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Linux Kernel Moves To Github
An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds has announced that he will be distributing the Linux kernel via Github until kernel.org servers are fully operational following the recent server compromise. From the announcement: 'But hey, the whole point (well, *one* of the points) of distributed development is that no single place is really any different from any other, so since I did a github account for my divelog thing, why not see how well it holds up to me just putting my whole kernel repo there too?'"
I clicked the link and here's what I got: "Server Error 500 - An unexpected error seems to have occurred. Why not try refreshing your page? Or you can contact us if the problem persists." with a cute parallax scrolling animation of GitHub logo falling down the Grand Canion. I've never seen 500 error on GitHub before.
Linus writes: "since I did a github account for my divelog thing, why not see how well it holds up to me just putting my whole kernel repo there too?"
Why not? Because you just broke GitHub! That's why!
And now let's all remain silent while the instant, distributed, cpu-intensive, encrypted https slashdotting of GitHub starts in 3... 2... 1...
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
And now let's all remain silent while the instant, distributed, cpu-intensive, encrypted https slashdotting of GitHub starts in 3... 2... 1...
AND FORK!
Can we just agree that both are awesome and ClearCase _really_ sucks?
*frustrated user*
pfft...this is clearly a slashvertisement for Linus' divelog!
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
Maybe they were just taking a second to resolve the paradox of Linux distributing itself!
Invaders must die
Has Linus changed his mind in the last week? http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.ext4/27628
Sourceforge is quite obnoxious these days; most modern open source projects seem to use github instead. The Linux kernel is hardly the first big project they've hosted...
First, Github has been around for quite some time now and is just hosting for Git - hardly "vague" (is that the word you were looking for even?) and by your argument shouldn't sourceforge also cost money now? You know that massive load also comes with massive numbers of visitors and publicity and bandwidth is cheap now right? They are getting free direct advertising to programmers all over the net. How is that bad for them exactly?
Get a web developer
Here is an overview of hosting facilities.
Others do seem more capable.
Why is HAL such a good idea?
I know that I can move a Linux installation image from one machine to another without a glitch, while Windows (which has a HAL) fails miserably if the source and destination machine vary in any non-trivial way.
Here's my prediction: right now this site is "free for OSS". kernel.org will raise a massive load (so will slashdot). How long before policies change and people will need to cough up in order to reach kernel source code?
And how long before every OSS project just moves to a different host as soon as those policies change? Somehow I don't think the policy is going to change.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
A HAL theoretically makes the system portable, but Linux does not have one (normally) and is still quite portable, and Windows has one, and is not ...?
Reactos does not appear to have a HAL (unlike the Windows it is modelled on) but has been ported to other architectures anyway ?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Linus has said that when kernel.org is back up the github repo will be turned into a mirror.
IIRC Windows is quite portable, having run NT on x86, PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, and I heard Windows 8 runs on ARMv7.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Never have I had to agree with a post more.
My employers, not particularly tech-literate, have even seen this and learned it first-hand, and have had to get themselves out of the habit that "moving that server to new hardware means configuring a new one, effectively".
Move a Windows server - you can be in for a world of hurt unless you want to fresh-deploy it every time. Move a Windows-client, historically you'd be prepared for blue-screens because you have the "wrong" processor type (Intel vs AMD - requires disabling some randomly named service via the recovery console, for example), reinstalling the vast majority of the drivers (probably from a 640x480 safe mode) and even then can't be guaranteed to get anything back and working - not to mention activation, DRM, different boot hardware (e.g. IDE vs SATA), etc.
Move a Linux server - unless your OWN scripts do something incredibly precise and stupid with an exact piece of hardware, it will just move over. At worst, you'll have to reassign your eth ports to the names you expect using their MAC address (two seconds in Linux, up to 20 minutes in Windows and a couple of reboots).
Hell, you can even change the kernel entirely, or the underlying filesystem type or any one of a million factors and it will carry on just as before, maybe with a complaint or two if you do anything too drastic but almost always with no ill-effects and a 2-second resolution.
The only piece of hardware on Linux that I have to "fiddle" is a USB-Fax modem that has ZERO identification difference between two examples of itself. You literally have no way to assign them to fax0 and fax1 except guesswork - or relying on the particular USB port name which wouldn't translate between computers. But the install has moved through four machines (from an ancient office workstation with IDE - sacrificial hardware to prove my point about its usefulness -, to a state-of-the-art server class machine with SAS RAID6 and redundant power supplies) without so much as a byte-change - just me swapping the fax modems over rather than bothering to code the change.
And if the hardware breaks? No big deal - pull out the old machine and/or any random desktop machine (or even laptop) with enough ports, image it across byte-for-byte and carry on regardless.
People don't get that this is a BIG feature that they should be pushing - whereas with Windows I've heard (and seen) horror stories about RAID cards not working without the exact controller/firmware/driver combo that they were setup with, blue-screens and hangs and activation dialogs when you attempt something like that, not to mention HOURS of fiddling to get the image running exactly how it was on the original machine (if that's even possible). It goes along with the "plaintext" / "plain file" backup strategy (hell, my /etc/ is under automatic version control with two commands!), etc.
The point of an OS is to make the software independent of the underlying hardware. Windows lost that independence a LONG while ago (Windows NT / 95). Linux still has it because of the underlying design of the whole thing.
Don't even get me started on restoring an "NT Backup" without having the exact correct hotfix/service pack setup that you were backing up from...
Part of this is because there seems to be far fewer Slashdot readers than in the past. The stupider ones have moved to Digg, reddit and Hacker News, apparently
While I will admit there have been many Slashdot readers who have moved to other websites, I think the issue here is more that as a percentage of the web community Slashdot no longer is the dominate community of discussion. This is more because there simply are fewer geeks running around on the web any more as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other "social media" sites have more ordinary non-geek people.... any one of which can also post a link going viral that will dwarf anything Slashdot would ever produce. Many of the larger websites routinely expect a large number of visitors for some things they post, and can more than compensate for what happens when they become the focus of a lot of people at once.
Slashdot will still bring a huge number of visitors to a site and for somebody doing a homebrew website it can be a big deal, but I'd agree that due to improvements in hardware and better software management there isn't nearly so much of a problem any more.
no, it takes massive effort and expense which is why Microsoft dropped those other three architectures, and the ARM port is still being worked on. Any windows admin can tell you what a bare metal restore does with the most minute of variations in hardware, it get screwed up. We can get MS Windows the alternate name of "Failure of HAL"
This is not the portability people are on about.
Take a HDD from a Windows machine and put in in another PC, try booting from it. I am convinced in all but specific circumstances it will not boot.
On the other hand, my current home desktop is a pair of software RAIDed disks that have been in 3 seperate computers now (Motherboard, RAM, video and sound output etc.). I have not had a problem doing this. Sure I now use "eth4" as my default network port but nothing else of note is a problem.
Linux's ability to select the correct driver/modules at boot is what enables this.
oh, those commercial unix implementations or freebsd scale from a handheld device to a supercomputer the size of a city block? FreeBSD is still trying to figure out how to run on 8-way or more SMP without seizing up under high load (check the warning on their web site). Whatever cool things from the past it has, Solaris is going down the tubes under Oracle, to be a one trick pony to run Oracle on their (well, Fujitsu's actually) hardware only. Wail and weep, commercial unix boy, your world is collapsing, and Big Blue and a Penguin are stomping it.
So, your definition of "more than Linux" is Windows NT?
Sell it to me. What does ReactOS aim to provide that a modern Linux based distro doesn't already give me? Games? Bleeding edge graphics drivers for, uh, games?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Sure it did. I tried booting Windows 7 32bit installation on different machine after laptop died. Both were Fujitsu-Siemens laptops with Intel cpus bought about 2 years apart, but Windows did not boot even in safe mode. Installation CD has some 'boot repair' mode, but it did not manage to do anything useful.
Perhaps you should read this recent article on LWN about Avoiding the OS abstraction trap. The core point to consider that a HAL is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Linux's development doesn't need nor likely should it have a HAL like other closed OSs precisely because it doesn't deal with binary drivers. Instead, code is frequently refractored, reorganized, etc and the main issue is whether the user space ABI stays intact. All pushing a HAL would do is further constrain the kernel to maintaining another set user space ABI, which would likely end up being suboptimal since no HAL is perfect, and devote developer time to something that instead of forming organically as hardware/code demands would wall the expectations and the ability to provide functionality. Such might be great for a platform that's expected to be deployed, be infrequently changed, and for which driver development is a one-off affair, but that's pretty much the antithesis of the Linux kernel.
I don't think Linus is "happy with the current 3.x state of Linux", but I wouldn't be surprised if he's happy with the development process in place that he's a part of that can change the 3.x line towards something better. The Linux kernel is constantly changing. There's unlikely to ever be a state, ie a one point snapshot, where the Linux kernel will ever make most people happy because there's too many people with too many diverse goals and they all desire to change the Linux kernel from what is to what it could be. That's the great thing about an open development model, where people can make that happen. And if nothing else, they can make their own fork of Linux if the Linus tree doesn't make them happy enough.
While that's great news for ReactOS, and with no offense to the ReactOS developers, but if I did Linux kernel development, I wouldn't be jumping on board ReactOS development. ReactOS is a noble project and I'm sure in the future I'll get a lot of use out of it, but I view ReactOS as a stopgap project. That is, it's something like wine, which seems more than anything as a way to run the occasional Windows program and to allow those who are using Windows exclusively now to have a path to switching to using Linux (or OpenBSD or whatever) rather exclusively to run the occasional Windows program.
I say this primarily because Windows is a massive beast of an OS, produced through decades of development. Trying to re-implement it with incomplete documentation, reverse engineering, etc is a task like to take many times as long and as such I can even optimistically only see ReactOS as an open Windows 2000 or Windows XP clone for the 2020s or 2030s. Having more developers might speed up the process a bit, but assuming there's already a critical mass of developers to move development forward, I think the mythic man hour and the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly, especially when it's hard to delegate a lot of the work on things when the things themselves are most a mass of "stuff we don't have documentation for but needs implemented anyways".
Now, if one has a personal interest in having a complete open Windows clone, then please join ReactOS development. I'm certain they'd appreciate the help, even if it doesn't speed up the completing time very much. I certainly commend anyone who works to better an open project that will give advantage to oneself and others. But, I wouldn't seriously consider
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
I'll have to metoo on that. No luck moving installations were it 2k/XP or Win7. But I've moved same linux installation (originally installed debian/potato(?), then repo-shifted to ubuntu/warty) from a HP Vectra (PPro 200) to self-built AMD 1800MP then to current Intel Q6600. And every single time, even though all underlying devices changed, linux just booted up. Sure I did copying from HD to HD to move from older media, but system itself didn't need major hear surgery.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
ReactOS suffers from two huge problems:
1. It's still in alpha stage and it's aiming at a moving target. The idea is it will eventually be broadly equivalent to Windows XP/2003 - I confidently predict that by the time it becomes even remotely stable, we will look upon XP/2003 in much the same way as we look upon NT 3.51 today.
2. Patents. We've seen what happens when a disruptive Linux-based product comes on the market with Android - everybody and his dog is suing Google. The fact that Linux doesn't try to ape Windows - combined with support from the likes of IBM - has kept Linux on the server relatively free from lawsuits (with the obvious exception of SCO) - ReactOS doesn't have anywhere near the level of support from large commercial organisations; I can't imagine many smaller companies wanting to publicly support something that is essentially painting a big target on its back and shouting "Hey, Microsoft! Aim here!".
There's this little project called Firefox that uses Mercurial. You might have heard of them.
uh, you do realize vmware contains a huge amount of software to make that seamless M.S. Windows "physical to virtual" thing happen? Now I myself have to migrate Linux machines into vmware for certain clients, I've found easy if application configuration files understood, Linux device naming and assignment priority are understood, fstab understood, and network plugging within vmware done correctly.
I assume you used the VMWare Converter P2V tool to move your servers, which works very well for Windows and not as well for Linux. VMWare Converter fiddles with the underlying Windows configuration so the image will work well on VMWare.
If you had used a Linux cloning tool, such as Clonezilla, you probably would have had a different experience. Of course, some older distros such as RHEL4/CentOS4 also did stupid things like the initrd would only contain the SCSI driver it needs to boot on specific hardware. Sometimes you would have to go back to the original hardware and tell it to store/load the SCSI driver for VMWare.
Sometimes it pays to have better sys-admins.
offline
factor 966971: 966971
And don't forget that if you decide to upgrade from a single core processor to a multicore processor that there's an incredibly annoying procedure that involves doing a repair installation just to activate the other cores. Which I've had to do in the past and it's not fun, all because MS doesn't feel like providing a reasonable way of doing it.
before the move
1- remove hidden intel drivers.
2- use something like belarc to get you serial number in case
2- sysprep -pnp -mini -reinstall -nosidgen -reseal -forceshutdown
move the drive or clone it to the new machine
upon reboot windows shall detect the new hardware, it may prompt you for the installation files if your hardware differ wildly but that's all, it may also prompt you for your serial for a reactivation but you noted it at step 2.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Github: Your center for decentralized version control!
Or
Github: Your hub for RCS without a hub!
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
In such a case, I do not care for what you make.
Seriously, if Linux won't support it out of the box, I'm not buying it. Got burned before with printers that only work on specific versions of Windows before, not going to have that again.
I only make an exception for 3D drivers and will stop doing that as soon as I can switch to an open driver.
I know what you're talking about as I have heard of doing it in NT4/2K, but I can say for certain that I did not have to do that in either XP or Vista when I upgraded from an Athlon 64 3200+ to an Athlon X2 3800+. Every computer I've worked on since then has been multicore, so I don't know if I just got lucky or what, but it just worked.
Also, at this point I don't think anyone cares anymore, it's unreasonable to expect such an update for old OSes and no one has to worry about this on new builds since only the lowest of the low end netbook/top CPUs are single core anymore (and at least Intel's has Hyperthreading which results in the SMP kernel being used anyways).
Now if you accidentally install a machine with your BIOS set to emulate IDE on the SATA ports and want to switch it to proper AHCI mode, you're in for a world of hurt. Supposedly that can be fixed by a procedure similar to the SMP switch on Win2K, but I never got it to work and have reinstalled two freshly built machines recently because some BIOSes are stupidly set in that mode.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I think you're underestimating sites like Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News, which drive enormous amounts of traffic. Slashdot just isn't as relevant anymore. It is fast becoming a sounding board for fanboys and trolls who think and act a certain way, and the accepted news submissions reflect this. There used to be programming links on the front page and discussions of technical issues.
These days, Slashdot's news cycle is:
* Google is great
* MS/Apple is evil
* Piracy is great
* Capitalism is evil
* Here's a video game or superhero movie review.
* Random Linux kernel news due solely to historical tradition.
This is 100% false.
"Linux is unstable, insecure, and breaks compatibility all the time, but it releases new kernel versions all the time!"
Which is all fine and dandy as long as the move is planned and not "OH MY GOD SMOKE!!!"
It is fast becoming a sounding board for fanboys and trolls who think and act a certain way, and the accepted news submissions reflect this.
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