Will reverse engineering make Third Eye Blind and Oasis get real jobs and go away? If so, where do I sign up?
Seriously, I'm part of an independant radio station, and I play in a local band. Nobody with music that I want to listen to wants to stop me from getting it.
You want copy protection right in the media? What if I BUY a bunch of CDs, and only like 3 songs on each one? I would like to make a "mix CD" for my car, so that I don't have to switch CDs and keep hitting the skip button, increasing my chances of crashing into someone. I'm about to build a computer-based CarMP3 player. Do I not have permission to copy music that I BOUGHT onto it?
I buy Bela Fleck, Autechre (who'd have guessed:), and They Might Be Giants albums because these artists are great and need to be supported. There are plenty of people that do the same, like my friend who didn't pay for Win98 or Quake, but won't let people copy BeOS.
Without copy protection, perhaps people who write bad pop songs will not continue to make more money than teachers.
I've seen some of those people that enjoy paying for software...ugh.
Anyway, UMBC is hardly a "wealthy school district" (It's a state college, in case you didn't know). We're quite a computer-centric school, so there's lots of money to go towards computers (even for the art and music departments computers, though they don't get money for anything else).
The reason that we as an organization can afford to pay for this lame-osity is that we manage to sell a lot of advertising for a school newspaper, equal to 2x the money we get from the SGA. I think that it would be nicer to be able to spend that money our Ad dept. works hard to earn on something else.
I hope this clears it up a bit...sorry for not mentioning that earlier.
We're now installing Quark on the G3s that my school newspaper uses for production work. Each licensed copy of Quark comes with a "dongle", a little piece of plastic that goes between the keyboard and the Mac (sort of like an adaptor that doesn't actually adapt...)
I've seen us buy 3 different OS revisions of MacOS in the past year, for each of the computers. I consider this a travesty...especially considering the very slight changes made between levels (which basically affected our operation not at all, except that it was needed for bug fixes and to keep compatibility with software, like Adobe Photoshop, of which we've also bought more than one revision in a year).
If vendors can already charge you more money every few months for software that still doesn't do everything it's supposed to, imagine how bad things will be if they pass a law like this...then we'll have to pay every month.
With Debian, if I want to use something, I apt-get it or compile it. If I hate it, I delete it. If I like it, I can use it as much as I want, and get bug fixes whenever they come out (much better for security than if I had to wait 2 months for our Purchasing Dept. to clear it!!!). If I have some spare time and feel skilled enough, I can even try to fix any problems with it, or add new features that I would find useful. If I need help, I go to my local newsgroup and have a solution quickly. All of this is free. There are no.5-increment-upgrade licenses to buy, no cheap plastic pieces to break or lose. And it works better than commercial junk!!! And there is none of this crap like "Our tech. support line is a 900 number, but if your product is still under warranty, you'll be refunded the charge". Gee, thanks HP...my school DOESN'T ALLOW DIALING 900 numbers (hmm, I wonder why), even with a long-distance code. Thank heavens your printer hasn't broken yet.
I understand that there is still a need for extremely complex software like Quark, and that free software does not yet fill this niche. However, we have already seen what software companies will do when given an inch...we can't afford to give them 2. At least, as a student organization, WE can't afford to.
If I modify the Linux kernel so that it works with a PCI card that I built in my basement, am I required to give people the source?
NO.
However, if I modify the Linux kernel and give it or sell it to other people, THEN I have to give them the full source along with that. There's no rule that says I have to share--I can keep my modifications to myself, as long as I don't give anyone the binary, either.
This is entirely correct. If you want to modify the kernal, and keep your modifications to yourself, no one can break into your house and force you to help out your neighbor:)
HOWEVER, if they do release the binaries, then they'd be obligated to release the source as well; though, this would be assuming that the NSA has to not break the law...
Also, as someone else pointed out, if they contract this work out to a 3rd party, that party must provide NSA (and whoever else they sell this to, or allow to obtain binaries) with the full source code.
Do you subscribe to BUGTRAQ? Do you know how many more security advisories RH has to put out as a result of their silly GUI tools? Boy, do I ever...and guess what? Our server is about to get a hard disk upgrade, and the new disk has Debian Potato. In fact, all of our machines are moving to Debian; once I used it, I never wanted to go back.
I'm firmly convinced that apt-get is the best thing since SMP. On machines at colleges where the staff changes every 4 years, the package manager MUST NOT SUCK. Also, on my own machines, I can install the base system of 28M, and then compile all other packages myself, so I'm in complete control (if I want more security, for example) Magnificent.
You CANNOT install RedHat without installing X-windows and at least the VGA-16 server; this is, IMO, VERY BROKEN!! And how can I smoothly upgrade from 5.2 to 6.x, so that I can use the latest RPMs of Sendmail and not be an open relay any more. No, that was purely hypothetical...
apt-get update apt-get dist upgrade
Amazing. The Way It Was Meant To Be.
And whoever stuck that extra/rc.d/ in between/etc and all the SysV stuff should be shot. Twice. At point blank range. With an elephant gun. In the head. (sorry, BOFH!)
I got a PCI capture card in a kit with a nice camera (auto-light correction, built-in microphone), and it's got a BT848 chipset--goes for a little over $100 for everything. They also make a "TV Master" card, which I believe has the same chipset.
Note that I haven't tested either of these under Linux YET, because the camera is used full time in a machine that, for ONE STUPID reason (not the webcam), MUST run Windows.
(hint: someone needs to make the linerec:// Winamp plugin available for a linux player (like icecast) for those of us that stream live data...they COULD open source it, since the last update to it was 3 years ago and it's only 30k, how complex could it be?)
Well, what I do is open it up in StarOffice. If they send me a.doc file, then I can either open it in StarOffice or, recent favorite, AbiWord.
I use both Linux and Windows machines as workstations in a newspaper environment, with Linux as the server. All the proprietary junk (Pagemaker files, etc.) takes place on the Mac. We use RTF as our standard file format, but SO can handle most anything people drag in from home on a floppy.
Lastly, why would I write my own OS? I already have Linux! I stopped most of my complaints about Windows when I stopped using it, but unfortunately I still have to support it.
It's true that I'm not much of a coder right now, though someday I hope to be. So, no, I can't do all that much with the source code for the kernel, or Mozilla, or sendmail. But, OTHER PEOPLE CAN, people who are probably many times better coders that I'll ever be (I have more fun as an admin), and if they have the code, then they can fix security holes, broken features, bugs, etc. Which, as an admin, is VERY important to me. If you subscribe to BUGTRAQ, you'll clearly see the difference demonstrated in the length of time Linux fixes arrive after a problem is posted compared to Microsoft ones.
Mozilla is a _free_ browser, open source and all. Why would they even consider basing it on a very non-free toolkit? There's no way.
I realize that you may like CDE (I use XFCE myself), and yes it's sort of inconsiderate to write apps based on QT (though from what I hear, it's also very easy and enjoyable). But GTK is not exactly an obscure/massive toolkit, and it's one that fits more with the spirit of Mozilla than QT, and much more than Motif.
I'm subscribed to a local Linux User's Group mailing list/newsgroup, and I think it's one of the best things in the universe. Whenever I have a question, someone can always help me, and I've always been able to resolve my problems. I do spend a lot of time reading the manual before I ask questions, but I didn't in the beginning...not enough, anyway.
OK, Netscape, SO, and Oracle are binary-only products, true. However, as someone pointed out, there is 32-bit x86 binary emulation under Linux, so you can run these if you really have to.
MySQL and ssh can both be compiled. True, you do have to be one level above "retarded aardvark" to compile MySQL, but not ssh!
./configure make make install
Works on every Linux for me, PPC, x86, and alpha. Anyway, how can you possibly trust someone else to make a "safe" binary of something so critical as SSH? Plus, if you live in the US, you have to use the RSAREF version, so you need to compile anyway...
I've been using ext3 (journaling ext2, still considered quite experimental) for a month now with no problems. I've been using Mozilla for even longer than that, so I guess I'm just that sort of guy:)
In my eyes, BSD seems like the "safe" OS for servers, though this can also translate into it being the "boring" OS for people like me; I take backups and I want the new features now...if the developer says they work for him, OK. Everything always seems to work for me...perhaps it's the "Magic Ass" theory at work...
I'm getting very tired of this "out-of-the-box" mentality. What is it that you want? If you want an OS to be totally secure OOTB, then it's impossible (different crypto for US v. other parts of the world). Plus, the idea of something being ready OOTB is so that less clued people can install it? This is a VERY BAD IDEA...you NEED cluefull people to at least set up the machine and put:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
in a cron job (or install AutoRPM, or whatever), preferably to stay around and admin it, or it's NOT SECURE.
So, OOTB is for desktops then, you say? OK, if I shipped a system to be what I considered secure, it wouldn't have telnet, FTP, etc. enabled (or even present), so a lot of newbies would have a hard time using it. You can either have it be easily usable or secure to start with, take your pick. Desktops run svgalib much of the time anyway, so there goes your security.
Also:
1. The ports system sounds a lot like the Debian package system, which has never let me down. Other than WebGlimpse, I haven't needed to do a single non-package installation (other than compiling SSH, for which I would never use a package)(but it DOES have a Glimpse package! and also htdig!)
2. As Tom said below, linux IS unix; and as YOU said, many linux apps originated in unix.
3. Personal preference: I think that SysV is a much better system than BSD. But that's just me.
The post to which you replied WAS crap, but please get away from this notion of "out of the box"; it really needs to die.
Growl.:)
Re:The #1 reason to pick FreeBSD over Linux
on
FreeBSD 3.4 released
·
· Score: 1
Oh yeah, you get Theo DeRaadt instead. Hrmmm...I still can't decide.
dpkg has an advantage over RPM (not sure about pkg_add) when it comes to dependencies. If you want to install a new package, you tell apt-get to install it, and it figures out what other packages you need. This vs. RPM, which tells you what _files_ you need...though I suppose you may want to install those library files manually anyway, but probably not in most cases.
One thing in particular that annoys me is that it keeps reccommending that "Linux experts should stick with RedHat", because of support. WHAT!!? I don't call myself a Linux "expert"; I've been using it for a little over a year, but I've learned a lot since that whole time has been spent as a sysadmin (if you're the only one around, that's how it goes) for a >100 userbase. I've NEVER called tech support; I never even really though about doing it. All the info you need can be easily gotten from HOWTO's, included documentation, and mailing lists. Most things can be done by using the comments in the config files! PLUS, if you need support, VALinux gives the best support anyway, and it's distro-agnostic. This whole angle was utterly stupid, IMO.
The only problem with installing Debian is that they want you to use dselect. I can't for the life of me figure out why. Capt is several billion times better than dselect; it's totally intuitive, and has a MUCH nicer interface. The most difficult (if you can call it that) part is getting your FTP sources correct; after that, everything is a cakewalk.
Also, they seemed to ignore that RedHat has things like incoming telnet connections enabled by default. The defaults in RedHat frighten me, if it's supposed to be for server use; Debian's defaults are MUCH better. RedHat does allow you to switch to MD5 passwords at installation time, but this operation is so trivial (edit 2 files and put "md5" in them, oh no) that it certainly doesn't make up for everything else. Personally, I would not reccommend RedHat as a server platform. It's got a lot of good things going for it, and I use it at home...but the servers are Debian.
I do admire things about each distro, such as Slackware's "backwards compatibility", and at the other end, Corel's SAMBA interface. And I make my reccommendations from my own (limited) experiences and observations. However, this review went about things the wrong way in a big way (IMHO). We really need to de-emphasize this idea of phone support, if we want people to really know what Linux is all about. It's about a community, helping one another at LUG meetings and on email lists; getting your own club along with the OS is part of the charm.
While the typical home user probably doesn't know enough to care about a buffer overflow exploit in syslogd, they DO want the latest cool software. They want to be able to install it easily, with the shiny GUI-front-end package manager, or a simple command. That's where Debian wins.
Got RedHat 5.2? There's lots of RPMs of new software that you can't use, because they're compiled for glibc2.1, or for newer versions of libraries, the RPMs for which are only compiled for glibc2.1....
Right, so you use the "upgrade" feature. And everything probably works. But you still have to go find and download the packages yourself, and worry about any dependencies yourself. Plus, you have to figure out how to configure the package after you install it.
Debian takes care of dependencies for you, gets the packages for you, asks you configuration questions as the packages are installed, and cleans up the package files for you. Also, they have a.deb for almost all software locally, so it's easy to find what you need. Capt and gnome-apt are super-easy to use. When you want to upgrade your whole dist, the only thing you have to do is change "slink" to "potato" (for example) in your FTP list, and:
apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade
Machine is upgraded while it's running, and again, configuration questions are asked on the fly. Much more sane, IMHO.
What I'm saying is that the article focused on the present, and immediate future. It didn't mention what would happen if you want a new package a year after you install Linux. That's an important thing to know--we want to prove that Linux is better than Windows, and knowing which distros do the best job of upgrading without reformatting (something which is fraught with peril in the Windows world) seems very important.
As a RedHat-only person for a while, I've recently begun using Debian. It's GREAT.
Basically, you give it a pool of FTP sites, from which you want to choose packages. When you want to install a package, you tell it. If there are any dependent packages not installed, it asks your permission, then installs them. As packages are installed, it asks you questions so that they'll be configured and ready-to-run.
I use the unstable tree, and it's not:) For the most part, "unstable" right now means "sometimes dependencies might be wrong, oops". I've never gotten a broken package, or had any trouble using potato rather than slink.
apt is indeed incredibly powerful. I, for one, think that console-apt is DONE. It does everything I need it to, AT THE CONSOLE, with what is (to me) a great interface.
We're using Windows and Linux workstations at a college newspaper. Now, most of the users are English or Theatre majors. However, some people clearly prefer the Linux workstations, because nothing ever randomly locks up, it's faster to log in, etc. These machines are faster than their Windows bretheren, though the Windows machines have 2X the CPU speed and 4X the RAM. Also, I can offer some apps on the Linux boxes (such as IRC) that are anti-multi-user on Windows, because Linux forces them to behave themselves.
Try letting your next door neighbor install Windows. They can't. Trust me, I've worked in a support shop, and almost no one can actually manage to install Windows98. Also, DAMN few people can install a modem correctly under Windows.
Installing software under Debian is TOO EASY. Gnome-apt or Capt gives you a list of all available packages, sorted in various ways, with short descriptions of what each one does. You choose what you want installed, Debian handles any dependencies for you (with your permission), and asks any questions that are needed to configure the package(s). And NO REBOOT!
I suppose that when you count uptime, you aren't including the fact that you have to reboot once per week because MS has come out with a new security patch for IE. Are you on BUGTRAQ? You should be.
All of my RedHat workstations automatically download and install the latest security updates for me, at 4am each morning. All I have to type on the (Debian) servers is:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
And I get the choice of installing the latest versions of all my installed packages. WITHOUT rebooting, or even disrupting service at all.
And, I did NOT choose Windows. I always find some way to leave the 'doze machines in the care of someone else, because my time as a support tech was MORE than enough. Windows is an awful OS, and it is NOT the most intuitive interface in the world. In order to keep our machines from randomly breaking, we use Ghost to deploy a hard disk image once per week (same as reformatting, reinstalling everything). Skip a week? Printing WILL break. That's what happens when you have a room full of machines that dozens of people use every day. It's not nearly as bad with the single-user office machines, but it's still bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Will reverse engineering make Third Eye Blind and Oasis get real jobs and go away? If so, where do I sign up?
Seriously, I'm part of an independant radio station, and I play in a local band. Nobody with music that I want to listen to wants to stop me from getting it.
You want copy protection right in the media? What if I BUY a bunch of CDs, and only like 3 songs on each one? I would like to make a "mix CD" for my car, so that I don't have to switch CDs and keep hitting the skip button, increasing my chances of crashing into someone. I'm about to build a computer-based CarMP3 player. Do I not have permission to copy music that I BOUGHT onto it?
I buy Bela Fleck, Autechre (who'd have guessed
Without copy protection, perhaps people who write bad pop songs will not continue to make more money than teachers.
I've seen some of those people that enjoy paying for software...ugh.
Anyway, UMBC is hardly a "wealthy school district" (It's a state college, in case you didn't know). We're quite a computer-centric school, so there's lots of money to go towards computers (even for the art and music departments computers, though they don't get money for anything else).
The reason that we as an organization can afford to pay for this lame-osity is that we manage to sell a lot of advertising for a school newspaper, equal to 2x the money we get from the SGA. I think that it would be nicer to be able to spend that money our Ad dept. works hard to earn on something else.
I hope this clears it up a bit...sorry for not mentioning that earlier.
We're now installing Quark on the G3s that my school newspaper uses for production work. Each licensed copy of Quark comes with a "dongle", a little piece of plastic that goes between the keyboard and the Mac (sort of like an adaptor that doesn't actually adapt...)
.5-increment-upgrade licenses to buy, no cheap plastic pieces to break or lose. And it works better than commercial junk!!! And there is none of this crap like "Our tech. support line is a 900 number, but if your product is still under warranty, you'll be refunded the charge". Gee, thanks HP...my school DOESN'T ALLOW DIALING 900 numbers (hmm, I wonder why), even with a long-distance code. Thank heavens your printer hasn't broken yet.
I've seen us buy 3 different OS revisions of MacOS in the past year, for each of the computers. I consider this a travesty...especially considering the very slight changes made between levels (which basically affected our operation not at all, except that it was needed for bug fixes and to keep compatibility with software, like Adobe Photoshop, of which we've also bought more than one revision in a year).
If vendors can already charge you more money every few months for software that still doesn't do everything it's supposed to, imagine how bad things will be if they pass a law like this...then we'll have to pay every month.
With Debian, if I want to use something, I apt-get it or compile it. If I hate it, I delete it. If I like it, I can use it as much as I want, and get bug fixes whenever they come out (much better for security than if I had to wait 2 months for our Purchasing Dept. to clear it!!!). If I have some spare time and feel skilled enough, I can even try to fix any problems with it, or add new features that I would find useful. If I need help, I go to my local newsgroup and have a solution quickly. All of this is free. There are no
I understand that there is still a need for extremely complex software like Quark, and that free software does not yet fill this niche. However, we have already seen what software companies will do when given an inch...we can't afford to give them 2. At least, as a student organization, WE can't afford to.
If I modify the Linux kernel so that it works with a PCI card that I built in my basement, am I required to give people the source?
NO.
However, if I modify the Linux kernel and give it or sell it to other people, THEN I have to give them the full source along with that. There's no rule that says I have to share--I can keep my modifications to myself, as long as I don't give anyone the binary, either.
Of course, it would be Really Nice of them...
This is entirely correct. If you want to modify the kernal, and keep your modifications to yourself, no one can break into your house and force you to help out your neighbor :)
HOWEVER, if they do release the binaries, then they'd be obligated to release the source as well; though, this would be assuming that the NSA has to not break the law...
Also, as someone else pointed out, if they contract this work out to a 3rd party, that party must provide NSA (and whoever else they sell this to, or allow to obtain binaries) with the full source code.
I like your style :)
/rc.d/ in between /etc and all the SysV stuff should be shot. Twice. At point blank range. With an elephant gun. In the head. (sorry, BOFH!)
Do you subscribe to BUGTRAQ? Do you know how many more security advisories RH has to put out as a result of their silly GUI tools? Boy, do I ever...and guess what? Our server is about to get a hard disk upgrade, and the new disk has Debian Potato. In fact, all of our machines are moving to Debian; once I used it, I never wanted to go back.
I'm firmly convinced that apt-get is the best thing since SMP. On machines at colleges where the staff changes every 4 years, the package manager MUST NOT SUCK. Also, on my own machines, I can install the base system of 28M, and then compile all other packages myself, so I'm in complete control (if I want more security, for example) Magnificent.
You CANNOT install RedHat without installing X-windows and at least the VGA-16 server; this is, IMO, VERY BROKEN!! And how can I smoothly upgrade from 5.2 to 6.x, so that I can use the latest RPMs of Sendmail and not be an open relay any more. No, that was purely hypothetical...
apt-get update
apt-get dist upgrade
Amazing. The Way It Was Meant To Be.
And whoever stuck that extra
Try:
http://www.phoebemicro.com
I got a PCI capture card in a kit with a nice camera (auto-light correction, built-in microphone), and it's got a BT848 chipset--goes for a little over $100 for everything. They also make a "TV Master" card, which I believe has the same chipset.
Note that I haven't tested either of these under Linux YET, because the camera is used full time in a machine that, for ONE STUPID reason (not the webcam), MUST run Windows.
(hint: someone needs to make the linerec:// Winamp plugin available for a linux player (like icecast) for those of us that stream live data...they COULD open source it, since the last update to it was 3 years ago and it's only 30k, how complex could it be?)
is a part of the kernel, at least the drivers are. Check out any recent kernel, I'm using 2.2.13 (with ext3 patches!)
Well, what I do is open it up in StarOffice. If they send me a
I use both Linux and Windows machines as workstations in a newspaper environment, with Linux as the server. All the proprietary junk (Pagemaker files, etc.) takes place on the Mac. We use RTF as our standard file format, but SO can handle most anything people drag in from home on a floppy.
Lastly, why would I write my own OS? I already have Linux! I stopped most of my complaints about Windows when I stopped using it, but unfortunately I still have to support it.
It's true that I'm not much of a coder right now, though someday I hope to be. So, no, I can't do all that much with the source code for the kernel, or Mozilla, or sendmail. But, OTHER PEOPLE CAN, people who are probably many times better coders that I'll ever be (I have more fun as an admin), and if they have the code, then they can fix security holes, broken features, bugs, etc. Which, as an admin, is VERY important to me. If you subscribe to BUGTRAQ, you'll clearly see the difference demonstrated in the length of time Linux fixes arrive after a problem is posted compared to Microsoft ones.
Mozilla is a _free_ browser, open source and all. Why would they even consider basing it on a very non-free toolkit? There's no way.
I realize that you may like CDE (I use XFCE myself), and yes it's sort of inconsiderate to write apps based on QT (though from what I hear, it's also very easy and enjoyable). But GTK is not exactly an obscure/massive toolkit, and it's one that fits more with the spirit of Mozilla than QT, and much more than Motif.
I'm subscribed to a local Linux User's Group mailing list/newsgroup, and I think it's one of the best things in the universe. Whenever I have a question, someone can always help me, and I've always been able to resolve my problems. I do spend a lot of time reading the manual before I ask questions, but I didn't in the beginning...not enough, anyway.
Dear Lord!
OK, Netscape, SO, and Oracle are binary-only products, true. However, as someone pointed out, there is 32-bit x86 binary emulation under Linux, so you can run these if you really have to.
MySQL and ssh can both be compiled. True, you do have to be one level above "retarded aardvark" to compile MySQL, but not ssh!
./configure
make
make install
Works on every Linux for me, PPC, x86, and alpha. Anyway, how can you possibly trust someone else to make a "safe" binary of something so critical as SSH? Plus, if you live in the US, you have to use the RSAREF version, so you need to compile anyway...
A bit of effort, please...
I've been using ext3 (journaling ext2, still considered quite experimental) for a month now with no problems. I've been using Mozilla for even longer than that, so I guess I'm just that sort of guy :)
In my eyes, BSD seems like the "safe" OS for servers, though this can also translate into it being the "boring" OS for people like me; I take backups and I want the new features now...if the developer says they work for him, OK. Everything always seems to work for me...perhaps it's the "Magic Ass" theory at work...
I'm getting very tired of this "out-of-the-box" mentality. What is it that you want? If you want an OS to be totally secure OOTB, then it's impossible (different crypto for US v. other parts of the world). Plus, the idea of something being ready OOTB is so that less clued people can install it? This is a VERY BAD IDEA...you NEED cluefull people to at least set up the machine and put:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
in a cron job (or install AutoRPM, or whatever), preferably to stay around and admin it, or it's NOT SECURE.
So, OOTB is for desktops then, you say? OK, if I shipped a system to be what I considered secure, it wouldn't have telnet, FTP, etc. enabled (or even present), so a lot of newbies would have a hard time using it. You can either have it be easily usable or secure to start with, take your pick. Desktops run svgalib much of the time anyway, so there goes your security.
Also:
1. The ports system sounds a lot like the Debian package system, which has never let me down. Other than WebGlimpse, I haven't needed to do a single non-package installation (other than compiling SSH, for which I would never use a package)(but it DOES have a Glimpse package! and also htdig!)
2. As Tom said below, linux IS unix; and as YOU said, many linux apps originated in unix.
3. Personal preference: I think that SysV is a much better system than BSD. But that's just me.
The post to which you replied WAS crap, but please get away from this notion of "out of the box"; it really needs to die.
Growl.
Oh yeah, you get Theo DeRaadt instead. Hrmmm...I still can't decide.
dpkg has an advantage over RPM (not sure about pkg_add) when it comes to dependencies. If you want to install a new package, you tell apt-get to install it, and it figures out what other packages you need. This vs. RPM, which tells you what _files_ you need...though I suppose you may want to install those library files manually anyway, but probably not in most cases.
with an awful lot of this review.
One thing in particular that annoys me is that it keeps reccommending that "Linux experts should stick with RedHat", because of support. WHAT!!? I don't call myself a Linux "expert"; I've been using it for a little over a year, but I've learned a lot since that whole time has been spent as a sysadmin (if you're the only one around, that's how it goes) for a >100 userbase. I've NEVER called tech support; I never even really though about doing it. All the info you need can be easily gotten from HOWTO's, included documentation, and mailing lists. Most things can be done by using the comments in the config files! PLUS, if you need support, VALinux gives the best support anyway, and it's distro-agnostic. This whole angle was utterly stupid, IMO.
The only problem with installing Debian is that they want you to use dselect. I can't for the life of me figure out why. Capt is several billion times better than dselect; it's totally intuitive, and has a MUCH nicer interface. The most difficult (if you can call it that) part is getting your FTP sources correct; after that, everything is a cakewalk.
Also, they seemed to ignore that RedHat has things like incoming telnet connections enabled by default. The defaults in RedHat frighten me, if it's supposed to be for server use; Debian's defaults are MUCH better. RedHat does allow you to switch to MD5 passwords at installation time, but this operation is so trivial (edit 2 files and put "md5" in them, oh no) that it certainly doesn't make up for everything else. Personally, I would not reccommend RedHat as a server platform. It's got a lot of good things going for it, and I use it at home...but the servers are Debian.
I do admire things about each distro, such as Slackware's "backwards compatibility", and at the other end, Corel's SAMBA interface. And I make my reccommendations from my own (limited) experiences and observations. However, this review went about things the wrong way in a big way (IMHO). We really need to de-emphasize this idea of phone support, if we want people to really know what Linux is all about. It's about a community, helping one another at LUG meetings and on email lists; getting your own club along with the OS is part of the charm.
While the typical home user probably doesn't know enough to care about a buffer overflow exploit in syslogd, they DO want the latest cool software. They want to be able to install it easily, with the shiny GUI-front-end package manager, or a simple command. That's where Debian wins.
.deb for almost all software locally, so it's easy to find what you need. Capt and gnome-apt are super-easy to use. When you want to upgrade your whole dist, the only thing you have to do is change "slink" to "potato" (for example) in your FTP list, and:
Got RedHat 5.2? There's lots of RPMs of new software that you can't use, because they're compiled for glibc2.1, or for newer versions of libraries, the RPMs for which are only compiled for glibc2.1....
Right, so you use the "upgrade" feature. And everything probably works. But you still have to go find and download the packages yourself, and worry about any dependencies yourself. Plus, you have to figure out how to configure the package after you install it.
Debian takes care of dependencies for you, gets the packages for you, asks you configuration questions as the packages are installed, and cleans up the package files for you. Also, they have a
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
Machine is upgraded while it's running, and again, configuration questions are asked on the fly. Much more sane, IMHO.
What I'm saying is that the article focused on the present, and immediate future. It didn't mention what would happen if you want a new package a year after you install Linux. That's an important thing to know--we want to prove that Linux is better than Windows, and knowing which distros do the best job of upgrading without reformatting (something which is fraught with peril in the Windows world) seems very important.
--Ray
As a RedHat-only person for a while, I've recently begun using Debian. It's GREAT.
:) For the most part, "unstable" right now means "sometimes dependencies might be wrong, oops". I've never gotten a broken package, or had any trouble using potato rather than slink.
Basically, you give it a pool of FTP sites, from which you want to choose packages. When you want to install a package, you tell it. If there are any dependent packages not installed, it asks your permission, then installs them. As packages are installed, it asks you questions so that they'll be configured and ready-to-run.
I use the unstable tree, and it's not
apt is indeed incredibly powerful. I, for one, think that console-apt is DONE. It does everything I need it to, AT THE CONSOLE, with what is (to me) a great interface.
Hold on just a minute.
We're using Windows and Linux workstations at a college newspaper. Now, most of the users are English or Theatre majors. However, some people clearly prefer the Linux workstations, because nothing ever randomly locks up, it's faster to log in, etc. These machines are faster than their Windows bretheren, though the Windows machines have 2X the CPU speed and 4X the RAM. Also, I can offer some apps on the Linux boxes (such as IRC) that are anti-multi-user on Windows, because Linux forces them to behave themselves.
Try letting your next door neighbor install Windows. They can't. Trust me, I've worked in a support shop, and almost no one can actually manage to install Windows98. Also, DAMN few people can install a modem correctly under Windows.
Installing software under Debian is TOO EASY. Gnome-apt or Capt gives you a list of all available packages, sorted in various ways, with short descriptions of what each one does. You choose what you want installed, Debian handles any dependencies for you (with your permission), and asks any questions that are needed to configure the package(s). And NO REBOOT!
I suppose that when you count uptime, you aren't including the fact that you have to reboot once per week because MS has come out with a new security patch for IE. Are you on BUGTRAQ? You should be.
All of my RedHat workstations automatically download and install the latest security updates for me, at 4am each morning. All I have to type on the (Debian) servers is:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
And I get the choice of installing the latest versions of all my installed packages. WITHOUT rebooting, or even disrupting service at all.
And, I did NOT choose Windows. I always find some way to leave the 'doze machines in the care of someone else, because my time as a support tech was MORE than enough. Windows is an awful OS, and it is NOT the most intuitive interface in the world. In order to keep our machines from randomly breaking, we use Ghost to deploy a hard disk image once per week (same as reformatting, reinstalling everything). Skip a week? Printing WILL break. That's what happens when you have a room full of machines that dozens of people use every day. It's not nearly as bad with the single-user office machines, but it's still bad.