Who cares? Slackware (IMHO) is so much easier to administer manually than any other distro I've tried (which is, unfortunately, more a reflection on the dependency hell I've run into with RPM-based systems in the past, but that has been a subject for other postings). My (updated) Slack 8.0 system is running so smoothly, I think I'll wait for a couple of weeks before I upgrade, though...
The good thing about RedHat and Mandrake to some extent is that they do good testing on the RPMS...
I wonder about this. A couple of weeks ago (for reasons irrelevant to this post) I did 3 (THREE) successive installations of mdk8.2 with identical parameters (with re-formatting of the partitions) on a box built specifically to run Linux, and each of those installations spat a different set of packaging-related problems.
Seems to me that if testing had been thorough, this could not occur...
On the other hand, have you noticed how hard it is to find Debian ISO images?
Easily downloadable ISOs are very nice indeed, but those of us on a student budget who can't afford ADSL here in Australia have a hard time getting hold of CDs, let alone downloading ISOs of Woody. I know Potato is supposed to be stable, but if you have to download the equivalent to the whole distro to get anything sort of current (at least for the desktop, anyway), you might as well consider another distro.
Re:Luke, use the source...
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Is RPM Doomed?
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I'm playing devil's advocate here, since I'm into Slackware's.tgz, but there is absolutely no reason why you can't use RPM on a Deb box (if you want to, that is).
I try my hardest *never* to install from source...
Maybe I'm missing something here, but are you really saying that a binary compiled and packaged by someone else may be less secure (or maintainable) than code you've built yourself? That doesn't make sense to me.
standardized Linux configuration files...
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Is RPM Doomed?
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The trouble with standardised config files is that this relies on all linux apps or processes interacting with the user or administrator in the same way. In other words, someone has to come up with a format that is "all things to all people" which is not concordant with the Linux "ethic" (for want of a better expression). Most Linux users want "infinite" latitude for customisation.
Re:Luke, use the source...
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Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
It also helps to have appropriate compiler flags for your box set in your shell environment, for example
Re:I like Slackware's .tgz
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Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I was just about to post something to the same effect. Having spent many hours trying to fix or work around broken package dependencies with RPM on RedHat and more recently Mandrake, I recently ditched both in favour of Slackware which I have found _much_ easier to maintain. Good to see I'm not alone in this...
The version of Gnome released with mdk 8.2 is 1.4.0, with few updates for the desktop apart from a few apps from their previous release. I'm perfectly willing to accept that their focus is on KDE, but I happen to be one of those people who don't really like it. I found so many things broken in mdk 8.2 that worked fine in 8.1 that I threw it out in favour of Slackware which works like a charm.
Does anybody remember the old-style coding sheets? Often provided for COBOL and FORTRAN programmers in the days when we had dedicated keypunch ops, but useful for assembly and other languages too; I found the header boxes helped to organise modules quite handily. Of course, to be considered a real programmer, it was way cooler to punch cards directly with an 029 keypunch... Them were the days...:-)
Fair enough, and actually I agree... I have both an HP48G+ and a TI-89. When I got the latter, it took me a couple of days to get used to using a different finger for the enter button.
...or low cost light bulbs all around the country to save more and more on electricity?
Who believes we'll save on electricity? OK, I might be a cynic, but experience tells me that if everybody started using low-power light bulbs, the power companies would just hike the price per kW-hour.
Yup. You can even still buy them. I think there's somebody in Eastern Europe somewhere still making them, and there's an active trade happening here and here. The latter link also has s/w for a slide-rule emulator (though from memory I think it might be windoze-only).
I said something similar in another post, but what the hell, it's better here... there is an app that allows you to use your TI-89 in RPN mode. And the ENTER button is marked ENTER - not =.;-)
I think I must be older;-) when I was at school (I left in '79) slide rules were grudgingly admitted to be OK, but we mostly used books of tables. Remember those?
I agree that slide rules are a great tool, and fun to play with (I still use my trusty Aristo occasionally just to keep in practice), but I hope you aren't assessing your students on their use of it. I still remember all the odd answers to practice problems that we saw in some of our engineering texts that are accountable for only by errors in the use of a slide-rule. This where the authors (presumably) had time on their hands and were not under pressure in an exam. I agree about the HP48, though. Mine is now wedging the door of my study open since I got a TI-89.
A lot of universities, including mine, have a policy (for examinations) of not allowing any device with a QWERTY keyboard, which has been extended to include PDAs. Hence you can take in a TI-89, but a TI-92, while functionally almost identical, is prohibited.
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Who cares? Slackware (IMHO) is so much easier to administer manually than any other distro I've tried (which is, unfortunately, more a reflection on the dependency hell I've run into with RPM-based systems in the past, but that has been a subject for other postings). My (updated) Slack 8.0 system is running so smoothly, I think I'll wait for a couple of weeks before I upgrade, though...
Don't you mean *WAS*?
I wonder about this. A couple of weeks ago (for reasons irrelevant to this post) I did 3 (THREE) successive installations of mdk8.2 with identical parameters (with re-formatting of the partitions) on a box built specifically to run Linux, and each of those installations spat a different set of packaging-related problems.
Seems to me that if testing had been thorough, this could not occur...
Easily downloadable ISOs are very nice indeed, but those of us on a student budget who can't afford ADSL here in Australia have a hard time getting hold of CDs, let alone downloading ISOs of Woody. I know Potato is supposed to be stable, but if you have to download the equivalent to the whole distro to get anything sort of current (at least for the desktop, anyway), you might as well consider another distro.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, since I'm into Slackware's .tgz, but there is absolutely no reason why you can't use RPM on a Deb box (if you want to, that is).
Maybe I'm missing something here, but are you really saying that a binary compiled and packaged by someone else may be less secure (or maintainable) than code you've built yourself? That doesn't make sense to me.
The trouble with standardised config files is that this relies on all linux apps or processes interacting with the user or administrator in the same way. In other words, someone has to come up with a format that is "all things to all people" which is not concordant with the Linux "ethic" (for want of a better expression). Most Linux users want "infinite" latitude for customisation.
export CFLAGS="-O9 -mcpu=athlon -march=athlon -pipe"
I was just about to post something to the same effect. Having spent many hours trying to fix or work around broken package dependencies with RPM on RedHat and more recently Mandrake, I recently ditched both in favour of Slackware which I have found _much_ easier to maintain. Good to see I'm not alone in this...
Isn't this inherently insecure?
But still way more than I can afford :-(
Do Macs not provide the little bitty hole for manual release of the CD tray? Or does this not work? Just curious...
In Elbonia perhaps? :-)
The version of Gnome released with mdk 8.2 is 1.4.0, with few updates for the desktop apart from a few apps from their previous release. I'm perfectly willing to accept that their focus is on KDE, but I happen to be one of those people who don't really like it. I found so many things broken in mdk 8.2 that worked fine in 8.1 that I threw it out in favour of Slackware which works like a charm.
Does anybody remember the old-style coding sheets? Often provided for COBOL and FORTRAN programmers in the days when we had dedicated keypunch ops, but useful for assembly and other languages too; I found the header boxes helped to organise modules quite handily. Of course, to be considered a real programmer, it was way cooler to punch cards directly with an 029 keypunch... Them were the days... :-)
Actually I am not one of the guys who pulled out of Kyoto. There are /.ers out here who are not resident in the US, you know...
Fair enough, and actually I agree... I have both an HP48G+ and a TI-89. When I got the latter, it took me a couple of days to get used to using a different finger for the enter button.
Who believes we'll save on electricity? OK, I might be a cynic, but experience tells me that if everybody started using low-power light bulbs, the power companies would just hike the price per kW-hour.
Yup. You can even still buy them. I think there's somebody in Eastern Europe somewhere still making them, and there's an active trade happening here and here. The latter link also has s/w for a slide-rule emulator (though from memory I think it might be windoze-only).
I said something similar in another post, but what the hell, it's better here... there is an app that allows you to use your TI-89 in RPN mode. And the ENTER button is marked ENTER - not =. ;-)
The button on my TI-89 is marked "ENTER", and there is an app that allows you to use it in RPN mode. I find it's _much_ faster than my HP48G+.
I think the HP48G+, 48GX and 49G are still in production, it's just that HP aren't developing any new machines.
I think I must be older ;-) when I was at school (I left in '79) slide rules were grudgingly admitted to be OK, but we mostly used books of tables. Remember those?
I agree that slide rules are a great tool, and fun to play with (I still use my trusty Aristo occasionally just to keep in practice), but I hope you aren't assessing your students on their use of it. I still remember all the odd answers to practice problems that we saw in some of our engineering texts that are accountable for only by errors in the use of a slide-rule. This where the authors (presumably) had time on their hands and were not under pressure in an exam. I agree about the HP48, though. Mine is now wedging the door of my study open since I got a TI-89.
A lot of universities, including mine, have a policy (for examinations) of not allowing any device with a QWERTY keyboard, which has been extended to include PDAs. Hence you can take in a TI-89, but a TI-92, while functionally almost identical, is prohibited.