People choose the desktop they like, and that happens to be either Gnome or KDE.
Granted, the majority of open source desktops run Gnome or KDE, but the preference is not either/or. It's all inclusive. Why? Because there is no single solution for everyone, especially in the open source world where most people are arrogant individualists and are proud of it. The point of this release preview is NOT the gui. The gui is superficial and will probably change/modernize as the project hits 1.0 and beyond. The point of this release was to preview the underpinnings that have taken so long to get into a truely usable state. I was astonished at how gorm works almost exactly like the NeXT DE did in the video of Jobs evangelizing his OS that was posted not too long ago here on slashdot. I am also astonished that you can take a GNUstep app like GNUmail.app, compile it on an OS X box with a simple click, and have it run without any modifications, with a cocoa look-and-feel. No GTK-to-Cocoa porting bullshit. THAT is the point of GNUstep. Personally I think that's pretty damn cool. While a GTK app will run well on *BSD/Linux/Solaris and run buggy on Windows, a well-written GNUstep app will run stably, without modification, on OS X and GNUstep...doubling (if not more - there are probably more OS X users than GNUstep users) the userbase for GNUstep apps.
While I do not think there should be a forced de-facto open source desktop, I do think GNUstep is a damn neat project and should be respected, not shit upon by fanboys of a particular opensoure DE.
If it doesn't, there's always FreeBSD amd64 and oss. I use it for my nForce 3 onboard sound, and it works like a charm. And, it's free for personal/home use. Only supports x86 on netbsd, though.
You're assuming that there are only 100 developer through the live of all projects that are interested enough to work on it, and no new developers will join the separate projects as time goes on...and that none of the projects will share code. Those are pretty loose assumptions.
True. but you could still do something fucking lame like attaching a ata66 drive as a slave to an ata100 drive, in which case you would be running the ata100 drive EXTREMELY SLOW. Just becuase it's activated by default doens't mean you're not so dense as to have your hardware set up incorrectly. Of course, you're probably a troll. In which case I am one as well. In which case, We Have Both Been Trolled. We Should Have A Nice Day.
Opening GNOME Terminal these days takes 10 seconds
4 seconds here. Using the X-one-thousand counting method, where X is an integer greater than 0. Perhaps it's time for you to (a) upgrade or (b) use xterm? I mean...open source is about choice, right? Choose to use a less resource-intensive terminal for your out of date hardware. HELL, i'm using FreeBSD and it's fucking DEAD man!
nVidia provides their own closed source, binary drivers and therefore nVidia cards are not supported by DRI.
Unless of course you run FreeBSD on AMD64...like me...then you're SOL. Bullshit.
Interesting you say that. All of my friends who are HUGE family guy friends are not pot heads - many of them are avid anti-drug people. And I actually first saw and became addicted to the show before I had ever touched marijuana (when it was originally aired). One thing i've noticed, though - engineering-oriented people tend to not like it as much, mostly because they find it too random and unstructured. Scientists, mathematicians, and lovers of discovery in general, however, are absolutely enamored with it. I think it has to do with a whole true vs false intelligence thing. Those with true intellect love family guy, and those who pretend they're smart (ie - engineers) want to find anything they can wrong with it simply because it's a generally popular series that they don't have the brains to grasp it. It makes them feel inferior. Those with God complexes HATE that.
"So what do you run?"
"BSD/Linux"
"Uh...yeah...which one? Both?"
"Both? What do you mean? I just run BSD/Linux."
"Err...you men GNU/Linux?"
"No No, BSD/Linux. Linux is just a kernel, remember."
"Uhh..."
And they're right for the most part. Plus I think an OSI ambassador signs an agreement to shower at least twice a week. Definitely, to borrow from esr's butchered version of the jargon file, a Good Thing.
Perhaps he'll throw in some mention of being a direct, flute-playing, sex-crazed channeller of Pan himself, and how that makes him cope. Fuck. When I read that essay on religion i swear i lost about 10 IQ points, making me officially a retard.
"Each evoluton which betray itself and its ideals had ended uyp eating its children." In which case I can see every reason to expect the Free Software movement (and hopefull the Open Source movement with which it shares some adherents) should be different.
I wholly agree. I don't see the open source revolution following in the footsteps of, say, the communist revolution in Russia because the open source revolution is different. Its main foes are the monopolists and IP-barons who wish all property to be theirs and the only barriers they see are laws and capital. The nature of open source uses this to its advantage - various licenses ensure that at least existing software be left free (in the case of BSD) and at most all changes to existing software be made free (GPL) using laws that are particularly hard to circumvent. At the same time, as money is more a secondary issue in open source rather than a primary as it is in proprietary software, it lies completely out of the realm of the second barrier of the capitalist. That is, no matter how much money microsoft throws at a piece of published, open source software, its rights cannot be bought.
In short, communism died because ideals are easily tainted by power and money. Open Source Software will at least die a more difficult death because it is based on law and pragmatism. Those can only die with the death of our laws and a shift of ideals in our society (pragmatism is a relativistic thing, after all). The death of laws means the death of a concept of IP and Copyright, through which all would be conceptually free.
Errr...i fucked up. You will be using the standard package set...and what'd you get from that is programs that are known to work stably on any system architecture. It was just in response to him implying that portage only contains beta-quality programs in the tree, which is only true if you key it for your particular arch.
For your consideration: most IT types never compile a line of code.
After the initial setup, the admin of this system wouldn't compile a line of code. The package building box would do all of that for him or her. The beauty of this system is that it's 90 - 99% automated, but not dependent on RH/Novel/Debian fuckups or incompatibilities that might slip down the pipe. Any fuckups are the responsibility of the admin. They have no scape goat. They have to be on the ball and perform 100% or they will be fired.
So, besides a lot of additional work, what does this guy get by using the standard Gentoo package set?
First, the additional work would be in designing and implementing the system. Otherwise he'll probably have the same workload as any other admin. Also, he won't be using the standard Gentoo package set. He'll be using packages custom built on a compilation machine for the specific needs of the site, then deployed based on machine group need (ie, render farm, workstation, mail/DNS/samba server). What would he get? He would have an intimiate working knowledge of the entire system that he designed and implemented himself, allowing for quicker response, shorter trouble shooting times, and increased job security. Generally be a more efficient worker overall because he knows more than the average sysadmin about his system.
The one positive I can see is some real job security since no one else would be able to take over a customized gentoo compile farm and update scheme like you propose
Yeah, well, you gotta do something to set yourself apart from the hordes of redhat/debian/suse zombies out there with no real job skills other than ability to walk from desk to snack machine 10+ times a day, and press buttons. This is by no means a solution for your standard corporate entity, it's more a flexible, inhouse system for a company that needs it.
Every point you made is moot, assuming the Admin is competent. IF I were the admin, I would make sure that:
1) All the program VERSIONS were considered stable (in the case of server software, like apache, postfix, samba, etc) or atleast usable (in the case of Desktop environments and browers - which in the open source community are generally used at Beta quality). Again, you can tell portage to do all of this. When you don't have it keyworded to your arch, you DO NOT INSTALL BETA SOFTWARE.
2) Have the system tested out and known to work before it's deployed. This is just being a good admin. You don't put stuff into use that might or might not work as expected.
3) As for the configuration updates, that's fairly simple to get around. On major system releases, you update your admin system first, then merge the config changes, then deploy them the night after the farm updates (in this case i would plan it on saturday, so you have sunday to mitigate any problems). Basically the same thing the RH/SuSE updates do.
4) Speaking of farm - Zoophilia? Jesus you sick fuck.
Like i said, if you do everything right, the system will work. If you don't do everything right, you get fired.
And as Linux-communism fights for the rights of the workers(coders), BSD-liberty fights for the rights of all, to clash in the way nature intended - without coercion in the form of software licenses, with true fairness and decency, in the form of the all mighty, competition-creating fork! Based on the idea that different implementations of the wheel are not recreations, but are neecessary to approach the true form of the wheel, as Plato saw it! Diversity of implementations are a direct result of diversity of ideas, all of which combine to represent an integrated truth of form from which all walks of humanity prosper from! And so I pledge to One License, under csh, with liberty and code forks for all!
Nice job missing the joke, Einstein. However, just to counter you with a bit of reason, and not dogma..
stability:
If you use their standard package set, meaning not keyed for your specific architecture, stability will not be bleeding edge. You'll be building programs with configurations that are well-tested, generally since the inception of portage.
high-level support options:
Yeah, you're right here. But as far as I'm concerned, if the bosses hired you, they should have confidence in your skills and your resourcefulness.
security:
Right here, too. Also - to me - any security in linux is standard, unless you're running an older (read: 2.4.x) kernel that doesn't have much new feature influx. At that point, kernel security approaches that of the BSD's, though I would argue that base system and system services security is still rather low due to lack of development cohesion.
rapid updates:
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. So wrong. For gentoo to be considered for a corporate environment, you would definitely set up a centralized build server, possibly with distcc installed on all of the workstations to mitigate the load, distribute it across the network and speed up compilation times. This build server would also act as a weekly package checkpoint. All of the servers and workstations would use this machine as their central package repository and using a little cron magic and universal, standardized config files, every machine would update on saturday or sunday, grab the new packages off the server, install them, and be done with it. There would be no office-drone typing emerge -u world, then going on an extremely long coffee break. If you were to set up a network of 200+ gentoo machines without making your own, custom stage three tarball, you ARE crazy.
and ease of administration:
See above. After you got the initial infrastructure in place, it would be a breeze. Assuming everything works out right. But hey, they hired you to admin the systems, right? That's what you're there for.
Now, personally i'm past my gentoo phase. Goin' back to the ol' faithful FreeBSD. But, just because Gentoo is a source-based power-user-centered distro doesnt mean you can't cook up your own in-house solution while taking advantage of the awesome tools gentoo provides. The only reason apt is faster than emerge is because emerge uses source by default, while apt-get uses binary packages by default. However, portage can use binary packages and apt-get can indeed install from source. In their default forms you're comparing apples to oranges. Bottom Line: I can be done, and if you have the know-how, it can be done well.
Agreed. An on-site compilation server that builds all neccessary packages weekly (and possibly serves as an intranet server for webmail/samba donmain controller/etc), along with a handful of dedicated servers and however many desktops managment decides to float away from windows - all running FreeBSD - would be my option of choice. Cap it off with an OpenBSD gateway and you would have a very stable, smoothly-running, well integrated, time-tested, mature network. All that's missing is high-level support
Of course, he asked about linux, didn't he? It's a shame.
If I had mod points, I would mod you up. Everyone brings up the example of microsoft using BSD tools...but those BSD tools not only still exist in Net, Free, Open, Dragonfly BSD, and Darwin, but they exist in a more modern, usable form than they do in the standard Microsoft commandline tools. As long as people are interested in a project it will be developed, no matter what open source license is slapped on it. The only thing that kills a project is disinterest, and the GPL doesn't protect against that.
You do realize that that's business as usual in the US, right? We pay the government to fund various research. The results become public domain or (in the case of BSD) are licensed liberally so corporations across the country can then use this information to forward the flow of capital in a more efficient manner. I personally don't like this intrinsic government-corporation coupling, but it's how our system has decided to speed the movement of capitalism - first in our borders, but now internationally. The basic idea is that the public invests in research that will then be used for the benefit of the public. It just happens that in a capitalist society the fruits of that research are generally sold back to those who funded it. Note that I said generally - I'm using the BSD network stack right now (on FreeBSD) and I didn't have to pay for it. That's why *I* like open source software. I can stick it to the man by benefiting from projects funded by public money while minimizing my contribution to the flow of capital/business as usual.
NetBSD had the first AMD64 system. FreeBSD still has the most cohesive system that works with the least amount of headaches (it's why I use it over the various linux distros i've tried on AMD64 - namely Ubuntu and Gentoo).
I am interested. I have been for a couple years. I've downloaded Solaris ISO's since version 8 for x86, and I got my hands on some x86 ISOs from a friend of mine for version 7. Please do not talk as though you speak for all open source software users, or some larger, abstract community you think is represented by the lifeless dozens you hang out with in #linuxizdeebest on freenode. I use FreeBSD. I use OpenBSD. I use OS X. I use Windows. I use NetBSD. I use Linux. I used Solaris at my old job. I am not interested in pigeon-holing myself based on mindless idealistic zealotry. Your opinions are indeed your own, so please don't lump others into some all-encompassing "we" based upon your own voluntary closed-mindedness.
Slashdot Mirror
You know it.
People choose the desktop they like, and that happens to be either Gnome or KDE.
Granted, the majority of open source desktops run Gnome or KDE, but the preference is not either/or. It's all inclusive. Why? Because there is no single solution for everyone, especially in the open source world where most people are arrogant individualists and are proud of it. The point of this release preview is NOT the gui. The gui is superficial and will probably change/modernize as the project hits 1.0 and beyond. The point of this release was to preview the underpinnings that have taken so long to get into a truely usable state. I was astonished at how gorm works almost exactly like the NeXT DE did in the video of Jobs evangelizing his OS that was posted not too long ago here on slashdot. I am also astonished that you can take a GNUstep app like GNUmail.app, compile it on an OS X box with a simple click, and have it run without any modifications, with a cocoa look-and-feel. No GTK-to-Cocoa porting bullshit. THAT is the point of GNUstep. Personally I think that's pretty damn cool. While a GTK app will run well on *BSD/Linux/Solaris and run buggy on Windows, a well-written GNUstep app will run stably, without modification, on OS X and GNUstep...doubling (if not more - there are probably more OS X users than GNUstep users) the userbase for GNUstep apps.
While I do not think there should be a forced de-facto open source desktop, I do think GNUstep is a damn neat project and should be respected, not shit upon by fanboys of a particular opensoure DE.
If it doesn't, there's always FreeBSD amd64 and oss. I use it for my nForce 3 onboard sound, and it works like a charm. And, it's free for personal/home use. Only supports x86 on netbsd, though.
You're assuming that there are only 100 developer through the live of all projects that are interested enough to work on it, and no new developers will join the separate projects as time goes on...and that none of the projects will share code. Those are pretty loose assumptions.
True. but you could still do something fucking lame like attaching a ata66 drive as a slave to an ata100 drive, in which case you would be running the ata100 drive EXTREMELY SLOW. Just becuase it's activated by default doens't mean you're not so dense as to have your hardware set up incorrectly. Of course, you're probably a troll. In which case I am one as well. In which case, We Have Both Been Trolled. We Should Have A Nice Day.
Opening GNOME Terminal these days takes 10 seconds
4 seconds here. Using the X-one-thousand counting method, where X is an integer greater than 0. Perhaps it's time for you to (a) upgrade or (b) use xterm? I mean...open source is about choice, right? Choose to use a less resource-intensive terminal for your out of date hardware. HELL, i'm using FreeBSD and it's fucking DEAD man!
From the Site:
nVidia
Status
nVidia provides their own closed source, binary drivers and therefore nVidia cards are not supported by DRI.
Unless of course you run FreeBSD on AMD64...like me...then you're SOL. Bullshit.
Interesting you say that. All of my friends who are HUGE family guy friends are not pot heads - many of them are avid anti-drug people. And I actually first saw and became addicted to the show before I had ever touched marijuana (when it was originally aired). One thing i've noticed, though - engineering-oriented people tend to not like it as much, mostly because they find it too random and unstructured. Scientists, mathematicians, and lovers of discovery in general, however, are absolutely enamored with it. I think it has to do with a whole true vs false intelligence thing. Those with true intellect love family guy, and those who pretend they're smart (ie - engineers) want to find anything they can wrong with it simply because it's a generally popular series that they don't have the brains to grasp it. It makes them feel inferior. Those with God complexes HATE that.
You, sir, are in desperate need of a life.
I would use it just to confuse people.
"So what do you run?"
"BSD/Linux"
"Uh...yeah...which one? Both?"
"Both? What do you mean? I just run BSD/Linux."
"Err...you men GNU/Linux?"
"No No, BSD/Linux. Linux is just a kernel, remember."
"Uhh..."
And they're right for the most part. Plus I think an OSI ambassador signs an agreement to shower at least twice a week. Definitely, to borrow from esr's butchered version of the jargon file, a Good Thing.
Perhaps he'll throw in some mention of being a direct, flute-playing, sex-crazed channeller of Pan himself, and how that makes him cope. Fuck. When I read that essay on religion i swear i lost about 10 IQ points, making me officially a retard.
"Each evoluton which betray itself and its ideals had ended uyp eating its children." In which case I can see every reason to expect the Free Software movement (and hopefull the Open Source movement with which it shares some adherents) should be different.
I wholly agree. I don't see the open source revolution following in the footsteps of, say, the communist revolution in Russia because the open source revolution is different. Its main foes are the monopolists and IP-barons who wish all property to be theirs and the only barriers they see are laws and capital. The nature of open source uses this to its advantage - various licenses ensure that at least existing software be left free (in the case of BSD) and at most all changes to existing software be made free (GPL) using laws that are particularly hard to circumvent. At the same time, as money is more a secondary issue in open source rather than a primary as it is in proprietary software, it lies completely out of the realm of the second barrier of the capitalist. That is, no matter how much money microsoft throws at a piece of published, open source software, its rights cannot be bought.
In short, communism died because ideals are easily tainted by power and money. Open Source Software will at least die a more difficult death because it is based on law and pragmatism. Those can only die with the death of our laws and a shift of ideals in our society (pragmatism is a relativistic thing, after all). The death of laws means the death of a concept of IP and Copyright, through which all would be conceptually free.
Errr...i fucked up. You will be using the standard package set...and what'd you get from that is programs that are known to work stably on any system architecture. It was just in response to him implying that portage only contains beta-quality programs in the tree, which is only true if you key it for your particular arch.
For your consideration: most IT types never compile a line of code.
After the initial setup, the admin of this system wouldn't compile a line of code. The package building box would do all of that for him or her. The beauty of this system is that it's 90 - 99% automated, but not dependent on RH/Novel/Debian fuckups or incompatibilities that might slip down the pipe. Any fuckups are the responsibility of the admin. They have no scape goat. They have to be on the ball and perform 100% or they will be fired.
So, besides a lot of additional work, what does this guy get by using the standard Gentoo package set?
First, the additional work would be in designing and implementing the system. Otherwise he'll probably have the same workload as any other admin. Also, he won't be using the standard Gentoo package set. He'll be using packages custom built on a compilation machine for the specific needs of the site, then deployed based on machine group need (ie, render farm, workstation, mail/DNS/samba server). What would he get? He would have an intimiate working knowledge of the entire system that he designed and implemented himself, allowing for quicker response, shorter trouble shooting times, and increased job security. Generally be a more efficient worker overall because he knows more than the average sysadmin about his system.
The one positive I can see is some real job security since no one else would be able to take over a customized gentoo compile farm and update scheme like you propose
Yeah, well, you gotta do something to set yourself apart from the hordes of redhat/debian/suse zombies out there with no real job skills other than ability to walk from desk to snack machine 10+ times a day, and press buttons. This is by no means a solution for your standard corporate entity, it's more a flexible, inhouse system for a company that needs it.
Every point you made is moot, assuming the Admin is competent. IF I were the admin, I would make sure that:
1) All the program VERSIONS were considered stable (in the case of server software, like apache, postfix, samba, etc) or atleast usable (in the case of Desktop environments and browers - which in the open source community are generally used at Beta quality). Again, you can tell portage to do all of this. When you don't have it keyworded to your arch, you DO NOT INSTALL BETA SOFTWARE.
2) Have the system tested out and known to work before it's deployed. This is just being a good admin. You don't put stuff into use that might or might not work as expected.
3) As for the configuration updates, that's fairly simple to get around. On major system releases, you update your admin system first, then merge the config changes, then deploy them the night after the farm updates (in this case i would plan it on saturday, so you have sunday to mitigate any problems). Basically the same thing the RH/SuSE updates do.
4) Speaking of farm - Zoophilia? Jesus you sick fuck.
Like i said, if you do everything right, the system will work. If you don't do everything right, you get fired.
And as Linux-communism fights for the rights of the workers(coders), BSD-liberty fights for the rights of all, to clash in the way nature intended - without coercion in the form of software licenses, with true fairness and decency, in the form of the all mighty, competition-creating fork! Based on the idea that different implementations of the wheel are not recreations, but are neecessary to approach the true form of the wheel, as Plato saw it! Diversity of implementations are a direct result of diversity of ideas, all of which combine to represent an integrated truth of form from which all walks of humanity prosper from! And so I pledge to One License, under csh, with liberty and code forks for all!
Nice job missing the joke, Einstein. However, just to counter you with a bit of reason, and not dogma..
stability:
If you use their standard package set, meaning not keyed for your specific architecture, stability will not be bleeding edge. You'll be building programs with configurations that are well-tested, generally since the inception of portage.
high-level support options:
Yeah, you're right here. But as far as I'm concerned, if the bosses hired you, they should have confidence in your skills and your resourcefulness.
security:
Right here, too. Also - to me - any security in linux is standard, unless you're running an older (read: 2.4.x) kernel that doesn't have much new feature influx. At that point, kernel security approaches that of the BSD's, though I would argue that base system and system services security is still rather low due to lack of development cohesion.
rapid updates:
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. So wrong. For gentoo to be considered for a corporate environment, you would definitely set up a centralized build server, possibly with distcc installed on all of the workstations to mitigate the load, distribute it across the network and speed up compilation times. This build server would also act as a weekly package checkpoint. All of the servers and workstations would use this machine as their central package repository and using a little cron magic and universal, standardized config files, every machine would update on saturday or sunday, grab the new packages off the server, install them, and be done with it. There would be no office-drone typing emerge -u world, then going on an extremely long coffee break. If you were to set up a network of 200+ gentoo machines without making your own, custom stage three tarball, you ARE crazy.
and ease of administration:
See above. After you got the initial infrastructure in place, it would be a breeze. Assuming everything works out right. But hey, they hired you to admin the systems, right? That's what you're there for.
Now, personally i'm past my gentoo phase. Goin' back to the ol' faithful FreeBSD. But, just because Gentoo is a source-based power-user-centered distro doesnt mean you can't cook up your own in-house solution while taking advantage of the awesome tools gentoo provides. The only reason apt is faster than emerge is because emerge uses source by default, while apt-get uses binary packages by default. However, portage can use binary packages and apt-get can indeed install from source. In their default forms you're comparing apples to oranges.
Bottom Line: I can be done, and if you have the know-how, it can be done well.
Agreed. An on-site compilation server that builds all neccessary packages weekly (and possibly serves as an intranet server for webmail/samba donmain controller/etc), along with a handful of dedicated servers and however many desktops managment decides to float away from windows - all running FreeBSD - would be my option of choice. Cap it off with an OpenBSD gateway and you would have a very stable, smoothly-running, well integrated, time-tested, mature network. All that's missing is high-level support
Of course, he asked about linux, didn't he? It's a shame.
For a server/generic business desktop, it provides what's needed for work to get done.
hitler killed a ton of jews
If I had mod points, I would mod you up. Everyone brings up the example of microsoft using BSD tools...but those BSD tools not only still exist in Net, Free, Open, Dragonfly BSD, and Darwin, but they exist in a more modern, usable form than they do in the standard Microsoft commandline tools. As long as people are interested in a project it will be developed, no matter what open source license is slapped on it. The only thing that kills a project is disinterest, and the GPL doesn't protect against that.
You do realize that that's business as usual in the US, right? We pay the government to fund various research. The results become public domain or (in the case of BSD) are licensed liberally so corporations across the country can then use this information to forward the flow of capital in a more efficient manner. I personally don't like this intrinsic government-corporation coupling, but it's how our system has decided to speed the movement of capitalism - first in our borders, but now internationally. The basic idea is that the public invests in research that will then be used for the benefit of the public. It just happens that in a capitalist society the fruits of that research are generally sold back to those who funded it. Note that I said generally - I'm using the BSD network stack right now (on FreeBSD) and I didn't have to pay for it. That's why *I* like open source software. I can stick it to the man by benefiting from projects funded by public money while minimizing my contribution to the flow of capital/business as usual.
(Linux leading the way of course)
NetBSD had the first AMD64 system. FreeBSD still has the most cohesive system that works with the least amount of headaches (it's why I use it over the various linux distros i've tried on AMD64 - namely Ubuntu and Gentoo).
I am interested. I have been for a couple years. I've downloaded Solaris ISO's since version 8 for x86, and I got my hands on some x86 ISOs from a friend of mine for version 7. Please do not talk as though you speak for all open source software users, or some larger, abstract community you think is represented by the lifeless dozens you hang out with in #linuxizdeebest on freenode. I use FreeBSD. I use OpenBSD. I use OS X. I use Windows. I use NetBSD. I use Linux. I used Solaris at my old job. I am not interested in pigeon-holing myself based on mindless idealistic zealotry. Your opinions are indeed your own, so please don't lump others into some all-encompassing "we" based upon your own voluntary closed-mindedness.