Interview With Lead Yoper Linux Developer

Bongoots writes "Andy Kissner from Linuxforums.org has just posted this: 'In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of hype and controversy surrounding Yoper, ranging from insults to ruthless Gentoo comparisons. I recently sat down with Andreas Girardet, who is a key developer for Yoper, to dispell all the rumors and discuss the direction in which the Yoper project is headed.' Click here to read the rest of the interview."

Comments

This guy is an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod me flamebait or troll if you must but his ego is way out there.

Re:This guy is an idiot

[jr87]

[AG] It is not rocket science and if one has the know-how, one could tweak their Gentoo, LFS, or even Debian system to be like Yoper. You would probably spend weeks/months doing it, but after this long, possibly frustrating road, you would get something like Yoper. But instead of a week-long struggle, you can have Yoper ready within 10 to 15 minutes,which to many people is more important than a steep, frustrating learning curve. Some of the "secrets" of turning your distro into Your Operating System are:

yeah...this kinda did it for me. Weeks and months? has he ever tried prelinking..was pretty quick and painless for me. thanks to the nice guide

Re:This guy is an idiot

[xsecrets]

Well I guess you missed the part right before that where he listed like 5 other things than prelinking, and yes some of those other items can take quite some time.

Re:This guy is an idiot

[nyteroot]

No, seriously, this guy is either an idiot, or has never really used gentoo. Let's look at his list here:

0.) Performance patches from Con Kolivas, i686 2.6.7 kernel, reiserfs
1.) All original sources, minimal patches.
2.) Compiled with i686 against latest gcc
3.) Stripping
4.) Prelinking
5.) Latest gcc and glibc and other sources
6.) Keep everything only dependent to what it really needs not what
the ./configure happens to find.
7.) Hdparm on install

0) Check. And the option of quite a few other patchsets including aa-sources, mm-sources, and gentoo's own gentoo-dev-sources.
1) Check. Gentoo does this.
2) Checked and beaten. Gentoo (with 5 seconds of configuration) compiles everything for your specific class of chip, e.g. athlon-xp or pentium4. And if you don't want to do the compilation, there are stage3 (i.e. complete systems) available for each class of chip.
3) Check. Gentoo does this.
4) Check. Not only is this 5 seconds in Gentoo, but the new version of portage does it automatically.
5) Check. Gentoo has this. Also, he doesn't mention Yoper's deal, but Gentoo has support for NPTL.
6) Check. Gentoo allows you to set what configure options are turned on and off with USE flags.
7) The single point on which Yoper has Gentoo beat. And seriously, man hdparm.

Re:This guy is an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

I can use my computer the same day I build it. Yoper -check Gentoo -nope.

This guy rules

[carambola5]

Some of the "secrets" of turning your distro into Your Operating System are:

0.) Performance patches from Con Kolivas, i686 2.6.7 kernel, reiserfs
1.) All original sources, minimal patches. ...

Well, at least we know he isn't some PR person faking being a dev.

More pointless branching

[Anonymous Coward]

The phrase "united front" mean anything to the linux community?

Re:More pointless branching

[Platinum Dragon]

The phrase "united front" mean anything to the linux community?

Maybe not, but my hackles tend to go up when I hear terms like "unity" and "united front" tossed around, perhaps because they tend to be used by Troktskyites and other vanguardists wanting everyone to follow their way, and only their way.

Yes, I hang around in some fringe circles. Hang around for a moment, this is going somewhere.

An anarchist would be more concerned with solidarity between groups that share common goals--you can have tens, even thousands of different projects and groups, but they work best when sharing ideas and supporting each other instead of each group demanding that everyone else follow behind their glorious leadership.

How might this esoteric political argument apply to software?

I cringe whenever I hear about "the next killer distro that will take over" or silly distro holy wars over Debian vs. Gentoo vs. Mandrake vs. Fedora as "the desktop distro." OTOH, cooperative efforts like freedesktop.org, the Linux Standards Base, and some of the efforts to bridge the KDE and GNOME desktops with common protocols make me smile. In situations like these, software "solidarity" can allow for numerous distributions aimed at different groups of people to work well together because they share common protocols and technologies, interchangeable stuff when possible.

Mind you, this submission bugged the crap out of me, precisely because the submitter came across in a combative, pseudo-underdog fashion that seems intended to bleed mindshare from other distributions in favour of one group's (or individual's) ego, rather than trying to just make a better collection of software or doing one thing better so that others can learn and benefit.

Bah, I'm exhausted, and I'm not sure this made much sense, but there you have it--I think what the real problem facing the FOSS community is false unity versus real solidarity.

Re:I'm a bit sick of Linux distributions...

[dan_sdot]

Seriously, if all the people who demanded an easy to use yet just as powerful linux distro while slagging off the rest as being too hard/a big pain in the arse actually sat down and tried to build what they wanted, we could have it by now.

I don't think that he was saying this "this distro sucks."
I think was he was saying was: "Who gives a crap?"
So somebody created a new distro, wow, thats special. And what does this have to offer? Exactly what he was saying, that it super 1337. These stories come out every so often, and the /. hive mind pays the distro homage, but the thing doesn't really offer what linux really needs.

What distros need to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yoper sounds neat; and to be honest, all the modern Linux distros I've tried (Mandrake, Suse, Knoppix) work out of the box as long as you're content to use whatever is included in the initial installation.

However, as a desktop OS, there are three things every user needs that no distro provides yet:

1. Easy installation of any Linux software. Don't give me RPM-hell, dependency hell, command-line compiling, proprietary click-n-run depositories, or any other excuses. Only the Mac does it right: you drag the icon to your Applications folder. Voilà. The first distro to accomplish this will be king.

2. Simple, centralized, user-friendly control panels for *everything*, with smart defaults. Why does Mandrake, arguably the most desktop-ready distro, still have printer settings in PrinterDrake, printer settings in the KDE control center, and another panel full of printer settings in the KDE menu?

3. Better support for basic peripherals, like printers and scanners. It's tough shopping for printers at Staples when you know that nothing on the shelf is likely to work.

I'm not saying I have the solutions, but these are major problems that all regular computer users have when grappling with Linux.

Re:What distros need to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

" The closest most distros have come is custom software repositories to serve packages in the right format for their distro. But as long as there is more than one linux, this problem will remain."

Perhaps - but if you had a distro that:

1. Used binary packages with all libraries and dependencies included, à la Mac OS X.

2. Kept user-installed apps in an accessible Applications directory, represented like a single icon (again, like the Mac).

3. Was smart enough to compile and build such packages if an RPM or tarball was dragged to the Applications folder. ...then you would have a distro that could conquer Windows. Difficult to do? Undoubtedly. Worth doing? I think so.

And before anyone tells me to "do it myself" or accuses me of not actively participating in the open source world, I do support the best way I can - I buy open source products like Mandrake and Suse, in the hopes that one of them will build a Great Linux Distro one day.

For now, Linux seems to be taking the worst of Unix and the worst of Windows, mixing in some innovative but inelegant solutions, and pronouncing it a desktop OS. Look at who did it right - Apple - and go from there.

Re:What distros need to do...

[poptones]

1) You are thinking like a geek way too much. Why the hell whould I worry about what folder something goes into? The way software is installed on linux parts of an app go into several different folders anyway.

If you want to make it easy to install software, make a control panel app with some sanity that allows easy selection of all available software. With the exception of having four separate buttons and stupid nagscreen on each ("you just said you want to - install, remove, manage - software... is it ok if we do that now?") mandrake is pretty close to doing this. But you still have to set it up for the package repository, and the search capabilities suck. Both these issues could be fully addressed by someone wiling to create and maintain a proper website dedicated to the task and/or create a better installation panel. But it's already so very close as to be a non issue: how often do you launch software by drilling down to it's folder? I don't ever - if it's installed it's probably on my path, so I just type the name from a command line or the "Run..." box.

2) I recently setup a friend's computer to run mdk10. She's a 40 year old mom of a teenager who spends most of her time online in mud-type forums and playing games, and she got her first system MAYBE ten years ago. The one I was working on is an HP she bought at wal-mart and it's connected to an h-p printer/scanner/copier gizmo she also bought at wal-mart. I ran the mandrake install wizard, and when it was finished I showed her the basics of using her new linux system by scanning a picture of her daughter using the gimp, retouching it to get rid of the scratches, and printing it. The only thing that didn't work was the POS lucent winmodem, which I resolved by setting her up with a new Motorola winmodem that has (proper) linux driver support from motorola.

Lack of ability to do this universally is not a failure of linux - it's fucking amazing it even works as well as it does when you consider nearly every one of those drivers came from someone's individual dedication, not some corporate monkey's need for a weekly paycheck (although that noble volunteer may well be a corporate monkey by day). If you want better linux support for peripherals, get onto the folks at staples and tell them you need shit that works with linux. And when you find something supported by the manufacturer, make sure they know why you bought their product.

Slashdotted...

[dan_sdot]

Wow. The yoper site is already slashdotted. You would think that they would try to beef up their site before putting it on Slashdot. Where do they think they are going to get most of their users?
I don't think that this is leaving a very good impression.

Re:Just use Windows, for Pete's sake

[slug359]

A virus that spreads like like msblaster did is very easily possible, if someone discovered a flaw in a piece of popular software that runs on most linux machines, such as OpenSSH (please don't reply with stuff about openssh running as a user with no access to anywhere on some distros, it can somewhere, or home distros not having openssh, it's an example). You don't need root to connect to an IRC server, and listen for commands to fire packets at people.

Also you mention email worms/trojans, why do you need to be root to start a program that emails everyone in your evolution/kmail/syphleed address books?
All it needs is the ability to connect outwards on port 25 and read your address book, like your email client running as your user does.
It could even drop a DDOS zombie into your home directory that attacks people with your ping binary (forked off multiple times).
Additionally it it could add itself into your bash_profile/x startup file so it starts when you logon.

Yes, it couldn't affect other users on the local machine, but it would still spread and affect the user that opened it, just like running an email virus on Windows as a restricted user would.

Here we go again...

[BrokenHalo]

No, seriously, this guy is either an idiot, or has never really used gentoo.

Another obligatory post from a Gentoo zealot.

I don't have any particular beef against Gentoo (except that I don't use it because I have too many machines with different architectures), but this kind of message strikes me as clawing for trendy-geek points. If you want to be a true geek, you might consider rolling your own (Linux From Scratch, in other words). Following a series of instructions from a recipe-book doesn't qualify.

As far as the individual points you mention are concerned, most are available with any decent distribution, and the remainder are easily implemented from the command-line.

Re:Wasted Time

[trewornan]

This is exactly what Open Source is about:

Don't like any of the distros out there - roll your own! Then if you want to you can make it available to anybody else who wants it - very nice of him to do this. Don't like his distro - don't use it! Only like certain bits - take the code for those bits and use it in your own distro or submit a patch for whatever your chosen distro is!

Why is this a problem . . . the more the better, good for him!

Got benchmarks?

[Rex Code]

Slack 9.0 is mostly optimized from i386 to i586 depending on the packages, so expect Yoper to be _much_ faster.

Slackware is already optimized with -mcpu=i686, and has been for a long time (yes, even Slackware 9.0). The fact that it also uses -march=i486 really doesn't slow it down, since very few things make use of the extended opcodes.

Since processor optimizations are often touted as a major advantage, I'd be interested in knowing a few programs where the difference between "-march=i486 -mcpu=i686" and "-march=i686 -mcpu=i686" is measurable. I've been unable to find any so far.

Personal Mission

[BillsPetMonkey]

my personal mission in life, which is to unseat the Microsoft monopoly.

So it's not to make a grat Linux distro then?

Shame.