Nevertheless, I'll bite, because the Newbie/Guru question is a recurrent and important one.
The two most difficult problems the ones who hack the Debian installers are:
1. multiple archs, problem known, best luck to porters.
2. flexibility vs ease of use
This is actually the hardest part, because it does not have a technical answer. Debian installers have always been very flexible (need something special ? Alt-F2 and open a console, now do your stuff and get back to the install process), and both butt-ugly and slightly too technical for a non-technical user.
The future installer will keep the same degree of flexibility while at the same time making it easier for first-time users, adding hooks making it possible to reuse the installer for automated installation (something like FAI) or for remote-controlled installation, or many other wild things.
Whenever an elegant solution is found that meets the needs of both flexibility maniacs and new users, it is used. But Debian will not lose flexibility and alienate its usual user base to attract new users at any cost.
Finally, to answer your completely, I'd conclude that people migrating from windows will feel more comfortable using other distros (I check out every major release of Mandrake, just to see their progress).
When/If they need the degree of control and flexibility that Debian provides, then Debian'll be there for them. But the spirit of Debian lies elsewhere. I wish good luck to the RedHat, Mandrake,... hackers in their work to make Linux a nicer place for new users, but let me hack my Debian boxes precisely the way I want them.
Find a distro that suits you, learn it, like it, show it to others and we'll both be happy.
Have a nice day
ps: I'm not particularly smart but instead I have hard-bought knowledge, I want power and control over my own box, and I evangelize Debian to all of my friends who can appreciate it, and Mandrake to those who just need a penguin that works.
This is partly true, but when you'll do some serious developing, you'll learn that the ability to test some piece of software on multiple architectures is priceless.
Lots of bugs are uncovered because they explode in some archs, whereas they're just screwing up silently on others. (stack corruption, out-of-bounds writing to memory...). Remember to switch compilers, too, as they all make different assumptions.
Now, Debian made a choice, and their choice you must respect. Remember that bugfixes coming from those other arches (XFree, anyone ?) will benefit you too !
> Even Debian who just NOW is starting to work on a GUI installer when working gpl GUI installers > based on Debian have been around for years.
No GPL-based GUI installer available for "production" meets the requirements for Debian: *mostly* the 11 architectures Debian supports (all spinoffs concentrated mostly on i386), but some other things too, like being able to scale between newbie and guru. Most GUI installers cater to the needs of the newbies, or the ones that don't need absolute control, but some people need more and they can find it in the current installer.
Debian users have different expectations from Debian software than the users of other distros.
In particular, NO ARCHITECTURE IS SUPERIOR TO THE OTHERS, it's true for the installer, for X, and for pretty much everything else. So an installer either works for all architectures, or it's not the official installer. See the amount of work done to port PGI.
From the tone of the Pine review, I'd *guess* they were impressed by the ability to quickly tackle email through, say, a network connection. (Like a telnet from a windows box to the server).
Hey, fellows, wait till you learn about ssh -X:)
But I agree that it is good that they understood that sometimes text-based is better that point-and-click.
# Gnome 2: deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian../project/experimental main contrib non-free
# KDE 3: deb http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian/./ deb http://people.debian.org/~bab/kde3./
# E17: deb http://people.debian.org/~ljlane/downloads e17/
'nuff said.
If you want the greatest and latest, you got it. Debian Developers are not necessarily using potato, they like features as much as anybody else. But Debian's "stable" stamp is something that has much more weight than that.
Besides, Debian has that annoying habit of usually doing the right thing. That's what the article is about, really.
However, what is the right globbing for "/bin/sbin/usr/bin/usr/sbin" ? I've tried some nasty things with zsh, but nothing really good. And non portable, it seemed.
<lame defense> But your stuff is much more readable, so my half-joke for the original poster would be lost !:) </lame defense>
If it's only two characters, and really important, then it's most likely in/bin:)
Or just do: ls/bin/usr/bin | grep '^..$'
But there are some stuff in/sbin and/usr/sbin, so maybe
find / -type d -name '*bin' -maxdepth 2 | xargs ls | grep '^..$'
See how intuitive that was ?:) (though I'm sure somebody can come up with something better)
Seriously, though, there are quite a number of GUIs that are pretty decent to shield you from the command line. I happen to like Konqueror 3, actually (most of all the split-screen). And with the tabs in 3.1, it's gonna rock !
Anyway, use what you like best, that's what the fight is *really* about.
It's true I haven't tried consumer-level distros in a while. That's good if they get that one right.
However, kindly allow me to modify my point in:
When the sh*t hits the fan and Joe User tries to understand why his drive won't respond, won't he feel weird getting those SCSI errors ?
(Besides, think of the poor Mandrake/Suse/RHAT dudes that do the behind-the-scenes configuration stuff ! I think they'd like a more consistent behavior from the kernel:)
I seem to recall seeing somewhere that there were plans to move some of the SCSI code (incl. that which is used by ide-scsi) that doesn't specifically belong to SCSI to a higher, more abstract level. This way, devices that need SCSI-*like* functionality don't feel the drag of the whole SCSI interface.
But I'm not a specialist, so check google for that. (I just did, but I've got waaaay too many results:)
> a) The kernel is not the UI and as nothing to do > with usability
You're mostly right, however there are some overlapping areas.
For example (cheap shot, I know:) take CD burners.
Why the fsck should I need scsi-ide emulation to have my 100% IDE burner act as if it were an SCSI one ??? (and hang the SCSI stuff once every now and then, btw)
Answer: (as far as I understand it, IANAKH) because at the time it was easier to "route" the IDE burners through the SCSI API instead of moving the common code to the upper level.
But try to explain to Joe User why he should add hdc=ide-scsi to his lilo.conf ! He'll find that dumb, and I can't blame him.
That's just an example, but it *does* mean that kernel and "user experience"(tm) are not separate things.
Now stop pretending to be insensitive geeks and mod parent up.:)
Note to parent poster:
in the future, to add some geek appeal, add a fake "-- Larry Wall in <1234567890@wall.org>" signature. Anyway, he said so many things you might even get it right.
No problem here: my nautilus is gone, and everything is still accessible through the Applications menu. (it'll be back as soon as I apt-get it back, but I'm lazy:)
Actually, Nautilus is a *pain* when used w/ transparent terminals, as each redraw of the icons will cause each terminal to redraw. Besides I don't like desktop icons anyway. What I miss in nautilus is: 1. middle-click to open new windows 2. split-screen for easy DnD 3. Konqueror, that's what I miss, actually.:)
But with nautilus gone, everything is quite snappy on my PIII450. Of course "everything" is a lot damn smaller now:).
> What kind of fscking imbecile allows critical > infrastructure control systems to be connected > to the Internet?
A truly fscking imbecile.
However, some computer systems *have* to be hooked up. And once they are 0wn3d, they *have* to be cleansed. Thus using up time and manpower that could best be used somewhere else.
Besides being a PITA, it would also be a PR victory for the other side if they succeeded in "cracking the US military's servers". (never mind if it's not critical, out of the inner network, with no information on it).
So it's really a "red herring", yes. Do not fear for your "national security", but fear for your national pride:)
If you read the article, you'll see that it does NOT conclude that "Linux is dead".
Actually, it describes a rather accurate picture of the present situation: rapid growth in the server market, improvements of the desktop software, the beginning of Linux preloaded PCs, MS brewing more weird stuff.
Nothing we already don't know, though. It must be a slow news day.
> Yes, that's right. The people saying ISS shouldn't have > spoken up are advocates of Security through Obscurity. > There's no other way of looking at it.
The line is quite thin but it exists.
If (the bug is a simple fix any admin can make):
disclose first
patch later If (the bug is a grave one ):
If (it is not public knowledge yet and the bug has appeared for only a "short time"):
do NOT disclose
coordinate between vendors
wait for a patch
prepare exploit code
If (it is not public knowledge yet but the bug has appeared "quite some time ago"):
disclose anyway
Patch ASAP, but expect that the bad guys know the vulnerability anyway
It's not perfect, and it depends strongly on reasonable values of "short time" and "quite some time ago", but it's really only fair to the admins. At least they can prepare for the attacks, even if it means kludgistic hole-plugging.
It's at least (more or less, my understanding may well be incorrect) the position of Debian on security issues.
Anyway, as someone said, admins should remember that unpatched vulnerabilities most likely still exist, and that good protection includes running Apache as an unprivileged user, possibly in a chrooted environment. It does not do any good to the web server itself, but it should prevent (hinder) any further contamination.
Don't forget to add that bookmarks have support for 3 different clicks:
left-click opens in the current tab, middle-click opens in a new window or tab right-click pops up the 'Properties' menu.
You can also manage your own toolbars, easily add bookmarks in folders (not like File Bookmark, scroll, scroll, etc) Just open the folder and do 'Add Bookmark'. Need a new sub-folder ? Open the folder and 'Add Folder'. Just like Konqueror actually. Now if antialiased text in gecko looked as good as kHTML's it would be paradise.
You can also open a whole folder of bookmarks in tabs or windows , in one click !
It is a wonderful browser.
The only complaint I have is that when it creates or renders a tab it's not very snappy, but I've got not-too-recent hardware:)
Re:There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packager
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2
> APT is what makes debian's package management so > smart, not dpkg.
Sorry, but you've got it backwards there.
"APT makes Debian's package management so easy to use."
But what makes it smart is the Debian Policy that states exactly how packages should behave, not the "Guidelines". The difference is that not conforming to Policy is a "Serious" bug (read: Release-Critical) , whereas guidelines do not convey the same sense of absolute necessity.:)
As the old chinese proverb goes: "When the wise points at the Policy, the fool watches apt-get"
Note that most Debian developers are not paid to work on their packages, they do it on their free time, so your comparison with RPM packagers might not hold 100%. The one tool that truly helps is the bug tracking system, (http://bugs.debian.org) and the great number of users that provide bug reports and patches.
The culture you're referring to is a strong driving force in striving to achieve excellence.
Consider this a corrective patch to your original post with which I [almost:)] fully agree.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn.
/. would this be modded 'Insightful' ! :)
Only here in
Very well said. Nothing to add. Except, maybe: :)
MOD UP !
(are you a troll ? Or just a frustrated user ?)
... hackers in their work to make Linux a nicer place for new users, but let me hack my Debian boxes precisely the way I want them.
Nevertheless, I'll bite, because the Newbie/Guru question is a recurrent and important one.
The two most difficult problems the ones who hack the Debian installers are:
1. multiple archs, problem known, best luck to porters.
2. flexibility vs ease of use
This is actually the hardest part, because it
does not have a technical answer. Debian installers have always been very flexible (need something special ? Alt-F2 and open a console, now do your stuff and get back to the install process), and both butt-ugly and slightly too technical for a non-technical user.
The future installer will keep the same degree of flexibility while at the same time making it easier for first-time users, adding hooks making it possible to reuse the installer for automated installation (something like FAI) or for remote-controlled installation, or many other wild things.
Whenever an elegant solution is found that meets the needs of both flexibility maniacs and new users, it is used. But Debian will not lose flexibility and alienate its usual user base to attract new users at any cost.
Finally, to answer your completely, I'd conclude that people migrating from windows will feel more comfortable using other distros (I check out every major release of Mandrake, just to see their progress).
When/If they need the degree of control and flexibility that Debian provides, then Debian'll be there for them. But the spirit of Debian lies elsewhere. I wish good luck to the RedHat, Mandrake,
Find a distro that suits you, learn it, like it, show it to others and we'll both be happy.
Have a nice day
ps: I'm not particularly smart but instead I have hard-bought knowledge, I want power and control over my own box, and I evangelize Debian to all of my friends who can appreciate it, and Mandrake to those who just need a penguin that works.
This is partly true, but when you'll do some
serious developing, you'll learn that the ability to test some piece of software on multiple architectures is priceless.
Lots of bugs are uncovered because they explode in some archs, whereas they're just screwing up silently on others. (stack corruption, out-of-bounds writing to memory...). Remember to switch compilers, too, as they all make different assumptions.
Now, Debian made a choice, and their choice you must respect. Remember that bugfixes coming from those other arches (XFree, anyone ?) will benefit you too !
> Even Debian who just NOW is starting to work on a GUI installer when working gpl GUI installers
> based on Debian have been around for years.
No GPL-based GUI installer available for "production" meets the requirements for Debian: *mostly* the 11 architectures Debian supports (all spinoffs concentrated mostly on i386), but some other things too, like being able to scale between newbie and guru. Most GUI installers cater to the needs of the newbies, or the ones that don't need absolute control, but some people need more and they can find it in the current installer.
Debian users have different expectations from Debian software than the users of other distros.
In particular, NO ARCHITECTURE IS SUPERIOR TO THE OTHERS, it's true for the installer, for X, and for pretty much everything else. So an installer either works for all architectures, or it's not the official installer. See the amount of work done to port PGI.
I hope that makes it a bit clearer.
> Logo? Squeak! :) (Or, just for fun, is there a Logo variant apt-gettable now?)
:)
:)
apt-get install ucblogo
ucblogo looks just as awful as what I remember using
But LOGO is a great way for children to learn a different kind of abstraction: command/effect.
(and I say 'command', not 'click' !
I remember programming a turtle on acid, with the 'random' function !
> Benchmarking the various "Benchmarking Programs"
:)
Yes but, "Quis benchmarkiet ipsos benchmarkiem ?":
Who benchmarks the benchmarks ?
(s/benchmark/custod/g and Google for the original quote
They might have backported the fix.
From the tone of the Pine review, I'd *guess* they were impressed by the ability to quickly tackle email through, say, a network connection. (Like a telnet from a windows box to the server).
:)
Hey, fellows, wait till you learn about ssh -X
But I agree that it is good that they understood that sometimes text-based is better that point-and-click.
My /etc/apt/sources.list (extracts):
../project/experimental main contrib non-free
./ ./
# Gnome 2:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian
# KDE 3:
deb http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian/
deb http://people.debian.org/~bab/kde3
# E17:
deb http://people.debian.org/~ljlane/downloads e17/
'nuff said.
If you want the greatest and latest, you got it. Debian Developers are not necessarily using potato, they like features as much as anybody else. But Debian's "stable" stamp is something that has much more weight than that.
Besides, Debian has that annoying habit of usually doing the right thing. That's what the article is about, really.
Ah, I knew that there was a better way !
/sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin" ? I've tried some nasty things with zsh, but nothing really good. And non portable, it seemed.
:)
However, what is the right globbing for "/bin
<lame defense>
But your stuff is much more readable, so my half-joke for the original poster would be lost !
</lame defense>
If it's only two characters, and really important, then it's most likely in /bin :)
/bin /usr/bin | grep '^..$'
/sbin and /usr/sbin, so maybe
:)
Or just do:
ls
But there are some stuff in
find / -type d -name '*bin' -maxdepth 2 | xargs ls | grep '^..$'
See how intuitive that was ?
(though I'm sure somebody can come up with something better)
Seriously, though, there are quite a number of GUIs that are pretty decent to shield you from the command line. I happen to like Konqueror 3, actually (most of all the split-screen). And with
the tabs in 3.1, it's gonna rock !
Anyway, use what you like best, that's what the fight is *really* about.
heh, lol :)
:)
It's true I haven't tried consumer-level distros in a while. That's good if they get that one right.
However, kindly allow me to modify my point in:
When the sh*t hits the fan and Joe User tries to understand why his drive won't respond, won't he feel weird getting those SCSI errors ?
(Besides, think of the poor Mandrake/Suse/RHAT dudes that do the behind-the-scenes configuration stuff ! I think they'd like a more consistent behavior from the kernel
> which "upper level" are you referring to?
:)
I seem to recall seeing somewhere that there were plans to move some of the SCSI code (incl. that which is used by ide-scsi) that doesn't specifically belong to SCSI to a higher, more abstract level. This way, devices that need SCSI-*like* functionality don't feel the drag of the whole SCSI interface.
But I'm not a specialist, so check google for that. (I just did, but I've got waaaay too many results
> a) The kernel is not the UI and as nothing to do
:) take CD burners.
> with usability
You're mostly right, however there are some overlapping areas.
For example (cheap shot, I know
Why the fsck should I need scsi-ide emulation to have my 100% IDE burner act as if it were an SCSI one ??? (and hang the SCSI stuff once every now and then, btw)
Answer: (as far as I understand it, IANAKH)
because at the time it was easier to "route" the IDE
burners through the SCSI API instead of moving the common code to the upper level.
But try to explain to Joe User why he should
add hdc=ide-scsi to his lilo.conf ! He'll find that dumb, and I can't blame him.
That's just an example, but it *does* mean that kernel and "user experience"(tm) are not separate things.
-1, Offtopic !
:)
What about poetry and metaphor ?
Now stop pretending to be insensitive geeks and mod parent up.
Note to parent poster:
in the future, to add some geek appeal, add a fake "-- Larry Wall in <1234567890@wall.org>" signature. Anyway, he said so many things you might even get it right.
Well they provided us with a good laugh by hosting the site on a BSD box, so maybe they're really on our side ! :)
No problem here: my nautilus is gone, and everything is still accessible through the Applications menu. :)
:)
:).
(it'll be back as soon as I apt-get it back, but I'm lazy
Actually, Nautilus is a *pain* when used w/ transparent terminals, as each redraw of the icons will cause each terminal to redraw. Besides I don't like desktop icons anyway. What I miss in nautilus is:
1. middle-click to open new windows
2. split-screen for easy DnD
3. Konqueror, that's what I miss, actually.
But with nautilus gone, everything is quite snappy on my PIII450. Of course "everything" is a lot damn smaller now
> What kind of fscking imbecile allows critical
:)
> infrastructure control systems to be connected
> to the Internet?
A truly fscking imbecile.
However, some computer systems *have* to be hooked up. And once they are 0wn3d, they *have* to be cleansed. Thus using up time and manpower that could best be used somewhere else.
Besides being a PITA, it would also be a PR victory for the other side if they succeeded in "cracking the US military's servers". (never mind if it's not critical, out of the inner network, with no information on it).
So it's really a "red herring", yes. Do not fear for your "national security", but fear for your national pride
If you read the article, you'll see that it does NOT conclude that "Linux is dead".
Actually, it describes a rather accurate picture of the present situation: rapid growth in the server market, improvements of the desktop software, the beginning of Linux preloaded PCs, MS brewing more weird stuff.
Nothing we already don't know, though. It must be a slow news day.
Those that don't get this one should Google for :)
"Ed is THE editor"
> ^X^S :wq
:wq
> Damn!
>
you're missing something:
^X^S
Damn!
wtf ?
^C
^D
WTF ????
oh yeah !
^Q
hey ! Where did my terminal go ??
> Yes, that's right. The people saying ISS shouldn't have
> spoken up are advocates of Security through Obscurity.
> There's no other way of looking at it.
The line is quite thin but it exists.
If (the bug is a simple fix any admin can make):
disclose first
patch later
If (the bug is a grave one ):
If (it is not public knowledge yet and the bug has appeared for only a "short time"):
do NOT disclose
coordinate between vendors
wait for a patch
prepare exploit code
If (it is not public knowledge yet but the bug has appeared "quite some time ago"):
disclose anyway
Patch ASAP, but expect that the bad guys know the vulnerability anyway
It's not perfect, and it depends strongly on reasonable values of "short time" and "quite some time ago", but it's really only fair to the admins. At least they can prepare for the attacks, even if it means kludgistic hole-plugging.
It's at least (more or less, my understanding may well be incorrect) the position of Debian
on security issues.
Anyway, as someone said, admins should remember that unpatched vulnerabilities most likely still exist, and that
good protection includes running Apache as an unprivileged user, possibly in a chrooted environment.
It does not do any good to the web server itself, but it should prevent (hinder) any further contamination.
(yes, I code in Python, how did you know ?)
Don't forget to add that bookmarks have support for 3 different clicks:
:)
left-click opens in the current tab,
middle-click opens in a new window or tab
right-click pops up the 'Properties' menu.
You can also manage your own toolbars, easily add bookmarks in folders (not like File Bookmark, scroll, scroll, etc)
Just open the folder and do 'Add Bookmark'. Need a new sub-folder ? Open the folder and 'Add Folder'. Just like Konqueror actually. Now if antialiased text in gecko looked as good as kHTML's it would be paradise.
You can also open a whole folder of bookmarks in tabs or windows , in one click !
It is a wonderful browser.
The only complaint I have is that when it creates or renders a tab it's not very snappy, but I've got not-too-recent hardware
> APT is what makes debian's package management so
:)
:)] fully agree.
> smart, not dpkg.
Sorry, but you've got it backwards there.
"APT makes Debian's package management so easy to use."
But what makes it smart is the Debian Policy that states exactly how packages should behave, not the "Guidelines". The difference is that not conforming to Policy is a "Serious" bug (read: Release-Critical) , whereas guidelines do not convey the same sense of absolute necessity.
As the old chinese proverb goes:
"When the wise points at the Policy, the fool watches apt-get"
Note that most Debian developers are not paid to work on their packages, they do it on their free time, so your comparison with RPM packagers might not hold 100%. The one tool that truly helps is the bug tracking system, (http://bugs.debian.org) and the great number of users that provide bug reports and patches.
The culture you're referring to is a strong driving force in striving to achieve excellence.
Consider this a corrective patch to your original post with which I [almost