Re:Concise guide to Linux on the deskop for non-te
on
Linux Desktop Guide
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, after following steps 1,2,3,5 and 6, my Dad's laptop still: -didn't have a working modem -didn't have a working wireless card -didn't have working bluetooth -displayed at 640x460 in 256 colours Software I then had installed amounted to: -notepad -wordpad -paint -windows media player -internet explorer -outlook express
After installing Mandrake 10.0 on it: -modem didn't work (winmodem, par for the course - he doesn't need it now so I haven't installed the vendor's linmodem driver yet but it does work onmy laptop of similar model) -wireless didn't work (Intel Pro Wireless 2200) -displayed at 1600x1200 instead of 1680x1050 (so you had to scroll the screen to see the whole desktop). -bluetooth did work (after installing kdebluetooth from the CDs it was immediately useable)
Software I had installed amounted to: -Full office suite -development environment (my dad develops a bit of software in C++/OpenGL) -Full Tex editing environment -Choice of better internet browsers -Choice of better mail client with built-in spam detection -mathematical software (Octave etc) -choices of multimedia software -
To get all devices working under Windows XP I had to load all the driver CDs HP shipped with the machine.
To get the remaining hardware working under linux I had to download a driver for the wireless card and adjust the screen resolution.
So, it looks like linux actually wins with your instructions (and this is pretty recent hardware).
Now, my Dad is technically inclined, but doesn't really have much Linux experience.
This harks back to my days with Red Hat 5 and Mdk 6. Without trying to start a flamewar, I really think a Debian based system with Synaptic setup for updating is the best solution.
At the time of RH5 and Mandrake 6, apt was only available in testing, and synaptic did not exist. A year or so later, Mandrake had urpmi and MandrakeUpdate and rpmdrake (when apt was in a stable release but there was still no synaptic).
By now, Fedora has yum...
Catch up with the times (or, maybe you are running Debian stable and still think KDE-3.0 is the latest and greatest;-)).
Use drakperm (not draksec) for permissions
on
Linux Desktop Guide
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· Score: 1
Another example is the Mandrake security center... it has several "uneditable" settings. For example I need the/proc tree to be world-readable.. impossible to change without either a) lowering security level as a whole or b) edit the "default settings" config file in some hard-to-find location.
This is a file permissions issue, please use drakperm to have your own settings on/proc or any other file/directory. There is no need to edit the default settings config (if you do want to edit it yourself, use/etc/security/msec/perm.local).
So, it seems your example is bad - care to provide another one? BTW, you can't edit all settings in Windows either, that's why there's a registry editor...
And, instead of "writing it myself", you can always file bug reports for the development and stable releases (bugs really do get addressed).
Re:Concise guide to Linux on the deskop for non-te
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, after following steps 1,2,3,5 and 6, my Dad's laptop still: -didn't have a working modem -didn't have a working wireless card -didn't have working bluetooth -displayed at 640x460 in 256 colours Software I then had installed amounted to: -notepad -wordpad -paint -windows media player -internet explorer -outlook express
After installing Mandrake 10.0 on it: -modem didn't work (winmodem, par for the course) -wireless didn't work (Intel Pro Wireless 2200) -displayed at 1600x1200 instead of 1680x1050 (so you had to scroll the screen to see the whole desktop). -bluetooth did work (after installing kdebluetooth from the CDs it was immediately useable)
Software I had installed amounted to: -Full office suite -development environment (my dad develops a bit of software in C++/OpenGL) -Full Tex editing environment -Choice of better internet browsers -Choice of better mail client with built-in spam detection -mathematical software (Octave etc) -choices of multimedia software -
To get all devices working under Windows XP I had to load all the driver CDs HP shipped with the machine.
To get the remaining hardware working under linux I had to download a driver for the wireless card and adjust the screen resolution.
So, it looks like linux actually wins with your instructions (and this is pretty recent hardware).
Now, my Dad is technically inclined, but doesn't really have much Linux experience.
What this is describing is a proxy process (it very specifically says process) running as root/admin which accepts RPCs (remote procedure calls) for privileged operations, and then makes the call as root, on behalf of the user.
That's not what su or sudo do
But, it is what dbus does... and it could even be what ssh does... (ssh root@localhost 'rm -Rf/tmp').
I think you might be missing the point of my posts, and the point of the story, which was Fedora deciding on urpmi as their new package front end.
No, it was just that someone ported urpmi to Fedora, and made packages available, as part of a project to bring some of the really nice features on Mandrake to other RPM-based distros.
YaST proved (to me) that it could handle some RPMs better than the distro the RPMs were created for.
My point is that you must have been doing something *really* wrong, because I have built hundreds of packages on many different machines, installed them on many machines via urpmi or just by double-clicking on the package, which required a number of other packages to be installed, with no problems.
BTW - YaST was just GPL'd by SUSE (although it's not available for download yet). Try it and you'll see why they hung on to it so long.
No thanks, I don't want a config tool that forces you to use it for everything you do, that does nothing more than the tools I already have that allow me to do anything I like manually without clobbering my changes.
Basically there aren't prebuilt packages for Mandrake for some relatively common libraries and programs, either officially or unofficially.
Well, then, if you have made a package, upload it to incoming, send a mail to cooker, and someone will check it and upload it.
But, in the meantime, change to the directory above the one that holds your RPMS (ie the result of 'rpm --eval %_rpmdir') and run 'genhdlist.', and then run 'urpmi.addmedia myrpms file://`pwd` with hdlist.cz', and you will be able to urpmi them, or urpmi anything that depends on them. And, if you don't want to genhdlist all the time, use a virtual medium instead.
I do this, and I do it on a remote build cluster, and I can urpmi any package I build anywhere.
That or the name of the package for Mandrake was not the standard name of the library/program.
File a bug on the package that has the missing provides (the name can be different, but it should provide the generic name, like openssl-devel).
The other issue, the one about being able to write source RPMS (.src.rpm files) that work in several distros, has to do with the different distros standarizing on the RPM macros, file naming conventions, version schemes and so on. It is all in the Back End. It would be great of course, and it would save a lot of duplicated efforts for the different distributions.
If you RTFA, that's what this project is about. But, first we need a working urpmi and slbd...
Until linux apps start shipping as staticaly built to avoid the dependancy hell that is linux right now... security vulnerabilities in a widely used library will only require updates to that library, not every application that uses it (statically).
Some mandrake contributors are already looking at this - but the problem is knowing which SRPM will provide which "provides", and thus knowing which package to build.
But, there are some other more important things to do right now - this will most likely have to wait until after 10.1 (we have enough other features to implement).
The problem is that updating a whole desktop is not really feasible, as there could be some issues with applications breaking, or conflicts which haven't been fully tested (but are before the next release). For example, one of the Mandrake contributors made GNOME2.6 packages available for Mandrake 10.0, but then you had to live with wxWindows (and bittorrent-gui) not working.
However, you will find there are lots of updated packages for Mandrake 10.0, some available via the MandrakeClub, some available on the public mirrors.
Anyway, you may rather ask yourself why a newbie user would want to upgrade from kde-3.2.2 to 3.2.3 (and "because I wanted the latest" doesn't count).
Re:No, we still don't have cross-distro rpms
on
URPMI For Fedora Core 2
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· Score: 2, Informative
Unfortunately mandrake has chosen to rename their core system packages and libraries in such a fashion that a redhat rpm won't recognize them as dependencies and vice versa.
While we may have renamed them to have saner library handling, there are provides in the packages to keep them compatible with the broken RH names. If you find one where this is not the case, feel free to submit a bug report.
Anecdotal for sure but: I've been using Mandrake and urpmi for about a year and a half now. I create my own RPMs for programs I install that don't have one, so that I can uninstall it easily if need be and to contribute something back to the community however small. I list all dependencies in the RPM exactly like I should, however urpmi never would automatically resolve those dependencies on another Mandrake box (the box the RPMs were built with of course had the dependents).
If you had urpmi media available that had the required packages, then maybe you didn't update the medium.
I build on all sorts of machines, and install packages via urpmi (from local disk, network, cdrom, or the build cluster via ssh).
But since I don't care for the way Mandrake hides/alters some default file locations this puts Fedora back on the table for me.
I would really like to know what you mean here. Having used Mandrake, and doing consulting on RHEL2, RHEL3 and Fedora2, I can't think of any differences...
On a new Dell 1750 server, 'yum install perl-ldap' took well over a minute to resolve dependencies (and a second or two to actually install the packages from the mirror which was one hop away on a Gb connection). On my laptop (with much slower disk and CPU), Mandrake does the whole operation in under 10 seconds.
On both machines, similar numbers of packages had to be installed.
The difference is non-trivial.
Mandrake had (package installation tools) first
on
URPMI For Fedora Core 2
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· Score: 2, Informative
Fedora/RH now has the posibility of running Yum, Apt-Get, URMPI.
Which Mandrake has had for a few years now. Both apt (and synaptic) and yum are in contrib (and have been for a while).
If warns you (and requires a confirmation to continue) if a package is not signed. It warns you (and requires a confirmation to continue) if a package is signed, but you have not told urpmi to trust packages signed by the key used for the packages in the repository you are using.
That's another advantage urpmi has over all other packaging frontends I am aware of.
For one,yum is *much*, *much* slower than urpmi at dependency resolution, second, I don't think yum supports retreiving packages via ssh/rsync, and I am sure there are others.
AFAIK, the 441 system would sell at about the price of 2 whitebox machines, but it also comes with support (I think it was 1 year,but I forget now), and a lot of other software integrated.
Sure, the US has a lot of free GIS data, but maybe you've heard that there people who live outside the US? And, maybe they also prefer free software, open formats and more available data?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, after following steps 1,2,3,5 and 6, my Dad's laptop still:
-didn't have a working modem
-didn't have a working wireless card
-didn't have working bluetooth
-displayed at 640x460 in 256 colours
Software I then had installed amounted to:
-notepad
-wordpad
-paint
-windows media player
-internet explorer
-outlook express
After installing Mandrake 10.0 on it:
-modem didn't work (winmodem, par for the course - he doesn't need it now so I haven't installed the vendor's linmodem driver yet but it does work onmy laptop of similar model)
-wireless didn't work (Intel Pro Wireless 2200)
-displayed at 1600x1200 instead of 1680x1050 (so you had to scroll the screen to see the whole desktop).
-bluetooth did work (after installing kdebluetooth from the CDs it was immediately useable)
Software I had installed amounted to:
-Full office suite
-development environment (my dad develops a bit of software in C++/OpenGL)
-Full Tex editing environment
-Choice of better internet browsers
-Choice of better mail client with built-in spam detection
-mathematical software (Octave etc)
-choices of multimedia software
-
To get all devices working under Windows XP I had to load all the driver CDs HP shipped with the machine.
To get the remaining hardware working under linux I had to download a driver for the wireless card and adjust the screen resolution.
So, it looks like linux actually wins with your instructions (and this is pretty recent hardware).
Now, my Dad is technically inclined, but doesn't really have much Linux experience.
My mom's machine is next.
This harks back to my days with Red Hat 5 and Mdk 6. Without trying to start a flamewar, I really think a Debian based system with Synaptic setup for updating is the best solution.
...
;-)).
At the time of RH5 and Mandrake 6, apt was only available in testing, and synaptic did not exist. A year or so later, Mandrake had urpmi and MandrakeUpdate and rpmdrake (when apt was in a stable release but there was still no synaptic).
By now, Fedora has yum
Catch up with the times (or, maybe you are running Debian stable and still think KDE-3.0 is the latest and greatest
Another example is the Mandrake security center... it has several "uneditable" settings. For example I need the /proc tree to be world-readable.. impossible to change without either a) lowering security level as a whole or b) edit the "default settings" config file in some hard-to-find location.
/proc or any other file/directory. There is no need to edit the default settings config (if you do want to edit it yourself, use /etc/security/msec/perm.local).
...
This is a file permissions issue, please use drakperm to have your own settings on
So, it seems your example is bad - care to provide another one? BTW, you can't edit all settings in Windows either, that's why there's a registry editor
And, instead of "writing it myself", you can always file bug reports for the development and stable releases (bugs really do get addressed).
Actually, after following steps 1,2,3,5 and 6, my Dad's laptop still:
-didn't have a working modem
-didn't have a working wireless card
-didn't have working bluetooth
-displayed at 640x460 in 256 colours
Software I then had installed amounted to:
-notepad
-wordpad
-paint
-windows media player
-internet explorer
-outlook express
After installing Mandrake 10.0 on it:
-modem didn't work (winmodem, par for the course)
-wireless didn't work (Intel Pro Wireless 2200)
-displayed at 1600x1200 instead of 1680x1050 (so you had to scroll the screen to see the whole desktop).
-bluetooth did work (after installing kdebluetooth from the CDs it was immediately useable)
Software I had installed amounted to:
-Full office suite
-development environment (my dad develops a bit of software in C++/OpenGL)
-Full Tex editing environment
-Choice of better internet browsers
-Choice of better mail client with built-in spam detection
-mathematical software (Octave etc)
-choices of multimedia software
-
To get all devices working under Windows XP I had to load all the driver CDs HP shipped with the machine.
To get the remaining hardware working under linux I had to download a driver for the wireless card and adjust the screen resolution.
So, it looks like linux actually wins with your instructions (and this is pretty recent hardware).
Now, my Dad is technically inclined, but doesn't really have much Linux experience.
My mom's machine is next.
What this is describing is a proxy process (it very specifically says process) running as root/admin which accepts RPCs (remote procedure calls) for privileged operations, and then makes the call as root, on behalf of the user.
... and it could even be what ssh does ... (ssh root@localhost 'rm -Rf /tmp').
That's not what su or sudo do
But, it is what dbus does
I think you might be missing the point of my posts, and the point of the story, which was Fedora deciding on urpmi as their new package front end.
No, it was just that someone ported urpmi to Fedora, and made packages available, as part of a project to bring some of the really nice features on Mandrake to other RPM-based distros.
YaST proved (to me) that it could handle some RPMs better than the distro the RPMs were created for.
My point is that you must have been doing something *really* wrong, because I have built hundreds of packages on many different machines, installed them on many machines via urpmi or just by double-clicking on the package, which required a number of other packages to be installed, with no problems.
BTW - YaST was just GPL'd by SUSE (although it's not available for download yet). Try it and you'll see why they hung on to it so long.
No thanks, I don't want a config tool that forces you to use it for everything you do, that does nothing more than the tools I already have that allow me to do anything I like manually without clobbering my changes.
Basically there aren't prebuilt packages for Mandrake for some relatively common libraries and programs, either officially or unofficially.
.', and then run 'urpmi.addmedia myrpms file://`pwd` with hdlist.cz', and you will be able to urpmi them, or urpmi anything that depends on them. And, if you don't want to genhdlist all the time, use a virtual medium instead.
Well, then, if you have made a package, upload it to incoming, send a mail to cooker, and someone will check it and upload it.
But, in the meantime, change to the directory above the one that holds your RPMS (ie the result of 'rpm --eval %_rpmdir') and run 'genhdlist
I do this, and I do it on a remote build cluster, and I can urpmi any package I build anywhere.
That or the name of the package for Mandrake was not the standard name of the library/program.
File a bug on the package that has the missing provides (the name can be different, but it should provide the generic name, like openssl-devel).
But, yum was *included* in the ditribution (or contribs, which is close enough) before RH hijecked the Fedora project and adopted yum.
And, Mandrake adopted apt quite early on as well.
So, no, I don't think I am wrong, since in January 2003 we had them all in contribs (ie part of the distro).
You mean like synaptic or gnome-apt?
...
No, not a package installation GUI, one for installing the OS
What is google?
U TF -8&q=urpmi
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=
The other issue, the one about being able to write source RPMS (.src.rpm files) that work in several distros, has to do with the different distros standarizing on the RPM macros, file naming conventions, version schemes and so on. It is all in the Back End. It would be great of course, and it would save a lot of duplicated efforts for the different distributions.
...
If you RTFA, that's what this project is about. But, first we need a working urpmi and slbd
Until linux apps start shipping as staticaly built to avoid the dependancy hell that is linux right now ... security vulnerabilities in a widely used library will only require updates to that library, not every application that uses it (statically).
Some mandrake contributors are already looking at this - but the problem is knowing which SRPM will provide which "provides", and thus knowing which package to build.
But, there are some other more important things to do right now - this will most likely have to wait until after 10.1 (we have enough other features to implement).
The problem is that updating a whole desktop is not really feasible, as there could be some issues with applications breaking, or conflicts which haven't been fully tested (but are before the next release). For example, one of the Mandrake contributors made GNOME2.6 packages available for Mandrake 10.0, but then you had to live with wxWindows (and bittorrent-gui) not working.
However, you will find there are lots of updated packages for Mandrake 10.0, some available via the MandrakeClub, some available on the public mirrors.
Anyway, you may rather ask yourself why a newbie user would want to upgrade from kde-3.2.2 to 3.2.3 (and "because I wanted the latest" doesn't count).
Unfortunately mandrake has chosen to rename their core system packages and libraries in such a fashion that a redhat rpm won't recognize them as dependencies and vice versa.
While we may have renamed them to have saner library handling, there are provides in the packages to keep them compatible with the broken RH names. If you find one where this is not the case, feel free to submit a bug report.
I won't bother with the rest of your FUD.
Anecdotal for sure but: I've been using Mandrake and urpmi for about a year and a half now. I create my own RPMs for programs I install that don't have one, so that I can uninstall it easily if need be and to contribute something back to the community however small. I list all dependencies in the RPM exactly like I should, however urpmi never would automatically resolve those dependencies on another Mandrake box (the box the RPMs were built with of course had the dependents).
If you had urpmi media available that had the required packages, then maybe you didn't update the medium.
I build on all sorts of machines, and install packages via urpmi (from local disk, network, cdrom, or the build cluster via ssh).
But since I don't care for the way Mandrake hides/alters some default file locations this puts Fedora back on the table for me.
...
I would really like to know what you mean here. Having used Mandrake, and doing consulting on RHEL2, RHEL3 and Fedora2, I can't think of any differences
And I'm guessing it has a GUI for this too???
...
Are the ebuild files checked with crypto signatures?
Are sources checked with crypto signatures? What are they checked against?
Are binary builds checked against signatures? I don't think so
But what really matters is the quantity and quality of packages.
;-).
With Debian, we have apt, more packages than any other distro, and a more thorough and sane policy.
With Mandrake, we have urpmi, apt, yum, policies, more tools to automatically assist in generating quality packages, more tools to check packages for adhering to policies, and we're rapidly catching up.
Plus, we have a working GUI installer
Do some reasearch and find out for yourself
On a new Dell 1750 server, 'yum install perl-ldap' took well over a minute to resolve dependencies (and a second or two to actually install the packages from the mirror which was one hop away on a Gb connection). On my laptop (with much slower disk and CPU), Mandrake does the whole operation in under 10 seconds.
On both machines, similar numbers of packages had to be installed.
The difference is non-trivial.
Fedora/RH now has the posibility of running Yum, Apt-Get, URMPI.
...
Which Mandrake has had for a few years now. Both apt (and synaptic) and yum are in contrib (and have been for a while).
Anyway, Mandrake has more packages
Maybe you should read up on urpmi then.
If warns you (and requires a confirmation to continue) if a package is not signed. It warns you (and requires a confirmation to continue) if a package is signed, but you have not told urpmi to trust packages signed by the key used for the packages in the repository you are using.
That's another advantage urpmi has over all other packaging frontends I am aware of.
For one,yum is *much*, *much* slower than urpmi at dependency resolution, second, I don't think yum supports retreiving packages via ssh/rsync, and I am sure there are others.
AFAIK, the 441 system would sell at about the price of 2 whitebox machines, but it also comes with support (I think it was 1 year,but I forget now), and a lot of other software integrated.
Sure, the US has a lot of free GIS data, but maybe you've heard that there people who live outside the US? And, maybe they also prefer free software, open formats and more available data?