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UserLinux Releases First Beta
MohammedSameer writes "According to DesktopLinux, UserLinux has released their 1st beta CD, based on Debian. The project, led by the long-time open source advocate Bruce Perens, aims to provide businesses with freely available, high quality Linux operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support options intended to encourage productivity and security while reducing overall costs."
Bruce Perens, now that you are around, what's your take on the Canonical project? On the surface, it would appear to be along the lines of what UserLinux is supposed to do... not forgetting that neither is "final" yet, of course ;-).
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
You forgot to include you name in the first 45 characters of the Wiki. Please do this as we do not want you to miss any of the consulting revenue that you derive from this.
Hell, we all know that that is about the only reason you do anyting involving linux these days.
Prove me wrong by listing 3 major things you have done to help linux in the past 3 years that where not directly related to bringing you consulting revenue.
freely available, high quality Linux operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support options intended
Best of luck to you and show them that it is quite possible to make money off of supporting open source softwares.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
...freely available, high quality Linux operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support options
Why a distro based on Debian? Why not just certify, service and support Debian itself?
I know there has to be a seperate distro for every ego in the OSS world, but from a technical point of view, why is a new distro needed?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
How is that different than Fedora?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Obviously that's a huge jump and the right distro is important. I've been strongly considering Gentoo mosty for keeping the systems up to date and secure (leave everyone in the stable tree, and cron a nightly GLSA to patch all known security holes, and emerge -uD world)
As "administration free" as it seems right now in thought, I am a bit concerned of the nightmare it could become if things get unorderly.
With Red Hat abandoning the business desktop a dedicated business desktop with the open source community behind it is exactly what I am looking for. I admire Sun's Java desktop and Xandros' Business desktop, but I guess I'm just too spoiled by the Debian and Gentoo forums. Both are very active with loads of people helping out. For me I'd much rather get my help that way as apposed to waiting on hold to talk to the next know nothing tech support person.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
How do you plan on getting the closed source software venders to certify their products to run on UserLinux so I can get support on those apps from the vendor?
If only there were some way to get them to read the proxy.pac file...
Interesting idea, would require a javascript interpreter somewhere though.
Failing that, why not just wget the pac file and read it to get an address, the set http_proxy and/or ftp_proxy environment variables?
And of course that could be be stuck in a script if the pac file is simple enough.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Bruce, one major thing you haven't talked about on your wiki is how you are going to give back to us developers who work on Debian, which is the core distro. So far, no of the distro vendors have been willing to support us monetarily (unless they hire us into their corporations). What is the plan on redistributing some of that consulting/support income back to us?
Redhat and SuSE's upgrade cycle seems much more disruptive than Debian's. Our main frustration with them is that each of them seem to want to do a complete re-install when doing a major upgrade.
And the first person who gets a serious distro using that name will do VERY well. It's a name that makes sense and we know that everything is in the name... or at least the people who make decisions think so.
Here's my wish/hope list for a business [client] oriented distribution:
Network Login Service Support for:
* Novell NDS, Microsoft Domains and of course your NIS and all that.
* A nice email + swiss army software thingy (like Evolution with support on the server)
* MS Office compatible office suite and/or an ass-kickin' wine configuration that REALLY works especially for brain-dead admins who expect to double-click on SETUP.EXE.
Of course there will be other apps that will need to complete anything beyond the basics listed above, but once those basics are done, it's 90% there.
And when I mean MS Office compatible, I mean REALLY stinking compatible for importing and exporting MS Word docs and stuff. So far, nothing's been perfect yet though it keeps getting better.
I assume that's not everything, given that you have a seperate release and everything. What is the difference between the User Linux distribution and Debian? In other words, why aren't you just doing "Debian support" rather than creating a new project?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
If you want to be a support company, you can list yourself as an uncertified one on the wiki (nobody is certified, we haven't opened that yet). Once we get certification going, we will expect certified support providers to contribute a portion of their revenues on userlinux support business to operate the userlinux vendor certification and marketing efforts.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Has anyone made a UserLinux LiveCD yet or is that my next challenge (armed with Fabian's new remastering tool and perhaps I'll even try rolling in some automation of the lazy umount method of removing the cd, I don't need much of an excuse but I suspect I might have to do some fixing up so if anyone has already started ... :-)
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
e will put our packages into Debian's repository once they are stable, as Skolelinux has already done. Adding the selection to pkgsel or tasksel is possible, but we ask the question much earlier, right after the language and keyboard questions in the first-stage installer, so that we can do some additional configuration during the install process and save the user some questions. If we went in the tasksel menu, we would not get to do anything for the user until the second-stage install.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So UserLinux has the same requirements for free software that Debian has?
As a recent example, I won't find Sender-ID support in UserLinux?
Well, actually that was "my" booth, I am still executive director of the Desktop Linux Consortium. Everybody had the same sort of cube. Yes, the sign was cheap. And how much audience did you expect for a system that hadn't released its first beta? That was sort of a "show the flag" exercise.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Fedora is still struggling to reimpliment Debian's community, and is still making it difficult for "outsiders" to have as much say as RedHat folks.
</hearsay>
Debian and UserLinux have almost the reverse of the relationship between Fedora and RHEL. RHEL starts with Fedora and adds various things. UserLinux starts with the HUGE number of well-tested packages in Debian and whittles it down to a manageable core that can be depended on to be there. It's sort of a "Debian standard base" if you will.
One excellent feature is that instead of relying on stuff like Dag Wieers excellent, but still 3rd party, set of packages for Fedora, nearly every open source application of note is packaged in debian (and has been checked against Debian's very strict policy) and will be easy to install on a UserLinux system. When the next Debian and UserLinux releases come out, the upgrade path for those "add-on" packages will also have been well tested.
So, long story short (too late), what really makes UserLinux valuable is that it _is_ Debian, and has all the strength and experience of Debian behind it.
-Mark
You know, it's been said 1000 times over, the Linux community needs to have 1 distro, Linux. This is getting ridiculous. You know why so many people haven't switched from Windows to Linux? Because you people make it so difficult to do so.
Instead of creating a new distro everytime there a developer wants to add a new feature or something, why not add it to the core Linux OS. Seems like every month Slashdot has a story about some new distro that just hit the streets and about how great it is.
For once guys, get your act together and start banning together. Community my ass!
http://rip747.blogspot.com
You rationalize the choice and then immediatly dismiss it without rationalization. The switch of te button order was made because of the results of a usibility study. The study was pretty simple. When a user pops open a dialog box, their eyes gravitate to 4 places: the corners of the dialog. Naturlaly then, you want the prefered operation to be immediatly reachable at the exact same offset of every dialog. Yes is the bottom right of every window where Yes is the prefered choice. Then, when the user decides to move away from teh prefered choice, he simple moves his eyes left to the next prefered choice. This *IS* much easier on users: the usiblity study proves this. That's what they're for. It is however different from most traditional Unix programs and Windows. In the former case, there was never any standard. People just put the buttons there because it's how they'd always done it, because they never think about it. In the Windows choice, MS says to put them that way. MS did not have a usibility study for this, they simply chose it because it's what they always did. What it does however, is put the default prefered choice, usually OK, at an undetermined location. If the window is 400 pixels wide, it might be here, if it's 300 pixels wide, it might be there. There is no natural tracking. Gnome took a gamble by following the "better" way of things. They certainly recognized that it would be inconsistant with Windows, and with KDE too, and most other Unix programs. But they took that chance. They said "we can do it better", and IMO, they did. If you only use Gnome applications, which is of course the goal of the Gnome project, this works out. ;)
Actually I installed UL before I knew what I've done. I was looking for network installation images of debian for one of the freshly arrived machines. The default debian installer didn't work for some reason - I don't remember if it was SATA harddrive or smth like that... I did more search - found this UL network installation files, put them up in dhcp and installed the beast... What I liked: besides standard basic questions which it had to ask (like keyboard, partitioning) it asked me just 1 question to choose from: workstation or workstation and server... I remember that I chose workstation... Since then it installed everything and didn't ask a question (or I was sleeping and I missed it), as opposed to debian installation where you need to configure many packages by answering some basic questions... What I didn't like - I didn't catch why workstation installation installed apache for me... So in two words: I installed debian wo knowledge that it wasn't debian and was surprised that it went too smoothly... Then splashscreen announced that it is userlinux... anyway I decided to upgrade to unstable so I moded sources.list and here we go - I had the desktop ready to be used in less then an hour without paying much attention on what it is doing there :-)