Slashdot Mirror
Raymond Knocks Fedora, Switches to Ubuntu
narramissic writes "After 13 years as a loyal Red Hat user, Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, is switching to the Ubuntu distribution. In a message distributed to Linux mailing lists and news organizations, Raymond cited technical issues with Red Hat, such as the way repositories are maintained, the submission process and 'stagnant' development of Red Hat's packaging technology, as well as governance problems, the failure to gain desktop market share and the failure to include proprietary media formats. 'Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige,' Raymond wrote. 'The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels.'"
The fedora-devel-list has already responded to this, as well as Alan Cox himself.
Personally, I'd like to see ESR's response to these rebuffs.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
does it run linux? .....oh...sorry...got ahead of myself.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
From TFA:
Which servers to corroborate my suspicion: RMS is an autist, whereas ESR is a realist.
Fit right in, both Ubuntu and ESR loves proprietary stuff.
-- Linux user #369862
Eric "ass" Raymond is still a self-important arrogant gas-baron.
Truly an American icon.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Can't a prominent OSS person just switch anymore? It seems like they have to make a big political stink out of it. It's really too bad that people can't leave when things are still amicable, and instead they let it boil over to a traditional email flame-fest by the time they act.
This is one guy, but! Over the last few years, I have seen much more Linux and Unix devotees switch to Macs than Ubuntu.
And new app is released for Windows and a person goes to its webpage and clicks download. And doubleclicks on an installer and the app is ready to go.
And new app is released for OS X and a person goes to its webpage and clicks download. And drags the app to where the like and the app is ready to go.
On Linux you wait around for someone to 'package' the app and upload it to a repository so that Linux users can then download it along with a million other packages that app needs.
WTF?
For what? So every little distro can scatter config and app files all over the harddrive in a slightly different way?
Funny how you never hear Windows or Mac users wishing for package managers and app repositories...Just like you never hear Windows or Mac users looking to make their desktop look and function like KDE or Gnome...
I want to know WTF Cox is talking about when he says that "The moment Fedora includes non-free stuff it becomes a problem for all the people who redistribute and respin it". The people who respin it aren't your problem. You're not obligated to support them. They're making a derivative let them derive. The people who redistribute don't have a problem so long as your licensing agreement permits redistribution. As for the statement "it becomes unfair in the proprietary world in the eyes of everyone who didn't get included", uh, so? Life isn't fair. Love isn't fair. Nothing important is. If they want to court redhat users, they can do that without any help from redhat.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...I thought Everybody Loves Raymond!?
While I am normally amused at the cries of "FUD" whenever someone outside the user/developer community criticizes anything that has to do with open source (especially when the criticism is a valid one), things like these I think pretty much paint a picture of a group of people who've become institutionally incapable of absorbing and incorporating criticism of any sort, no matter who it emanates from. One would think Raymond is among the few people who have earned the right to say "wow, this sucks and needs to change". The recent back-and-forth between Torvalds and GNOME is another good example.
Maybe is the mythic "vociferous minority" that also pollutes teh interwebs with the "M$ IS TEH SUXX LINUX ROOLZ" mantra, but whatever it is, it looks damn bad.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
What with all the Ubuntu stories of late, far outnumbering the Red Hat/Fedora stories, shouldn't we get a Ubuntu logo on these articles now?
http://www.mhall119.com
then BSD^H^H^HRed Ha^H^H^H^H^HFedora is dying! :P
I'm not very familiar with Fedora, so the "proprietary formats" complaint intrigues me, since Ubuntu doesn't strike me as particularly proprietary-format friendly... it's based on friggin' Debian, after all.
How is Ubuntu going to be any better at supporting proprietary formats? It sure doesn't support any "out-of-the-box" (er... from a fresh install) -- you have to add multiverse to your sources list in order to get access to them. (Or you can use Automatix, but that's hardly an "official" part of the distribution). I always assumed Fedora had something similiar. Am I assuming too much?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Or rather, yesterday. This site is getting slow. That is all.
So, I'm too lazy to find the article, but I remember reading on /. a few months ago that they're redoing the RPM format.
The entire code will be re-written as a first step. After that, who knows?
I really want to know why anyone cares what anyone else is using for their computers? It does not matter and does not affect me so why should I care. Why should there even be an article on this topic. I change my mind all the time does that mean I should submit articles to slashdot about where I'm going to eat tonight? What video card I'm going to buy? I just think people should get their own lives and learn to think for their self. It makes no difference what anyone else uses for their OS.
No I'm not trying to come off as a troll or start a flame war, just trying to understand why everyone cares about this.
hello
He went from a technically superior person wiith use positive impact and a great standing in the OSS community to a cynical self-promoting has-been.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Now we'll enjoy his enlightened commentary on the Ubuntu MLs. How many variations on the theme "you don't subscribe my opinion, therefore you're a bumbling fool" will we have to suffer before he jumps ship again? ESR, LFS is over there ->!
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
I have never been a RedHat (I'm including Fedora here) fan. I have run almost every version since the beginning because I'm a consultant and RedHat/Fedora is one of the "standard" Linux distros that some companies use. RedHat based systems have always had two basic problems:
1. The install is non-standard. They move stuff into wierd locations and often you have to add special considerations to your build process to make it work on RedHat based systems.
2. The packaging system sucks donkey balls! I can't stress that enough. RPM is awful. They have tried to fix it with all sorts of tacked on systems but they all suck. They're always slow as hell and the dependancy system often doesn't work right. I mean the term "RPM hell" was coined for a reason.
But I am biased because I started with Slackware (basically before there was anything else) and went to Debian not long after. Although I have tried many, many distros over the last 15 years I always come back to Debian based systems. Ubuntu is what I run now because it has the goodness of Debian with a better/faster development model.
I saw the response to Raymond's comments. It's always the "do the right thing" argument which is valid but I believe there needs to be a balance between reality and complete fanaticism. Windows is a commercial product from an "evil" corporation yet they are still top dog dispite morally attractive alternatives. There are many good valid reasons behind that.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Same thing I posted to LWN yesterday --
ESR seems to be very unprofessional and childish. Examples:
* Regularly sends "open letters", ostensibly to some party he disagrees with, but really to the public. These should either be privately directed to the intended party, or should be addressed to the public.
* Sends this drive-by flame about how he is switching to Ubuntu, without mentioning his financial relationships with Linspire, and by extension, Canonical.
* Makes a speech about how Linux should have nonfree codecs WITHOUT disclosing his financial relationship with a distro that specializes in that. It comes out some time later.
* Made up that stupid story about how Bill Gates insulted him at a conference once, and told it to lots of reporters.
* Threatens people with physical/gun violence (like Bruce Perens), thus hurting the cause of gun rights which he seems to care about.
* His obnoxious "travel rules" -- http://www.catb.org/~esr/travelrules.html
* Claims to speak for everyone in "his movement". Uses "we" a lot when making claims.
* Changed the statement in the jargon file that most hackers tend to be somewhat libertarian, which is probably true, whether you agree with that philosophy or not, to read that most hackers are Neoconservative, which is demonstrably false, again whether or not you agree with that philosophy. He did this because he HIMSELF had become a neoconservative and warblogger.
I left Red Hat behind way back in 1997 and installed Debian. It only took him 10 fricking years to figure it out.
+1 insightful
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I did the same thing around the time the colossal mess that was Fedora Core 3 was out. Most of the Linux users I know (which amounts to around 40 or so people I work with and know socially) have switched from Redhat to Ubuntu (or OSX) for desktops and laptops. And a lot of us have switched to Solaris 10/Express for servers. Naturally the Debian users I know still use Debian :)
Looking back, I should have left Redhat around 7.3, which was the last good and consistently stable RH release.
Finkployd
... it's an interesting one to be sure.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
We have no chair-throwing morons.
We get to see the process and watch the final outcome. This gives us a better understanding of why Gnu/Linux is the way it is and where it is going.
Good for ERS speaking up. Even better for Alan Cox to reply. I only hope ERS replies to that. :)
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Instead of dumping RedHat/Fedora, he should switch to RHEL and purchase the support he needs.
Friends don't let friends line-dance.
Here is part of Cox's response:
Sure, ESR's comment was fairly divisive, but why pour more fuel on the fire? This was divisive enough as a Fedora vs Ubuntu flamewar. Now it's Open Source versus Free Software. And Alan Cox just told Eric Raymond to go and die.
Can you imagine Bill Gates telling Steve Jobs to go screw himself? In fact, I just recently saw some photos of those two hanging out at some social function, chatting and getting along fine. Now my head is filled with the image of Gates and Jobs living it up and having a laugh, with Cox and Raymond hunched over their computers in the background banging out enraged emails to one another.
We can be a fucking embarrassing bunch at times.
If any distro fails "to include proprietary media formats" it would be Ubuntu. Out of the box, I've yet to encounter a single edition of Ubuntu that would play mp3 files (or for that matter, any MPEG related format). And I doubt that the problem stops there.
Of course, as a programmer with limited internet access (mostly through public terminals) I avoid Ubuntu for another reason: A distro without dev packages on the disc is a distro not worth my time.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
i don't care what he says, what he likes, or what he thinks. He's a racist. Fuck off ESR.
Well... don't let the door hit your ass on the way out!
I'm not very impressed with Alan Cox's response, especially considering he sent it from his redhat.com email address.
That sort of rudeness is not needed between a representative of a major open source company and its customers/users. It doesn't matter how much Alan has contributed to Linux, or how much he dislikes ESR, or how much he supports Fedora Core. His response was not needed, and reflects badly on himself, Red Hat, and Fedora Core.
ESR isn't the only person who has experienced some pretty serious problems with Fedora Core. There are many users who have noticed that it is having QA problems. Maybe Alan Cox should listen to what ESR is saying, and address the technical issues. These sorts of personal spats don't help anyone in the open source community.
It is too bad Eric is using his celebrity in such a negative way. He could have focused on what he likes about other distributions, rather than what he doesn't like elsewhere.
For myself, many of the reasons that Eric lists for not liking Fedora, are exactly what I enjoy and want to see more of in a linux distribution.
Long live Linux distributions!
So what happens when ESR becomes just as pissy about Ubuntu if it doesn't work for him? Haven't there been the same sort of similar problems (in general) with the management of Ubuntu? So after ESR comes to the realization that Ubuntu is just as hard/easy to work with as Fedora, will he switch back, jump to yet another distro, maybe give up and start using Windows?
.... people had been wondering "what the fuck it was ESR was up to lately, since he hadn't gone off on an ill-advised tear in a while".
What exactly *does* ESR contribute these days? I have to be honest when I say that -- while he was in the right place at the right time with the right idea when it came to Open Source -- for the most part the rest of the time I see him as a tremendous Oxygen Thief, stealing valuable oxygen that could be consumed by other more productive folks.
Who cares if ESR uses Red Hat or not? I don't care if he uses Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu or dusts off some Yggdrasil disks, to be honest. Let him use "what works for him."
It's not like he's going to be leading this army of "Red Hat Deserters" or something. If it wasn't for Slashdot running a story about it, nobody would even have noticed or cared....
ESR thinks what he has to say is important, and has persuaded some journalists and bloggers that he is important as well.
and rolled your own with all the packages available, why bother choosing a distribution? Your computer is already built, so why reinstall aka Windows style?
He always tries to say asshole things just for effect. Probably considers ESR his mentor.
Just ignore Moronpoo.
He is referring to the possibility of licensing proprietary formats, like MP3, which has been discussed within Red Hat and Fedora before. Basically, the Red Hat legal department is of the opinion that if Fedora were to distribute MP3 (or other proprietary codecs) support, then Red Hat could get in trouble. Red Hat has more than enough money to purchase a license for MP3, and would probably be willing to do so even for Fedora, which of course they do not make money off of. But the issue is that they cannot purchase a license that would also apply to redistributors. The people at Fedora have decided that this is a sacrifice they are not willing to make -- they want Fedora to be truly free, and fully redistributable.
#include ".signature"
Me, I am very tired of Linux not working out of the box on every graphics card more than six months old. 11 years of hacking tired. Bored to tears in fact.
Ubuntu(Edgy eft) was the first distro that worked on all 4 machines i install on. no tweaking(except for playing dvd's)
can't blame him
I have most rhel releases( i have passed a few courses), but well. I do want something that just works.
Thank you Canonical.
Go ahead and start modding me down now, but it has to be said: It's childish behavior like this that is tearing down Linux bit by bit.
I've used Linux since version 0.9 and just recently said goodbye to it because of this shit. I've listened to Torvalds, ESR, Cox, David Cantrell and the rest of the pack of wolves nitpick it to death. THEY'RE the reason Linux never went mainstream to the desktop (I said DESKTOP, people), there's way too much infighting that's keeping it down.
Until everyone agrees to work together like they should to _advance_ Linux, they'll continue to keep it as stagnant as it has been for the last few years, which has been nothing but arguing over software patents and proprietary drivers.
What's left for me? I'm keeping my Solaris x86 server and I've bought a Mac. Case closed.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Not meant as a desktop OS.
Fedora just worked on mystem.
/etc/xorg.conf file manually even once.
Ubuntu did all sort of weird things here and there.
Also I prefer KDE and Kubuntu sounds very low priority for the ubuntu community.
Fedora is the only distrobution I've tried (out of ubuntu 6.10, suse 10.1, opensuse, and of course fedora) that I didn't have to touch my
My native resolution of 2560x1600 actually worked out on initial boot and during the installer for that matter.
My drivers were easy to install via the add/remove gui so I got beryl working with a check box. No series of steps, a total of 2 checkboxes to get it to work.
so in my humble opinion to rate ease of use and overall experience I would rate:
beryl > osx > vista > compiz
kde/vista/osx > gnome/xfce/enlight/etc
msoffice > openoffice
kopete > gaim
vlc > all the other video players in linux
I know some of these are off topic, but in the end fedora has been my best linux experience to date for whatever reason.
-judging another only defines yourself
I think even bigger news is that somebody still pays attention to ESR.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
One of the things that has amazed me about the Linux community (and really, it seems to be a Linux thing; other open-source apps seem to be able to weather honest critiques without all the knee-jerk bile spewing) is its inability to stomach criticism. I read ESR's article, and regardless of what someone might feel about his personality, the article and its writing made sense.
He gave a very reasoned explanation for why he left, and one that deserves consideration. I know I ditched RPM distros for the same reason years ago, and if he's complaining about the same things that I was experiencing back around the turn of the century then I'm very willing to believe his allegation that package management on RH/Fedora has been stagnant for a long time.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming color of the response has been people attacking ESR's personality rather than trying to speak to his criticism. Like you said, it makes us look damn bad. Moreover, it should serve as evidence that ESR is right to any outside observer, since character assassination is usually only used by people who can't actually refute a person's arguments.
I guess I can see how it's big news that such an important person has switched distributions. No wait, actually I don't see at all.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
..managing Red Hat / Fedora systems in production and dev environments forever. Since the beginning.
For the first time in a long time I don't have to concern myself with that responsibility.
FC6 is an ugly mess. I've installed it on a few machines between work and home and none of them were totally clean. It's noticeably slower than it should be. Some of this is new blade hardware, some of this is years-old equipment that should still have good life left in it.
At home I installed Ubuntu a few days ago and things I got tired of messing with in FC6 installed the first time without a hitch. Ubuntu feels just a bit antiquated under the hood, but basic services that I've come to desire (yes, and I'm talking about copying my son's DVDs so that he can destroy them at will and I can burn him new copies of his favorite 'choo videos) in a desktop environment _just _work in Ubuntu.
If that's the middle ground of consumer oriented linux, then I'm happy someone like Canonical is championing it.
I started with Slackware in 1995, and I consider myself to be a newbie. RedHat came along with much fanfare, I tried it, it sucked, I went straight back to Slackware.
Debian was then next big thing. I tried it, it sucked, went back to Slackware.
Now I work at a Debian site. Machines that have been "maintained" with daily updates superficially work, but try to install additional packages, and they fall down.
I got an EMT-64 box. So I put on Umbongo Crusty Warthog. It was impossible to do anything with it except point at pictures on the screen...
I went back to Slackware.
I use Slackware. It works, I get my work done, it's cost-effective, it saves me time.
Stick Men
But I'll tell you what - after seeing slashdot, and this here story I'm about to unfold, well, I guess I seen somethin' every bit as stupefyin' as you'd seen in any of them other places. So I can die with a smile on my face, without feelin' like the good Lord gypped me. Now this here story I'm about to unfold took place in the late '90s - just about the time of our conflict with Milo and the Kosovars. I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? Sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about ESR here - ESR from slashdot. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's ESR. ESR, from slashdot. And even if he's a drama queeen - and ESR was most certainly that. Quite possibly the drama queeniest in all of slashdot, which would place him high in the runnin' for drama queeniest worldwide. Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough...
Does ESR have some kind of cult of people who actually care about his software preferences? How is this news? Or is it just a slow day?
RedHat was my first choice for whenever I wanted a Linux box; because of its long history. It just wouldn't install on my laptop, and I had better things to do than figure out why. Ubuntu was a snap. Synaptic package manager is very intuitive. I just wish it included more geeky items. I know Ubuntu is "for the masses", but it's still Linux after all. However, I was able to use a combination of apt-get and tarball to make it fulfill my latest needs, and it's sitting there happily chugging along. Like all Linux desktops, it's a bit flakey. I have to use keyboard shortcuts to make windows re-appear, and if I had been a real n00b I probably would have had to ask somebody. Still though, the bottom line is that it installed. If it can't do that, game over. The willingness to include proprietary drivers may have had something to do with that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What's sad about this is that Fedora people (particularly Alan Cox) are responding by emulating the less
attractive part of Richard Stallman -- an assertion that 100.0% ideological purity is more important than
actually having people *use* the software.
Both ESR and Mark Shuttleworth have a very realistic and very respectable position: compromise just a
little bit on the ideological purity, not to the point of letting anything obnoxious through, but just
enough to make the software *useful* to non-hackers. And even that is done with the goal of making it a
temporary situation so that we gain enough influence to have those proprietary bits removed eventually.
The Stallman/Cox purist types seem to have conveniently forgotten that the GNU system was bootstrapped by
proprietary software. It didn't just emerge fully formed on day one.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Why should I give a damn which OS ESR uses? News flash, people: I use a Mac! Film at 11!
This is just a bunch of immature political posturing. Wasn't there any REAL news to report on today?
ESR, I've got news for you - sooner or later you're going to run into similar quirks and dependency problems with Ubuntu. You are a power user, and power users tend to do things that might break their systems (such as running yum or rpm with a --nodeps flag . . .). It's happened to most of us at one time or another. If you are really looking for rock-solid stability, then don't use a bleeding-edge development distro like Fedora! RHEL or CentOS are both perfectly suitable for most tasks, and have had enough time for most of the kinks to be worked out.
Ye who asks shall receive: http://blog.levhita.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/07 /ubuntu-logo.jpg
No wonder people are switching...
I've been thinking about switching to Ubuntu at the 7.04 release, but after this, I don't think I will. Kind of standing for my distribution when others have abandoned it.
Kudos for the Fedora developers for the excellent job.
Raymond is a big L Libertarian who managed to get famous by coining a phrase, so all the other naive loud mouth self-important rand-ites follow him like he's the second coming of christ.
I'm no fan of ESR, but on this issue there are two important things to note.
First of all, he's absolutely right on this issue. Sure, Ubuntu has problems with package management just as much as the next distro. However, they will only bite you if you try to stray from what is supported. If you want to install something that requires newer libraries you will get bitten. If you try to install a weird package from source, you might get bitten. If you try to add too many third party repositories to your sources.lst, then conflicts will emerge. For the most part, it all works. Even if you stray a little bit and add an extra repository or two, you'll still be ok. If you stick with what Ubuntu supports, you'll be perfectly fine every time.
With Red Hat or Fedora this has never been true. In fact, it has never been true with any rpm distribution. It has almost always been nearly impossible to find anything but the most popular software in the standard repositories. Not only that, but it's even harder to get the newest versions of things when the come out. All you can do is stick with what they provide on the CDs and upgrade whenever they have a new version to get the newer packages. 9 times out of 10 when you find an rpm out in the wild it creates a dependency nightmare.
This brings me to the second point. All his complaints about Red Hat and Fedora have always been true. I've used Red Hat/Fedora at least once every year since '99 and every one of his complaints was as true then as it is now. He seems to be acting as if these problems are more recent, when my experience tells me that is not true. RPM has always sucked and it's never gotten better or worse. The only change now is that Ubuntu appeared and got better. Red Hat and Fedora haven't changed at all, and that's the problem.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
And why should anyone give a damn about what ESR thinks? Just because the guy's written a book? So what? That doesn't make him any more qualified than anyone else to be listened to. Frankly, I have no idea why Slashdot trumpets his pronouncements as if they came from On High. ESR has a big mouth and a bigger ego - I guess that's what it takes to make it in today's OSS community. Very sad.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
Have you tried out MEPIS, the KDE based, ubuntu package using distro that just works (for me) when you run it off the CD?
I think this is a good thing. Anyone who read the Cathedral and the Bazaar know that this is just a normal part of open-source development. It is a Darwinian society, and different projects evolve and vie for developer mind share. RPM was revolutionary and innovative - then APT came about and did it one better. RPM remains more popular thanks in part to it's better timing and wider-spread use. APT, however, was the first major player in the package management area which satisfied dependencies. Installing software using APT (when the given distro has their apt repository set up properly) is a joy. Additionally, though more complex to create the DEBs, they seem much better adapted to do their job than RPMs and SRPMs. I don't know a lot about Fedora but I know that their goals are not in line with the mainstream Linux user's needs, and the prevalence of Ubuntu and Debian show this.
Now, other distros (knoppix, ubuntu) which are Debian based are showing people better technology and results and are consequently gaining mind share. IMO, the Debian way of having strict free-ness guidelines (the DFSG), while still supporting additional repositories with non-free solutions ( non-free, contrib, etc) is the ideal solution. It continues to encourage free solutions while providing a means to make it "just work" when necessary, until free solutions are available.
Ubuntu takes this one step further - with a different goal from Debian, Ubuntu has the potential to be a real desktop OS suitable for average users (maybe not yet, but soon), and all by leveraging and increasing the mind share of Debian and the source code it (and many other distributions) rely on.
Perhaps the way his goodbye email was worded offend some people, it is clear he was frustrated when he reached this decision, but as long as he is working on open source and contributing to a major distribution, he is doing us (users of open source) a service. It is my hope that Debian-based distros continue to grow in market share and mind share (as they already are compared to older distros), which only fuels their continuing advancement.
-Carl
He also states that AMD and ATI are being punished for their poor Linux support by getting less time spent on bugs related to their hardware. Note that these are actually bugs in open source code that has no affiliation with either company. The only people really getting punished are the end users who get lumped with buggy sofware in order to coerce them into boycotting AMD.
Remember that old ideal that was all about writing a good code base and then using the license to keep it free and help it improve faster? What were we smoking, eh? All this time we could have been using shitty drivers to lead the huddled masses to revolution!
...because you obviously didn't read it.
.exe on Windows, or a nice .app on OS X, it most certainly does have some sort of package on Ubuntu.
Those commands are for updating the system (not installing a brand-new package), and in the very next paragraph, I described how Ubuntu provides a very nice GUI for doing the exact same thing.
Even supposing you did need to use a commandline, it is not difficult to find one, nor is it particularly difficult to copy and paste my commands into that shell.
Also: "Wait for someone else to get around to adding it to the repository" is kind of like "Wait for someone else to actually develop the software". Completely irrelevant, when most of the software is already going to be in some sort of repository, I just Google for "<app> Ubuntu repository". Some apps actually distribute their own repositories -- audacious has its own Ubuntu repository. Synaptic does provide a GUI for changing repositories (which then edits your sources.list for you), and also provides a nice GUI for searching for an app in a repository.
You could whine "But when I tried Linux five years ago, I couldn't find an app I really wanted in a repository!" Which would be kind of like whining that the app you wanted on Windows was only available for download as a zipfile. If it would have an installer
You also seem to have carefully ignored how clicking on the download link is the beginning of a fairly long process, compared to checking a box and hitting "Apply" in Synaptic.
Your knee is jerking. Please don't reflexively dismiss an entire post because it mentions (gasp!) a commandline.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This is the amount of me not caring about what Linux distribution this Eric Raymond guy uses.
God, root, what is difference ?
ESR is getting all the attention he wanted, but posting his public letter all over the Linux web sites. Unfortunately, everyone is falling for it. Just because he jumps and down and screams doesn't mean he deserves the attention. It's also interesting how he mixes a few personal technical items with a big political issue. That gets people frothing (on one or the other), but doesn't really provide constructive discussion.
Let's look at the reality:
1) ESR has a package conflict. In an attempt to fix that he removed a library that was critical to the functioning of the package system, and then he was stuck, unable to restore his system.
Users aren't supposed to delete libraries from their system. If they try to do this with the package system it complains and stops them. If you do it by hand or you use the switches that allow you to override the system, then it's up to you to know what you're doing. Obviously ESR didn't know what he was doing, because it caused him these problems. You can sum this up as:
ESR removed the safty, waved the gun around, and pulled the trigger, and then was surprised when he shot himself in the foot. He should know better.
2) ESR didn't say what packages he had a problem with.
A lot of work goes in to making sure the primary Fedora repositories are consistent and work, but mistakes do happen. A bug report would have been more useful than just ranting about it.
I often see consitency problems in unsupported repositories and work around them. They're unsupported, which means it isn't Fedora's fault and is sort of to be expected.
3) ESR wants RPM to be statically linked so this can't happen.
Unfortunately, ESR hasn't looked at the realities of a modern distribution. Statically linking key applications used to be a good idea, but Linux today has a lot of pieces that won't function without shared libraries. Given all the things the package managers do, they need a fully functional system. Statically linked applications work when you're doing system recovery, but that's about it.
4) ESR couldn't fix his system.
Fedora ships with a system recovery disk. It is a full Linux system running from a CD. It's designed to let you fix just about anything that happens with your system. He could reinstalled the missing library by using that. Rescue disks are far from perfect. You really need to understand what you're doing to use them. But he didn't try, and didn't ask for help, and clearly didn't know how to do it himself.
5) ESR is important and everyone should listen to what he says
ESR is no more important than any other developer out there. Developers and users should get listened to. But if you look at the history you'll see that ESR has pulled this sort of histrionics several times before. And if you go through the archives and compare the state of things today, you'll even see that many of ESR's ideas have been implemented regardless of how loudly he shouted about it, and claimed that they've wronged him, and they don't respect his years of work.
Now the big political fight. ESR thinks Linux should include closed source modules when no open source version exists. Since Ubuntu is doing that, he's going to switch to Ubuntu. Good for him. I don't care. There was no reason to send the fact to web site expect to get attention.
It's good that Ubuntu gives you that option. Fedora made the choice to stay 100% open source. Ubuntu may get more people using Linux. That's a good thing. Fedora may get more people to develop the missing pieces. That's a good thing. I can't predict which will be more effective in the long term, so they're both good options. Everyone can make their own choice.
So what do we make of all this? ESR threw a hissy fit, and it got him attention. That's what he wanted so it worked for him. He may have hurt people at Fedora and he may may have attracted more Linux people to Ubuntu. Those are both very selfish actions. Reacting to his hissy fit is bad, because it hurts communication and it promotes more hissy fits in the future. So next time ESR rants, read it for the points it makes, but don't react to the hissy fit. Then maybe next time he'll have a discussion instead of trying to grab attention.
That fact that we are free hurts us because we apparently don't want anything to do with anything that isn't free, hindering our progress. The fact that we come in many flavours means that stupid bickering happens. Etc.
...and they pretty much all sound the same:
"^&*(#$% sucks. I tried to $%^^ the $$#$ and it #$&6^ my system!"
Oh yeah... I know, baby.
Just got done listening to my sometimes co-admin rail on about how some small update to his Debian install fritzed the VPN, iptables, and the default route is coming and going at its own pleasure, after years of flawless performance. He's going to Ubuuntu as well...
As an analogy, I drive a 1985 Ford Explorer, with about 238,000 miles on the original transmission, no repairs. In most forums, people call me out - it's 'not possible'. Yeah whatever. There are horror stories for everything I think, except maybe oatmeal.
How many years until we hear that 'Ubunntu sucks', and Debian or whatever is Raymond's new choice.
He does make a valid and important point though. There isn't a single distro that I trust completely. I had to force a mySQL update from v3 to v5, because yum and rpm both didn't recognize that I had the needed php already installed. And pear. And something else I've forgotten the name of. It survived, but there was no fix.
And don't get me started on documentation in general. Ugh.
I'm glad he changed when the pain was too much. If only I could swap out my Windows XP for something else that *worked* and let me do the work I need to do. No, silly, Vista ain't it...
-rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
aka
"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."
aka
"Freedom isn't free"
You could have marked that as potentially NSFW!
Plus, you owe me a keyboard. And a hot cup of tea.
E! S! R!
E! S! R!
He's so fat!
He weighs more than my car!
a highly experienced linux user, acknowledged as a hacker, had to spend four hours on a trivial upgrade ?
And linux is ready to take over the desktop ?
maybe it is time linux got real, and realized the desktop is not a good market. I bet that would make linux a better product , if you concentrate on where your strength is, like servers - if all the energy squandered on kde and gnome desktops, and all that other stuff had gone into apache/security/database stuff, linux would rule the server
Liked it, but I was left with no upgrade path other than doing another CD-based install. Ubuntu upgrades can be done in the usual way with APT.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If his chief complaint about Red Hat is that it hasn't beaten Windows... I hope he doesn't think hitching his falling star to Ubuntu is going to help that goal.
Vista has Red Hat making Yellow Underwear. Ubuntu will meet the same fate. When your biggest deficiency as a product versus Windows is that you aren't Windows... that's a pretty impossible hurdle to overcome:
Just ask Lindows.
Have a look at Klik.
..having my brane eaten.
2 004-May/msg00104.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/
ESR might have large and extremely pertinent reasons to have made the switch, which behooves a man of his stature, but I switched for much simpler reasons. I have been a redhat user since 5.2 and then switched to fedora when redhat became RHEL and all that. I have made the switch last month. Reason ? Honestly, Ubuntu is a much better distribution. I know that it must have been said a million times but Ubunutu is a complete and a desktop-ready distribution. My reasons for switching --
1. The aptitude thingy rocks. yum/rpm has come to late and with too little.
2. With Ubuntu your laptop/Desktop works, out of the box. My friend has Fedora on his laptop and could not get the wlan working. When I looked into it I realized that the corporate rats at fedora do not bother to package the firmware for iw2200 with the driver. This is symptomatic and representative of the problem with Fedora. When I installed Ubuntu on my laptop ( Toshiba satellite ) iw2200 just worked out of the box. When I say everything, I mean everything. That was a first time for me. Pleasantly surprised.
3. For the average joe user, administration tasks have been very conveniently wrapped over gksudo and the administration tools actually work. Compare network-admin to system-config-network on fedora and you will know what I mean.
4. From the desktop point of view, the only problem that I found was that development tools do not come installed by default. The development tools have to be aptitude-ed. However the great thing is that the installation media is just a single CD as opposed to the 5 or 6 which fedora unleashes unto the poor installation dude. With the bandwidth most people have, installing stuff over the internet using aptitude is a breeze. So once you get a hang of that, things are happy.
I personally would recommend Ubuntu to any first time user or a person slightly miffed by Fedora.
If you forcibly remove an essential package, thus hosing your system, you can still recover by using a live CD distro.
ESR complained that rpm isn't statically linked. On Debian, dpkg and apt-get aren't statically-linked either. Neither is bash. Also, some packages' pre/post-installation scripts require Perl, as well as dozens of other shell commands, none of which are statically linked. I doubt the situation is any different on Ubuntu.
I can find lots of things to complain about Fedora (for example, /etc/sysconfig/net* is a huge nasty hack compared to Debian/Ubuntu's ifupdown mechanism), but "rpm isn't statically linked" isn't one of them.
http://outcampaign.org/
Easily the most amusing sendup of the "Ubuntu trio" I've ever seen.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
If yum can't install a package for an end-user, the *package* is broken, not the packaging system. BTW, someone mentioned false auto-dependencies on Perl script examples in the %doc directory. I haven't run into this, but there is "Autoreq: 0" and "Requires: ...". A pain for the package builder, but not for the end-user.
The only "dependency hell" I've ever had with yum is when building source RPMs - and of course that doesn't use yum. I would like yum to (optionally) auto-install build dependencies (but sometimes you have to build the build dependencies from source). In my dreams, building from source would be as smooth as gentoo. I've heard a rumor that this is coming.
After building a package from source, I'll try a direct rpm. But if that is missing stuff, I just copy my new package to my own repository and let yum do all the dependency chasing!
I once again see the levels of Slashdotters at work.
The average Slash Dotter: Microsoft sucks. They are the borg. Everything else is cool.
Slightly into it: Microsoft sucks. They are the borg. Mac sucks. They have no real power. Linux is cool.
Even more into it: Ditto, but your linux sucks.
5 (Insightful): Everything stinks but the OS I developed myself, in my own basement, for whatever specific task I use it for (in this case, posting on slashdot and developing a better OS for OS developers).
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
LWN ran this a day or two ago, and their headline was ESR's Farewell Letter. I had such great expectations for a moment, until I read the article :-)
Bruce Perens.
never to argue with handicapped or mentally-challenged people who advocate the use of firearms, even if it's just online!
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Of course in the Linux world of OS/distributions, you don't have to hate a distribution to switch, you just have to like another one better. You can even have fun running different distributions on different computers. You might even just shift because one community is currently more fun to work with than the other community.
Linux is all about being free to choose all of the time, for any of it's users or supporters. Even Redhat is free to use, service and support Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edbuntu if it so chooses. When your are selling service and support, it really does not make any sense not to service and support every major Linux distribution (IBM did take a pretty smart position on Linux), even if you do declare a current favorite.
Now all that is needed is for google to replace the two 'o's in Google with the three Ubuntu logo's with the appropriate links, to give it a nice little boost (don't forget what hurts M$ helps Google).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You know, I've tried just about all of the major distros out there, and have come to the conlusion that everyone has it's downsides and it's upsides. Opinions are like assholes everyones got one, and this thread seems to be a bunch of Fedora/RH bashers. IHMO RH/fedora is probably one of the better ones, RH has been a major player( if not THE major player) in linux and open source since the beginning and no one seems to appreciate the contributions they have given back to the community. Yes they may have made some blunders during the RH9->RHEL migration. Where's everyones appreciation? RH/Fedora has consitantly been one of the top distros.
5 2
Every package management system has issues: rpm,deb,tgz and dependency issues with their packages and software to resolve them: yum and apt to name a few.
I seen issues with installation,packaging, and dependency issues on virtually every distro out there including Ubuntu. My personal favorite to dislike is Gentoo. (see one of my earlier posts)
If ESR truely did a rpm -e --force --nodeps on a core library then he deserves what he gets. I've done it before with zlib, busted out the rescue cd, and was up and running again un less than 10 minutes. Why didn't he make his own RPM? I've been doing this for years, it's not rocket science, and I suspect that ESR may be smarter than me. Also RPM is no longer "stagnating" so to speak, it is being actively worked on by the major RPM distros: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/16/0702
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Fedora/RH is a good distro that doesn't deserve the bashing that it get here
ok, there's the anti-microsoft angle, but why not had he switched to OpenSUSE? For a power users such as himself, it would have been a natural choice.
Seriously, didn't he disappear after months of spouting anti-Muslim diatribes? Almost as crazy as Stallman.
no matter what distro you use. You are at the mercy of repositories maintained by people who are not controlled by those who created the distro. I had the same issues with Unbuntu, Mandriva, Linspire, Debian, and others. The reason why I chose Red Hat Fedora is because Red Hat's support is a whole hell of a lot better than the other distros and they can help me out when issues like that happen.
I find it funny that many here on Slashdot claim that Linux libraries do not get corrupt, and here exists a story showing how they get corrupt. In this case it happened with the Red Hat Up2Date software. I had the same issues happen to me with apt-get, yam, yamex, synaptic, and even cnr. Then the instructions you have to follow and commands you have to use to fix the library corruption are very complicated and can mess up your system worse if you do them wrong. In my experience I have found more issues of Linux library corruption than Windows library corruption simply due to the fact that Windows Update is a much more superior technology for updating an OS than Linux has yet to offer. Sure Windows libraries do get corrupt from time to time, but I've gotten into the habit of reformatting my system at least every year after backing up data for both my Windows and Linux boxes and then installing from scratch. Sometimes every three or six months instead of a year.
But please, do stay in denial of Linux library corruption as well as spread more FUD about Windows library corruption, I could use the good laughs over it.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
come on! this guy has been a loud mouth for long enough that he has earned his right to be called by his initials. it's ESR people. /bye bye Karma
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
(not you, the parent poster).
...at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable."
Reading Eric's message, did anyone get CHILLS down their spine?
ACTUALLY, it was using --force that rendered the system unusable. It's called a SAFETY mechanism.
Quick... someone give this man a nail gun, and show him how 'limiting' it is that the nailgun has to make contact with wood before firing. Someday, we'll read about how ESR dropped something out his car door, reach for it without using PARK, and then we'll hear about how his CAR rendered his shooting finger "unusable". It's always someone else's fault Eric.
There used to be a name for users like this on IRC. I remember seeing new Debian users who install Debian stable, then wontonly mix in Debian Unstable and nightly. The next time they did an apt-get update, this class of user would demand to know why "apt broke my system".
This guy is a poster child for why conservative managers stick with Windows. It's been YEARS since he wrote anything that was genuinely useful and NOT designed to get a headline ('zork' style kernel config manus, anyone?). Did anyone else get a laugh on at the Fedora list quote, how 2006 New Years Resolution was to help the Fedora package folks? Gee it's 2007 now.
Every word or letter from him is blatent self promootion, and should be viewed with the same skepticism reserved for Paul Therriot and their kind. Right now it appears Ubuntu is becoming more popular than Fedora (or at least there's that PERCEPTION), and this alone is ESR's motive for switching.
All of these package systems suck. Crashes and library hell are part of price we pay to avoid compiling from source. I upgraded a Dapper Ubuntu kernel the other day and my system wouldn't reboot. It was totally hosed and I had to reinstall. Ho hum. I installed Winbind yesterday and it crashed on start. I see others posting the same problem on the Ubuntu list with no solution. Oh well. I simply compiled Samba from source and it worked fine. Am I giving up Ubuntu? No, I'll stick with it. Building and maintaining a server isn't easy. IT takes work and foresight. And I'd say making Linux (obviously built to be a server) into a desktop is even harder. It takes the patience of Job.
Is that like DLL hell? Fedora is clearly on its way to being a successful operating system, if it has something in common with Windows!
Well, ESR's experience agrees with mine. And I don't know what it is about the Linux kernel developers that causes them to behave in such a rude manner.
In any case, more relevant than ESR's or Cox's opinion are some statistics. Google query statistics pretty much tell the story here.
Ugh! The reason why FreeBSD has good documentation, is because it would be unusable without it. Even with the documentation though, it's still a pain in the arse. WTF is up with installing ports packages to
Without the documentation, I'd be struggling to make sense of the whole thing
There's a FreeBSD guy at my work, who managed to convince us to install it on a few webservers. I thought it'd be great, because I've heard good things about FreeBSD and was curious about it. What a mistake! The Apache package will crash if we send it a HUP signal, with some error about the php module causing a fault. I spent a day trying to get java installed on it. The ports system generated errors for some java versions, and for others (after having to download some Sun packages), it tried installing X11 along with java. In the end, I had to download a binary package created by a specific sub-group of FreeBSD, only downloadable by a webpage that I had to search high and low for.
Then there's the compiling. Want to install anything? Use ports, download the source, and wait for it to compile. Any dependent packages? Download and compile them as well. Compiling everything annoys the hell out of me. Yeah, I know I can use pkg_add -r to install binary packages remotely, but I'm a believer in sticking to one type of packaging system. It's either ports or binary packages. Start mixing them up, and I'm sure there'd be issues in the future after upgrades. Plus, it just adds to the system administration nightmare, as the binary packages and ports packages have to be updated separately.
One nice thing about FreeBSD is that the kernel is more interactive by default, compared to Linux, during heavy IO. It's much nicer to use a system that seems to barely notice if you're untarring a huge file. You have to tweak Linux a bit to get the same feel.
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Ubuntu still can't run x86-32 Linux programs on x86-64 OS decently. Its support for this is the bare minimum, whereas Fedora's works great and can even run Wine.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Confrontational people switch too.
I'm a Randite, and I can't stand the guy. While I completely disagree with RMS' views on property rights, he's had the moral fortitude to stick to what he believes and follow it completely (and in the process giving no sanction to those who would alter his philosophy to the point of nonexistence). ESR seems to flip-flop to whatever viewpoint will place him back in the limelight again.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
... ESR's post would have been taken seriously if it was his first post.
Given the fact that this must be his, err, 3'rd (?) farewell post, I find it *very* hard to take him seriously.
- Gilboa
I had my kids around too.
/.
Definitely needed a warning label for that link. Of course after gthe goatse thing a few years ago I should have learned better to click on links of pics on
http://saveie6.com/
You should try Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. The [K] makes ALL the difference ;)
Why the hell you would want to use Ubuntu when there is Fedora Core 6?
Here is a short story on a nightmare installation of Ubuntu that would switch anyone back to Fedora in a hurry.
A friend of mine had her computer messed up by her jealous red neck hubby and she asked me to fix it and replace windows with Linux. A nice 1.2Ghz Gateway computer with an on board S3 video card and a TNT2 Nvidia card. It turns out that the water that went into the computer helped fry the Video Card. I replace the video card with a card out of my junk box, a gforce 2 200 mx nvidia card. Since she only has a CD drive and I didn't want to take my DVD drive out of my PC to do the install of Fedora I proceeded to download the latest respin of Fedora in CD form. Since there was a day at least before it'd be done according to Azeurus I downloaded the internet install CD from Ubuntu, the internet install from Fedora having failed with a crash (before I added a 256M sim of RAM in her PC). I proceeded to install Ubuntu with the internet install. It took several hours on a comcast connection (7Meg bandwith).
The only thing that would work with Ubuntu is the nvidia open shit driver. I installed the real nvidia driver to find out that ubuntu would no longer be able to load the GUI.
It turned out that it would attempt to load to the second video car which is disabled. After several attempt to revert back to the open shit driver I gave up considering that I have now my Fedora CDs.
The Fedora install went sort of OK, in text mode, Just like Ubuntu it did insist that my video card was a S3 despite the fact that it is not true, it is supposed to be disabled.
I then installed the Livna repository and proceeded to download the nvidia driver. That took a few minutes.
I then tried to load the GUI, it bombed out. I looked into the xorg.conf to find out that just like Ubuntu it still insisted on putting S3 in the configuration. I replaced with nvidia and ran startx. It now works beautifully. That part didn't work when I tried it with Ubuntu.
In less than an hour I have a fully functional Fedora Core 6 that works very well. It took close to half a day with Ubuntu to get to nowhere with a lot of cursing in the process.
One thing I don't understand about the complainers in regard to the dependancies is what purpose does it serve to install a program that will not work because you are too ignorant to accept the fact that it needs certain other files. To flag that as dependency nightmare is not only ridiculous but moronic. The dependency part of RPM is to make life real nice for the one who install a program. With Fedora I tell yum to install a program and if I setup the environment correctly it will be nice enough to find everything I need.
My message to those morons is that if you are too stupid to learn how to read go to ubuntu and let fedora to the people who know how to read. If you are lucky you will not have the nightmare scenario that I had with Ubuntu. My conclusion about that episode was that despite the hype Ubuntu is still crap.
I have tried most versions that came out so far and have yet to find one that is acceptable. The one that I tried yesterday was edgy. The fonts were awfull. The defaults fonts with Fedora look superb.
BS. I lost count of all the regressions I came across between 6.06 and 6.10. The quality assurance just isn't there with ANY linux distribution because its dependent on 'you and I' and 'you and I' are lazy fucks :D
I had to install ubuntu server the other day to test something.
...
...
Here are my rants:
The name is stupid, I don't care what language its in or what it means it just sounds dumb.
Samba is not installed by default, makewhatis does not appear to exist anywhere?! WTF!
Kernel messages look weird.
Lack of support of compatibility libraries for applications compiled gainst earlier c libraries.
I don't like the debian ui for the package manager it looks weird and is hard to understand what is going on with it initially.
Now heres a list of things I don't like about fedora..
Political BS aside there is nothing worth disucussing here and ubuntu is a debian knockoff that is not significantly better or worse than any other modern distribution.
13 years ago I installed linux from 16 floppy disks. I would say at least some progress has been made since that time.
I just tiptoed into PenguinPark a couple of months ago, after a period of reading up a little. I chatted with my local source and we decided to go for THE most stable distro we could agree on, even if that meant it wasn't decked out. I am interested to watch the "100% Pure" crusade, but newcomers simply have to get started doing *something*.
I will even compromise and only run a very limited series of Apps, because I simply cannot bear any kind of crazy crash in Linux right off the bat. If I get a deathwish and feel like fiddling, I'll fiddle on one of my spare Win boxes.
I don't know what class of users I belong in. I'm using Linux where it fits because of the basic philosophy. I make the concession to proprietary fragments out of raw necessity. Yet I really don't enjoy OS-level problem solving. I far prefer to live within apps and watch them breathe or break as they choose, but when end-process or such executes, I need to know that I can't hurt the root OS.
From this point, all the "Unstable Upgrades" comments about Red Hat begin to make me mildly glad that all these posters are doing okay in uBuntu (Debian-based?).
Unfortunately, so far Linux is one of those items which I will use myself, but will not recommend yet. If nothing else, MS is doing us a 1% favor by having to tell customers that an OS MATTERS. They don't want "just windows" to be good enough anymore. But by being forced to educate users that the OS concept can even be changed gets people looking less-than-180-degrees-away from Linux.
Everyone else in the world is considering how to unify. The Linux movement feels to me like an OS version of what the 1980's were for basic pc's. Everyone's had a few years now to develop the basics. If my theory holds, the best four distros to really consolidate their communities will lead, and the rest will become nostalgia.
Let's suppose there are at least nine major distros right now. (Y'all can list them.) Presume at least seven cores each. Add a few misc items. That's *SEVENTY* variants. Far too many. I'd like to see some of the smaller teams settle differences and do some inter-operability work between upgrades. Four distros with four cores each plus the misc items would cut the serious contenders to 25 variants. That might be focused enough to generate important synergies.
Just my thoughts as a high second-tier user making the switch.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Given what ESR has written, I've never been able to understand why he uses the more canned/"user friendly," distributions. I would have expected him to use something a lot more old school, like Slackware or LFS with pkgsrc.
As for Alan Cox, he's the kernel team's resident GNU troll...he was pestering Linus for a while on kerneltrap about migrating the kernel to version 3 of the GPL. Raymond has his ideosyncracies, but being Stallman's bitch and aggressively advocating that the rest of us become the same isn't one of them.
Raymond is a fairly extreme narcissist, with some political ideas that I definitely do not agree with, but at the same time I have an enormous amount of respect for his writings where software is concerned. If you've never read this before, you might want to go and check it out...it's an awesome book IMHO.
People are probably going to call me a hypocrite for the above, given the amount of time I devote here to trashing Stallman...but one of the biggest differences between the two men is that I've never seen Raymond display the attitude, "This is how you must think," the way Stallman does. He writes what he does, but then it's entirely up to us as to whether we want to accept it or not. In the book I linked above, he actually lists reasons for ignoring him.
I'm also aware that people who worship Stallman consider Raymond a moral sellout...but that's part of the whole point. Raymond's position is about advocating that people should be able to be self-determining; Stallman's is creating a rigid moral code and then vitriolically condemning people when they don't follow it. I know which I prefer...and which I consider to be more about genuine freedom.
One of the things that has amazed me about the Linux community (and really, it seems to be a Linux thing; other open-source apps seem to be able to weather honest critiques without all the knee-jerk bile spewing) is its inability to stomach criticism.
GIMP.
But you're right. Linux users (I've been using it since the mid-90s) are all too frequently childish fools, trapped in a competition of one-upping their neighbour. I'll never forget that guy who installed Linux, because Quake 3 got a higher framerate, and started prattling on about his superior abilities in Linux (he had only been using it for a week!), while using the net from the root account.
Smart, but an ego the size of NYC.
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 6 working days since you last successfully posted a comment
If Father Cox and Father Raymond start slugging it out in public, some people will just leave the church instead of following a particular side of the schism. This is just sad!
speaks to yours (and much of the linux community's) vast ignorance of the "multimedia codecs problem".
No amount of money or engineering time will fix the problem.
The issue is that Red Hat does not own the patents on the technologies used by any of the popular multimedia codecs. Licesning groups like MPEG want significant royalties per seat.
You pay for bundled codecs with Windows XP in the sticker price.
FFMPEG and the players that use it together form an extremely capable drop-in replacement for (QuickTime + RealPlayer + WMP), built from reverse engineered source code, that plays nearly every file format you can think of out-of-the-box.
But Red Hat could never ship that in source code form, or make it free for download in binary form.
Neither does Ubuntu. Linspire allows you to get it, but Linspire has a pay-to-download service that they use to cover their own asses and extract money from you, to turn over to royalty-demanding groups.
So there's the situation in a nutshell. Legal, not technical.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...but it didn't used to be. Red Hat used to be a pretty decent Desktop OS circa 1999. When they spun off the desktop product (2002 or so) as Fedora to focus on Server OS's I switched to Suse. Now that I've been screwed by Suse 10.1's update system it's time to switch again...
You got old and tired of hacking it; now you have the money to spend on hardware you pick from HCLs.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
So, the idea of an operating system that you can just copy and give to a coworker or install on server-I-pulled-from-the-garbage without a license doesn't appeal to you anymore?
Well I have the linux for you! Single CD with every legally questionable bit of software on there that does everything your heart desires. I call it "LaLaLand Linux"
Hey, NVidia just slapped me with a cease-and-desist for distributing their intellectual property on these boot ISOs, sorry, no more updates for you.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I use Windows and all manner of Unix at home and work, and I have not been motivated to move to FF2 on any of the systems. There really isn't anything new under the sun, and it doesn't improve memory leaks, so I stick with 1.5.0.9 and every OS is at the same version, so profiles are compatible across environments...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
ESR is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Packaging mistakes bite every distribution (Gentoo, Kubuntu, you name it)
The error left him in a touch spot. Rather than trying a different tact, he did a potentially damaging operation and got burned. He didn't even take steps to fix the problem.
So his "solution" is to trash his system and move to another.
Complaints about Fedora's packaging infrastructure have some merit. But he is ignoring the efforts that the community is undertaking to resolve many issues (from the 2nd-party repository merge, to the extras management changes and integration, to little things, like the "where's my MP3 codec" user warning and autodownloader for FC7)
So, naturally the first reaction by those who are more intimately knowledgable about distributions and their pros/cons is to say: "He's just being ESR".
Because we don't want people point to his tirade to bolster a position on a technology that is little more than a religious argument or dick-measuring-contest. It was a passionate statement by a party with non-neutral interests who is becoming increasingly marginalized, and thus should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
Frankly I'm tired of Gentoo vs. Ubuntu vs. Fedora rants and switching stories. Why do we need to throw more fuel on the fire?
We need to focus on common standards and distribution specific strengths.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
that won't mean anything, or change anything from a user's perspective. It won't fix your problem when you can't figure out how to install firefox.2.0-fc7.i386.rpm on your x86_64 FC4 box.
It may be important to sysadmins, and definitely developers who package for Fedora, however.
One good thing that could come out of it is revising the multi-file, single-thread-locked Berkeley DB backend. Maybe SQLite? That'd be nice. That way you can have multiple processes doing transactions against the configuration database. And you could support PIT backups and restores of all managed packages and stuff... *drool*
One can dream.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Ubuntu won't be installed on any computer near me unless it can be booted without a whole load of kernel parameters. Ubuntu quite frankly sucks. I hate to claim FUD, but I'm not sure what else this could be.
What are you trying to install, some pre-alpha release of 5.04 or something? Or by "computers" do you mean you're trying to install the i386 version on, like, an old iMac or a PS3? Seriously, I just installed Ubuntu on an ancient Toshiba laptop (didn't even have an ethernet adapter) and the ancient 5.04 that the laptop's owner had installed himself even worked decently. I hate 5.04 (and it wasn't working with his pcmcia Wireless-G card, wouldn't even detect that it was there) so that's when I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu . . . and 6.10 worked flawlessly. Well, flawlessly but really really damn slow
That's only one example, yeah, but I'd argue it's a border case, something really old and rather proprietary. On the other end I also installed Kubuntu 6.10 on my sister's new Acer laptop about a month ago (the upside of Vista: XP machines clearanced recklessly). Too bad 7.04 isn't out yet, it has a few little tidbits that would be nice with a laptop, but despite having previously been an exclusive Windows user my sister is quite satisfied. And nearly all I did was just install it, clicking next-next-next and etc (weirdly the Acer laptop had half the HDD partitioned to a blank Fat32, it's like it was deliberately set up for a Linux/Windows dual-boot). I've also installed on a friend's old Compaq, another friend's Dell, and the AMD64 release of Kubuntu 6.10 on my semi-brand-new AMD socket 939 X2 (on a SATA drive, and the chipset the motherboard uses was unsupportable by Linux until relatively recently). And so on and so on.
At no point have I ever had to add a single kernel parameter.
That includes my older computer where I started with 5.10 preview release, started fucking with things that I shouldn't have (in many ways moreso than ESR, and I certainly know a hell of a lot less than him, especially at the time) and bungled several upgrades, and still, still I never had to do anything at all with kernel parameters.
Parent, I cannot think of many reasonable explanations for your troubles with Ubuntu, especially since you make it sound like every computer you've seen won't work with Ubuntu without unholy invocations. Perhaps you are the unluckiest person in the world, yet only with Ubuntu?
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I got a new current-generation AM2 motherboard, and the nvidia drivers would not run on the nvidia video chip set no matter what I tried, and no matter how many suggestions I got and tried from Fedora and Nvidia web forums. When I changed to Debian Etch, it came up in VESA the first time and ran nvidia as soon as I grabbed it via apt-get. The stand-alone dpkg installs programs much more reliably than rpm ever did. The common problem here is rpm, I am glad to see that Red Hat is planning on revamping rpm, but I can't wait around for them to make it work, I make a living using my computer.
I got other things working during the initial Debian installation that either I never got working in Fedora or only got working with substantial investment of time and effort.
My experience with the yum automated installer has shown it as flaky at best. It hung indefinitely when something in the repository list was offline, and when a list gets long enough, something is likely to be offline at any one time.
Other than that, it isn't that different on a day-to-day basis, KDE is KDE regardless of where it runs, and VMware Server works well on either. The Debian multimedia installation script and Fedora Frog are comparable.
But as far as the overall desktop experience goes, I'm a lot happier with Debian than I ever was with Fedora. If I'd known how big the difference was, Fedora Core 3 would never have appeared on this box, I've been using Fedora since Fedora Core 2.
The Fedora development team needs to roll up their sleeves and figure out what Debian does right that they don't and do it better, not bitch at ESR for smelling the coffee. The race to create a usable Linux desktop hasn't been won yet.
For non-Linux users - Debian is the distribution that Ubuntu is derived from.
Tech Public Policy stuff
While on the whole, I'm happy with Debian, one still has to watch what apt-get does. To install one package, aptitude (apt-get shell) invited me to remove my entire KDE desktop and chunks of gnome. I decided that it was time to quit while I was still behind.
And the chances of getting a source-build to work on Debian distros is no better than it is on Fedora. I'd love to see someone come up with an automatic build-from-source program for Debian. (I mean from tarballs)
Tech Public Policy stuff
on a machine on which a distro would work at all. (Fedora 2,3,6, Debian Etch, Freespire, SLED10... 3 different Athlon motherboards)
Tech Public Policy stuff
any more than it is for any knowledgable user on any other major distro. Find the third party multimedia installer script, check off the boxes for the software you want, run it and it's done. I assume ESR ran Fedora Frog, cleaned up afterwards (unless he got a more up-to-date version than I did, in which case there was no cleanup), and started playing back his mp3 and pr0n collection, just like everyone else does.
This works because since the multimedia installer is unofficial, it can point to proprietary codecs and ones that aren't available the USA for legal reasons. However, one generally has to do some research to find those installers, and the n00b isn't going to know they exist.
This is a workaround, not a solution.
That's what ESR is talking about. This is an area where we need solutions, not workarounds.
Tech Public Policy stuff
(FC6) Yum just hung. I've got a much longer repo list in Debian, and ... It Just Works. If a repo is down, there's an error message one can safely ignore. And probably should, since the repo will probably be up next time.
One still has to watch what the installer does, it's quite possible to find that the installer wants to get rid of a dependency problem by trashing a bunch of apps. But that's just saying that it isn't perfect... and if that happens, one just backs out and tries something else.
Tech Public Policy stuff
And I thought we'd have to take Fedora *from his cold dead hands*. :-)
Now I have to clear my browser cache and hack into our corportate internet usage survailance system... again.
If Fedora becomes an ubergeek only distro whose users are willing to spend as much time debugging new installs as Windows users spend keeping malware off their boxes for the sheer coolness of it, don't bitch when your market share drops so low that the only cool new apps that everyone else is using only get to Fedora Core when somebody from the Fedora community gets around from porting it, and if your distro drops below critical mass, that's going to be somewhere around forever. Or you find that your job (assuming you use your box to make money with) requires you to run a commercial *nix app that requires you to switch distros. Will it be important to you when OpenOffice 3 comes out and it won't be supported in Fedora for another couple of revs?
Even Red Hat won't be able to keep it alive. Wouldn't it be funny if they announced going to Debian or Gentoo or OpenBSD as a base?
Worth it to be "for geeks only"? Tell me in a year or so.
I'd like to see Linux with competitive distros. If Fedora's people want to have one, the developers must work on usability. If they don't, it's going to become irrelevant.
Anyone serious about Fedora should thank ESR for the warning. He's a strange looking canary for the Linux coal mine, but his experience reflect mine and I switched because there was something I had to have (a working motherboard) that wouldn't run on Fedora... but runs just fine on Debian. (and presumably, on Ubuntu)
Tech Public Policy stuff
to adopt a goat.cx-based logo. Assuming legal issues can be worked out, of course.
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When I used it shortly after FC6 came out, it was a bit behind (it's a third-party individual developer thing) and required a bit of manual cleanup afterwards. But under half an hour to get multimedia running was good enough, if the installer's up to date now and it probably is, half an hour should go down to download + automated configuration time... which you can spend doing something away from the computer. It's no more "offcial" than Automatix is, and for the same reason.
Tech Public Policy stuff
ESR's public switch away from Fedora hopefully will shed some light on some problems with Fedora project and related distributions. As a system administrator who supports labs with Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS workstations, I can tell you that one of the most annoying things about adapting a new version of one if these distributions is the fact that neither mplayer nor the video codecs are provided. This is somewhat mitigated by projects like freshrpms on Fedora Core, but RHEL and CentOS users don't have such an alternative as far as I know. My solution is to grab the source RPM packages from freshrpms repositories and rebuild them on RHEL. This doesn't always work well as the newer versions of mplayer and xine (plus two dozents of libraries that they depend on), depend on the newer version of libraries that are present only in the latest Fedora Core distributions (since there is quite a lag because RHEL is updated almost once in two years). It would be great if RedHat did something about this.
Non-issue as far as choosing between Fedora and Debian-based distros. Runs fine on FC6, and runs fine now on this Debian Etch box.
No matter which distro you try to run it on, remember to look for a writeup on how to install it that's SPECIFIC FOR YOUR DISTRIBUTION.
Then, look for a how-to on getting it to hook up to the rest of your system more efficiently via shared SAMBA (between guest and host) filespace and 1000 mbps virtual Ethernet card... the default is a 10mbps card. This is important because other than the clipboard, the shared filespace and virtual Ethernet card are the only ways that the guest ahd host OSs can run, and the virtual Ethernet card is the only way your guest VM will talk to the outside world.
The way that VMware Server runs on FC6 or Debian is sufficiently similar that I can't remember without referring to the article above which I was running on when I wrote it a few weeks ago.
Tech Public Policy stuff
you have to pay attention if aptitude (CLI shell for apt... I like it) tells you that it's going to deinstall xx number of applications to satisfy dependencies.
Luckily, when something like this happened to me, I had just installed the AMD64 Debian and not a lot of other apps, so I didn't have a big investment in the system... I just blew it away and installed a 32 bit version which actually had the apps I needed.
And I now keep an eye on what the installer tells before deciding to go with y n q.
Nothing's perfect, no choice of distro or OS relieves you of the obligation to pay attention to what your computer is doing.
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anyone picking out an OS / distributions based on any reason other than his or his organization's needs.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Ports and packages are essentially one single system: packages are built from ports. You can do this yourself by going to directory /usr/ports/blahblah/port-version and issuing command: make package. You can use pkg_add -r to install readily available binary packages via FTP. And of course you can also use portinstall and portupgrade to install binary packages (options: -PP install only binary packages, -P install binary if available otherwise build from source)
If you prefer strictly binary packaing system you might want to try OpenBSD. Their ports and packaging tools are actually much more advanced than FreeBSD's (better dependency checking, pkg_add allowing binary updates etc.). The only problem with OpenBSD is that there is not as much software available for it as there is for FreeBSD and Linux.
I use Ubuntu now (and used to use Red Hat). I'm quite happy with it. But to be fair to the GP, when I installed Ubuntu Dapper from a CD (back when Dapper was the current stable thing to use), the install process turned into a black screen somewhere before the end, when it was trying to configure X. And this is on a laptop with Intel graphics chipset, one of the best supported. So I have to agree that Ubuntu does have hardware problems from time to time, just like all the other distros.
:-)
Since getting past that, though, Ubuntu has been pretty good. Oh, the wireless has locked up the whole system from time to time, boot has locked up with ACPI errors, sound has stopped working after kernel upgrades, kernel upgrades have sometimes failed to update the Grub boot menu, and it's impossible to switch X from the laptop screen to an external screen without restarting X. But apart from those niggles, it's been pretty good
Ah Eric S. Raymond. The self-proclaimed know-it-all of the 'hacker' world.
*sigh*.
Does anyone even read his gigantic emails anymore? He sends
a) open letters, so that everyone can see how great and prolific he is
b) recently he has been sending automated annoying equally huge
emails to the net-snmp mailinglist, about documentation not being
up to date. Fine, but please don't spam the mailinglist with that, send
it to the maintainer.
The funny-ironic-sad thing with esr is, that he sort of exactly became
what he writes about in his 'hacker-manual'. He tries to hard. And when
nobody listens, he throws a tantrum. He really wants people to recognize
him as an important person in de 'scene'. People grow tired of people
who constantly criticize, but do not deliver constructive input Raymond.
It seems to me that you lack any real constructive skills like 'developing'
and instead bash on other peoples efforts and code. The only thing you seem
to be doing is write documentation, write huge essays [which is good, if they
have been written with the right idea in mind, not blatant self promoting] and
oh yeah, fetch-mail. Well props for that. But you can't use those few merits to
launch yourself as the great icon forever. What have you lately contributed to
the community?
I dont' care about your opinions. I don't think many do. So why
send out huge emails? The whole email is saturated with a hidden 'Please put
me in the spotlight'. It's a bit sad really. My advice, back down on the tone of voice,
and tell people what to do, and instead be constructive again and appreciate
the effort people put into their projects and ideals. Then people might respect
you again.
No, the Ubuntu 6.06 that I got via Shipit.
Or by "computers" do you mean you're trying to install the i386 version on, like, an old iMac or a PS3?No, only Athlon XP and Pentium 4-based computers.
At no point have I ever had to add a single kernel parameter.It's not only me, in several forums I have seen questions about Ubuntu 6.06 and 6.10 locking up during kernel boot, and other users suggest trying with kernel parameters noacpi, noapic, nolapic, etc. Since Ubuntu at the same time is claimed to be sooo much easier to use and install for novices (which I'm not), I'll not accept having to try around with various kernel parameters (it should be user friendly, right?) where I don't have to with Fedora/CentOS.
Perhaps you are the unluckiest person in the worldCertainly not, I have a system that works fine, even though it isn't Ubuntu. Just trying to dispel the myths that Ubuntu is sooo much easier than Fedora. It depends on your system in both cases. Fedora may work fine on my systems, but fail on others, and likewise Ubuntu may work fine on some people's systems but fail on others (like mine).
Heh, no distro is perfect. It is funny though, I tried to switch from ubuntu to fedora a few times, but fedora was *NEVER* able to fully install itself on my dell laptop, amd64 desktop, or my pentium 2 266mhz (yeah that old thing) correctly.
laptop always froze up when dealing with some sort of pcmcia stuff (wtf? i don't even have any pcmcia cards in there)
amd64 desktop always kernel panic'd when the screensaver kicked in (truely sucked)
pentium 2 didn't have its hard drive found (how could you not find the hard drive???)
Hello ESR,
I happily run both Fedora and Ubuntu and manage a package in both environments. Neither make it particularly easy and dependencies are a problem in both. I suspect you'll eventually find that both environments have their pros and cons.
Good luck to you.
I'm going to get hung up on this remark in the summary (did not RTFA):
...which are not supported by default in Ubuntu. RedHat, sure, probably because you actually pay for it. Not sure it's needed in the Enterprise Desktop market, though. Maybe, I'm not entirely sure as I'm not a member of that market.
"and the failure to include proprietary media formats"
If you want those, Eric, do us all a favor and switch to Linspire. Or MEPIS.
ESR has so far refused to clarify if he was running the current stable relase Fedora Core 6, or the completely bleeding-edge rawhide
Or if he was running one of the not quite as unstable but still a work in progress fc7-test series (which are less buggy than rawhide (whose purpose is to be buggy and fun)) which exist for the purpose of trying to stabilize things for the next release.
But, he did post this on the fedora-devel list which is expressly and only for the purpose of being used by people that are running these UNSTABLE, TESTING VERSIONS THAT ARE NOT PRODUCTION READY AS CLEARLY INDICATED.
ESR knows the value of reporting exactly what went wrong, which is why so many people pointed him to his own "smart questions FAQ". Add to this that he EXPRESSLY did something that he was told not to do and as a result effed up his own system.
As a result of all of the above it can reasonably be assumed that he's deliberately trying to create the impression that Fedora Core is unstable and that the package management system makes it difficult to upgrade individual components. I can put my hand on my heart and say unequivocally after years of using Debian and Fedora Core (and latterly Gentoo), that this is complete and utter rubbish.
ESR is trolling. Possibly for petty motives like personal attention (how pathetic), and possibly for monetary gain (to boost the Ubuntu/Linspire -- Canonical/Freespire empire). Whichever it is his content-free rant should be taken as FUD and he should have his arse kicked from here to Redmond for spreading it.
But generally I feel that ESR's rants are baseless. Nobody should consider his switch from Red Hat to Ubuntu as something bad for Red Hat or something good for Ubuntu. It's not. He's just stirring up trouble by announcing his switch, rather than privately switching for some legitimate reason.
Slackware never blows up because of packaging/installer issues.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In the same vein, I attempted last December to use Ubuntu's LVM tools to do something that is not yet supported in Linux LVM. I should have read the LVM FAQ first, yeah. But Ubuntu's tools lost my data and couldn't bring them back. Fedora's tools brought them back.
So Ubuntu's evil, right?
Well, even though it's not, I'm not going to play with Ubuntu again until I get a chance to undo the non-optimal physical organization of my disks, and I may not play with it then. I did play with the live CDs enough to wonder why everyone gets so excited about Ubuntu. For my hardware and software, Fedora works fine.
But I will say this, accepting closed drivers is not really a strategy informed by the long view.
This is a little long but my hypothesis is that a change of architecture with a system aware of its own constitution and history of change could eliminate deps hell, improve portability and safety of system configurations and user data, and beneficially blur distros together.
I've often run into deps problems though force or compiling things solved them.. with RH9 (okay shoot me) though I haven't installed an rpm for a while. Also managed servers tend to run things like RH7.1, this is a major hosting company I use (global servers) and I wsa told recently they also have a Fedora Core 4 snapshot but that's it. (I wanted to install the latest drupal on the custom rh7 system they use and it wasn't doable).
So we have situations where disk space, security or other considerations make it very difficult to add new apps based on new libraries. And maybe yes you do install things that interfere with a system otherwise build from a pristine repository.. in some markets maybe. Personally I have not yet seen a repository that included all the apps/libs/code I needed.
Okay. I think everyone knows what the heck dependency hell is. Why isn't it possible to make it impossible to have dependency hell by changing the architecture a little (or a lot)? I'm not saying do virtualization of the whole system. Think about being able to roll back state and branching like in a CVS. Just keep track of packages, installed files, config files. Maybe being able to choose per user or based on an environment variable what combination of libraries is in effect. I expect this sort of thing has already been invented before, but it hasn't trickled down to the desktop. So what I'm saying is that the rpm system and the way libraries are installed in specific folders makes rpm hell possible and makes the probability approach infinity as time goes on that cruft will build, even though some people think it is supposed to make dll hell go away.
For me, it started ever since I wanted to use RH's automatic updater on http and then I started worrying about whether it would erase my settings and self compiled auth libs, etc. And if you ever let it go for a while then things get way too scary to ever update an old box. Then the RH auto updater service died. Then more years with lots of things being installed. Most recently unfortunately I moved all but the least important apps to external storage which of course is half dead now.
So the question is, why not allow multiple versions to exist on the same disk, and call different combinations into life at an arbitrary time? It wouldn't necessarily require more disk space (although WinME IIRC had an extra gig for system state recovery), and would add a much-needed degree of resilience. It might even make it easier to remember where all those files went when you built things over the past several years, so that you can even move to a new machine with some of your past environment intact. My ideal system would allow all these neat things to be used as they appear on the world stage, and remember all the system installations you've been doing so that you have a real chance at system portability into the future. I want to back up my data and the way my system worked at a specific time too! These things are all possible if we had a system that gave users more intelligent support in terms of keeping things sane and safe. Also I think such a system would blur the edges between distros since of course they would just become system personalities (I can even imagine SuSE being in there.. maybe). 2nd tier mediator services might even spring up that could help you get different split personalities to work together and merge toward a single one in the future.
So my hypothesis is that systems are currently unstable or even insane and that they are highly unlikely to remain as sane as they putatively were when they were originally installed, despite that we are not talking about windows here, and that we need a more resilient architecture that understands where different files came from, is able
A repost of a comment I just made but somehow as an AC...
This is a little long but my hypothesis is that a change of architecture with a system aware of its own constitution and history of change could eliminate deps hell, improve portability and safety of system configurations and user data, and beneficially blur distros together.
I've often run into deps problems though force or compiling things solved them.. with RH9 (okay shoot me) though I haven't installed an rpm for a while. Also managed servers tend to run things like RH7.1, this is a major hosting company I use (global servers) and I wsa told recently they also have a Fedora Core 4 snapshot but that's it. (I wanted to install the latest drupal on the custom rh7 system they use and it wasn't doable).
So we have situations where disk space, security or other considerations make it very difficult to add new apps based on new libraries. And maybe yes you do install things that interfere with a system otherwise build from a pristine repository.. in some markets maybe. Personally I have not yet seen a repository that included all the apps/libs/code I needed.
Okay. I think everyone knows what the heck dependency hell is. Why isn't it possible to make it impossible to have dependency hell by changing the architecture a little (or a lot)? I'm not saying do virtualization of the whole system. Think about being able to roll back state and branching like in a CVS. Just keep track of packages, installed files, config files. Maybe being able to choose per user or based on an environment variable what combination of libraries is in effect. I expect this sort of thing has already been invented before, but it hasn't trickled down to the desktop. So what I'm saying is that the rpm system and the way libraries are installed in specific folders makes rpm hell possible and makes the probability approach infinity as time goes on that cruft will build, even though some people think it is supposed to make dll hell go away.
For me, it started ever since I wanted to use RH's automatic updater on http and then I started worrying about whether it would erase my settings and self compiled auth libs, etc. And if you ever let it go for a while then things get way too scary to ever update an old box. Then the RH auto updater service died. Then more years with lots of things being installed. Most recently unfortunately I moved all but the least important apps to external storage which of course is half dead now.
So the question is, why not allow multiple versions to exist on the same disk, and call different combinations into life at an arbitrary time? It wouldn't necessarily require more disk space (although WinME IIRC had an extra gig for system state recovery), and would add a much-needed degree of resilience. It might even make it easier to remember where all those files went when you built things over the past several years, so that you can even move to a new machine with some of your past environment intact. My ideal system would allow all these neat things to be used as they appear on the world stage, and remember all the system installations you've been doing so that you have a real chance at system portability into the future. I want to back up my data and the way my system worked at a specific time too! These things are all possible if we had a system that gave users more intelligent support in terms of keeping things sane and safe. Also I think such a system would blur the edges between distros since of course they would just become system personalities (I can even imagine SuSE being in there.. maybe). 2nd tier mediator services might even spring up that could help you get different split personalities to work together and merge toward a single one in the future.
So my hypothesis is that systems are currently unstable or even insane and that they are highly unlikely to remain as sane as they putatively were when they were originally installed, despite that we are not talking about windows here, and that we need a more resilient archit
Otherwise, it looks fine and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Just junk food for thought...
I have switched to Ubuntu as well. Three words, Long Term Support. A six month release cycle and two year "support" cycle just doesn't cut it.
-ellie
For those who don't know who ESR is:
- the-code
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them
Livna did not become Fedora Extras. Livna exists for the sole purpose of providing packages for Fedora that violate Fedora's policy of not including proprietary or patent-encumbered software. That's why it's full of things like video/audio codecs, NVIDIA drivers, etc. Fedora Extras has always been subject to the same policy as Fedora Core, so those packages couldn't be included in Extras either. (And now that Fedora Core and Fedora Extras are merging, it's moot).
What Livna *has* done is make sure that their packages are compatible with Fedora Extras, so it should (theoretically) be safe to include Core, Extras, and Livna in your yum configuration and treat them as one repository.
as opposed to src.deb
if it works with tarballs, I've got a program I want to test that with now.
Tech Public Policy stuff
i may just switch to debian as it only requires 16 megs of ram and lower system requirements equals better system performance with more resources available.
Shall I tell you what distro I use? Do you want to hear why I changed?
No. You don't care, and I don't want to waste the time typing that stuff. Back to life, back to reality everyone.
I so want to change my logon to OxygenThief ....
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
>For some reason, he keeps getting crazier and crazier, seemingly for the sake of promoting himself,
:-)
Why don't we try asking him? But you go first, I'll stand over here OK?
I'm sure we'll get a pistol-waving rant how it's ALL OF US that are crazy. See it's due to all the flouride in our water. Eric's keen on avoiding flouride completely.
He has a problem and has a temper tantrum - I have seen it personally all too many times. Did someone see the threats that go along with it sometimes? I have been on that end of it too.
Why do people listen to this arrogant ignorant ahole?
The ubuntu community should keep in mind a few facts on how he operates. He unusually starts off with basic obvious true points and then leads you to his often unsupported and ridiculous conclusions. Then his response to critics is unusually personal attacks, ie classic flame tactics. In the end he often turns on those he called allies. The ubuntu community should keep this in mind as he tries his manipulations and takes credit for the work and ideas of others.
I hope the ubuntu community ignores him and we can send him private emails telling him to STFU!
For automated updates via GUI, try adept_installer.
PAY ATTENTION TO THE BOTTOM STATUS LINE telling you the number of programs it proposes to upgrade vs the ones it proposes to remove. It will give you detailed info on programs listed for installation/removing via point and click.
I make a living as a writer (oddly enough, Linux how-to articles) with this workstation, and I don't have the luxury of having spare boxes to throw in if this box goes down.
Tech Public Policy stuff
... counseling business, of course.
- the-code
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.