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.
From TFA:
Which servers to corroborate my suspicion: RMS is an autist, whereas ESR is a realist.
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.
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.'"
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
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
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 would say it's not about proprietary stuff, it's more about compatibility, market share and choice. If you don't want proprietary drivers, codecs and so on, choose Fedora / Redhat. But if you want usable distro that you can use as a nice desktop OS, without worrying about 'if it's open source or not' go for Ubuntu. Or Linspire. Or Mandriva.
That's the beauty of Linux - something for everybody, you can mix'n'match. The only reason why people speak about it is ESR is a big player in FOSS crusade.
He chose Ubuntu, fine. Don't like it? Find different idol you can follow.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
Not always true. For example, Skype, Parallels and Opera, among others, deliver packages for the major distros right alongside the .msi's and .app's. Ive also seen debs (Ubuntu user, forgive me for not noting others) for quite a few OSS apps. VLC and Democracy Player come to mind. From my usage, the problem does not exist.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
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.
Apparently not anymore =P
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
VLC media player too, there are many out there you just have to go and open your eyes. .deb is fairly common package format. That along with .rpm and they both are out there many times one right after the other.
hello
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.
Linux package managers and formats - Band-Aids for crappy system design decisions made long ago that no one wants to fix.
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.
Hmmm... that's just a load of bull.
o ra_core6
3 Months ago I installed Ubuntu.. in a virgin installation I could do nothing. After searching for and installing Automatix, I could do stuff.
2 days ago I replaced that Ununtu desktop with Fedora 6... in a virgin installation I could do nothing. After searching for and finding the excellent HowoToForge doc on spiffing up Fedora,:
http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_fed
I could do everything I wanted with just slightly more effort. (My reasons for switching has nothing to do with not liking Ubuntu. Its just that my hard drive crashed and I wanted to try Fedora 6 upon re-installing a new desktop).
Out of the box, both Distros offer the same capabilities, and lack of proprietary drivers, codecs, etc. The user has to do it for themselves by going to third part websites for these.
Newsfollow.com
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.
I disagree, i hear many people wishing for a online app repository of free apps for windows and osX
I know myself, id love to just type in pkg_add -r blaapp ( or use a fancy gui interface )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
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...
.deb or .rpm and installing that.
Actually there was demand for having a repository system on Mac, which is why fink exists. This allows Mac users to access a repository of open-source unix software.
Also, in fact, KDE has been ported to Mac OS X. I know of people who use it, because there are some KDE apps they really want to run on OS X. The next version of KDE will in fact run on Windows too. The reason these ports were developed is because of some number of people who wanted those features.
As for repositories, I personally love them. In fact I now find the "Windows way" of installing software to be painful and primitive. As another poster pointed out, Linux users still have the option of downloading a
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!
Except Me http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
.... 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.
I miss the days of redhat 9 when there was 1 super good version. Good enough for corporate and home with a single distro. Ubuntu might be good for home, but there is no support for bigname devices.
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 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"
Windows has a package manager, just not one that pulls from a repository. As a Windows and Mac user, I hereby wish both had functional package managers that integrated with repositories. The benefits are numerous. Note, that is not to say I want the platform to migrate to the same lousy package formats as Linux tends to use. I want to keep clan and portable and contained OS X style .app bundles, I just want a nice package manager to handle some discovery, downloads, updates, clean uninstalls, and situations where the app needs to install a kernel module or something.
Actually there was demand for having a repository system on Mac, which is why fink exists.Well, Fink is pretty much a compatibility tool for installing Linux ports, but there are real package managers for OS X that handle both CLI, X11, and Aqua applications.
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.
OSX already has it, Darwin Ports
http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/
Why is this marked as a troll? He makes a valid point. Linux package managers do a terrible job of accommodating commercial software the vendor does not want added to someone else's repository.
This is not a black and white issue and I wish people would stop trying to defend their favorite, beloved OS for one second and actually think about this. Package managers are bloody useful. They handle dependency issues, installation and un-installation of apps, updating apps, discovery, and download of apps. In future they could be used in addition to provide licensing and registration of applications, ACLs for applications running in secure environments, build instructions for source, and certification of applications from trusted third parties (whitelists, blacklists, and even greylists). It is doubtful anyone will manage to gain all these benefits without a package manager.
Package managers are not perfect. First, they don't provide a lot of the things I listed above that they could. Second, they are not as easy to use and the packages in them are not as useful and flexible as something like .app bundles on OS X. There are real benefits to drag and drop installation and un-installation, as well as inclusion of FAT binaries and the ability to send a functional application via IM, or run them from a thumb drive with no special tricks or customization.
If OS zealots would just look at it objectively, it is clear that a combination of an application manager and portable application bundles is the ideal. Why can't someone incorporate both and give us the best of both worlds?
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...
Parent is a perfect example of what's wrong with our little OSS community. Years of contributing ( we're not talking use here, but actual contribution ). And this is the response of multiple people to his post.
We don't care if the software has issues that aren't being addressed.... just don't criticize.
Call his letter a troll if you like, but this wasn't some noob saying "MY MP3z WONT PLAY, SCREW FC!".
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
Try FreeBSD. It's like slackware with documentation that works :)
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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!
On Windows, I go to mozilla.com, click the download link, click "open", then click "yes" at a security prompt, and if I'm lucky (and no one's intercepted the download), I actually get Firefox, and not Firefox+spyware.
.NET runtime, check the box for it, and click "install", and watch while it downloads everything needed to install it and bring it up to date. Unfortunately, these are both fairly primitive (when compared to Unix package management systems) and closed to everyone except Microsoft and Apple.
On OSX, I go to mozilla.com, click the download link, save it somewhere, doubleclick the file to "mount" it, then drag it to Applications, then "eject" the image, then throw it away, then empty my trash.
Those are the FASTEST ways to install Firefox on either of those OSes.
On Gentoo, I type "emerge firefox". On Ubuntu, I type "apt-get install firefox".
That it installs a million other packages is irrelevant -- those "million other packages" are also going to be downloaded on Windows or OSX, the difference is that they HAVE to be downloaded, even if more than one app uses them. This is called "shared libraries", and every single time I talk to people about this, they either agree that Linux package management is a good idea, or decide they'd rather waste disk space and RAM by doing it the Mac way.
And yes, I do wish there were decent package management systems for Windows or OSX. In fact, there are -- there's one called "Windows Update", and another called "Software Update". In fact, for a taste of how package management could work on Windows, you could go to the Windows Update website, find the
Which means that on Windows, to update my system, I have to check nvidia.com for new video drivers, mozilla.com in case there's an update that Firefox or Thunderbird won't automagically download (it's happened before), update.microsoft.com for Windows updates, then Office Update for Office updates (since I have an older version of office which won't be updated through Microsoft update), launch Steam and poke it in several different ways to make sure it actually checks for updates, then Clamwin for a new version of their anti-virus software -- they'll download virus definitions automatically, but not new versions of the software -- then Creative Labs for new sound drivers... And let's not forget, many of these will require a reboot, and certainly the Windows Update stuff will refuse to install any more updates until you reboot with the last updates, meaning if you let it go for awhile, you could easily have to reboot 4-5 times.
And I only use Windows to occasionally test stuff in Office (in case OpenOffice fails), or play Steam games.
On OSX, at least I don't have to reboot. However, I did have to check Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird (which hasn't ever automatically updated itself), Software Update, Chicken of the VNC, Python, Java, Adium, Growl, Neverball, TunnelBlick and OpenVPN, rdesktop, Microsoft's own remote desktop software, mplayer, mencoder, VLC, CyberDuck, Acrobat Reader, and iCab. Individually, by browsing to their websites, or opening the program and clicking "check for updates". Some of them will update automatically, most of them won't, and it's hard to tell by looking at them which are automatic and which aren't -- and the ones which aren't won't update unless I open them, meaning if I leave a program for a few months, I might open it and find 2-3 updates waiting for me.
I used OS X every day for work, until my Powerbook died.
Both of the above scenarios will often involve me actually having to download a patch, or a new version, manually from the website -- in yet another easy-to-intercept vanilla HTTP connection.
On Linux, on Gentoo, I type these two commands:
emerge sync
emerge -uaDN world
On Ubuntu, it's even easier:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
That will update absolutely EVERYTHING on my system. And on the Ubuntu side, no matter what repositories I'm set up for, the system will
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It has two of them, and nobody but Unix beards use them.
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.
I know you're not even bothering to disguise your trolling AC, but I use the KDE port on OS X, and am very glad it is available. My favourite LaTeX editor (Kile) is a KDE app, and the with the KDE port it's easy to use it under X, whether or not I bother loading the KDE desktop.
Ye who asks shall receive: http://blog.levhita.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/07 /ubuntu-logo.jpg
No wonder people are switching...
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Beats the HELL out of the competition (Windows primarily).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
True, except that is all unix/x11 based items, ive yet to see any cocoa apps there ( i could be wrong of course, things might have changed )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Are all of your posts this clueless and irrelevant?
Not that it really matters much as you have displayed your total lack of intelligence pretty clearly, but i was mildy curious.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Still, I'm glad it's been posted on Slashdot; now we can put all the trolls and flames under one article, and maybe see some civilised discussion tomorrow after we've all got it out of our systems.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not to feed the trolls, but in Ubuntu, you don't have to know any of those things, just open Synaptic and use the nice spiffy GUI to do the same thing. Sorry that in the digital age, the ability to type is something that we can't expect of a user.
My Babylon
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
Hmmm... Synaptic for Windows... it could use Sourceforge and Freshmeat as repositories... you could have the little alert icon in the systray that tells you when updates are available...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
...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.
Let's consider the two most common package managers: RPM and dpkg. Neither of them has any problem at all with letting you install commercial software without it being in a repository. In fact, commercial software like IBM DB2 is simply shipped in RPM files that are installed by a flashy graphical installer.
What kind of accommodation are you expecting?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You could have marked that as potentially NSFW!
Plus, you owe me a keyboard. And a hot cup of tea.
Smart. I've been going through hell with Ubuntu. I'm sure all distros suck for one reason or another, but I've never had Fedora hose my system like Ubuntu has (twice).
I'm not sure what you mean by "explain, and not rationalize", but the point of a package repository is convenience, not security. Admittedly, installing (or removing) a .app is pretty painless, but keeping track of updates can be a pain if the program doesn't do it itself. I like just being able to type a single command and have it update everything that needs updating. If you prefer checking for updates manually, that's your choice. I'm lazy, and I'd rather have the computer figure that stuff out for me (it's better at it than I am anyway).
- I need a loop in my shell rc file to add
/opt/*/bin to my path. Wildcard expansion in $PATH would be a huge bonus.
- Libraries are installed in
/opt/{lib_name}/lib, so I need to manually specify paths when I compile.
Once a package has been installed like that, copying it to another machine is simply a matter of dragging the folder across (optionally or tar'ing it up along the way). Apps could easily be distributed like that. You could quite easily build a package manager that would track dependencies and do some niceties like removing orphaned libraries and automatically updating applications.The biggest problem with *NIX applications is that they have a horrible habit of scattering their files all over your filesystem. This basically forces you to invent a package manager just to handle a task that ought to be easy. Keeping applications up to date might need a specialised tool; installing and uninstalling really shouldn't.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
apt-get on Windows. THAT would pwn.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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
( we're not talking use here, but actual contribution ).
We are? Like what?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I want my package manager to know where these RPMs came from and be able to keep them up to date for starters, you know like all the other software. I want it to be so simple for developers to have their applications bundled this way that all commercial software is bundled this way. Further, I want the package manager to accommodate discovering this application, downloading it, registering it with the vendor, and paying any licensing fees. I basically want to go to a Web page an click on the download link under "Linux" and have my package manager open up with a listing for that item of software that provides everything I need to manage the commercial package rather than having to mess with a different installer for each commercial program.
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.
You do a good job of describing the advantages of a good package manager. I agree for many situations the Linux way is easier. The problem I have is the state of existing package managers for non-ideal situations:
Okay I don't want you to get me wrong here. I really, really appreciate the advantages of package managers. For expert users especially they are way, way better in many ways. It is hard to overstate the advantages of a centralized update system. The problem I have is I don't think current package managers do enough to accommodate the needs of commercial, closed source developers and so they bypass them, resulting in less security and convenience for me. Further, I think the packages themselves are lacking in portab
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.
There are one or two options. I've found Fink on Mac OS X to be OK (though annoying in some ways). On Windows there's win-get; I haven't tried it, but here's an app list. Some of them look a bit out of date though.
What is the problem? Take aproaches like shove it all in /opt and set a couple of environment varibles with your installer - there has been commercial applications on *nix for a couple of decades and linux can be treated the same way. Need extra libraries and you are not sure what the distro will have? On everything other than MS Windows your dynamic libraries have version numbers so it doesn't matter - just make sure your appication can find the right one and bundle it in to be sure. You do not have to use the package manager on the distro and it may be better to ignore it so that is one less thing to be dependant on so your application will run on all the recent distros for the same architecture.
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.
...but... in his autobiography^Wessay "The Cathedral & The Bazaar" he's described as an Accidental Revolutionary.
That's funny, I'm sure I recall someone else using that phrase in a popular biography...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
...And then you realize, you are so ready for Solaris 10.
OTOH, it's good to see someone still championing Slackware. I was always kind of bummed that Yddragsil went under, if for no other reason than watching users try to pronounce it.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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.
Easy enough. The commercial vendors just need to provide repositories of their own. Have the installer or install script add their repository to the end of /etc/apt/sources.list.
Click'n'run. Can be done with a web site, doesn't need any changes to the package manager.
You'll never be able to get rid of the mess of different installers. Even on the Mac, where Apple provides a standard installer and documents the standard installation process, vendors still insist on building their own crappy installers that don't quite work right. Same on Linux. Commercial software vendors seem to think that a non-standard installer gives them a commercial edge.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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
Actually, a codec buddy is planned for Fedora 7. This would launch when the users tried to play certain codecs, and allow the user to install them after informing the user why they cannot be included in the main distribution.
Not everybody loves Ubuntu, you know. I use Fedora Core, and it works fine. Never had any significant problems with it. In contrast, the Ubuntu cd locks up on boot on all machines I tried it on.
Actually, the Fedora Project have been counting the number of unique ip addresses that have requested updates, and reached more than one million, so there certainly are quite a few systems running Fedora Core.
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 ;)
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 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.
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.
Tech Public Policy stuff
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.
Tech Public Policy stuff
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
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
OS X is not always an exception to this rule. I don't know that it is practical to install all applications via drag and drop, given the need for kernel modules and the like. I certainly agree with your point in that it should be an option whenever possible and I think that whether software is installed from a CD, repository, or from some internet channel mechanisms should be in place to manage it and keep it up to date. What I'd really like to see is the OpenStep specification expanded to include official locations for repository information for updates to the software, so a package manager will always know how to do this.
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.
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
Yeah, and theoretically everyone can just migrate away from Windows and move to Linux. Why should a commercial developer start using the official package manager if they have to do extra work to register their software for every package manager in use? Why should they use the repository if they already have to implement their own registration service to insure a given item of software is up to date? What is the advantage for them?
If you want developers to take advantage of features you have to design those features to easily accommodate those developers.
You'll never be able to get rid of the mess of different installers. Even on the Mac, where Apple provides a standard installer and documents the standard installation process, vendors still insist on building their own crappy installers that don't quite work right. Same on Linux. Commercial software vendors seem to think that a non-standard installer gives them a commercial edge.OS X does not have a proper package management system, only a minimalist one that adds very little value. Commercial software developers are right, it does give them an edge to roll their own installer/registration/update scheme because there is no one standard for packages/package management and because none of the package managers in use offer all the functions they need. Why design to target a dozen package managers and still have to develop your own registration/verification setup to prevent people from ripping you off, when you could just use a custom installer that takes care of all of it and you don't have to worry what package manager the end user has?
The whole point of my argument is if you design a package manager that does accommodate all the needs of a commercial developer, including developing a standard that all package managers can adhere to, then maybe commercial developers will be motivated to use it, since it will be easier for them. The end result of course, will be more ease of use and functionality for end users, which should be the goal of package managers.
One of the things I think a lot of developers of all platforms don't seem to understand is arguing "if only they would do this" without considering ways to motivate users to do that. Offering a feature that does not get used does not help anyone. You have to make the feature easy enough and beneficial enough to the people who are the decision makers. Technically, developers could all manage the particular functionality we're discussing without changes to exisiting package managers. Realistically, that is a pain in the butt for them and does not benefit them, so they don't, and it is end users who suffer for it.
Currently there is not one standard for package managers and no package manager offers all the features commercial developers want, so they roll their own installers. As a result, end users have to juggle to methods of managing and updating applications, which sucks for novices. End users have to run some random binary installer and hope it is not malicious.
there has been commercial applications on *nix for a couple of decades and linux can be treated the same way.Yeah, but commercial software on other platforms has moved on in the mean time. Developers don't want to give you a binary and trust you only install it once, while ignoring widespread illegal copying. Since package managers don't handle this, or even do a good job of handling software installed from a CD-ROM, since their is no official (package manager independent) way to provide repository information for updates of that software, commercial developers almost all roll their own solution, if they target Linux at all.
You do not have to use the package manager on the distro and it may be better to ignore it so that is one less thing to be dependant[sic] on so your application will run on all the recent distros for the same architecture.That may be fine for the developer, but is sucks for the user. They now have two methods they have to deal with for keeping software up to date and uninstalling software and they still have to run some arbitrary binary rather than just install a package, which is no worse on low security systems, but a lot worse on systems that implement ACLs. You honestly don't think making a package manager that actually handles all the functions developers want is a better idea than having them all have to roll their own solution or ignore Linux?
My second thought was 'Wait, there are people who still use Fedora Core?'
Still, I'm glad it's been posted on Slashdot; now we can put all the trolls and flames under one article
Looks like a troll, sounds like a troll... oh wait, it is a troll...
Whilest Ubuntu seems to be gaining a lot of support from home-users these days, I'm afraid the corporate world still makes far more use of Red Hat based distributions than Ubuntu. I'm sure this is to a large extent down to the proliferation of RHEL and CentOS in industry for server applications - people are used to the structure of these systems and want to use something similar on their desktops - Fedora wins in those stakes.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Otherwise, it looks fine and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Just junk food for thought...
That's not the fault of the package manager. The developer could choose to distribute it in a repository and add some sort of license or registration on the "config" step, and have the program refuse to run until it's completed. They could even choose to roll their own repository -- it's actually getting significantly easier, I think, for users to add repositories and install software from them.
However, I suppose you could add this to package managers. They already have support for a generic concept of a license, and I believe Ubuntu will ask you the first time it finds a strange license, and then not ask you again if you say yes.
So IM isn't the obstacle here, really, it's pulling a package out of your running system. The only package manager I know of that will do this is Gentoo's Portage, but it could serve as a model for others.
Games don't store them in the game binary. Just because it's in a .app does not magically mean people will store resources separately, instead of in the binary -- and just because it's a package and a normal binary doesn't mean people will be stupid enough not to put music into some folder, like everyone else.
I know id games store stuff effectively in zipfiles, and I know most of the open source games I have store the music files in the game folder. There's one closed source game that stores the game music in a bunch of gigantic mp3 files, named '.dat'.
Assuming they were universal binaries in the first place. Otherwise, it's using emulation, which Linux can do also -- though not even close to seamlessly.
However, assuming most of this was commercial software, the right thing for a package manager to do would be to give you an easy way to grab all your license keys and a list of software, and let it re-download everything.
And I know not all software will let you do that; some must be installed using the installer, or from a DVD. But if they would use our packaging scheme, then the only downside here is bandwidth. It could even be made to be intelligent about grabbing what it needs off the old laptop.
True enough. This is probably your trickiest use case, and the best way to do this on our existing package management systems would be to give them a button to create a portable copy -- but to treat it as another Linux installation target. Worst case, you could chroot onto the thumb drive.
Generally, if it's a global, persistant database, it would go in
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That's not the fault of the package manager. The developer could choose to distribute it in a repository and add some sort of license or registration on the "config" step, and have the program refuse to run until it's completed.
If a developer already has to implement their own update mechanism to insure this for new versions and the initial registration and host their own "repository" for the software, why shouldn't they just roll their own service entirely? I mean if they have to choose between rolling their own service or, rolling their own slightly less functional service and trying to write a script for each of the many existing package managers, why should they do the latter?
Technically they could to the former, but it does not make a lot of sense for them. In order to simplify package management for user I think the package managers need to be made easy to use for all the needs of commercial developers in order to actually getting them using it and improve the platform. This means defining and using standards for package management and including everything needed by developers in that standard.
However, I suppose you could add this to package managers. They already have support for a generic concept of a license, and I believe Ubuntu will ask you the first time it finds a strange license, and then not ask you again if you say yes.
I think it is vital that a standard for packages and package management include an official registration channel for licensing as well as a standard location within the package for such a license in order to get developers on board.
So IM isn't the obstacle here, really, it's pulling a package out of your running system. The only package manager I know of that will do this is Gentoo's Portage, but it could serve as a model for others.
The basic idea is not only the ability to extract a portable package from an installed application, but to do so in a very user friendly way. If I drag my application icon into my IM window or e-mail or to a CD, it should "just work." You could do this with great complexity by having the OS recognize those export methods, create the bundle, and recognize incoming bundles on the other end and automatically install them, but I think that is a whole lot harder than simply adopting OpenStep style packages within your package manager in the first place.
Games don't store them in the game binary. Just because it's in a .app does not magically mean people will store resources separately, instead of in the binary -- and just because it's a package and a normal binary doesn't mean people will be stupid enough not to put music into some folder, like everyone else.
We're not just talking about music, but also images and movies and the like. Simply having a standardized location within the package greatly simplifies finding these items, means development tools are more likely to make use of that location, and means third party tools designed to extract these and convert them to more common formats know here to look. This is not a huge win, but it is more elegant and results in better and more predictable behavior from developers in my experience.
However, assuming most of this was commercial software, the right thing for a package manager to do would be to give you an easy way to grab all your license keys and a list of software, and let it re-download everything.
Why? Why re-download everything when you already have it? What if it was never available for download in the first place and you got it from a network share at work or a CD-ROM you bought at Walmart? What if you have a slow internet connection, or don't have any internet at the time of the upgrade? What if you paid for software, but the copy of the serial number was lost in a fire or when you moved? Is it really a good idea to work from a clean slate every time?
And I know not all soft
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
And then you realize, you are so ready for Solaris 10.
Got the T-shirt.
Stick Men
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.
"So under Linux to install a simple user space app that you see announced on a website instead of clicking on the download link right there in the announcement you have to:
Wait for someone else to get around to adding it to the repository
Know about setting up repository url/addresses if the app isn't part of the default repository set
Know about command line shells
Launch a command line shell
Know about things like command case-sensitivity
Know exactly how to type each and every letter you just listed
What a joke."
You forgot to add
Know about where all the undocumented symliinks point to that are scattered all over the fucking filesystems of the 529 odd known different distributions of 'Linux' (source : distrowatch "Number of all distributions in the database: 529")
I've been waiting a long time for Linux developers to acknowledge & deal with dependency hell.
Looks like it's gonna be a long wait more yet judging by the posts in every public forum.
A joke indeed, which is a tragedy.
If I already have to implement my own login mechanism and host my own "website" of pages, why shouldn't I just roll my own HTTP server entirely?
Here's hoping they find a way to save time by using the existing package managers. I know I would. Dependencies alone is a pretty big deal -- for instance, suppose you ship a product written in python. You could roll your own shell script to check the version of python used, or force people to download the package and test it, or worse, distribute python with your package (something OS X people have to do if they need a version other than what Apple ships) -- or you can simply make your package depend on Python, and let the system handle everything else.
Well, they could just pick one. Frankly, the only package manager out there that I think is worth considering is dpkg. The only other that's even remotely popular is rpm, and it's horribly broken, both technologically and politically. I liked Gentoo, but Gentoo/Portage packages are basically scripts anyway, and it's trivial for them to wrap other packaging systems -- in fact, they do it all the time.
So, distribute debs via a repository -- which is simple enough that even a small project like audacious can run their own (note that it only provides audacious packages) -- and then start talking about whether you want to legally let other people repackage your stuff (for instance, Gentoo). It may be a bit of legal work, but certainly no development time, to support Gentoo or Debian once you support Ubuntu. (Or Gentoo/Ubuntu once you support Debian.)
Fine, as long as you understand that "within the package" is relative. The important part is that the license is delivered to the user before they use the software, and can always be found wherever the software is installed.
It already has to, to an extent. The example you give with IM is illustrative; most IM clients don't recognize sending more than a single file at once, and a .app is certainly not a single file.
Also, Linux does not have you EVER click directly on where the app is. You click on things like menu entries. I do, however, have an idea for how such a UI could look and work, and how you'd do the backend. I think it's actually somewhat trivial compared to writing a new package manager, which I intend to do anyway.
Would you be happy if we had standard locations scattered around the filesystem?
Oh,
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
They don't have to "register" their software. They just need to package it in the appropriate format, just like for any other platform.
If they have their own up-to-date service, like Firefox does, then they can rely on that. However, in practice it's going to be more reliable to use the standard mechanisms. For instance, Firefox updates on Linux can fail because the user running the browser doesn't have write access to the directories where Firefox is installed.
User experience. It's much easier for me to install PostgreSQL on a remote server than it is to install DB2, because the custom installer for DB2 requires X. Java is a PITA on Linux because if you install the official Java distribution, packages which require Java have no idea it's there, and try to install GCJ and GNU Classpath.
I'm still waiting to hear what those needs are, what it is that a commercial developer needs to do but can't do today with APT or RPM. (Other than license handling, which nobody is going to want implemented in open source package management.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Ubuntu includes a boatload of proprietary drivers. I was not talking about codecs.
-- Linux user #369862