Linux will never, ever achieve dominanace if every distributor has to maintain its own packages of every popular application demended by its users.
Uh, I thought there was public consensus on this that packaging software is the whole point of the "distribution" concept! What is it you think distributions are supposed to do, if not this?!
People will not switch to Linux if you either have to live with the packages maintained by a single organisation or be TRULY "hackerish" ahd compile parts of the system from source
I don't think compiling from source is a hack at all. Maybe this is not what you meant by "hackerish"...
A distribution that advertises that it supports multiple packaging formats is telling you two things:
1) We don't put enough time into our packages to make our package system fully functional.
2) We, and our users, approach the package system in a hackish way.
Yes, Debian has 'alien', but they're not really advertising it, nor would I reccomend using it except in extreme circumstances (e.g. no source.tar.gz). That these guys advertise this compatibility speaks very ill about their distro, IMO.
Spoken like a guy who grew up in the age of relatively quiet drives. Back in the day I used computers that sounded like a bowl of rice crispies in milk when they swapped. If the paging got really loud, well, they drowned out conversation with their banshee-like noise.
And the video card in that computer is... wait for it... 3DFX Voodoo Banshee. It has so little vram though that "swapping" is kinda a misnomer.
That's great if it works for you. I was cheesed of this morning when I wanted some package (maybe OpenAL, maybe GtkGLArea, can't remember), and it wasn't anywhere to be found on any of those 4 cds.:(
But I wasn't as happy with the memory consumption. About 230 MBs of RAM were used on a clean, default load (according to "free", just after the OS loaded -- no major cashing has occured yet). I find this requirement huge, it means that computers with 256 MBs of RAM will swap heavily after only a few minutes of using the system (e.g. after opening Firefox and Evolution or OOo alone).
I'm not sure about the memory-bloat measuring technique he's using. I just installed FC4 on a 128mb machine, and after boot and gnome login, only 48K of swap is in use - that's nothing! According to his supposition I should be swapping like a banshee already. I think his RAM-measuring technique is not accurate.
I haven't really gotten to use FC4 much yet, and that's because the installation is bloated and kept me up late last night! In this day and age of net connectivity, its just stupid to force people to d/l four CDs. Back in the day with RH 7 you could get away with just downloading the 1st CD, but my install (mostly for C development) ended up spanning all four CDs. When the limiting reagent in your install time with the CD-Write speed of your burners, that's a warning sign that your distro is doing something a little wonky.
But toys actually do things and have moving parts.
Miniatures just sit there and look inert.
I shake my heads at my friends who are into minis for "the realism". What's so realistic about a little statue, when, say, Warcraft 3 has animated whipper-snappers running around and yelling things, dynamic eyepoint, deformable geometry, etc?
3d scanning and printing will make Miniatures Wargaming a much more active hobby. Imagine, instead of waiting for Games Workshop to sell you some incredibly overpriced Space Marine, you can just copy your buddy's. Have a cool "kitbash" (homemade modification)? Publish it and let others download it. This is why I see the current business model for Games Workshop and all the other minitures companies radically changing by 2015. It will become a much more fan-centric hobby.
Again, I'm new in BSD-land, but my impression is that if I install a bzflag package (a game), there's not some hard-working bsd guru out there pouring over the sources to bzflag, looking for buffer overruns. I have been known to get Debian security alerts for games from time to time, from which I infer there is some Debian guru pouring over the sources looking for security holes. Obviously, Debian is way to huge for even an infinate number of these gurus to get this right, so they're necessarily going to stretch thin.
When I was building my new desktop Debian box, it had all-fancy-pants on-board Nvidia sound chips that theoretically might work if you were Linus Torvlads and you called in some favors and were really focused. I tried for a few hours, then ordered a $9 sound blaster off of eBay. When I slotted the sound blaster, sound just worked. I think that was a good money/time trade.
But that's not the end of the story. A few kernel recompiles later, sound stopped working. The module was still loading okay, everything seemed fine, just: no noises. It turned out that someone had made the nvidia on-board fancy-pants card now autodetect, and it had kicked the soundblaster out of sound-slot-0, so I had to re-plug my speakers into a different hole.
Wow, can you imagine, when we had 0% television, we fought ourselves free from Britian, abolished slavery, created a inclusive democracy, and defeated fascism.
Since we got 100% broadcast television, we haven't won any war that's gone on more than 12 months, and our electorate is getting increasingly fuzzy on the theory of evolution.
Am I the only one seeing a relationship here? We should pray for all TV to die. We should wish TV on our enemies.
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Has java ever been successfully used as a device driver on Windows, Mac, or Linux?
The entire idea is just silly to me. Lets install apache from a .deb, then install mod perl from an rpm from a different distro. That'll work great!
Ditto cups, gnome, kde, x.org, you name it, any large package that's factored into small parts by distributions is just begging for trouble.
Better to have one distro that gets it right.
(and, no, I didn't read the article, and your post _is_ informative, btw)
A distribution that advertises that it supports multiple packaging formats is telling you two things:
1) We don't put enough time into our packages to make our package system fully functional.
2) We, and our users, approach the package system in a hackish way.
Yes, Debian has 'alien', but they're not really advertising it, nor would I reccomend using it except in extreme circumstances (e.g. no source.tar.gz). That these guys advertise this compatibility speaks very ill about their distro, IMO.
Grandparent is saying $12,000 is the subsidized price. The true cost is higher.
Great! I can't wait to "employ" the "core" of certain Ubuntu community members!
Spoken like a guy who grew up in the age of relatively quiet drives. Back in the day I used computers that sounded like a bowl of rice crispies in milk when they swapped. If the paging got really loud, well, they drowned out conversation with their banshee-like noise.
... wait for it ... 3DFX Voodoo Banshee. It has so little vram though that "swapping" is kinda a misnomer.
And the video card in that computer is
That's great if it works for you. I was cheesed of this morning when I wanted some package (maybe OpenAL, maybe GtkGLArea, can't remember), and it wasn't anywhere to be found on any of those 4 cds. :(
I'm not sure about the memory-bloat measuring technique he's using. I just installed FC4 on a 128mb machine, and after boot and gnome login, only 48K of swap is in use - that's nothing! According to his supposition I should be swapping like a banshee already. I think his RAM-measuring technique is not accurate.
I haven't really gotten to use FC4 much yet, and that's because the installation is bloated and kept me up late last night! In this day and age of net connectivity, its just stupid to force people to d/l four CDs. Back in the day with RH 7 you could get away with just downloading the 1st CD, but my install (mostly for C development) ended up spanning all four CDs. When the limiting reagent in your install time with the CD-Write speed of your burners, that's a warning sign that your distro is doing something a little wonky.
Good point.
But toys actually do things and have moving parts.
Miniatures just sit there and look inert.
I shake my heads at my friends who are into minis for "the realism". What's so realistic about a little statue, when, say, Warcraft 3 has animated whipper-snappers running around and yelling things, dynamic eyepoint, deformable geometry, etc?
Hm, except fans can create decent minis on their own. I bet I know 6 people who could turn out a decent Paneuropean Jaeger Heavy Tank or a USS Iowa.
Also, all that stuff up till now, didn't come with a EULA because the companies didn't follow computer graphics. Heh.
3d scanning and printing will make Miniatures Wargaming a much more active hobby. Imagine, instead of waiting for Games Workshop to sell you some incredibly overpriced Space Marine, you can just copy your buddy's. Have a cool "kitbash" (homemade modification)? Publish it and let others download it. This is why I see the current business model for Games Workshop and all the other minitures companies radically changing by 2015. It will become a much more fan-centric hobby.
Again, I'm new in BSD-land, but my impression is that if I install a bzflag package (a game), there's not some hard-working bsd guru out there pouring over the sources to bzflag, looking for buffer overruns. I have been known to get Debian security alerts for games from time to time, from which I infer there is some Debian guru pouring over the sources looking for security holes. Obviously, Debian is way to huge for even an infinate number of these gurus to get this right, so they're necessarily going to stretch thin.
My impression is they just ignore it. But then, I'm just a noob.
But their package compilation system looks a lot like:
tar -zxf foo.tar.gz
cd foo
make
make-install
That doesn't seem like a distribution-maintained package at all.
A few _days_? Ouch.
When I was building my new desktop Debian box, it had all-fancy-pants on-board Nvidia sound chips that theoretically might work if you were Linus Torvlads and you called in some favors and were really focused. I tried for a few hours, then ordered a $9 sound blaster off of eBay. When I slotted the sound blaster, sound just worked. I think that was a good money/time trade.
But that's not the end of the story. A few kernel recompiles later, sound stopped working. The module was still loading okay, everything seemed fine, just: no noises. It turned out that someone had made the nvidia on-board fancy-pants card now autodetect, and it had kicked the soundblaster out of sound-slot-0, so I had to re-plug my speakers into a different hole.
Anyone wanna buy a soundblaster?
I even bought that game, one of only three such games I bought for my ][e, and I still failed to draw the connection.
Great writeup! After an entire paragraph I have no clue what this story is about, Zonk!
Hm, so if they licenced to be embedded in the PS3...
Darth Bill: Join me, and together we can rule the universe as Father and Sony
All your inner pain is caused by slashdot dupes. Taco: guilt and pain have a purpose, but learn to control them. A lesson to be told.
I agree that there's no provable causal relationship between TV and our post-Hiroshima military performance.
: (
Wow, can you imagine, when we had 0% television, we fought ourselves free from Britian, abolished slavery, created a inclusive democracy, and defeated fascism.
Since we got 100% broadcast television, we haven't won any war that's gone on more than 12 months, and our electorate is getting increasingly fuzzy on the theory of evolution.
Am I the only one seeing a relationship here? We should pray for all TV to die. We should wish TV on our enemies.
When their latency to battle.net gets too high, I wonder if they'll suddenly start to understand why Freecraft is a good thing?
When their latency to battle.net gets too high, I wonder if they'll suddenly start to understand why battle.net is a good thing?