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Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health
phreakuencies writes "The ChangeLog in slackware-current got a distiguished update today on Jan 22: Patrick Volkerding updated us on his health condition stating he is not back in perfect shape but getting more medical tests and results. The initial phrase on the ChangeLog: 'I'm going to call this Slackware 10.1 beta 1, because we're at a state where things are relatively stable.' Read up here"
Patrick could just post a complete changelog of his health?
Slackware got mostly replaced by Gentoo on its position of "zealot distro", but Gentoo+Portage requires helluva horsepower under the hood unless you want to wait a week for OpenOffice upgrade. Slackware still is a viable choice for everyone who wants to learn the inner workings of Linux and uses some CPU running below 1GHZ.
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I think this "event" reflects the way in which most open source projects are lead.
Certainly you won't see in a commercial product news about the health of the developers as items in a ChangeLog.
However, in open source, the freedom to fork is often given as an excuse for allowing one person to be the benevolent dictator of the whole thing. On good merits, it seems, because many argue that if it weren't for that, things would never get done and stuff. But this "dictator" stuff gives the project owner a lot of power and a lot of discretion, and someone said once "power corrupts".
Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?
you can get precompiled packages for gentoo, no need or point most of the time compiling things yourself.
but slack still has it's following, and is fundamentlly different from gentoo - and damn, it's one of the old and still going distros.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"power corrupts"? Show the corruption here. So Pat's running the show for Slackware. Big deal if he puts his current medical condition in a changelog. This isn't the common cold we're talking about. He's gotten lots of support from the Slackware community, so I want you to explain how he's somehow mad with power.
Parent: -1 Troll or -1 Stupid
"Patrick Volkerding".
:-)
However, it seems that there has been a bug fix for this package's recent problem
but I wonder: assuming he has to pay for medical care (I'm British, sorry) - I hope he makes enough money from this project to adequately cover these costs.
Here is my real beef - I love open source, but it pisses me off when I speak to people in business when they talk about free software in terms of monetary cost. I believe that if you regularly use and rely on certain software - OS or not - that you should be obliged to pay something in return to the support the process.
Frankly, there are a number of businesses who really rely on this software and refuse to believe that they owe anything in return - money or code.
Sorry folks, rant over...
learn the inner workings of Linux and uses some CPU running below 1GHZ
You mean iPod?
This struck me... I use Slack on two *really slow* PCs (233 Mhz) and it makes them perform just fine. And yet I've never paid Pat a dime. I think it's time I started a subscription. What about you?
I sure hope the guy doesn't die soon, Slackware has been the only Linux distribution I ever really liked. Anyway, Pat's ChangeLog gave me an idea, what if most developers kept mental health ChangeLogs? Mhlogs!
perhaps you should consider the entire paragraph for Lord Acton's letter :
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I've seen people run Gentoo on much slower computers. They have something called *patience*. Or DistCC. If you have several computers, DistCC will reduce compilation times significantly, since it is able to share the load. Or you could just wait. Also, remember that OpenOffice doesn't *run* on many slower machines. Any machine that can run OpenOffice or KDE usably is one that can compile it in a decent time. Or, you could just be patient, or use binary packages (they are available for KDE, OO, GNOME, etc.)
The change log got a "distiguished" update from Patrick "Volkerding"?
How about that?
There are also those of us with something called "Things to get done." Don't get me wrong, I like Gentoo, I think it's a great distro to really learn Linux on, but I'd never use it in any kind of production environment, personally.
To do so in a reasonable manner would require me to essentially maintain a base install of my own tarballed up, and if I'm going to do that, I may as well let someone else spend the time on it - be it Pat Volkerding, the Debian project, Redhat, or whoever - so I can spent my time getting work done.
It's not a matter of patience so much as priority. Like I said, I have *nothing* against Gentoo as a distro and have run it myself in the past. I just strongly disagree with the "It's a square peg for your every round hole" mentality many Gentoo users have in regard to it.
This guy got finally reasonnable. Instead of trying to take care of by himself, he finally went to a doctor, and, best part : Stayed with the same doctor
Of cours, any doctor usually start thinking of the most plausible and statistically significant cause of disease. Usually patient should come back and only if no improvement has been seen, then only the doctors start considering more unlikely or rarer diseases.
But if the patient is unhappy with the first diagnosis of the first doctor and moves to another doctor, the new will start over again from the very beginning.
It's OK to try change doctors when you're not very sick and when you try to find a nice doctor who you like to have him as the one who you usually refer first to.
BUT when someone health is compromised HE SHOULDN'T keep switching doctors. He should try to stay with one (and eventually have him refer to other colleauges if he need more help).
Because each time a patient siwtch doctors, he loose time because of this start-over-again.
And I'm not speaking about the economical problems : doctor switching reases the health cost a lot because a lot of things (lab exams, etc...) are done twice or thrice.
It's a big problem we have here in Switzerland.
There's some work to avoid this kind of redundancy : One exemple of such project in Geneva (CH) is e-toile (Sorry website in french, you have some english info here).
We hope that by building secured networks, doctors could share some information and avoid repeating the same stuffs all over again.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
One of Pat's logs mentions that he was diagnosed with and being treated for infective endocarditis. The medical literature I've read informally refers to that disease as IE.
I think we all know what IE can do to your system. I would have thought Pat would have known better than to mess with it. Perhaps he should spend a little more time reading Slashdot? At any rate, the cure is pretty simple.
This is good news for me. I've been waiting rather impatiently for the next release of slackware. I've tried every distro that offers a download and slackware is the only one I liked. I liked it enough to get a subscription. I'm sure Pat would appreciate it if some of you did the same.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
I believe that if you regularly use and rely on certain software - OS or not - that you should be obliged to pay something in return to the support the process.
Isn't that what RedHat concluded, then split their distribution into Enterprise and Fedora. Ever since the Enterprise product came out, more people at my organization started using Linux.
You just can't sell free software.
But since Slackware doesn't offer OpenOffice packages, you have no choice but to compile. I use both (3 slackware boxes, 1 gentoo). They each have their merits to us zealots.
In my prior work we were doing customisation work on our companys own product. Most customisation was done my team of 1 Programmer, (1/3)Project Manager and (1/2)Grapician. Sometimes Pm and graphician being the same person. Programmer was generally doing one project at time. Project manager was managing 2 or 3 and graphician was doing mostly one at time, but was resereved only for hald of the time for a project. Typical project lasted 2 months. Getting specification and connectons from client has half the work.
Employees got sick once in a while like people do.
There was allways the trouble to explain customers.
The usual question was. Why have you not replaced him(her). Our project is prime importance.
a) 25 some will most likely be sick 2 days, geting new programmer to understand takes longer.
b) Puting people in middle of half written code that does not do what is needed, usually means large chunks being rewritten, when original author knows what is missing and only adds that.
c) a lot of specification was usually on the air, and doing the code to interface was the minor part.
d) We sure did not have spare developers.
e) Yes, they all are.
Beside the fact that you CAN install a program like OOo without a package or without compiling,like, by using a installer!
"The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner."
IMO 10.1 should be delayed till KDE 3.4 release but maybe it will feature more bugs than the current 3.3.2 version. Sure, this is not as important Slackware 11 or 10.2 - judging by new release intervals, the next version should ship QT 4, KDE 4 and 2.6 kernel by default. Now that will be a desktop platform!
Dear Pat,
.
c micro.html with regards to this.
I wanted to make you aware of a possible cause for the chest pains and other symtpoms you've been suffering.
What you are suffering may be a simulated illness.
I am a victim of involuntary human experimentation. I am being used in research to develop technology for secretly and remotely harassing a target and influencing human behavior. I have a web site that describes my situation at http://www.geocities.com/mrmistermicko
I have seen instances in which the technology being tested on me has been used to simulate an illness in a target. Also, on a number of occasions powerful, debilitating chest pains have been inflicted on me through this technology.
Your situation fits a pattern of victimization by this technology. I can't really give a better reason for my suspicions than that. Having been a victim of involuntary experimentation and harassment for many years, and having seen many other victims -- only a very few of which realized that they were being intentionally attacked -- your experiences triggered my "pattern recognition circuits".
The symptoms you've described, their sudden onset, the inability of doctors to diagnose them, your position as really the ultimate authority for the Slackware Linux Distro., and the fact that there is a concerted effort to undermine and destroy the open source community, your age -- I believe I read somewhere you're in your mid-thirties, which seems to be a typical age when victims begin to suffer a high level of harassment.
The fact your latest update says that your new cardiologist at the Mayo clinic "with no planting of any suggestion from me whatsoever came to the conclusion that it seemed to be infective endocarditis". The very best medical doctors are often the ones most likely to cooperate with these involuntary experiments, and to participate in the research. I have had many cases in which the group harassing me has used knowledge of my beliefs in an attempt to influence me -- by parroting my beliefs back to me in a context that they hoped would lead me to adopt additional beliefs, or adopt a course of action that they wanted.
One of the early goals, when this group begins attacking a victim, is to deprive the victim of all resources for self-defense -- to make the victim unemployed, penniless, if possible homeless, and to sever all their relationships with friends and family. Your comments about your savings fit that pattern. You might look at http://www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/mind_control/m
Anyway, from my experiences, I just recognized a pattern in what you described that made me think you might be a victim of electronic harassment or involuntary human experimentation (usually it's both) with the kind of technology that's been used on me.
Perhaps you'll find the information in my web site, and the links, make for interesting reading. If you do ever think you are being victimized like I have been, you might consider having your heart condition examined in Cuba. Cuba doesn't seem to mind taking an openly hostile attitude towards the US and the West, and has good medical services. But don't wait until you've spent your last dime.
(You could also try seeing if electromagnetic shielding improves your condition, but it's tricky. Any holes in imperfect shielding can be exploited, and it is very difficult to shield against close-proximity alternating magnetic fields. Usually victims are implanted, and simply stimulating the implant can cause many symptoms, including chest pains. Such an implant is an antennae, so shielding yourself would be as difficult as shielding, say, a radio to the point it can no longer pick up any stations.)
On four of my gentoo boxes:
/proc/cpuinfo
# cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 349.116
Running flawlessy...
Quantum hacker.
The preferred method now, in all industrialized countries, to repress individuals engaged in activity that the government and powerful interests don't like, is to slap'em with a mental illness diagnosis. Then you fill'em full of powerful pyscho-active medication, which renders them incapable of doing anything which requires a high level mental focus and concentration.
If they start causing trouble again, well, they must have stopped taking their medication!
You know that they stopped taking the medication because anyone on that kind of medication is incapable of causing trouble, or doing anything of any significance whatsoever. So have your goons start harassing them with your secret, remote harassment technology ( http://www.geocities.com/mrmistermicko ) until they GET BACK ON THEIR MEDICATION and start behaving like good little boys and girls again.
There is a secret, coordinated effort to destroy the open source movement. Government and powerful interests don't like it because they don't control it, and it allows foreign countries like China, Russia, etc. to obtain operating systems and software that don't have any secret NSA back-doors. Open source software gives the power of softwar technology to everyone, not just the rich. They DO NOT like that.
Expect to see open source leaders like Volkerding to begin mysteriously manifesting symptoms of mental illnesses.
Why do soooo many distributions continue to use Linux kernel v2.4? I've heard some comments saying that Patrick wants to keep the kernel bootable on a floppy and that isn't supposidly possible with 2.6
Has version 2.6 bloated up so much that it can't fit on a floppy anymore?? Who uses floppys anymore anyway except for rescue disks. If the only thing holding Pat back is the size of a floppy, then I would say get rid of the floppy and go to a mini-bootable CD (Like SLAX...which, of course, is based on Slackware)
...produced by an organization of one -- or very few.
The issue that we face is that organizations themselves are changing. In Dan Pink's Free Agent Nation and on Tom Peters' website (among other places) there's lots of conversation about the change in organizations. They were an aberration. When this country first got founded we had craftspeople producing goods for themselves because there were no other ways to do it. When the tools needed to produce goods got too expensive (steel mills, cars, etc.) Organizations were created to have custody over those tools, and Organization Men came to use them and then they went home again. But for software, a quick trip to Dell and less than a grand will give you PLENTY of horsepower to produce goods and services in this, the knowledge based age, and the pendulum is swinging back to individuals and small groups that hang together.
If you haven't, read Free Agent Nation. Quite entertaining.
Bottom line is that Pat V. is an organization. An organization of one. And you'd better get used to that, because that's the way things are going (or returning.)
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
According to this, Infective Endocarditis is an infection of the lining of the heart's chambers (called the endocardium) or the heart's valves. If left untreated, endocarditis can cause life-threatening complications.
If you have chronic endocarditis, which may last for months, you may feel feverish and chilled, be very tired, lose weight, and have joint pain, night sweats, or the symptoms of heart failure.
It's treated by antibiotics, and sometimes requires surgery. The incidence of IE is approximately 2-4 cases per 100,000 persons per year. This rate has not changed in the past 50 years.
You'll get Pat's cooties!
With that logic how do you explain the thousands of people that still contribute to that free software. Because they have a good paying job at Taco Bell? The original author would have never been able to get that software to point its at with out the communinty. So if he left it closed it would still be crap software that he only used. Just because a ton of people helped him get it to where it was at doesn't mean he would have closed it because it a good piece of software now.
Jack Ass!!!
M.
I believe it's -running- flawlessly.
But how long does "emerge world" with updated KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice take?
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DragonFlyBSD/ports does just as much compiling as Gentoo (albeit with a better system for doing it), and I use it successfully on a P3-500. Compiling isn't a big deal unless you're a zealot for binary packages.
An ordinary UltraSparc IIi on 330 Mhz will run KDE 3.x perfectly fine, same goes with StarOffice. Compiling KDE takes nearly a work week in total CPU-time, I wouldn't call that a decent time.
You're real quick on the update, dipshit.
Portage doesn't need that much horsepower, just leave it on overnight. I can't do that, but 4 hours a day is quite enough to keep my 800mhz Duron up to date (and it has pretty much everything major installed). nice -n 19 emerge -u world, then your system is just as responsive and it's upgrading. Slackware is still a nice distro, but its lack of a dependency manager hurts it.
I am trolling
I've just pre-ordered 10.1, bought some more stuff on the slackware store, and made a paypal donation (the address for that is paypal@slackware.com). Total paid : about $80 , shipping not included.
I've been using Slack for nearly one year now and I think that -current is an incredibly up-to-date-yet-stable distro. Also it's an excellent teacher if you want to learn more about how a linux-based system works (yes, gnu/linux).
I always used the torrents to get slack, but this time I considered it was time to help Patrick. He needs money to finance his medical expenses (keep in mind he's in the USA).
Non-Americans : considered the low exchange rates of the dollar, making donations in dollars is not so expensive !
BUT when someone health is compromised HE SHOULDN'T keep switching doctors.
From what I understand (a mutual friend knows Pat and told me his story, independent of /.) many of the doctors Pat consulted simply refused to acknowledge that he was capable of diagnosing his own Actinomyces infection. I even saw a physician on slashdot
criticising him for self-diagnosis, and comparing a self-diagnosing patient to a "newbie blindly editing his/her registry".
If someone starts panicking, switching doctors rapidly and self-diagnosing at random, then I agree it's bad news. But when someone who is intelligent and scientifically-minded attempts to seek out information on their own health, and is rebutted by the medical establishment, then I consider it sadly indicative of the way knowledge is compartmentalised in our society, and the professional airs that some doctors affect.
I'm a molecular biologist, and (fairly or not) we routinely jibe at medics. It's perhaps a generalisation, but my experience is that physicians often simply don't want to know about new science. "Genetics? Molecules? Biotechnology? Pah. Bedside manner is the key, sonny, oh and my years of training, which rule out any possibility that you could know something I don't..."
As I understand it, the moment Pat found a doctor who was able to take suggestions as well as offer them, he stuck with that doctor. This, I think, is the bottom-line lesson here: find a doctor who listens as well as talks, who's prepared to admit that you might have a brain as well as a bunch of symptoms, and hang on to that doctor for dear life.
Oh, and get a bloody health service in this country.
I'm going to call this Slackware 10.1 beta 1, because we're at a state where things are relatively stable.
:-)
WTF!
He shouldn't let his health condition affect what he labels the Slackware versions!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Seriously. Up here, self-employed people who get sick don't face financial ruin. You probably can't find a better argument about why universal medicare benefits a country. Someone like Pat can run a one or two person business that benefits his community in an enormous way, without the risk of losing his shirt if he gets sick.
You could probably get in on one of those "genius" visas. I think we have them up here too.
Well, Gentoo Stats has some guesses (times approximate, of course).
Mozilla Firefox - 48 minutes
KDE - ~8 hours (more or less depending upon packages)
OpenOffice - 5:42 minutes
And, you could always get the binary builds of firefox or openoffice. Binaries are always available for the big packages.
Throw the bums out!
Young Biff: Why don't you make like a tree and get out of here?
Old Biff: It's LEAVE, you idiot! "Make like a tree, and leave."
Hmmm...this entire post sounds like Paranoid Schizophrenia to me. Some Chlorpromazine should help with that. Take some and stop inciting panic in the populace.
Yeah, I know. Chlorpromazine's "old school". I just couldn't resist responding, and "chlorpromazine" was the first antipsychotic medication to come to mind...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
When I was in 7th grade, I started out with a Slackware 3.4 cd I bought at Fry's. I had trouble installing it, and Patrick personally guided me through the install over e-mail, and eventually discovered I had a weird bug in my chipset. He sent me a patched kernel to boot the install with, and a diff file to compile my own kernel with. He really inspired me with his Open Source spirit- you won't find this kind of support with any commercial product. I am a slackware user for life. Pat- thanks for everything, I sure hope you get better soon.
slackware = learning a lot about linux/unix and the packages which are important to me.
example: i know very well the compilation options,the inner workings and overall philosophy of postfix, cyrus-imapd, mysql and others. I compile all of them myself, i figure out my own configure lines, and slack stays out of my way.
slack is a minimalist distro, and i move on to other more important parts of sys-admining then learning the "isms" of slack.
debian or gentoo?
that's a big fat negative. as a newbie you won't really be learning all-that-much unix/linux as you will be learning debianism or gentooism.
i.e. "the debian way" (a phrase even used by the deb ppl) and/or "the gentoo way"
and there's nothing wrong with that...but i chose a low profile distro. there is NO "slack way"
going from slackware to freebsd to crux is very easy.
Debian users will ask " how do i dpkg-reconfigure gpm" on slackware?
you don't. you never learn to use such a crutch in the first place.
you just edit the gpm.conf file like a good geek should.
the more time you spend learning "the debian way" or "the gentoo way" the less time you actually spend learning unix/linux.
i can guarantee you that people who are experienced in slackware can move to solaris, freebsd, os-x and other variants of unix faster then someone who knows gentoo and debian.
it's about core essentials. very few slackware users are actually zealots. we use what works. i am currently running slack, debian, solaris, redhat and os-x servers.
ppl that i know who use slack as well are the same way...they run a lot of stuff. it's hard to find a slack user that will sit there and crow on and on about slack.
gentoo otoh, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a gentoo user who won't debate all night about how great it is for EVERYTHING, and how all other UNIX variants don't hold a candle to it.
whatever
The rating on a comment is supposed to reflect the value of the comment, not the poster.
*raises hand*
I'm a slackware subscriber.
Harald
There are a lot more people in the Open Source movement they could target first before someone insignificant and largely useless like Patrick.
I can absolutely guarantee you that China does not run Slackware...
Note there's very little to the "gentoo way". It automates some boring tasks, while keeping others very "raw". You still manage stuff by editing config files, there are no "managers"... It's just that instead of "wget somewhere/package.tgz; tar -xvzf package.tgz ; cd package ; ./configure ; make ; make install" you just type "emerge package" and if "package" requires "library" and it's not present in the system, it will be downloaded and compiled too. And many more such. If you want configure flags, compile time options, gcc parameters, still can be done easily. Gentoo is slack on steroids :)
:)
Of course Debian is a different story. You can't even make install the kernel
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Maybe. IF they allow you to continue to see doctors after the first says there is nothing they can do. IF there is enough money to pay for the tests you need. (Of course if it is life or death it is done, but we do the work here in that case too, when the condition isn't that serious though there may be lines)
Its all a maybe. There are many people in Canada who come to the US for treatment because it is better. You pay for it, but you get better treatment. The reverse is also true because for some things it is better to live under a system like Canada.
So now we (the peanut gallery) are bad because we criticized him for all these self-diagnosis. I'm happy he finally guess right with the infective endocarditis. But that's a far way from this sulfur actinomycosis he was originally claiming...
Just a thought.
The fact that this has been ongoing for months and that he's still able to function indicates to me that it is a psychosomatic condition. The sad fact is that the slashdot community is enabling this by giving his condition so much attention. I actually feel embarrassed for him because he's battling such demons on a very public stage. His ego *needs* this to be a dire physical illness in order to save face to the global community.
I don't know Patrick but I would bet that he needs to address the underlying psychological causes and also focus on improving his health with stress mangement, diet, and exercise changes.
Consider the following quote from the New York Times Magazine cover story "Atomic Guinea Pigs", published August 31, 1997: "For decades, those who claimed to be victims of clandestine radiation experiments conducted by the United States Government were dismissed as paranoid."
It is well-known that in Soviet Russia, and in China, mental illness diagnosis and forced care were used to silence political dissidents. The US now appears to be adopting this method for silencing its dissidents as well.
Read about "The New Freedom Initiative", W's plan to screen the ENTIRE US POPULATION for mental illness: http://www.conservativeusa.org/mentaltesting.htm
Pat, I love ya, but you really need to get some more people on board. You can't be trying to do everything.
What's up with 10.0? There has not been a security update for a long time. Good to see you've upgraded to 2.4.29 for current, but the poor schmucks who are still running slack 10.0 might not know about this bug which allows local users to become root. I tried it myself on my slack 10, and it works (not every slack 10 box can reproduce the exploit, but I, for one, could). There are other bugs in 10 which really do call for a notice, but that one was enough to make my point.
I guess the fact that there are no longer any security bulletins should clue everybody in. Either stay current, or don't use slackware, for the time being.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Maybe you're just not an active Linux user? Either that, or you've never been to a BBS... Slackware is still one of the most popular Linux distributions today. And the only reason that not everyone uses it (as opposed to MandrakeLinux) is the user-friendliness of it. In laymen's terms -- it's more difficult to use. ;) I still use Slackware very often. I can't wait until 10.1.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
You must be new around here...
Mad Penguin> has announced their Slackware Handbook Project which aims to recreate the FreeBSD Handbook... but for Slackware. And they are keeping it totally open for anyone to add/edit content (peer moderated by other users). Pretty good stuff...