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Four Linux Vendors Agree On An LSB Implemenation
An anonymous reader submits a link to this story at Linuxlookup.com which says that "Connectiva, Mandrakesoft, Progeny and Turbolinux today announce the creation of a common implementation of the LSB 2.0 which will serve as the base for future products. The project, called 'Linux Core Consortium' (LCC), is backed by Linux supporters such as Computer Associates, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, OSDL, and the Free Standards Group."
LSB is the Linux Standard Base.
Is available in the PR and in the FAQ.
It's interesting to notice the differences with UnitedLinux. LCC is not to push one Linux Standard, but to push the Linux standard (LSB).
http://www.linuxbase.org/
LSB stands for Linux Standard Base. I quote rom the website:
What is the LSB Project?
The goal of the LSB is to develop and promote a set of binary standards that will increase compatibility among Linux systems (and other similar systems), and enable software applications to run on any conforming system. In addition, the LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit software vendors to port and write products for such systems.
What is the LSB Project?
The goal of the LSB is to develop and promote a set of binary standards that will increase compatibility among Linux systems (and other similar systems), and enable software applications to run on any conforming system. In addition, the LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit software vendors to port and write products for such systems.
What Does LSB Stand For?
The acronym LSB stands for Linux Standard Base. A key goal that led to the formation of the LSB project was to try to prevent the divergence of Linux-based systems, thus a name indicating base functionality for Linux. Note that the project prefers the use of the acronym LSB over the spelled-out Linux Standard Base to reduce the misconception that this is a Linux-only standard (see next question).
source: LSB faq
Was that difficult? No.
You can also go here:
n =/mandrakesoft/actions/2522
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/press/briefs?
and here:
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/lcc/faq
Yeah, I think he gets that.
I believe his point is that Novell is listed as a backer of this, but their product (SuSE) is not listed among the linux companies that made the announcement.
On the other hand Redhat is also listed in the same manner, so I don't think it means anything.
Think about the things that are broken in the default solaris install:
sed, awk, tar
Depending on what you're looking for you (ie. if you like a lot of the GNU convenience features) can include
ls (no, really, no colors, and lacking all manner of other sugary features)
grep (the raw Solaris grep is surprisngly slow compared to GNU grep, not to mentiona lack of options)
diff (go on, try diff --help, again, all the nice options are missing)
and as you say, many many more. That's some pretty basic stuff that, while not "broken", feels broken when you're used to the GNU versions.
Oh, and killall. killall is always fun on Solaris...
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
As a long-time redhat user I've come to like rpm a lot. I like spec-files, I like rpm, I like yum.
But, deb's dependency management is a little finer grained. And aptitude is a great tool.
So, if I could get my familiar rpm and yum commandlines, aptitude, and deb dependencies I guess it'd be the best of both worlds for me.
One huge problem for rpm-based distroes is of course that each of them has different packages and dependency trees. Ever tried using five yum repositories and hoping they just somehow manage to get along? As debian has larger number of packages from single source than any of the rpm-based distroes, and debian maintainers seem to handle dependencies pretty well, the resulting repository-hell might be a little easier to handle. But that's not a problem with the package format - it's a problem with repositories and maintainers.
Deb won't. LSB is RPM based.
Yeah for Yet Another Distro. Let's hype up the fact that Linux is about having a choice and then address the problem of "Linux is about having a choice". This will not make any purchase power wield MIS directors change their minds. They are either comfortable with Linux or not. If you now tell them that it doesn't matter wether you use Novell or RedHat because they are the same, people with Business knowledge will say that both companies are unsafe for long term support because neither understand the significance of PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION.
The correct way to use acronyms is to fully expand the acronym at it's first use, followed by the acronym in brackets. The acronym itself can be used from then on. For example:
"Connectiva, Mandrakesoft, Progeny and Turbolinux today announce the creation of a common implementation of the Linux Standards Base (LSB) 2.0 which will serve as the base for future products. The project, called 'Linux Core Consortium' (LCC), is backed by Linux supporters such as Computer Associates, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, OSDL, and the Free Standards Group."
Note that the original author did do this correct for the acronym 'LCC', but for some reason failed to handle the acronym 'LSB' correctly.
(If you really must know, it appears PowerPC is numbered this way).
That's simply not true. What you are referring to is called "endianess", which is the way the bytes are arranged in 16 or more bit words. There are two possible ways to store the bytes of a 16 bit word: least significant byte first (called little endian), and most significant byte first (called big endian).
The bits in a byte are always numbered from 0 to 7, with 0 being the least significant and 7 being the most significant bit.
Also, bits on physical lines (like address or data busses) are always numbered sequentially, and it therefore impossible to wire things up backwards because of endianness (it is, however, still possible with pure stupidity).
Endianness can be a problem, however, in computer networks; for example when transmitting a 32 bit word from an Intel machine to a PowerPC. The two machines differ in endianess (the Intel being little endian and the PowerPC being big endian), which means the byteorder is different, which can lead to incorrect values for the word after transmission, if the programmers don't take care to convert every word to network endianess before transmitting and from network to machine endianess after receiving.
For more information: http://www.cs.umass.edu/~verts/cs32/endian.html
Are you smoking crack? Deb won't support LSB? They ALREADY DO. In the 'stable' distro they support LSB 1.1, and 'testing' has LSB 2.0 support, as demonstrated by the link above. Do a little research before you post.
In fact, the Debian developers track the standards almost religiously, and have for a long time. Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and LSB support have been part of Debian for a long time now. That's why I personally use Debian. It is a completely free, relatively easy to use and administer (once you are past the initial learning curve), standards compliant distro with almost every open-source/free package out there already packaged for installation from the Debian distro mirrors.
Sorry, but you're incorrect. GE/Honeywell/Bull mainframes have always numbered the bits from left to right. After looking at it that way for about 25 years, I don't know why anyone would do it any other way. ;-)
When an incorrect post gets modded up, that's a sign that the misconception held by the poster is a commonly held one. Modding it up has the effect of bringing it to people's attention and making it more likely that a correction will be posted and modded up.
So, while I sometimes do wish there was an "incorrect" mod (or sometimes maybe "insufficient supporting evidence provided..."), I'm not sure that in practice it would work any better than the current situation.
--Bruce Fields