now wouldn't it be nice if a standard were made and users could be assured that, for the most part, regardless of what distribution they're using:
Of course, every time I bring up the idea of standardizing important parts of Linux distributions the lynch mob comes after me, because consistency and distribution-neutral package installation goes against the spirit of Open Source or something ("stifles choice", I've heard).
I mean, wouldn't it be nice to tell someone "just use apt-get and do X, Y, and Z" instead of "[Install Debian] and use apt-get to do X, Y, and Z"?
I have a hard time with man - yes, it's full-on documentation, but 19 times out of 20, I don't need the 15 highly obscure switches for a command, I just need the command in its simplest form.
What man is missing is an example section, e.g., "To find all files with mary in the title, use ls -R *mary*" or whatever; "to find all files modified in the last 10 days do..."
I will say right out that perhaps such a facility exists, but I am unaware. I am a GUI user of Linux (SuSE 9.1 X86_64) and my command line skills have rusted since I lived in VMS 20 years ago...
I still remember my first experience on a Redhat box. Being my usual 14 year old arrogant self I figured that I didn't have to read any manuals. Hey I figured out DOS by myself, right?
So I type in "X". "Hey wtf this stupid shit is broken, all I see is a grey background and some fucking weird cross? huh? linux sucks".
Oh boy :)
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
The problem with the apt-get approach is that it's like living in a town with only one supermarket. OK, so it's a really big supermarket but still:
- If you can't find the food you want in there, you're stuck
- If you can but it's stale, damaged or out of stock, you're stuck
- You are totally dependent on the people running the supermarket
- The larger a supermarket is, the harder it becomes to find things in it. Just imagine taking your grandma to a supermarket where the aisles stretched as far as the eye could see!
To stretch the analogy a bit further than it can really go, just imagine if getting tired of this one supermarket you travelled to the next town and bought a lampshade from a shop there. Bring it all the way back, put it in your house and suddenly your TV explodes.
What happened? "Oh, you mixed different repositories". All centralised systems suffer this but Fedora worse than most - you're fine as long as you stick to the core repositories but if you add others (and you do need to do that, if you want a big enough collection to be useful) things will randomly break due to "conflicts". Just imagine trying to explain that to grandma!
Oh yeah. There are a bunch of other problems as well. I've seen a lot of 3rd party packages of software that are totally broken. Often the users don't connect the problems they are seeing with the packages. This happens a lot with complex software like Wine, Mono etc ... I've seen quite a few packages of Wine that won't even start! It's pretty clear that many 3rd party packagers hardly test what they produce at all, especially in the case of "new release, I'll just bump the number in the spec and rebuild". I'd estimate that about 40-50% of the tech support problems I deal with in Wine are due to incorrectly built packages. It's not even hard! Just configure, make, make install but people still cock it up mightily - using badly done wrapper scripts and moving files around from where they're supposed to be are the most common, but bad builds happen too.
Apt-get has other problems. You have to duplicate this huge effort over and over again for each distro. This doesn't happen so you get vendor lockin - the very thing we're trying to all get away from, no? I've met more than one person in my life whos number 1 reason for using Debian was "I can apt get lots of software". It was not due to the merits of the distribution itself, it was not due to have a nice installer, slick default desktop, solid PAM setup etc etc. It was because installing software was not a pain in the ass.
Apt-get works great as long as you are willing to throw infinite manpower at the problem. We don't have infinite manpower, duh. So centralised packaging cannot be a scalable, sustainable way forward for our community outside of certain use cases like servers (where it works well).