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Linux Standard Base 2.0 released
prostoalex writes "Linux Standard Base 2.0 has been released by the Free Standards Group. The release will allow application developers to ensure their product works on multiple flavors of Linux. FSG keeps a list of compliant distributions on its Web site."
It should be stated that the gcc c++ abi for 3.4 series is incompatible with later versions.
It is? Works fine here :P
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
Why do companies need to pay to be registered as compliant?
Why not use an open/free option?
This spec was released August 30th, over 2 weeks ago.
Who would have thunk it...
Has two products listed on the compliancy page. Caldera set to expire near the end of this week, and SCO Linux Server set to expire next month. I wonder if they'll try to get renewed.
All your standard-base are belong to us!
Try the Google cache.
Try Coral..
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Which versions of the various distros will be compatible with LSB 2?
I am thinking somewhere around Fedora Core 6 or so. Anyone want to hazard a guess? This could get sticky with so many options and yet another standard to abide by...
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
I'm kind of disappointed looking at the list of compliant distributions - there aren't many on there, especially when you consider how many distributions there are out there.
With that in mind, how much can this "allow application developers to ensure their product works"?
Easy? Bah! I want spend 30 hours searching for HOWTO's! I want to type "apropos -k" until my fingers are numb! I want to scan scripts until I hallucinate ascii!
Bah! Bah I say!
If they're not on this list, I have a hard time taking this list serioulsy
All of the certified distros are commercial products. Where are the community distros in all of this?
Could it have something to do with the Fee Schedule? The fees don't seem that steep.
Can't read the article of course, but will this be the next big push for linux on the desktop? Or is it more for the server crowd?
Being able to install apps without going into a dependancy hell should boost the public's view of the user friendliness of linux.
Standards like the LSB are absolutely useless as long as the vast majority of distributions do not fully implement them. Even worse, is when the big distributions don't.
this seems like a step in the right direction for naysayers of linux who keep claiming that until linux has universal standards, it will never be very popular...
Interoperability is a great goal, but is anyone addressing patching/updating? Currently, it seems that these updates are handled as follows: download new packages, remove old packages, install new packages.
That seems fine for smaller bits of software but for a KDE bug fix or an OO.o update, downloads can go to the 100MBs or more. Fine on a DSL line, but dial-up users are still going to get hit hard.
I understand that OSS is better at fixing bugs and that's great -- but between Mandrake 10CE and now, it feels like I've downloaded another distro worth of updates. Is there something being done (maybe the whole binary diffs thing mentioned before) to decrease the size of update files?
I'm posting this as part of an LSB thread in the speculation that binary compatibility may one day lead to (smaller) patches that can be applied to LSB-compliant distros...so a KDE bug stays a KDE bug and not a MDK bug, SUSE bug, RH bug, Debian bug, etc.
This makes it quite hard to follow a general howto for a general *nix nox, while using emerge to get the packages.
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
I mean what are they going to come up with next, a standard packaging format?
Jesus, they're just taking all the fun out linux.
considering the fact that gentoo is a source based distribution, it really can't. However gentoo trys to stay as similar as possible when it can for minimal pain
I was under the impression something like the LSB doesn't change much. Does anyone have a summary of the new or changed items?
Im thinking this is a great improvement for linux in general...
If you have ever sat in on a dev channel on irc listening to people fight over where something should go on the filesystem, or where things should get installed to, then you will understand this is great milestone for developers.
Sometimes the majority just means all the morons are on the same side.
I wish Solaris was LSB compliant even though it's not Linux. Here's a good reason for standards:
There is a killall program on Linux, it kills all processes that have a processname that matches the argument you pass to it.
There is a killall program on Solaris, it doesn't take any arguments and will kill every process running.
List of compliant distros via Coral cache: HERE.
To err is human, but to forgive is beyond the scope of the Operating System...
On sale this week for only $3000.
Debian is listed as a "Silver Member" on their group member page.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
A Beowulf Cluster of Linux standards? Don't we already have that?
They specced out C++ ABI and libraries this time.
This is a nice addition, since many developers prefer C++ in spite of considerable rifts between it and the Unix culture.
At the time LSB 1.3 was written, there was no open C++ ABI standard, and the issue was left dangling. There is such an ABI now, and g++ supports it fully. In fact, the entire LSB 2.0 C++ spec is written around libstdc++ from gcc 3.x.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
No, you're thinking clusterfuck.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
I presume that LSB is simply spec'ing existing practice, correct? Or have things changed since that posting? Is this really an issue, even, since a system might be able to support an "old" and "new" C++ ABI by having both the "old" and "new" libraries installed?
Also: if the C++ symbols will be stored as (name space + package + class + method) in that order, ELF is used, and there are many hash collisions, this might create a lot of overhead loading large C++ libraries. The reason: while linking, you'd have to compare a lot of text before matching, because so many symbol entries would have a common prefix that you'd have to keep matching over and over again. Am I reading this correctly?
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Is the LSB responsible for /opt?
Good heavens .. thunking was what Windows programmers had to worry about when the Wintel world went from 16 to 32 bit operating systems. So, Windows programmers don't thunk anymore, and Linux programs never have to thunk at all.
Think global, act loco
Can't you make an RPM which compiles as part of installation?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
yeah i get that too, it makes it especially dificult to find config files for packages such as apache, i end up doing a "find / | grep 'string'" which works most of the time, but it would be nice if portage told you where it put things.
Certification of gentoo is almost certainly out of the picture, as you can't know from one system to annother which libraries are installed.
This might be an interesting use for slots though. Someone could build a series of ebuilds that require the specific library versions that the LSB specifies, and keeps them in slots (so they're not unmerged when they're upgraded). Then a Gentoo user who has emerged "LSB-Base" would have a decent chance to be able to run any LSB 2.0 requiring binary package.
you could, but it totally defeats the better package management solution that gentoo uses. Plus it breaks things like versioning. RPM doesn't work very well with sources
Use the following command:
equery is part of gentoolkit (emerge gentoolkit).
I'll probably be modded down for this...
"For payment terms please contact The Free Standards Group"
Read the date on your link. Terpstra worked for Caldera in 2001, when they were a Linux company. As far as I can tell, he never worked for SCO, new or old.
Try Google. You may have heard of it. He now works for PrimaStasys, Inc.
I'm disgusted that you attempted to link someone who has done so much for Free software with SCO.
All my configs are stored in /etc/ under Gentoo.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Last time I did an install when I selected LSB packages it told me I needed to use the 2.4 series kernel? This could just have been a glitch in the distro I was using, but considering I've never installed a piece of software that needed the LSB I immediated unselected it.
Whenever I hear the word standard regarding Linux I tend to think its a good thing, but I've started to feel pretty indifferent regarding the LSB. Is there any reason I shouldn't?
Quack, quack.
IIRC, your system doesn't have to use RPM natively to be compliant. It just has to deal with RPM v.3 packages. This can be done by either installing RPM (can be done), or using alien to change the package format.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
First off, you have to make sure your new standard SOLVES AN EXISTING PROBLEM and does so without creating new problems.
The LSB doesn't solve any problems for the Open Source developers (they're restricted to outdated libraries).
Nor does it solve any problems for the current users.
But it needs both of those camps to adopt it so that the commercial ISV's can write to it.
But that is not in the best interest of the various commercial distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, etc). Their best interest is to form partnerships with those same ISV's by offering those ISV's incentives to certify for their distribution (sharing the porting costs, the support costs, marketing costs, etc).
RHEL is LSB compliant I thought...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Why use find instead of slocate? slocate is sooo much faster since it builds a DB of files. find will do a search each time it is ran. slocate should be ran nightly as a cron job. I do agree about Gentoo's setup. I dropped it because things were all over the place and the compile times as well : )
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Rather than specify apt or rpm or whatever, why not specify the FUNCTIONALITY that is required and let each package tool handle that however it deems best.
Focus on including the required information in the package itself. That makes cross-platform easier.
Guys don't give me this crap about companies feeding off the work of Open source. These companies have worked hard on their closed source applications and want to be able to port their software as binaries to Linux. This is a good thing.
To use that analogy, would a developer releasing software for windows be feeding off the hard work of MSFT? This standard will help create a symboitic relationship between commercial developers and the linux platform.
The average joe does not want access to the source, all they care about is compatibility and interoperability of software. Open standards are something the average joe might support but they could care less about the source.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
slocate's updatedb is one of the first things I turn off when I install a new version of linux.
The people who think it's reasonable that a machine should be slowed to a crawl by locking up the disk every single day at an arbitrary time for 10+ minutes for infrequent random searches are not being very sensible. Particularly with large disks. Particularly when only a tiny fraction of the disk changes every day. Particularly since most people usually only search a tiny fraction of the disk each day. Particularly since slocate doesn't allow the arbitrary expressions like -exec that find does. Particularly since slocate won't find things created since the last database update.
At the very least the distributions should provide a GUI or on-demand manual update option and leave the automatic update off by default.
The same reasoning applies to other dross the distributers put into cron including man page update and to a lesser extent core file cleanup. Cron usually makes sense only on an always-on machine and is fundamentally inefficient. Efficiently implemented on-demand is better. It's like the difference between polling and interrupts. Polling/cron is always a performance "race" condition.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
"Guys don't give me this crap about companies feeding off the work of Open source. These companies have worked hard on their closed source applications and want to be able to port their software as binaries to Linux. This is a good thing."
I'm not going to argue whether those ISV's are "feeding off" of anyone or not. That's not the point.
If everyone adopted the LSB tomorrow, it would be a good thing for those ISV's.
But what is the incentive for anyone who is NOT one of those ISV's to adopt it?
"This standard will help create a symboitic relationship between commercial developers and the linux platform."
Yes, the ISV's will benefit. But what about the other Open Source developers? What's in it for them?
What about the current users? what's in it for them?
What about Red Hat? Why would this be better than forming their own partnerships with those same ISV's?
"The average joe does not want access to the source, all they care about is compatibility and interoperability of software."
That may be so. But what is the incentive for whatever distribution Joe is running to conform to the LSB? Particularly when it is quickly outdated?
Sorry, I seriously doubt that, as any software written for Intel will probably work for AMD as well. Also, don't agree that all commercial software is evil, nor that binaries are evil.
Finally the Linux guys agreed that there SHOULD be a standard (even if it's not implemented yet).
.os hell mentioned earlier. (No more recompiling! Halleluyah!!)
Seriously, saying Linux is 1000 times better than Microsoft is kinda being hypocritical when they make MS's same mistake: Despising standards in favor of proprietary implementations. (NO, i DON'T mean open vs closed source. I mean standard vs proprietary).
Anyway let's see if in a couple of months, this resolution helps programmers deploy Linux binaries that run on _ALL_ compliant Linux distros, ending to the
For political reasons, the LSB standardised on RPM. Most (all?) of the community have moved onto something better than RPM and so do not comply in that regard.
RPM doesn't work very well with binaries neither.
Linux is not Windows
Forgive me if this joke has been posted a 1000 times before... ;-)
Firstly the LSB covers several platforms nowdays, secondly its goal is to create common packages. That means getting the same package running on Red Hat and SuSE regardless of whether its proprietary or free software.
I don't see what all the fuss is. If you do not like cron, updatedb, etc, just turn them off! MS Windows starts every stinking thing in the world that most home users do not need, most users are used to extra services running. The thing is, is that you can turn off what you don't want, no big deal.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Yes, thanks for the correction, I did a big typo. Since I work with regexes a lot, I always think of *|? as regex stuff over just wild cards.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Standards, there are so many to choose from...
... yeah! We ran the tests and they all passed! Cert us!"
A standard doesn't mean squat unless there's a driving reason to support and comply with it. That's not to say that LSB couldn't become that, but that IS the hurdle it must overcome in order to fulfill its true function.
The reason you have to pay to get certified is simple:
"Uh
I don't know if LSB is doing the cert testing themselves or using a RedHat approach (which is decent, but academically flawed). If they aren't, results aren't truly verifiable and they're just overcharging people for some small amount of administration work. If they are, more power to them. That means they're serious about this and it could be the One True Standard for all.
for what?
i have yet to find a gentoo package that isnt covered in the forums....
sure...not official howto...but better
There was a story about this at Linux Weekly News.
-jim
to my customers.
I'm not interested at all in an OS. I want to run my mail & web servers on SOMETHING. I'd rather run it on linux because it runs faster on Linux than it does on the same box with Windows.
The downside right now, is that I have a serious hassle picking a disti, keeping it up to date (or allowing not a single port to touch the net) and worrying about compatibility.
I'm going to check out the list of distributors right now. I'm way way more likely to pick a conforming distribution.
I'd even be willing to pay the person who put it together for me for their effort. Jokes about LSD aside, I'd pay my fifty bucks for a pure standard disti with a good installer and a good automatic update process to keep it running right. I'd pay it in a heart beat.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"The benifit for the home user is that he has a larger selection of software he might want to use available."
No he does not. That won't happen until AFTER the ISV's write the software.
What is his incentive TODAY?
"The benifit for the open source developer is MORE people see his work and he gets more kudo's and he has an easier time getting his work to work without tracking down all the different ways it can break on the various distro's and having to fix THAT rather than write what he wants."
That sound more like the closed source ISV's. They are the ones looking at getting their software to work with fewer changes.
And so forth.
What is the incentive for Joe or a developer or a distribution to support the LSB today? Without the additional software available yet?
You just choose the one you like & run with it ;-)
My pics.
If you're a software developer, the last thing you want to deal with is bug reports from people who didn't patch or build the code properly or have tried to deploy it on something like Debian Unstable or a similarly bleeding edge system. If you can't isolate your own code as the variant in a system, there's no hope of fixing some bugs. Good luck when everyone builds with different optimizations (compiler bugs, yay!), feature sets (hey, you didn't even compile in support for X, no wonder the GUI's not there) and so on. Selective optimization is good enough, or do you compulsively overclock as well?
3d studio would be a problem yes... but the thing is... You'll never know until you tried the change yourself =)
I would like to tell you to use debian but thing is that it does not matter too me what distribution you use... Just try it and you find out that it's nice... Does it cover what it is that you want to do? I really don't know.. The only person that can tell you that is you... Try it for a few months (any dist). and then ask yourself. Does it cover my needs? If no, go back to Windows. If yes, keep using it.
I kept myself from chaning to linux (debian unstable) because I told myself that I needed Windows for this and that... Well, now I think the switch was the best choice I ever did... It made me a better network administrator, a better it manager and I found a new hobby =)
I still boot back to windows once in a while to play some games. But these times get futher apart all the time...
I was under the impression that Patrick had sorted all this out or did I mishear?
So, in sum, they are evil greedy bastards? ;-)
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
"Gee I dunno then, I guess there no point in doing somthing if it don't benifit me TODAY after going to a job is so stupid if I have wait till later for my paycheck."
No, you have a job today because if you did NOT then you would be broke later. You need the job to make the money to pay for food/shelter/clothing/debts.
But that doesn't apply to Linux and the LSB.
Today, Linux works. Tomorrow, Linux will work. Next month, Linux will work. Next year, Linux will work.
So what is the incentive TODAY for someone to change a WORKING SYSTEM to make it easier for the ISV's to port their software to it?
Personally, I don't believe the ISV's will do so. If they haven't ported to Red Hat yet, what's stopping them? That's the largest corporate distribution.
Much like you, I put it off forever.
Being touted as the "newbie distro" I tried Mandrake 7. No dice! I couldn't even get online. I continued to make the leap every six months or so only to go back to Windows after a week of pain.
Then last summer, Mandrake 10 came out.
The install was a snap, and it recognized all of my hardware immediately. There were a few headaches sure, but none of them prevented me from using the OS the way I wanted to (ie. browsing, downloading etc.). A year later and I could never go back. The only reason I even boot into Windows anymore is to update the iPod.
That said, I still don't know how to mount any of my USB drives or get my digital camera to work. I think something might be corrupted with my operating system. Anybody have any suggestions?
If you could be anything you want, I'll bet you'd be disappointed.
Well, I do it like this:
1: Plug in drive /dev/sda1
/etc/fstab
2: Look at kernel messages from 'dmesg' to find that it's appeared as
3: Add a suitable line to
4: Add an icon to KDE desktop
After which it's just a matter of plug in, click to mount, go. I heard that FC2 will recognise the device and mount it automatically, which is nice...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You lose me after step 1 :)
/etc mount point, but beyond that I'm lost!
I don't know how to look at kernal messages, nor do I know what fstab is. Obviously it's something under the
If you could be anything you want, I'll bet you'd be disappointed.
First of all, 'dmesg' is a command which shows you any messages from the kernel - all that stuff that scrolls past on startup about detecting and configuring devices. When you connect a USB storage device, a message gets thrown up saying that something just got detected on a USB port, that it's been set up as a storage device, and that it's been set up with the device identifier /dev/sda1 (or whatever it might be).
The /dev directory contains a huge number of files, each of which represents a device of some kind; for instance, /dev/hda is your main hard disk, while /dev/random is a virtual device that spews random gibberish if you try to read it. Hence all the joke commands you'll see about using the 'dd' command and copying /dev/random to /dev/hda - which would quickly trash the hard disk :-)
So you've seen the message from 'dmesg' saying that your USB gizmo has been recognised as a disk, and assigned '/dev/sda1'. Now for /etc/fstab. This file lists a bunch of devices in /dev, and where each one should be mounted. So you might have a line saying 'mount the device /dev/cdrom using type iso9660 in the location /mnt/cdrom'. Add a line saying 'mount the device /dev/sda1 using type vfat in the location /mnt/usbthing'. /etc/fstab also sets which users can access a particular device, and whether or not it's mounted automatically on startup, and things like that.
Once /etc/fstab lists your device, then you can mount it as a normal user (if you set it up that way, of course). Otherwise you need to be root all the time, which is... unhealthy for day-to-day work. Then you can create an icon on the KDE desktop, which will then mount the device when you click on it. The other desktops probably have similar functions.
That's the way I did it, anyway. I imagine the more desktop-oriented distros have helpful control panels and wizards and things which will handle all this behind-the-scenes stuff, but it's worth knowing. /etc/fstab is a pretty easy to come to terms with, as config files go.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I have no problem configuring locate/updatedb the way you describe. Running it at night is pointless, I only turn on my machine when I use it and I don't want updatedb wasting my time when I use it. Most laptops have slow hard disks and updatedb can soak up all disk bandwidth for minutes. I find in practice that I almost never use locate because I'm searching based on file contents not file names.
All I'm saying is that by default it should be turned off; for most users it's causing more problems than it solves. My next door neighbour running on a low-end desktop machine had her machine slowing to a crawl every day for no good reaon. She didn't like it and doesn't even use locate/find.
To the wider issue of cron and polling interfaces. Every day updatedb is potentially scanning the entire storage hierarchy just so that the few dozen files that have changed are indexed. The correct solution would be that each non-temporary file is indexed in the background when it is changed, both so the index is up-to-date and so every directory on the disk isn't being re-read again and again.
Polling interfaces are fundamentally inefficient and why interrupts were invented. They are always a "race" condition because the time of the poll only accidently matches the times of changed server state and the times of client query. Instead, state should be pushed/pulled depending on whether client queries or server state changes are more frequent/expensive.
I think polling (and the related concept of timeouts) should only be used as a last resort. Sometimes there is no alternative but time is wasted because of it. It frequently causes reliability problems because different systems have inconsistent views of the world.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Except that this really has nothing to do with software.
!
Software == source.
Er, yes. Software is generally created from source. Not having source available doesn't make something not software. In fact, having source available doesn't make it Open Source either (eg, qmail, pine, Windows 2003).
This is not about binary only stuff. Read the article. It's clear you haven't.
Thanks for the explanation! I'll give it a shot today.
If you could be anything you want, I'll bet you'd be disappointed.
I asked what motivation you would provide to people to get them to use the LSB TODAY.
You went on about how you work today so you can get paid later.
I pointed out that Linux works today and the Linux will work next month and so on.
Now you're off about the desktop. This is about the LSB.
"Here's another way of looking at it, why do you have a pci bus in your computer instead of a gatway or dell or hp or whatever bus?"
So, it's like an analogy or something?
Fuck your analogies. Just tell me what incentive there is for someone to use the LSB TODAY.
"The difference is the home desktop is a very different environment vs the corporate it shop."
I don't give a fuck. Again, just tell me what incentive there is for someone to use the LSB TODAY.
"If I were a creating for profit home software I would not be justify a linux version because my effective market is too small."
I am remaining in the state of not-giving-a-fuck'edness. Just tell me what incentive there is for someone to use the LSB TODAY.
"Having a standard (as long as it's a useable one it doesn't have to be perfect) allows distro's to effectively group thier market shares in the eye's of software creators."
Distributions market their distribution to end-users.
Not to ISV's.
Distributions can take their marketshare numbers to ISV's and show a market for the ISV's software if the ISV's will port to that distribution. To add incentive to that, the distribution will usually help with support or porting or a marketing campaign. This is what Red Hat has done.
So, in conclusion, there is NO incentive for ANYONE who is not currently emotionally invested in the LSB to adopt it.
They will gain the same benefit in the future if other people adopt it.
But, because there isn't any incentive, no one will and the promised commercial ISV software will never materialize because no one is using the LSB and the LSB will spend another 6 years trying to get to version 3.0.