Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health

Maybe instead of update... by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 01:17 · Score: 4, Funny

Patrick could just post a complete changelog of his health?

Re:Maybe instead of update... by XChilde · 2005-01-23 01:42 · Score: 1

Now the illness is over, good luck! But does he still want to exclude GNOME from Slackware?
Re:Maybe instead of update... by rah1420 · 2005-01-23 03:26 · Score: 3, Informative

Perhaps you should RTFA. His illness is in no way over.

From the latest changelog entry, it looks like progress is being made, but he still has a bunch of diagnostics facing him and possible heart surgery. That hardly qualifies as "over."

I think I'll wander over and buy a copy of Slackware now.

--
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Re:Maybe instead of update... by coraxo · 2005-01-23 06:04 · Score: 2, Funny

I checked your posting history and it's not so great either,

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Strc prst skrz krk and vomit! Can help.
Re:Maybe instead of update... by rnd() · 2005-01-23 16:31 · Score: 1

I can't believe that Pat thinks he was flamed for self-diagnosing. The point of those who advised him to get himself to a qualified doctor was that one's health is too important to risk. He was visiting small town family practice doctors when he should have been going to the ER of a major research hospital and then subsequently to the appropriate specialists.

Pat, we all hope you get better. But (no flame intended) you still shouldn't have waited so long to get yourself to a specialist.

--
Amazing magic tricks
Re:Maybe instead of update... by essreenim · 2005-01-24 00:05 · Score: 1

gnome is p00

Re:All well and good... by SharpFang · 2005-01-23 01:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

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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45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

Benevolent Dictator Attitude by vladd_rom · 2005-01-23 01:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

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?

Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by gl4ss · 2005-01-23 01:26 · Score: 2, Insightful

slackware *IS* a commercial distro, and mostly an one man show.

a lot of people forget that very often :)

in ultra small businesses(1 or 2 people) the health of the people in it is actually pretty important to know for the clients..

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world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by RenHoek · 2005-01-23 01:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

Hmmm I think the benevolent dictator argument is a good one, but you forget one think. As democracy protects us (in principle) against politicians going corrupt after getting elected, so does the GPL protect us from benevolent dictators going bad..

If the 'people' no longer wish to live under the benevolent dictators rule, then they can just pack up the 'country' (=software) and start one of their own. If the rest of the people agree that the dictator has gone corrupt, then they will flock to the new distribution, leaving the old corrupt dictator with nothing to rule over.

So I don't think giving health reports in a changelog is going to have the people up in arms.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by lars_stefan_axelsson · 2005-01-23 01:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

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?

I don't see why not. If people don't like it, they can, as you say, fork.

However, your question of whether that would be done in a commercial product needs a more serious answer.

In a word, 'no', you would not expect to see that in a commercial product (at least not typically, see below). The reason is that commercial products are produced by organisations that like to project (the falsehood) that they have transcended the inviduals working for them. I.e. we the organisation will support and stand by, this product, even if all the 'worker bees' that actually build it and know it would all go and croak tomorrow. As anyone who has ever been involved in professional software development can attest, that's simply and emphatically not true. If only a few key personel leaves a product development team then pandemonium (and frequently hillarity) ensues as the organisation reels from the shock and grief and desperately tries to find it's balance again.

As the customers of said (large) organisation already have a feeling this is true, they must always be kept as completely in the dark as possible about the individuals in the organisation actually doing the work (and their well being). If it were otherwise, the customers suspicions would be confirmed within a week and they'll all run away rather than walk.

This is why we've had the 'quality' revolution in the past decade or so. Corporations hate to be in the hands of the worker bees, since said worker bees then can (and will) demand more of a share. Hence every large corporation (or organisation, think the military that practice for a scenario where a large percentage of the worker bees /and even a few queens/ can be killed at any instant) must 'commoditize' the work done for them, making the workers as replacable as possible, so that they can be replaced. Not even cogs in the machinery, because the typical machine will stop with a cog missing, but rather less than cogs.

That's why you see CMM and the like. To make workers less of craftsmen (i.e improving their skils, taking pride in their work etc, as craftsmen have a tendency to make themselves irreplacable) and more like worker bees. Instantly replacable.

This has gone on for quite some time in 'ordinary' industry, started with Henry Ford in fact, and the transformation in the production industry is now almost complete. Less so when it comes to the design side of things as the corporations still need design skil. They're trying as hard as they can though, hence the call for process improvements.

In open source we don't have to try and fool our customers as we aren't dependent on them. Hence we don't have to keep up the pretense that the project isn't in the hands of a few skilled people. Some smaller companies with heroes can operate the same way (as going with them is the long shot anyway, their customers aren't as easily scared). I remember when Dan Hildebrand (the chief architect of QNX) died from cancer. The company put his obituary on the front page and had it there for quite some time. Now, of course, in that business everyone already knew that he'd died, so trying to pretend that it hadn't happened wouldn't have worked anyway.

So, the fact that we all know that Linus is the boss of Linux and that the project will flounder without him if e.g. he were to step in front of a bus (at least for quite some time) is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. We have smarter 'customers' who can handle the truth. "You wan't the truth, you can't handle the truth!"

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Stefan Axelsson
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by MikeBabcock · 2005-01-23 02:08 · Score: 1

I don't really care what commercial software would do, arguments about how commercial slackware is aside. I don't want my distro to behave like "commercial" software anyway.

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- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by Danborg · 2005-01-23 02:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

Dude, cut Pat some slack (no pun intended). He only put his health update in the changelog because it is the most effective way of getting the word out to the Slackware community. Pat doesn't really have a blog, so the changelog is the next best thing.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by squiggleslash · 2005-01-23 02:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

Mod up +5 Insightful. For an example of this actually happening, there's Atheos, which was forked as Syllable when Atheos's developer disappeared from the scene.
In many ways this is one of the major intents behind the GPL: The GPL means you never have to put your faith in someone else when you use someone else's software. You are not limited by them. You are not giving them your testicles and a large hammer whenever you trust your data to something they wrote. Normally it's phrased in the conspiracy-driven language I just used, but it applies equally to situations where the reason for that lack of support could be entirely honest and unforseen, like Pat's situation today.
And on that note, may I wish Pat the best of luck. Whatever I move on to, Slackware will always have a soft spot for me, both as the first distro I used, and as the one that worked closest to the way I want such a distro to work. Slackware is a work of art.

--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by RenHoek · 2005-01-23 04:43 · Score: 1

As democracy protects us (in principle)

Yes, it's that "in principle" part which tells you to just stfu 'cuz nothing you say after that means a gosh darn thing.

The 'in principle' is an caveat emptor. Democracy _can_ be perverted, as the GPL can. It's no 100% surefire way, but it's effective most of the time..
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by Fnkmaster · 2005-01-23 04:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

Your post explains why I have left the software industry (or at least the world of "enterprise software" bullshit).

From a management perspective (I've been there before), I understand you don't want the whole fate of the company to rest on one person's shoulders. You want source code that is clean and well documented so if somebody leaves, somebody else can pick it up and eventually figure the damned thing out. But if a key team member leaves, it WILL have an adverse affect on the project and time lines, and pretending otherwise is just ridiculous.

Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization? In my experience CMM is bullshit anyway. The reason projects usually required heroic efforts wasn't immature, non-predictable development processes, but because project requirements changed throughout development, and deadlines weren't moved to match. If you know what you're building and you have good craftsmen with experience estimating project timeframes, it's not terribly hard to do.

And no, stuff like XP doesn't help when your sales people change their minds about what's critical regularly as they find another client potentially willing to part with a half million bucks if only we have feature X. Those clients never actually parted with their money, I found - feature X as a roadblock was almost always a bullshit excuse, and when we pulled a week of all-nighters to demo feature X, it never actually closed a deal.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by SilverspurG · 2005-01-23 04:55 · Score: 1

Democracy _can_ be perverted, as the GPL can

Would you mind explaining how you can compare the GPL, a license to distribute information, with democracy, a system by which representatives are elected who will ultimately have the power to legally speak for their constitutents?

I'd love to hear it.

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fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by SilverspurG · 2005-01-23 05:06 · Score: 1

it does break down in a few areas

Only in the important ones. Say, control over funding?

Who cuts your paycheck?

--
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by Hugonz · 2005-01-23 05:41 · Score: 1

... then they will flock to the new distribution, leaving the old corrupt dictator with nothing to rule over.
Can you say XFree86?
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by lars_stefan_axelsson · 2005-01-23 05:48 · Score: 2, Interesting

Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization?

Amen and not me. I mean, I even went back to finish my PhD because I thought that I'd develop personally from it (not because it would make me more money, over the course of my career it's a net loss). Hence I (and every damn geek I know) are firmly in the 'craftsman' category.

Corporations OTOH is in the business of making money, not making cars, or software or whatever. (They're even required by law to be in this business; increase share holder value or else). When the inefficiencies of corporations have diminished (as a result of competition) then paradoxically, there's less of a place for people in those corporations that are in any other business than making money. I note that very few people are in that business. People instead seem to insist to cling on to old fashioned ideas and outmoded values such as behaving morally (instead of lawfully), programming computers (instead of maximising profit or minimising cost), increasing their skills for self satisfaction (instead of doing a cost benefit analysis) etc. etc.

I think you point to an interesting dilemma in that of course a thousand man corporation can't just be expected to go belly up and die just because one guy walks home and takes the blue prints with him. For no other reason than that that isn't exactly fair to the other 999 guys (or gals) working there. On the other hand, in order to address this the pressure today is 100% on making everybody completely replacable, that's how economy works, instead of finding a balance between the needs of the one and the needs of the many.

With the world (through globalisation) becoming ever more efficient, the pace increasing and the people in it not changing much, it'll be interesting where and how it all will end. It's clear that it cannot just continue on the road it's on now, we'll hit the end sooner or later, we can't all end up worker bees with one (or three) queen(s) on top. Can we?

--
Stefan Axelsson
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by Hugonz · 2005-01-23 05:48 · Score: 1

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?
Ok:
"Commercial" (or rather proprietary)products do not have changelogs. They have release schedules and such marketing BS. Even if such a product is a one man show, outsiders do not know it, and if something happens to that man, many times the schedules are delayed and/or the product may never hit the shelves. I think you are judging apples with an orange mind.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by Cyno · 2005-01-23 06:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?

No, in a commercial product they would just put advertisements in their changelog.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by big_a · 2005-01-23 07:51 · Score: 1

I disagree with the parent comment. I don't feel Pat's comments reflect a "Benevolent Dictator" attitude at all. And, it's silly to think that the owner of a project could, or indeed should, distance themselves personally from their project...

Here is the quote from the changelog:
And about my status... I didn't want to have to bring this up again, but since a lot of people are under the impression that I've recovered and I'm just fine (and are beginning to make the usual demands of my time ;-), I'd better clarify what's going on. Especially since I'm not exactly fine.

Most open-source project owners don't work on their projects full time. It would be great if they could, but it's more like a really, really time consuming hobby. And, you don't realize just how demanding it can be until you're a project owner yourself.

There are many ways in which project and owner are intertwine. Half the project owner's job involves the usual stuff which you would expect: programming, packaging the distributions, fixing bugs, determining what features/functions to include, etc... But the other half involves lots and lots communication.

Like it or not, the project owner is the face of the project. He/She gets (and hopefully answers) all the user emails, questions, coordinate sub-projects, etc... A good owner is always visible and doesn't work in a vacuum. If this makes him/her a benevolent dictator, then so be it (...jedi.)

All of these tasks are demands placed on the owner for his/her time. If there are situations in the owner's life that are effecting the quantity or quality of his time (i.e. health problems, busy at work, changing jobs, having a baby, going on vacation) then he owes to the users to make this knowledge public.

Would I have gone into so much detail? Probably not. (But, since he was flamed so badly last time he commented on his health, he's just trying to be thorough...)

Is the changelog the best forum to do this? Maybe. How many changelogs do you normally read? And would you have paid attention if it wasn't front page on SlashDot?
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by jesterzog · 2005-01-23 08:36 · Score: 1

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.

I don't follow your line of reasoning at all. There are lots of small businesses, for instance, that operate with exactly the same philosophy and relation to their customers. This doesn't mean that nearly all businesses operate in the same way, and it doesn't mean that it the sometimes less-formal methods of small businesses operators should reflect on those of other businesses.

Open source or not, Pat can run his project however he likes. Similarly, there are many open source projects that are run much more professionally, and they're treated with respect to that by their customers and users. Open source doesn't define a development process (despite some claims to the contrary) -- it merely sets some rules for distribution that in many cases makes the result more flexible for use by others.

Would I use slackware? Perhaps, if it suited my needs, but always with the understanding that it'd be more akin to paying a neighbour to do something for me with all the facets of their personality involved, rather than going to a more established organisation whom I'd trust as being able to more solidly stand behind what they're providing.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by 21chrisp · 2005-01-23 09:51 · Score: 1

XFree86 rings a bell

Re:All well and good... by gl4ss · 2005-01-23 01:28 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

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world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.

What are you talking about? by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 01:31 · Score: 1

"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

Re:What are you talking about? by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2005-01-23 01:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'd go further than that, since Slackware is his one-man-show baby, people who use it are very much interested in both his health and what will happen if the worst comes to the worst.

A couple of years ago (or maybe even now for outsiders), people were wondering what would happen if Linus went one-to-one with a bus. That was actually a reason not to adopt Linux. Now we all know that people like Andrew Morton and Alan Cox are available and experienced.

What way would people go if Slackware went down the tubes? Debian? I know I found Red Hat incredibly frustrating when my ignorance and Unix inexperience meant I had to leave Slackware and move to something easier to configure. In the end it was SuSE 5.0 I turned to, it's PCnfs printing capabilities worked 'out of a box'. Not sure I'd see SuSE as a migration path for Slackware users nowadays though.

Get well soon.

--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:What are you talking about? by big_groo · 2005-01-23 03:06 · Score: 1

I'm using slackware-current right now, and if Slack *did* go down the tubes for any reason? I'd probably switch to - are you ready for this - FreeBSD.
Re:What are you talking about? by m50d · 2005-01-23 05:13 · Score: 2, Interesting

I think Debian and Gentoo are the obvious alternatives. Slackware people tend to compile a lot of their own stuff anyway since the default distribution is a bit light on the packages (no OOo for example), and there's a very nice port of emerge to slackware. Debian is quite slack-like but may be too political for many slackers.

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I am trolling
Re:What are you talking about? by tzanger · 2005-01-23 05:25 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've been using Slackware since it diverged from SLS so many years ago and I'd have to say that you are 100% correct about Debian... nice idea but if I wanted politics, I'd tune in to CSPAN. Their rabid use of GNU/everything has utterly and totally turned me off of the distribution. Gentoo? I don't think so. I think that I'd move to something like Vector Linux which is Slackware based and has a more sensible set of installer defaults (I use my own tagsets though already). The only real reason I'm not using Vector currently is because the ASCII art penguin has to go for starters but more importantly, Slackware is still the 'root' of it and why go with a little offshoot that doesn't change much at the current time?
Re:What are you talking about? by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2005-01-23 08:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

I have thought of that for one machine of mine (the firewall/proxy), but there is always that one problem: Linux simply supports far more hardware than any BSD variant. Linux hardware support used to be a major issue, now it is almost a given.

Funny, someone here on /. suggested a couple of years back that Linux would one day be mainstream and 'Uncool', and that people would migrate to BSD. I thought they were joking . . .

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Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:What are you talking about? by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 09:52 · Score: 2, Funny

A couple of years ago (or maybe even now for outsiders), people were wondering what would happen if Linus went one-to-one with a bus.

What is there to wonder about? Clearly the bus would be completely and utterly destroyed.
Re:What are you talking about? by msully4321 · 2005-01-23 15:09 · Score: 1

For the love of God, somebody mod that up funny.

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Slashdot: You will never find a more wretched hive of spam and zealotry. We must be cautious.
Re:What are you talking about? by m50d · 2005-01-24 04:25 · Score: 1

I'd say give emerde a try. One change to por2pkg and everything becomes completely reversible, so you can use packages for both. Just make sure you don't let it install pam and it works fine. And you don't need to worry about install defaults if you already have a working system.

--
I am trolling

The Most Carelessly Maintened Slackware Package by XChilde · 2005-01-23 01:37 · Score: 4, Funny

"Patrick Volkerding".

However, it seems that there has been a bug fix for this package's recent problem :-)

Re:The Most Carelessly Maintened Slackware Package by koekepeer · 2005-01-24 07:32 · Score: 1

this is SO NOT funny. imagine you are seriously ill yourself... and someone tells about you on TV, how you don't take care of yourself, implying it is your own fault, etc.

jesus man, how heartless can you be just to try to be funny

Ok, flame away... by odessa · 2005-01-23 01:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

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...

Re:Ok, flame away... by lars_stefan_axelsson · 2005-01-23 01:50 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

And hence the GPL as then you're not getting it for 'free'. The code you put into our project, you owe us back in return. So that we and others may remain free (as in libre).

--
Stefan Axelsson
Re:Ok, flame away... by jwdb · 2005-01-23 01:58 · Score: 2, Interesting

Well, that's the idea behind OS - people willingly giving away the product of their mind for others to benefit from. The idea is to expand the common pool of ideas and tools and to do something you enjoy, with the bonus of giving something back to the community.

Compare programmers to artists. You've got your traditional artist (software company) selling his paintings (products) retaining all rights. On the other side you've got the graffiti artists (OS programmers) painting murals on the city walls - everyone is free to enjoy their work. Of course, anyone can sell photos of the work, so it's more along the lines of BSD than Linux, but nobody is obliged to pay to view the original work...

Jw
Re:Ok, flame away... by HeghmoH · 2005-01-23 02:15 · Score: 1

I have a complimentary rant.

People who distribute software that is explicitly marked as "distribute at will, you are not obligated to pay anything" and then get annoyed when nobody sends them money piss me off! If you think that people should be obligated to pay you, then release your software under that license. If you're releasing your software under the GPL, BSD license, or other open source license, you are explicitly saying that nobody is obligated to pay anything for anything. If that's not what you want, don't do it.

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Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Re:Ok, flame away... by petrus4 · 2005-01-23 02:20 · Score: 1

As far as the GPL is concerned (Linux's primary license, more or less) it so happens that RMS agrees with you. Check this out, if you're interested...it's an article he's written about that very thing.
And of course, this is only something that comes up as a potential question in people's minds with the GPL anyway...if you're talking about software that uses the BSD or virtually any other FOSS license, of which there are several, it generally doesn't need to be mentioned. It seems to be primarily the GPL with which people have the misconception that free ("libre" - liberated or open source) HAS to also mean free as in beer as well. This of course was actually the core reason why ESR started using the term "open source", although I personally probably prefer the term "liberated software" myself, and am not sure why anybody else hasn't come up with that...because it implies freedom in terms of rules, but doesn't necessarily in terms of price.

Unfortunately the fact that one encounters misinformed GPL zealots from time to time (who help spread the misconception about the GPL in particular) doesn't help matters.
Re:Ok, flame away... by aldoman · 2005-01-23 03:35 · Score: 1

That would make sense, but...

Most 'great' OS projects start out really, really small. For example, PHP, mySQL and Linux all started out as just a hobby - noone really had intentions of making money out of them. So they release the code, go through a few releases before it becomes apparent that it's a good project. By this time the code has got quite a few contributors and it's rather large.

Now it becomes obvious that the original person who started this would like to close it up and charge for it. But the GPL doesn't allow this, as all the existing code is still in the public domain and as such people can fork it. This means they have to compete against someone else that is not going to be charging for it.

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IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
Re:Ok, flame away... by HeghmoH · 2005-01-23 04:03 · Score: 1

Basically, your argument boils down to this: people are stupid and don't plan ahead, so they don't match their actions to their intentions at the beginning of the project.

To which I say, tough cookies! If you open source your code, you are giving explicit permission for everybody to use it and not pay you a dime.

Most popular open source projects would never have become so popular if they were closed to begin with, so I don't see the problem. The GPL giveth, and the GPL taketh away.

If you think you might want to charge for your product, don't open source it, simple as that. If that means that you never get any recognition or contributions, too bad.

--
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Re:Ok, flame away... by AKnightCowboy · 2005-01-23 04:53 · Score: 1

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.
You don't owe anything in return, hence the term "free" software. We love free software and it saves us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in maintenance and licensing costs that would've otherwise went to proprietary companies. The entire reason we're using free software is because it costs nothing, not because we are free to change the source code. Frankly we couldn't care less about modifying it as long as it's not buggy. If we had to pay for it then it'd make much more sense to buy it from a commercial vendor and get a support contract.
Re:Ok, flame away... by lars_stefan_axelsson · 2005-01-23 05:33 · Score: 1

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

You're welcome. :-). What I meant to stress was that while all you say is true, I think most of those of us that use the GPL think that that's OK. I certainly don't mind people just using my work without contributing back. (Maybe they're not programmers and cannot contribute). I mean, it would certainly be nice if they did, but I can live with them slacking off. I mean, I don't contribute to Firefox or Emacs and I use both each day.

I do contribute by releasing all my other software as GPL on the off chance that someone would want it.

However, if people started to use my work in the sense of building on it and then taking the whole of the work for themselves, that would piss me off. I contributed it with no such strings attached and I damn well expect that others will do the same to me. That's why you won't see any BSD or similar code from me, or the company I work for (as they then could see a competitor climbing up to an advantageous situation on their backs).

Now, if rich corporations find some software extremely useful, it would of course be in their best interest to support it. So I think that that case can take care of itself.

Works for me.

--
Stefan Axelsson
Re:Ok, flame away... by valdrad · 2005-01-23 07:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

They benefit financially from Volkerding's work, but pay nothing, and they don't even think they should pay anything.
OTOH, The GPL doesn't require Pat to make free isos of Slackware available--that's his choice.
Other than charitable satisfaction, there's no advantage to buying an official Slackware CD set versus downloading the isos or buying them from a generic Linux CD vendor.
Giving away your product for free when purchasing the "official" version of it offers no user advantages (other than funding continued development) doesn't strike me as a sound business model for a _commercial_ software company.
I like OpenBSD and SuSE's model better, which allows the developers to make a decent living while still giving a free product to the public. If you want the OS via FTP download, it's there for you for free, but if you want it on CD, you need to buy it.
I'd like to see Pat finally incorporate FTP installation into Slackware and restrict CDs to paying customers for his own bottom line....and add pkgsrc to Slack, of course. Some of the features people would like Slack to have might actually be feasible if the company started pulling in enough revenues to keep some other developers on the payroll, at least back to the level they had before Walnut Creek sold out and kicked Slackware to the curb.

--
LewRockwell.com: anti-state, anti-war, pro-market
Re:Ok, flame away... by valdrad · 2005-01-23 08:29 · Score: 1

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.
Perhaps if the British weren't already paying out their arses for a managerial nanny state with socialized medicine they'd have some money left in their pockets for charity, eh mate? ;)

--
LewRockwell.com: anti-state, anti-war, pro-market
Re:Ok, flame away... by zenmojodaddy · 2005-01-23 09:22 · Score: 1

Troll or not, I'm gonna bite.

The British public coughed up £100 million plus in donations following the Boxing Day tsunami.
Re:Ok, flame away... by teromajusa · 2005-01-23 11:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

I doubt it. The US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country. Almost 3x as much per person as the UK. See here.
Re:Ok, flame away... by valdrad · 2005-01-23 11:59 · Score: 1

If you think that people should be obligated to pay you, then release your software under that license.
Other commercial Linux companies have found workable business models with the GPL. SuSE charges for CDs, while Red Hat charges for support.
Meanwhile, Mandrake and Slackware give away their product away for free in iso form and basically panhandle.
What's ironic is that the same people that try to guilt the public into supporting a given freely available commercial distro turn around and say, "Hey, don't bitch, you're not paying for it!" when its quality/features/development pace is criticized, never bothering to realize that if they didn't give away the farm they could use revenues to add value to their product and improve it and give paying customers a real incentive to purchase it instead of freeloading.
The other viable alternative as I see it would be for Pat to take Slackware in the direction of a non-profit organization and bring some volunteer developers onboard while soliciting donations from users like Debian does.

--
LewRockwell.com: anti-state, anti-war, pro-market
Re:Ok, flame away... by LardBrattish · 2005-01-23 17:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

Thanks for that - wish I had Mod points. That's been my contention for some time. All this BS about privatising health care just introduces more companies that want to leach off more profit.
When the (Right wing corporatist) Australian Government gave a $500 rebate for people with health care to encourage the take up of private health cover (admitedly rather well implemented over here but that's not what I'm talking about) the health funds all raised their prices by - wow, $500! What a surprise...
And the oink oink noises from the trough became deafening.
By definition a public owned system will be more "efficient" than private because it is not obliged to take money out of the system for the shareholders - unless you genuinely believe that all of the shareholders will put all of their profits back into your country - duh!!! It may not make a profit because the government may choose to distribute the money in a particular way e.g. running a privatised steel industry at a loss to subsidise the manufacturing sector.

--
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)

Re:All well and good... by XChilde · 2005-01-23 01:46 · Score: 2, Funny

learn the inner workings of Linux and uses some CPU running below 1GHZ

You mean iPod?

From TFA... by md81544 · 2005-01-23 01:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

So, this verson is going to be wrapped up pretty quickly. I hope people will support the release, because I'm sure I'll have a lot more bills before all of this is through, and I'm blowing through what little money I've managed to save.

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?

Re:From TFA... by NoMoreNicksLeft · 2005-01-23 03:02 · Score: 1

Same here, especially considering I just found another job. I really want a boxed set, but do I wait for 10.1, or just buy 10.0 ?

If ever I've used software that deserves my money, it's slack.
Re:From TFA... by Vulture101 · 2005-01-23 03:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

at least Pat could put a "donations" link in the site
Re:From TFA... by aberkvam · 2005-01-23 06:35 · Score: 1

From TFA in question, "I hope people will support the release, because I'm sure I'll have a lot more bills before all of this is through, and I'm blowing through what little money I've managed to save. Again, I'm not asking for donations, but I hope that when Slackware 10.1 comes out that people wanting to help out will order it." [emphasis mine]
Why would he want to put a donations link on the site when he doesn't want donations? If you really want to help him out, order a copy of Slackware.
Re:From TFA... by Vulture101 · 2005-01-23 06:55 · Score: 1

he is not saying he doesnt want, he is saying he is not asking for :)

besides, i just want to download slackware and pay something to the man for hes work.

Mental health ChangeLogs by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 01:48 · Score: 1, Interesting

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!

You forgot one thing .... by DrSkwid · 2005-01-23 01:48 · Score: 1

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

Re:You forgot one thing .... by DrSkwid · 2005-01-24 21:35 · Score: 1

Fair enough, I hadn't found that one.

It's a poor analogy anyway, maintaining Slackware is never going to make one appear on the world's most powerful people list.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

Re:All well and good... by agraupe · 2005-01-23 01:49 · Score: 1

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.)

Re:All well and good... by Slack3r78 · 2005-01-23 01:54 · Score: 1

They have something called *patience*.

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.

Health status : Finally ! by DrYak · 2005-01-23 02:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

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 ]

Re:Health status : Finally ! by DarkTempes · 2005-01-23 02:39 · Score: 5, Interesting

you really don't understand the current state of medical doctors in the states then...

most don't CARE about every looking for the obscure. they're good at taking care of the low end stuff (a one week virus, a cold) with advice or some small medication, and the high end immediate life threatening stuff (surgery, cancer) but if it comes to some obscure middle-ranged life degrading disease or problem they tend to just do their normal battery of blood tests and then say "you're fine, it's all in your head!"

and so then you must do doctor shopping.
you think people like wasting their time and money utterly with a doctor? they just HAVE to. and they tend to self-diagnose cause the doctor doesn't do his job and diagnose you himself. the medical profession is one of the few BUISNESS professions where you PAY MONEY and are not guarenteed RESULTS of ANY KIND.

I did the whole game, went around for two years with NMH [neurally mediated hypotension] before a cardiologist finally diagnosed me and gave me the proper medicine. First went to my primary care physican, she was just like "yes i know your life sucks and you're losing tons of weight and you look like you're dying but i have no clue so go elsewhere!" and that was basically the same thing, either they didn't know and they didn't care or they just wanted me to see a psych professional (which i saw many of and they all said i was just fine mentally for a person in my condition)
it's easy to judge something until it actually happens to you...
</rant>
Re:Health status : Finally ! by w1r3sp33d · 2005-01-23 04:18 · Score: 1

Do you know the whole story? Do you know what this guy went through to try to get his doctor to actually help him before joy riding around the country looking for someone to seriously look at his problem?
After what I went through this year, a story too simular to Pat's, I DO NOT trust any doctor in the US.
I pay for copies of every piece of paper from any doctor I see, I then copy it again and keep one full medical file in my car and one in my safety deposit box. This avoids the problem you describe, except I only get a few minutes with any doctor during any visit so they usually don't read anything I bring them from any other doctor, google, pubmed, or my own observations.
The doctor who eventually diagnosed and corrected my problem after a year of being instructed to do VERY DANGEROUS AND DAMAGING things to my body by other doctors, basically instructed me to only trust myself as I am the only one who is really intested in me being healthy and alive. Scary.
I replayed my entire story to another doctor a few weeks ago and went over all my labs, health diary entries, and daily graphs. His answer was an echo of the specialist, if a doctor won't listen to you for five minutes, they will never find the problem.
Would you listen to a patient describe symptoms for five minutes?
Re:Health status : Finally ! by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 04:48 · Score: 1, Interesting

This is mildly off topic, but I'll back you up on a recent experience of mine. I've had some intense sinus pressure on the right side of my face, but no pain. My normal GP (who has served me well) dismissed it initially, but after 8 months did little more than keep offering me decongestants. They didn't really help. We stepped through a few other options, including ear infections and a course of antibiotics. Still nothing. A few times I asked the guy if he could just take a look up my nose, it *felt* like there was something there, on the right hand side.

He wouldn't, just told me it would be fine, it's nothing to worry about.

That leads me to poke around with a pair of tweezers up my nose - you know, it's really surprising how much space you have back there if you really concentrate while you're prodding about, to see what is where.

After a couple of attempts I latched onto something that didn't give any feedback of belonging to me - I couldn't feel the tweezing, and it didn't hurt. Giving it a tug I felt a *big* pressure change in my sinus, and pulled slowly. Out came what has to be the filthiest thing from my head. Two and a half inches long, dark green/brown and stained with a little blood on the end, it was close to the consistency of a pencil eraser in parts, moving to the consistency of jello at one end.

Then came the draining. Gack. What looked like 2 tablespoons of pus ran from my nose, which honestly made me feel physically ill. I like squeezing a zit as much as the next person, but this was just a bit much.

Anyway, after an hour I felt awesome. no more pressure on the side of my face, and I swear my eyes focus a little better than they did before. I took the gel-lump into my doctor, told him what it was, how it happened, how it had fixed all the sinus pressure I'd been having.

He didn't think that was the problem.

Go figure. My situation wasn't problematic. I wasn't in pain, I didn't have any long term damage to my health, but still a doctor when presented with symptoms and requests from a patient and ignores them, even when the final cause is discovered isn't someone to keep around, so I changed docs and told him why. Give each doc a good go at solving a problem, but if they insist on sticking on a point that really doesn't feel right, do change.

Infective endocarditis by Fredge · 2005-01-23 02:09 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Good News by datadriven · 2005-01-23 02:11 · Score: 2, Informative

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

Re:Good News by clymere · 2005-01-23 02:50 · Score: 1

I subscribe as well. I can't wait for those 10.1 disks to show up in my mailbox! For anyone curious, you sign up and it charges you $25 each time a new release comes out...about twice a year. Thats a pretty damn good deal, and since I run Slackware on...4 machines, 5 if you count Splack, its a very very good deal. Thats like $5 a box ;) And of course, people buying Slackware who can afford to is what keeps it around for free download for everyone else. If it stops being financially viable, Slack might have to give it up, and I'd really hate that to happen!

--
once you go slack, you never go back

Isn't that what RedHat concluded? by luguvalium2 · 2005-01-23 02:12 · Score: 1

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.

Re:All well and good... by bender647 · 2005-01-23 02:26 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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.

Someone got sick by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 02:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

Re:All well and good... by MaynardJanKeymeulen · 2005-01-23 02:41 · Score: 3, Informative

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."

This is A Commercial Product... by rah1420 · 2005-01-23 03:39 · Score: 1

...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.

Re:OP's excellent spelling by Sanguis+Mortuum · 2005-01-23 03:52 · Score: 1

Isnt "Volkerding" exactly how his name is spelt? Which leaves a single typo, the 'n' missing from distinguished. I take it you've never made a single typo in your life?

Summary of Infective Endocarditis by FattyBoeBatty · 2005-01-23 03:55 · Score: 1

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.

Re:All well and good... by SharpFang · 2005-01-23 04:40 · Score: 1

I believe it's -running- flawlessly.
But how long does "emerge world" with updated KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice take?

--
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

Re:When oh when will distros use kernel 2.6? by ledow · 2005-01-23 05:02 · Score: 1

That's hardly the problem with slackware - it barely supports boot floppies any more, really. In fact, the recommended method of booting from floppies is in the Slackware FTP... there is a single-floppy of SBootMgr which just loads up an ElTorito boot loader that can boot from the slackware CD on even older computers that don't support CD-booting. As you say, nobody uses floppies any more.

2.6 being large is obviously not the concern here. I suppose the other explanations are that it's not as well tested, not as well supported by some older apps, requires many architecture changes in the distro and doesn't do much that 2.4 doesn't already do. The upheaval is hardly worth it at the moment.

If there's anything to learn from the Windows world, it's that just because something has a higher version number doesn't mean it's automatically better.

Re:All well and good... by m50d · 2005-01-23 05:17 · Score: 2, Insightful

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

Stick with one doctor? Only if you can talk to'em by Dioscorea · 2005-01-23 05:33 · Score: 1

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.

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.

Re:When oh when will distros use kernel 2.6? by phrag-slacker · 2005-01-23 05:44 · Score: 1

2.6 will be incorporated into slackware 11... aswell as the -current changelog, Patrick stated this in a recent visit to ##slackware @ irc.freenode.net, among other things. A full log of his, apparently first visit to a slackware IRC channel, in the in topic of the channel.

Health and version numbering... by Jugalator · 2005-01-23 06:19 · Score: 2, Funny

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!

Pat: Move to Canada by Jack+Action · 2005-01-23 06:40 · Score: 1

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.

Re:All well and good... by jsight · 2005-01-23 06:54 · Score: 1

I believe it's -running- flawlessly.
But how long does "emerge world" with updated KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice take?

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!

Re:The mental health gulag by Dr.Dubious+DDQ · 2005-01-23 08:05 · Score: 1

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

I have one. by Harald+Paulsen · 2005-01-23 09:56 · Score: 1

*raises hand*

I'm a slackware subscriber.

--
Harald

Re:I have one. by Lost+Race · 2005-01-23 21:27 · Score: 1

Subscriber since 1997! (Slackware 3.4)

Re:All well and good... by SharpFang · 2005-01-23 10:25 · Score: 1

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 :)

--
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

Re:Pat: Move to Canada by bluGill · 2005-01-23 11:53 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

Self-diagnosis by Isldeur · 2005-01-23 13:38 · Score: 1

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.

Re:When oh when will distros use kernel 2.6? by beakburke · 2005-01-23 13:46 · Score: 1

Slackware 10 (and maybe even 9.1?) was kernel 2.6 ready. It had all the required userspace stuff and libs to run 2.6, it just wasn't the default.

--
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.

Meanwhile, 10.0 is left to drown by Le+Marteau · 2005-01-24 11:45 · Score: 1

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

Re:All well and good... by SphericalCrusher · 2005-01-24 16:54 · Score: 1

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

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Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health

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